Free Republic

President Donald Trump's focus on the brazen U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro is frustrating some White House aides and Republican lawmakers, who want him to address economic and healthcare concerns in an election year, according to three people familiar with the matter.White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, her deputy James Blair and Vice President JD Vance are pressing Trump to prioritize domestic concerns, said two White House officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Vance has been the most persistent voice in meetings, repeatedly steering conversations back to kitchen-table issues, they said....

The relationship between President Trump and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene grew so poisonous that the White House told the Secret Service that Greene may have tipped off Code Pink protesters about his surprise visit last fall to a D.C. restaurant she recommended, two sources on Trump's team tell Axios. That episode — which involved a chaotic confrontation between anti-war activists and Trump — embarrassed the president and intensified concerns in the White House about his safety, a year after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. Why it matters: Trump aides view the Joe's Seafood debacle as a point of...

A GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the wife and son of Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was fatally shot while trying to mow down an ICE agent, has raised nearly $600,000 in less than a day. Good was shot on Wednesday during an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, in which she was using her vehicle to impede the operation throughout the day. The situation turned deadly when she began to accelerate her vehicle into an officer, who fired in what appears to be a clear-cut case of self-defense. The fundraiser, organized by Mattie Weiss, is titled “Support for Renee...

Yesterday, several videos went viral of Renee Nicole Macklin Good blocking ICE from driving down a neighborhood street in Minneapolis with a vehicle during an ICE raid. In one of the videos, several ICE agents are seen approaching the vehicle where Good was sitting in the driver’s seat. Her Honda SUV was parked perpendicular to traffic. Two ICE agents approach the window of the vehicle and demand that she move. She backs up, repositions her tires so she is aiming directly at the ICE agent standing to her right, and points her vehicle at the ICE agent in front of...

A Wisconsin man accused of killing his parents and stealing their money to fund a plan to assassinate President Donald Trump is set to enter a plea deal resolving the case Thursday. Nikita Casap, 18, is expected to agree to the deal during a morning hearing in Waukesha County Circuit Court in suburban Milwaukee. He goes into the hearing facing multiple charges, including two homicide counts, two counts of hiding a corpse and theft, with a trial scheduled to begin March 2. Online court records did not list the terms of the plea agreement. Harm Venhuizen, a spokesperson for the...

Recent polling has shown young voters overwhelmingly disapproving of Trump and the GOP amid increasing anxiety over the state of the economy, while young people played a big role in helping Democrats win in 2025’s off-year races. “If you’re 29 and you’re paying out the nose for health care, and you can’t own your own home and groceries are killing you, you don’t really care about the conversations about tariffs. That’s not where you’re living. You’re living at, ‘Hey, I need the price of eggs to drop,’” said Brett Loyd, a longtime Republican pollster who now works with an independent...

<p>A federal officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, shortly after the Trump administration deployed thousands of immigration agents to the city. Although the full circumstances of the killing remain unclear, video of the shooting shows an officer opening fire on the woman as she drove away.</p>

The Republican establishment is on the verge of extinction. Donald Trump’s first term wasn’t enough to kill it off: Trump came into office in 2017 with establishment figures such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan leading the party in Congress, and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, had been chosen for that role as a reassurance to the old guard... This time, though, things are very different. Though congressional Republicans have yet to become thoroughly MAGA, there’s no longer a sense that GOP leaders in the House or Senate represent a distinct political brand of their own, as McConnell and...

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was reportedly in the dark about the Trump administration’s plan to invade Venezuela and depose President Nicolas Maduro. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the White House excluded the nation’s top intelligence from discussions about the planned ouster, which was carried out on Saturday. People familiar with the situation said that Gabbard had previously opposed U.S. intervention in the South American country. “The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela,” Gabbard, then a Democratic member of Congress, tweeted in 2019. “Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose...

European governments now understand the seriousness of Trump's threats and are "desperately looking for a plan to stop him"BRUSSELS, January 8. /TASS/. Amid US President Donald Trump's increasingly harsh rhetoric about establishing control over Greenland, the European Union is preparing for a direct confrontation with the US leader, according to Politico Europe. "We must be ready for a direct confrontation with Trump," an EU diplomat briefed on ongoing discussions told the newspaper. "He is in an aggressive mode, and we need to be geared up," he added. The newspaper notes that while European governments previously did not realize the seriousness...

WASHINGTON — The Senate advanced a resolution Thursday to block President Trump from taking additional military action in Venezuela, just five days after the capture of Caracas strongman Nicolas Maduro. In a 52-47 vote, the upper chamber agreed to consider a so-called “War Powers resolution” to force Trump to end hostilities toward the South American nation, in a blow to the administration. The measure must still clear the Senate and House to take effect

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In what could prove to be a pivotal election year for the Republicans, with the midterms holding much influence, President Donald Trump arguably needs the support of his own party now more than ever. Especially as he is facing loud calls for impeachment from the Democratic Party on account of his Venezuela operation... Yet there is currently a split forming, as some prominent Republican lawmakers are publicly disagreeing with Trump regarding his renewed annexation threats against Greenland in the wake of the Venezuela intervention. In a series of inflammatory remarks labeled as “utterly unacceptable” by Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen,...

n the wake of an ICE shooting that killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, academics have joined the chorus of left-wing radicals seeking to abolish the federal law enforcement agency. "Abolishing ICE is the moderate position," said Victor Ray, an associate professor of sociology, criminology and African American studies at the University of Iowa. In another social media post, Ray referred to the shooting, which killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, as a "murder." Nobody has been charged with murder in the case.

Conan O’Brien warned comedians giving in to their anger at President Donald Trump that they are being “co-opted” and not making much of a difference. In a conversation with Oxford Union on Tuesday, O’Brien noted he often hears people say how “great” Trump must be for comedians. The one-time Tonight Show host argued the opposite, saying “talking crazy” is part of Trump’s brand and it makes it difficult to structure satire around it. O’Brien cited Trump’s construction of a White House ballroom as something sketch comedy writers would likely come up with to mock Trump — except it’s reality. “Comedy...

Did Obama really deport more people than Trump? On the surface, the answer is yes. During his two terms in office from 2009 to 2017, Barack Obama’s administration oversaw roughly 2.7–3.2 million deportations (removals and returns), making him, by some measures, the president with the highest total deportations in modern US history. Since Obama’s era included a higher share of border returns counted as deportations, his total figures appear higher even though the populations targeted were different. Under Trump, enforcement has increasingly focused on interior arrests and removals but these often lag in official numbers due to legal backlogs and...

For the past 22 years I have watched, written about, broadcast, and cross-referenced the groups, messages, and protests by the left in Portland, Oregon. For a long time, before the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was one of the few in Portland talking about the derivations of these groups on my blog and the radio. Before the category-killing Antifa movement subsumed the anarchists and BLM activists, these groups always came from one place: the ANSWER Coalition. This anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-capitalist, anti-anything-opposed-to-America organization gave cover to the wildest and most extreme groups in Portland. Earth First!, Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation...

The woman shot dead by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis has been identified as Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who had just moved to the city. She was a prize-winning poet and a hobby guitarist, who was there as a legal observer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities, city leaders have said. But the Trump administration has called her a "domestic terrorist". Good's death has sparked protests across the country, with many people holding signs that read "Justice for Renee". ... A fundraiser for Good's family, which was set up with a target of $50,000...

Top Minnesota Democrats are condemning President Trump for amplifying false claims about the murder of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman. Driving the news: On Saturday, Trump shared a Truth Social post and video that promotes unsubstantiated conspiracy theories tying Hortman's June 14 slaying to Gov. Tim Walz and alleged fraud in state programs. What they're saying: Walz, who considered Hortman a friend and political ally, blasted the post as "dangerous, depraved behavior from the sitting president of the United States." "In covering for an actual serial killer, he is going to get more innocent people killed," the DFL governor wrote...

He is not a neoconservative in the sense we once knew: he does not cloak American interventions in the language of democracy promotion, human rights, or universal values. Instead, he is a neoconservative without the values. What makes him distinctive is not the substance of his policies, but the way he frames them, stripped of the moralizing tone. Oddly enough, this makes his foreign policy more transparent—and perhaps, in some ways, more refreshing. Classical neoconservatism was never only about hawkish foreign policy. It was about the marriage of power and ideals. The movement argued that American might was essential not...