Free Republic

Fox News pundit and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen railed against Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s foreign policy proposals, calling them “criminally stupid,” and “utterly disqualifying.” Thiessen took to social media on Monday in response to an article Ramaswamy wrote with The American Conservative centered on how he would approach the Russia-Ukraine war and U.S. relations with China. “This by @VivekGRamaswamy is criminally stupid,” Thiessen wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, before quoting one of the lines from Ramaswamy’s piece. “Like a freshman foreign policy paper. Utterly disqualifying,” Thiessen continued. Thiessen chose a quote from Ramaswamy’s...

Former President Donald Trump speaks loudly about the Republican candidates he's backing for the midterm elections. His money isn't always where his mouth is, however, at least not to the same level as Senate Minority Leader Republican Mitch McConnell. With Election Day just four days away, Republicans are fighting to flip the Senate in their favor. Many Trump-endorsed candidates are neck-and-neck in tight races against their Democratic opponents. Every dollar counts this close to the election and despite last minute fundraising pushes on both sides, many races remain tight. In the meantime, Trump is directing his attention toward McConnell, a...

Trump is going to cost us the senate again. https://t.co/dAkvxbueNZ— Marc Thiessen 🆓🇺🇦 (@marcthiessen) August 15, 2022Really? And was has McConnell done? He blamed the Tea Party in 2010. What is McConnell’s message, around which GOP Senate candidates are encouraged to campaign? There is none. He does control the NRSC, doesn’t he? https://t.co/kpiOPrFvmZ— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) August 15, 2022

MADISON — Randy Schmidt and hundreds of his motorcycle-riding friends want to make sure Phillip Thiessen is remembered for how he lived — and for how he died. Wisconsin’s mainstream certainly hasn’t shown much interest in the murder of the Marine and long-time law enforcement agent, killed, according to the criminal complaint, by a Trump-hating man with a poisoned idea of Harley riders. Schmidt is one of the organizers of the Benefit Ride for Thiessen, set for 10 a.m. at the American Legion Foxhole Bar in Fond du Lac. Kickstands up, as they say, at 11 a.m. for a 50-mile ride,...

The “Resistance” warned us that if we elected an authoritarian such as Donald Trump, eventually there would be tanks in the streets of our nation’s capital. Well, on Thursday, their predictions finally came true. I’m kidding, of course, but some on the left are not. Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe tweeted a photo of tanks arriving in Washington for Trump’s “Salute to America” and declared “The resemblance to days before Tiananmen Square is chilling.” At Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, the Chinese regime broke up pro-democracy protests with tanks and troops in a military action that resulted in...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s now infamous talking points on the Green New Deal are the most unintentionally honest explanation of the neo-socialism now gripping the Democratic Party. Too honest, apparently. After her office sent the “FAQ” to NPR, The Post and other news organizations, and posted a similar version on her congressional website, they were met with withering criticism — prompting Ocasio-Cortez to furiously backtrack, seeking to disown and discredit documents her office had produced, posted and distributed. Sorry, you don’t get to do that. Ocasio-Cortez told us what is really behind her Green New Deal. Now she, and the Democrats...

For someone trying to demonstrate that the judiciary is not political, getting into a political fight with the president sure is a funny way to do it. ... Even Roberts's fellow justices know there is a difference. If there were no Obama judges or Trump judges, then why did Anthony Kennedy wait for Trump's election to announce his retirement? And why doesn't Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just retire now and let Trump nominate her replacement? Because they both want a president who would appoint a successor who shares their judicial philosophy. (And, lo and behold, Trump appointed a former Kennedy...

Just a few weeks ago, analysts thought that control of the U.S. Senate was in play this November and that momentum was shifting to the Democrats. Thanks to their brutal campaign of character assassination against now-Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, those chances appear to be slipping away.

All of Washington is waiting with bated breath to find out whether the Mueller investigation will provide evidence proving that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. So far, “Exhibit A” against President Donald Trump is the meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had with a group of Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. That meeting should never have happened. When you get an email offering to provide “very high level and sensitive information” from the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” that could “incriminate Hillary” Clinton and is part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr....

Democrats have a new theory for how they can win back Congress and the White House. Just like "soccer moms" helped put Bill Clinton in the Oval Office in 1996, and "NASCAR dads" helped George W. Bush win in 2004, Donald Trump, the theory goes, was elected because of "#NeverHillary" voters who didn't particularly like him but despised her. Axios reports that Democrats are targeting the "20% of Trump's voters [who] told exit pollsters they didn't like him" hoping these reluctant Trump voters will help power a "blue wave" in the 2018 midterms and defeat President Trump in 2020. One...

For those conservatives who voted for Donald Trump because of the Supreme Court, congratulations: You've been vindicated. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, she would have replaced the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal jurist -- giving the Supreme Court a left-wing activist majority for a generation. Because Trump won, Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed to replace Scalia, securing the court's 5-to-4 conservative majority. This week, the dividends of that appointment for conservatives were apparent in two landmark conservative rulings. In National Institute of Family Life Advocates v. Becerra, the high court ruled that the state of...

When it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration increasingly appears to have been a bottomless pit of deception. First, President Barack Obama failed to disclose to Congress the existence of secret side deals on inspections when he transmitted the nuclear accord to Capitol Hill. (They were only uncovered by chance when then-Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., learned about them during a meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency officials in Vienna.) Then, we learned that the Obama administration had secretly sent a plane to Tehran loaded with $400 million in Swiss francs, euros and...

Democrats routinely express outrage over claims of collusion with a foreign power to undermine our democracy. So where is the outrage over revelations that former secretary of state John Kerry held not one but two secret meetings with Iran’s foreign minister to strategize over how to undermine President Trump’s plans to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal? An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed the meetings after the Boston Globe broke the news, declaring , “We don’t see the U.S. just as Mr. Trump; the United States is not just the current ruling administration.” Think about what this means. Iran is...

Marc Thiessen: Pompeo is close to confirmation and 11 senators are close to making a colossal mistakeFor the first time in the history of the republic, it appears increasingly likely that a majority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will vote against the president's nominee for secretary of state. If this happens, it would be a black mark not on Mike Pompeo's record, but on the reputation of this once-storied committee. ~snip~ Last year, all 10 Democrats on the committee voted "no" to Rex Tillerson's nomination, making him the first secretary of state in history to be approved on a...

The government shutdown is over. Democrats finally realized that closing the government over illegal immigration was a losing political battle. They created a needless crisis and got rolled. So who is to blame for their current predicament? Along with Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Democrats can put the blame squarely on the man who could have legalized the “dreamers” when he had the chance: Barack Obama. During his 2008 campaign, Obama promised in a conversation with Univision anchor Jorge Ramos to make passing immigration reform one of his first legislative priorities, and even set a timetable. “I cannot guarantee that...

Stephen K. Bannon and his alt-right movement have helped accomplish something no one in a quarter-century has been able to do: get a Democrat elected in the state of Alabama. Alabama is one of the most reliably Republican states in the country. The last time a Democrat was elected was in 1992, and no Democrat has won more than 40 percent of the vote in a Senate race there since 1996. The closest election in recent memory was in 2002, when Jeff Sessions won reelection by a razor-thin margin of 19 points. Sen. Richard Shelby has won his last three...

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for many things — but when it comes to politics, I am especially thankful that Hillary Clinton is not sitting in the Oval Office. I am thankful that Neil M. Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court and that President Trump has secured a conservative majority that will protect human life, religious liberty, the Second Amendment and limited government. I am also thankful the president is moving at record pace to fill the federal appeals courts with young conservative judges. While the Supreme Court only hears about 80 cases a year, the federal appeals courts get...

Let's face it: The past 100 days have been a disaster ... for Democrats. While much ink has been spilled in the past week assessing President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office, the Democrats' abysmal performance has largely escaped scrutiny. So let's review their record. The Democrats spent much of Trump's first months in office pushing their unfounded narrative of Trump's alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin. But that narrative went up in smoke when Trump launched missile strikes against Putin's Syrian ally, Bashar Assad. Trump not only hit the air base from which Assad allegedly had launched his chemical...

Relax. Breathe. Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy. It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that. The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is...

The safety-pin-wearing left is aghast at the realization that President Donald Trump could actually follow through on his promise to “cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama” on his first day in office. He should do it.