Free Republic

President Donald Trump's political advisers have bluntly told him he can't win the November election if the campaign is about him, and for weeks they unsuccessfully urged him to pivot to a new strategy focused on his general election opponent, Joe Biden. Trump finally appeared to heed the advice Tuesday, although the setting and the tone of the political broadside may not have been what his advisers had envisioned. Trump's remarks, which mentioned Biden 31 times, were monotone, and the backdrop — the White House Rose Garden — was a break from longtime presidential efforts to separate official and re-election...

One of President Trump’s few major Silicon Valley backers in the 2016 campaign reportedly expects to abandon him in 2020. According to a Thursday evening report in the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist Peter Thiel likely will sit out the race this time around because he sees the chance of a Trump victory as slim. The Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter” reported that Mr. Thiel “has soured” on the president’s prospects in recent weeks because of the state of the economy and expected double-digit unemployment in November. Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal Holdings, spoke at the Republican...

President Donald Trump was briefed less and less with warnings about Russia's behavior toward the US because he would get angry when presented with intelligence about it, CNN reported on Wednesday. Early in Trump's presidency, officials learned to limit their verbal briefings on the topic and would often see their written materials ignored, former administration officials told CNN's Jim Sciutto. "The president has created an environment that dissuades, if not prohibits, the mentioning of any intelligence that isn't favorable to Russia," a former senior national security staffer told CNN. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, who started in May,...

Sources reporting that #NYPD Commissioner and Chief Of Department are resigning and between 300 and 800 officers are retiring immediately. https://twitter.com/JGilliam_SEAL/status/1269775545409187840

The Washington Post has another Christmas present for the President and, as usual, it’s in the form of a lump of coal in his stocking. Since there apparently isn’t anything new on Russia, Russia, Russia to report, this time it’s a claim that Trump was grumpy over comments made by Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch during his confirmation process and “considered” pulling the nomination. For nearly eight months, President Trump has boasted that appointing Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court ranks high among his signature achievements.But earlier this year, Trump talked about rescinding Gorsuch’s nomination, venting angrily...

Sources are reporting on an email letter focused on unseating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent by Senate Conservatives Action, a political action committee. The letter was signed by the former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccineli, who is now president of the PAC. NBC reported that political operative, pundit, and author Roger Stone circulated the letter, which NBC reported on but did not include a link to or a copy of the letter. BC reported. “It calls McConnell a creature of the swamp.’ Jim Clayton, who writes for Conservative News Daily, reported on Monday that he was sent the letter,...

Defense Secretary James Mattis was caught off guard by President Trump's announcement that he was banning transgender people from serving in the military, according to a New York Times report. Mattis, who was on vacation at the time of Trump's decision, only had one day's worth of notice before Trump tweeted his announcement of the policy, the paper reported. The report described him as "appalled." Sources close to the Defense secretary told the Times that Mattis was infuriated by the tweets, and saw them as an insult to transgender Americans currently serving in the military. On Wednesday morning, Trump wrote...

BREAKING NEWS: SOURCES TELL FOX NEWS TRUMP TO NAME EXXON MOBIL CEO REX TILLERSON SECRETARY OF STATE

Future First Lady Melania Trump and son Barron will not be moving to the White House after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, The Post has learned. The president-elect’s 46-year-old wife and their 10-year-old son are staying put at the family’s glitzy Trump Tower penthouse so that Barron can continue attending his Upper West Side private school, sources told The Post. “Melania is extremely close to Barron, and they have become closer during the campaign,” said a source close to Trump’s transition team. “The campaign has been difficult for Barron, and she is really hoping to keep disruption to a minimum.”

  Hillary Clinton is a secret sex freak who paid fixers to set up illicit romps with both men AND women! That’s the blockbuster revelation from a former Clinton family operative who is sensationally breaking ranks with his one-time bosses to speak to The National ENQUIRER in a bombshell 9-page cover story — on newsstands Wednesday. “I arranged a meeting for Hillary and a woman in an exclusive Beverly Hills hotel,” the man, who was hired by the Clintons,via a Hollywood executive, to cover up their scandals, told The ENQUIRER. “She had come to the studio to see the filming of a movie in 1994.”...

GOING VIRAL— Rumors online that Julian Assange is DEAD! STrange “deadman’s keys” were posted in the Twitter feed Sunday afternoon.

<p>The prez’s senior advisors claim she suffered TWO strokes while Secretary Of State.</p> <p>One of President Obama‘s senior advisors leaked sensational details of Hillary Clinton‘s secret battle with TWO mini-strokes during her tenure as Secretary of State, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned.</p>

--snip-- OPERATIVE: Yeah, two and the anchor. The anchor here is the absurdity. You know, the Enquirer story. Five women, shoving ‘em in closets and on desks or whatever right in the middle of meetings. That’s kind of, that’s, I just don’t see how you hide or how people miss that kind of stuff. That’s Bill Clinton stuff, you know. Sex crazed. And Glenn Beck does this whole I got raped by Ted Cruz bit this morning and everybody on my staff got raped, tasteless stuff.GP: Yeah, we blogged about that . . .OPERATIVE: yeah, I know, and that’s the...

WASHINGTON, March 15 — A former EgyptAir pilot told American investigators two years ago that the co-pilot of EgyptAir 990 crashed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean to take revenge on a company executive who had just demoted him and was riding as a passenger, a person involved in the investigation said today. American aviation investigators say they do not know whether the explanation given by the pilot, which was first reported today in The Los Angeles Times, is true. Since the crash of the Boeing 767, Egyptian officials have argued that there was no evidence that the co-pilot, Gamil...

Newt Gingrich plans to formally suspend or end his presidential campaign next Tuesday, senior Gingrich aides told Fox News.

A prominent Republican senator just told me that if Romney can’t win in Michigan, the Republican Party needs to go back to the drawing board and convince somebody new to get into the race. “If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate,” said the senator, who has not endorsed anyone and requested anonymity. The senator believes Romney will ultimately win in Michigan but says he will publicly call for the party to find a new candidate if he does not. “We’d get killed,” the senator said if Romney manages to win the nomination after he failed to win...

With just days to go before Nevada Republicans head to the polls to choose who they want to take on President Obama in November, reality show host Donald Trump is injecting himself into the race and endorsing Newt Gingrich. Trump's office announced Wednesday that he would make a major announcement Thursday morning in Las Vegas, without providing details of what he would say. Two sources confirmed to CBS News that the publicity savvy businessman plans to endorse the former House speaker in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Nevada holds its caucus Saturday.

Amid a hard fade in the polls and a struggle to remain in the 2012 spotlight, Michele Bachmann suddenly finds herself back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons — namely, her troubling habit of making misstatements and demonstrably false claims. It’s a problem, former top staffers for the Minnesota congresswoman told POLITICO, that’s plagued her since she first arrived in Congress in 2007. Three former senior aides to Bachmann painted a picture of a shoot-from-the-lip member who cavalierly makes assertions without knowing the facts — and would occasionally make them up to suit her needs. The issue was...

Allies of former prime minister regard darling of Tea Party movement as a frivolous figure unworthy of an audience Sarah Palin wants to show to the Republican right that she is the true keeper of the Ronald Reagan flame by meeting the late president's closest ally on the world stage.

"The bottom line is Sarah Palin is not going to run for president," says a Republican adviser close to front-runner Mitt Romney. "She's making money, she's moved on, she's kind of an entertainer rather than a politician. She still has some sway with the grass roots, but she is not going to run." "I don't think she's going to run," says a Republican close to Tim Pawlenty. "She has faded a lot in the last few months. I look at what she's doing now and say that she's found a way to get back in the story." Maybe these representatives...