Free Republic

The situation has all the elements that the president seeks: a showdown with a top political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his agenda.It is the fight President Trump had been waiting for, a showdown with a top political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his political agenda.In bypassing the authority of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, to call in the National Guard to quell protests in the Los Angeles area over his administration’s efforts to deport more migrants, Mr. Trump is now pushing the boundaries of presidential...

The open acrimony between the two men comes after the billionaire denounced President Trump’s signature domestic policy bill as an “abomination.” President Trump and Elon Musk’s alliance dissolved into open acrimony on Thursday, as the two men hurled personal attacks at each other after the billionaire had unleashed broadsides against the president’s signature domestic policy bill. While meeting with Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor, in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump broke days of uncharacteristic silence and unloaded on Mr. Musk, who until last week was a top presidential adviser. “I’m very disappointed in Elon,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve helped Elon...

Just hours before President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sat down with President Trump in the Oval Office on Friday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina dispensed some advice to the Ukrainian leader. “Don’t take the bait,” he said, encouraging him not to get into a spat with Mr. Trump. “I said, don’t get into arguments about security agreements,” Mr. Graham recalled on Friday evening in a brief telephone interview with The New York Times, as he sat aboard Air Force One preparing to fly to Florida with the president. Mr. Zelensky did not silence his concerns during his meeting with...

Layoffs are expected to rock The Washington Post this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The layoffs are slated to hit the Jeff Bezos-owned and Will Lewis-led newspaper's business division, I’m told. One person familiar with the matter said that the cuts will be deep, impacting many dozens of employees. The layoffs will surely deplete morale further inside the beleaguered newspaper, which has suffered a talent exodus over the last several weeks. As I reported earlier, star reporter Josh Dawsey will exit The Post for a job at The Wall Street Journal. His departure comes on the heels...

Kamala Harris, amid a furious battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, embraced a ban on fracking and offshore drilling. She supported Medicare-for-all. At one point, she advocated abolishing private health insurance. And she signaled an openness to a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.Now, the vice president’s campaign says she would not pursue the fracking and offshore drilling ban — it’s a highly unpopular position in states like Pennsylvania where natural gas drives the economy — if she becomes president. She does not support a single-payer health-care system, instead focusing on what she and...

On Tuesday, a few hours after Vice President Kamala Harris revealed she’d picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the conservative radio host Erick Erickson posted a video from Walz’s 2022 reelection campaign attacking his military service record. The slickly produced video resembled a professional television news segment, but it came from a Minnesota website called Alpha News, which received a “red” unreliable rating from media watchdog NewsGuard because it fails to disclose it was founded by the head of a conservative advocacy group. In the video, an unidentified woman interviews Thomas Behrends, a Minnesota farmer who served...

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, in separate private meetings with President Biden last week, told Biden his continued candidacy imperils the Democratic Party’s ability to control either chamber of Congress next year. In a separate one-on-one conversation, a person close to Biden told the president directly that he should end his candidacy, saying that was the only way to preserve his legacy and save the country from another Trump term, the person said. The president responded that he adamantly disagreed with that opinion and that he is the best candidate to defeat Trump....

President, aides grapple with accusations they strongly reject that they were not candid with the public about how his age affected his ability to do the job.When special counsel Robert K. Hur concluded in a February report that President Biden should not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents in part because a jury would view the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden and his aides hit back hard. The 81-year-old president called an impromptu news conference where he angrily denied that he was forgetful. “I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know...

When Biden met with historians last week at the White House, they compared the threat facing America to the pre-Civil War era and to pro-fascist movements before World War II President Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad. The conversation during a ferocious lightning storm on Aug. 4 unfolded as a sort of Socratic dialogue between the commander in chief and a select group of scholars, who painted the...

Still, one brother discussed new venture with major donor before Biden entered the White House. In the midst of his campaign for president, Joe Biden took his younger brother, Frank, aside to issue a warning. “For Christ’s sake, watch yourself,” Biden said of his brother’s potential business dealings, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation. “Don’t get sucked into something that would, first of all, hurt you.” Biden, whose tone was both “jocular and serious,” according to the person, seemed to know then what is becoming plainly obvious now: His family’s business ties threatened to undermine an administration...