Free Republic

Everyone is talking about Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts, but hardly anyone is calling this what it really is: the strategy by Elon Musk, President Trump, and the Republican Party to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, one piece at a time. The ACA, a historic piece of legislation that extended health coverage to millions of Americans, celebrated its 15th anniversary on March 23. Signed by President Barack Obama in 2010, the ACA expanded Medicaid and provided subsidies so that more working and middle-class Americans could have access to our expensive and complicated health care system. The law also made it illegal...

BRUSSELS — As President Donald Trump upends U.S. foreign policy, negotiating closer relations with Russia, threatening NATO allies and pausing cooperation with Ukraine, Washington’s traditional partners — and best customers — are rethinking their dependence on American weapons systems. From Canada to Europe, calls are growing to steer future defense spending away from U.S. equipment and toward their own industries, even as many concede there is no quick fix after decades of dependence. The U.S. pause of intelligence-sharing with Ukraine this month, and Trump’s threats to annex Canada and Greenland, have laid bare the risks of counting on the United...

CAIRO (AP) — When the first explosions in Gaza this week started around 1:30 a.m., a visiting British doctor went to the balcony of a hospital in Khan Younis and watched the streaks of missiles light up the night before pounding the city. A Palestinian surgeon next to him gasped, “Oh no. Oh no.” After two months of ceasefire, the horror of Israeli bombardment was back. The veteran surgeon told the visiting doctor, Sakib Rokadiya, they’d better head to the emergency ward. Torn bodies soon streamed in, carried by ambulances, donkey carts or in the arms of terrified relatives. What...

After Donald Trump won the presidency again, Rebecca Carlson was counting on this being the year things turned around for her 1,300-acre farm in northern Michigan. The farm has been in her family for generations but has struggled over the past several years amid the rising cost of fuel, fertilizer and other operating expenses. Then, last year, bad weather wiped out much of her crop. But the return of Trump, she thought, would help reverse things. Her farm had been awarded a grant worth $400,000 through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for the costs associated with hiring...

Turmoil on Wall Street is keeping financial planners’ phones ringing as 401(k) holders watch their retirement account balances fall with the stock markets they’re tied to. For the most part, they’re being told to sit tight and breathe through it. Vanese Pitts said she watched her husband’s 401(k) shed $8,000 on Monday, when a wide-ranging market selloff pushed the S&P 500 to its lowest close since September. The sharp downturn in recent days followed several weeks of losses on Wall Street that have left the stock index about 4.8% lower than where it started the year. Many 401(k)s follow the...

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) broke with President Trump over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday and advised against a public spat between the two leaders. “Are you disturbed at all by the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration about Zelensky?” ABC News’s Martha Raddatz asked Lawler on “This Week.” “I did not agree with the president’s rhetoric about … Zelensky. What I would say is this, it is not — it does not behoove either side to have this public back-and-forth,” Lawler responded.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) said Sunday that forcing Ukraine to agree to a resource deal with the U.S. in exchange for the possibility of support against Russia is akin to “victim extortion.” The moderate Republican said Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched the invasion of Ukraine three years ago, should be the one forced to pay. “Putin, and Putin alone, should bear the economic costs of Putin’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” Fitzpatrick said in a post on the social platform X. “To force Ukraine to pay these costs is the epitome of victim-blaming and victim extortion.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that the consumer confidence that accompanied President Donald Trump’s entry into office has eroded. The University of Michigan’s February report on consumer sentiment found that it fell by 5 percent, from 71.1 percent in January to 67.8 percent this month. Americans now expect inflation this year will be 4.3 percent, a 1 percent increase from last month. Morning Consult also found that consumer optimism is quickly fading. Consumers are worried about volatile decisions around sweeping executive orders and potential tariffs. Early polling data from Trump’s first days in office showed that the speed of the...

President Trump upended political norms and sparked widespread confusion with a series of executive orders challenging the Constitution and congressional control over the federal budget.Democrats responded in outrage, blasting the administration for sowing “chaos” and harming average Americans, and California and other states sued. Standing before a mourning nation following a tragic commercial airline crash that killed nearly 70 people in Washington, D.C., President Trump offered his somber condolences and said everyone was “searching for answers.”He then insinuated, without evidence, that diversity hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration — and the politics of his Democratic predecessors — were to...

The chaotic start of Trump 2.0 proved that Sam Rayburn was right when he said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” America needs a carpenter to rebuild the nation. It got Trump to make things worse..... Chaos and confusion reign supreme. The Trump administration is the gang that can’t shoot straight. Trump just needed a week and a half to bring the nation to its knees. The scary thing is Trump has been planning this shaky transition for four years. The first and certainly not the last mistake of the...

Russian firefighters are battling a three-day inferno in the southwest of the country, after a Ukrainian drone attack on an oil storage depot ignited the facility's diesel reserves. On Saturday Rostov Oblast Governor Vasily Golubev said that Russian air defense forces had repelled an attack by a Ukrainian UAV in the town of Proletarsk, located around 150 miles from the Ukrainian border. A day later, however, Golubev said that fallen debris from the UAV had landed on the industrial warehouses at the Proletarsk state reserve fuel facility, igniting a fire which Russian authorities have since struggled to contain. Golubev also...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that a Ukrainian incursion into Russia's Kursk region was a major provocation. "The Kyiv regime has launched another major provocation," Putin told members of the Russian government about the Kursk attack.

Former President Donald Trump was back peddling election fraud claims ahead of his expected announcement that he will be launching a 2024 presidential bid Tuesday night. Taking to Truth Social after ally Kari Lake lost in the race for Arizona governor, Trump, 76, falsely claimed that the election was stolen from her. “Wow! They just took the election away from Kari Lake. It’s really bad out there!” Trump wrote Monday night. Lake, Trump’s staunch supporter who maintained without any evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs on Monday after being projected to lose in the...

Henry Kissinger, the 99-year old former secretary of state, suggested that Ukraine would likely have to give up some territory in a negotiated settlement, though he added that “ideally the dividing line should be a return to the status quo” before the invasion, which included the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the seizure of parts of the Donbas. “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself,’’ Mr. Kissinger concluded. Almost immediately, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine accused Mr. Kissinger of appeasement, retorting angrily that “I...