Free Republic

On his last day as president on Jan. 20, 2021, Donald Trump stood in a snapping wind and waved goodbye to relatives and supporters before he took his final flight on Air Force One back to Mar-a-Lago. No elected Republican of any stature showed up at Joint Base Andrews for the bleak farewell. Trump, at that moment, was a pariah among Republican elites. The party’s leaders in the House and Senate, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, blamed him for the Capitol siege. Party fundraisers assured donors they were done with him. On conference calls, House Republican leaders contemplated a “post-Trump”...

If you've read RedState for any length of time, you know one of the things we are most known for is our hard-hitting commentary on press bias. Whether you come for the facts or the snark, we do our best to deliver insight into how the far-left twists narratives to push their political desires. That's what makes this next story so surprising. According to Politico, Donald Trump's campaign team wined and dined with top left-wing reporters on Tuesday night in preparation for the GOP primary debate (the former president will not be attending). SPOTTED IN MILWAUKEE — Team Trump wining...

... All across America, Democrats are using abortion as a powerful cudgel in their 2022 television campaigns, paying for an onslaught of ads in House, Senate and governor’s races that show how swiftly abortion politics have shifted since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June. With national protections for abortion rights suddenly gone and bans going into effect in many states, senior White House officials and top Democratic strategists believe the issue has radically reshaped the 2022 landscape in their favor. They say it has not only reawakened the party’s progressive base, but also provided a wedge...

The Federal Election Commission has dismissed Republican accusations that Twitter violated election laws in October by blocking people from posting links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden, in a decision that is likely to set a precedent for future cases involving social media sites and federal campaigns. The F.E.C. determined that Twitter’s actions regarding the Hunter Biden article had been undertaken for a valid commercial reason, not a political purpose, and were thus allowable, according to a document outlining the decision obtained by The New York Times. The commission’s ruling, which...

Former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday sued three tech giants — Facebook, Twitter and Google — and the firms’ chief executives after the platforms took various steps to ban him or block him from posting. Mr. Trump, speaking from his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, announced that he would serve as the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, arguing that he has been censored wrongfully by the tech companies. Speaking about “freedom of speech” and the First Amendment — which applies to the government, not to private-sector companies — Mr. Trump called his lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday in...

PITTSBURGH — Though they are both Democrats, John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, and Bill Peduto, this city’s mayor, have their differences on the environment. Mr. Fetterman, who toppled an incumbent Democrat in 2018 from the left, nevertheless calls Pennsylvania “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas” and sees extracting and taxing gas as critical to the state’s economy and the “union way of life.” Mr. Peduto lobbied unsuccessfully against a local petrochemical plant and is steering his once-struggling steel town to be independent of fossil fuels within 15 years. But they agree on one thing: a pledge to ban all hydraulic...

After five debates including at least 10 candidates, tonight’s face-off among seven Democrats will be the most intimate affair of the 2020 primary. The shrinking stage has not been without controversary: only one non-white candidate, businessman Andrew Yang, will be featured.

A member of the Republican National Committee rules panel accused his own party leadership of “institutional tyranny” on Monday, another escalation in the growing internal battle over the party’s arcane parliamentary procedures. Solomon Yue, the Oregon committeeman and member of the RNC’s Rules Committee, sent a more than 1,300-word email, obtained by POLITICO, to members of the rules panel on Monday morning, charging that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his allies had improperly tried to scuttle Yue’s proposal to change the underlying rulebook for what could be the party’s first contested convention in 40 years this summer. Yue is the...

Despite landslide victories on Tuesday, Donald Trump still needs to win Indiana — and he’s starting to act like it. The frugal Manhattan mogul has begun opening his wallet for the air war, spending more than $900,000 on TV and radio ads. He’s working the inside game, wooing Gov. Mike Pence one-on-one in what multiple Indiana insiders said appears to have been a successful effort to keep the governor on the endorsement sidelines. And Trump’s new campaign strategist Paul Manafort has been telling Republican officials, multiple people told POLITICO, that Trump is in the midst of doubling the ground team...

The collective reluctance to engage crystalized the state of the GOP nomination fight with five days left until winner-take-all primaries in Ohio and Florida that are must-win contests for native sons John Kasich and Rubio, respectively. They're fighting to survive, as is Cruz. But they're also looking to preserve their own dignity. As the nomination fight approaches what could be a climactic moment where Trump becomes the GOP’s presumptive nominee, his rivals are ditching the personal insults that only Trump seems capable of executing. No one, in fact, is eager to attack him at all—even on these issues of real...

SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Ted Cruz's campaign is trying to make the most of Gov. Nikki Haley's endorsement of Marco Rubio days ahead of the South Carolina primary: driving sky-high his political expectations here. "If he doesn't finish first, this is a massive loss," Jason Miller, a senior Cruz adviser, said hours after news reports began circulating that Haley would endorse Rubio at a rally Wednesday evening. "Rubio has to win here." Earlier this week, Jeb Bush had called Haley's endorsement "the most powerful, meaningful one in the state." Haley's backing of Rubio comes on top of the support of Sen....

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. - Days before the primary in military-heavy South Carolina, Ted Cruz came to a warship here to deliver a detailed plan to rebuild America's military after what he called "years of neglect" under President Barack Obama."More tooth, less tail – that will be our guiding philosophy," Cruz declared.In a sign of the speech's seriousness and importance, Cruz, who prefers to speak extemporaneously, stood at a lectern in a blue suit and tie and spoke from notes, with American flags and war planes behind him, aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown.For much of the 2016 race, Cruz has sought a...

Donald Trump unexpectedly announced Friday that he would skip a major Republican gathering to be held later in the day in South Carolina due to an unidentified “significant business transaction.” Trump was one of 11 GOP presidential candidates slated to speak at the Heritage Action Presidential Forum at an arena in Greenville. The event is co-sponsored by two of the biggest names in South Carolina GOP politics: Gov. Nikki Haley and former Sen. Jim DeMint. Trump’s campaign said his undisclosed transaction “was expected to close Thursday” but a delay made him unable to attend. “He sends his regrets,” the campaign...

When Sen. Rand Paul makes his first visit to Iowa as an official presidential candidate next month, he will head to the campus of the University of Iowa. The location—one of the state's biggest liberal strongholds—seems unusual for a Republican, but Paul is headed there in the hopes of appealing to a different constituency. As Paul prepares to formally enter the 2016 arena, younger conservatives are emerging as a backbone of his campaign strategy: a source not only of volunteers and energy but votes. A youth-fueled campaign, his team hopes, will also help brand him as a fresh face for...

From the first day of 2011, Mitt Romney was the favorite to win the 2012 Republican presidential primary campaign. No one else was even close. The 2016 outlook could not be more different. Offered the choice to bet on one single candidate to win the nomination versus the rest of the field, the choice would have to be "the field." For the first time in years, there is no one next in line. And without a former vice president or powerhouse former candidate looking likely to run, Republicans are shaping up to spend the next year and a half fighting...

In a sign of the internal backlash against the right wing of the House Republican Conference, Louisiana Republican Charles Boustany questioned the political allegiances and motivations of his tea party-aligned colleagues and said they had put the GOP majority at risk in the current shutdown fight. "There are members with a different agenda," Boustany said Wednesday in an interview in his office. "And I'm not sure they're Republicans and I'm not sure they're conservative."