Free Republic

President Donald Trump's approval rating has dropped to 40 percent, lower than all other presidents at this point in their terms, new polling released by Pew Research Center on Wednesday shows. Americans want Trump to govern less by executive order, listen to the courts, and don't like tariffs. Trump is losing ground with people on the fence. From February to April, his approval rating fell from 88 percent to 75 percent among people who supported him in the 2024 election but "not strongly," and from 44 percent to 31 percent among nonvoters. Of course, partisans will be partisans, and Trump...

President Trump says trade wars are easy to win. Investors think otherwise, and on Wednesday Mr. Trump decided maybe investors are right. After a flight from U.S. assets and a rout in the bond market, Mr. Trump announced a pause for 90 days on the worst of his “liberation” tariffs on most countries, China excepted. Markets celebrated with a stock-market rally on hope that perhaps Mr. Trump isn’t entirely oblivious to the damage he’s causing. The rout in dollar assets reversed, at least somewhat, and the rise in the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield eased. It would be hard to find...

Roofing-products manufacturer IKO North America has been on a factory-building spree in the U.S., with one plant completed and four more under construction. After President Trump launched a barrage of tariffs on U.S. trading partners, the math abruptly changed. Chief Executive David Koschitzky said IKO’s just-finished factory in Texas now faces higher prices on the steel it uses to fabricate metal shingles, while the plants that are still being built need machinery that isn’t made in the U.S. The company will continue with the projects, he said, but tariffs will make them much more expensive. “If we’re to be successful,...

The editorial board of The New York Times just eviscerated Donald Trump in a single paragraph. The piece, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president during the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity. Rhetorically matter-of-fact, the piece succinctly lays out many of the reasons Trump’s critics think his second term would be disastrous for the country—the implicit point being that nobody really needs a lengthy review of all Trump’s actions; everyone already knows what he’s about. Here it is in full, with its original...

Simply put, they hate Trump because he represents ordinary Americans — those who are not part of the political and corporate elite, who lack the advantages and connections of the Deep State, who are not media, academics, or celebs. President Trump puts ordinary Americans first, and it drives the elite nuts. The elite have spent so many years enjoying their advantages, including the psychological advantage of despising ordinary people, that they panicked when someone tried to take it all away from them. They can't go on living without that warm, reassuring sense of superiority. Contempt for average Americans was palpable...

Six months ago I wrote about the liberal media masquerading as journalists to scam the American people down a rabbit hole with their contrived high noon drama-filled fake news scandals. I called attention to the reality that “only in the Washington D.C. bubble can high drama and theater be manufactured by a topic the media elites and establishment politicians have wet their pants over in excited delirium that the general population have become bored with for some time now.” They make effective use of propaganda to convince or should I say fool the public that what they are doing is...

The Boston Globe pulled a column suggesting waiters should tamper with the food of Trump administration officials. "I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble. You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later,” freelance journalist Luke O’Neil wrote in the piece, which is now unavailable on the Globe’s website. O’Neil opened the 1,200-word column last week by saying that one of his biggest regrets in life was “not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon” when he waited on the conservative political analyst...