Free Republic

Trump’s trade strategy aims to slash the U.S. deficit by forcing fairer deals with key partners—pushing reciprocity, not profiteering, to regain economic balance. After only a hundred days, the Trump counterrevolution has made quite miraculous progress on the border, illegal immigration, cost-cutting, curbing the DEI/woke revolution, and a historic Ukrainian War settlement. The pushback to this multifront effort from the left has been formidable, if not hysterical. The greatest fury mostly centers around Trump’s efforts to force U.S. trading partners to adopt either reciprocal or no tariffs while obeying international trading norms—an effort aimed at vastly reducing the U.S. trade...

The left decries Trump’s deportation of an MS-13-linked illegal alien while ignoring its own legal hypocrisy and attempts to undermine the U.S. justice system. Since 2021, the left has waged a veritable war against the American legal system in a variety of ways. One serial target of Democrats and the Left has been the Supreme Court. In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke to an angry throng of pro-abortion protestors assembled at the very doors of the court chambers. He threatened two of the justices, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, by name. Schumer yelled to the volatile crowd that the...

Elite universities push for federal funding while ignoring legal and ethical obligations, fueling public distrust as they prioritize ideology over academic rigor and free speech. Harvard has refused to accept the orders of a Trump administration commission concerning its chronic problems with anti-Semitism, campus violence, and racial tribalism, bias, and segregation. Yet, unlike some conservative campuses that distrust an overbearing Washington, Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes. Aside...

Stanford University Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson recommends everyone “take a deep breath” when it comes to all the talk about tariffs. Appearing this week as a guest on Sirius XM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show,” the author and podcast host made several important points for Americans to consider as many in the media and Wall Street pundits predict calamity for the economy due to President Donald Trump’s trade policies. “There is a lot of misinformation,” Hanson said, first pointing out that many who are critical of Trump are only criticizing him because he is “Trump.” “Donald Trump did everything...

The real trade war wasn’t Trump’s—it was decades of lopsided deals, deficits, and double standards America tolerated while others profited. Trump’s So-Called “Trade War.”1. Many call the American effort to obtain either tariff parity or a reduction in the roughly $1 trillion trade deficit and fifty years of consecutive trade deficits “a trade war.” But then what do they call the policies of the past half-century by Europe, Asia, China, and others to ensure asymmetrical tariffs, pseudo-health and security trade restrictions, and large surpluses? A trade peace? Trade fairness? 2. Do Nations Prefer Surpluses or Deficits?Why do most nations prefer...

The left rages against Trump but offers no real alternatives on debt, trade, or immigration—just noise, while results quietly pile up. Two strange phenomena now characterize the political landscape. One, opposition to the Trump administration’s initiatives has reached a near-unprecedented fever pitch. The frenzy is manifested in strange ways. At the bottom end, there is an epidemic of street terrorism, including the keying of Teslas, bullying their owners, firebombing dealerships, or vandalizing charging stations. All that is mostly the logical but dirty reification of those in the media and the Democrats who brand Elon Musk as a foreign-born counterfeit citizen...

In this video, Victor Davis Hanson exposes the left's lies about tariffs. Hanson takes a deep dive into how progressive critics misrepresent tariffs as harmful, often portraying them as economic poison that hurts American workers and consumers. He argues that the left’s criticism of tariffs is rooted not in economic reality, but in a broader ideological opposition to Donald Trump's policies. Hanson reveals how tariffs, in many cases, are a strategic tool aimed at rebalancing trade and protecting American industries, rather than the disastrous tactic the left claims.

A Ukraine-Russia ceasefire looms, with Trump pushing deals, Zelenskyy negotiating leverage, and Putin weighing risks—while the West quietly concedes it never had a real plan to win. Aside from the rhetoric, there is a growing consensus among Western diplomats, military analysts, military officers, heads of state, and even much of the media about how to end the endless Ukrainian war. A proposed peace will see a DMZ established somewhere along an adjusted 1,200-mile Ukraine-Russia border. Tough negotiations will adjudicate how far east toward its original borders Russian forces will be leveraged to backstep. Publicly in the U.S. and covertly in...

Trump is racing to dismantle decades of leftist policies, but success hinges on speed, discipline, and the Supreme Court—while facing fierce resistance from entrenched institutions. When Donald Trump entered office, he faced a number of choices that had confronted the last three Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They all had the choice to either shrink government and reduce deficits or slow government growth while cutting taxes. They had the choice of using American power to restore deterrence by invading belligerents (e.g., Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan) or targeting enemies without deploying ground troops to...

California’s high taxes, crime, and regulations are driving an exodus, shifting political power to red states as the once-prosperous blue-state model collapses under economic and social strain. While the media and the new Democrat Party grow hysterical over the Trump counter-revolution, they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century. Much has been written about the collapse of the old orthodox Democratic Party, along with the growing irrelevance and dysfunction of the legacy media, elite universities, and state and federal agencies. But their growing unattractiveness is all related and was not...

The left knowingly pushed falsehoods on COVID, Biden’s fitness, Hunter’s laptop, and the border—dividing the nation while facing no accountability. For years, the left has advanced utter untruths for cheap partisan purposes that it knew at the time were all false. And now when caught, they just shrug and say they were lying all along. Once it was known that the first COVID-19 case originated in or near a Chinese communist virology lab engineering gain-in-function deadly viruses—with help from Western agencies—the left went into full persecution mode. They damned as incompetent, racist, and conspiratorial any who dared follow logic and...

The U.S. faces mounting trade deficits, immigration crises, and endless foreign wars, while critics of Trump's policies offer no viable alternatives to Biden-era failures. The Wall Street Journal has consistently criticized Trump’s economic policies, particularly his ongoing “trade war” with Canada, over the past several weeks. And certainly, the tensions are regrettable. Trump’s trolling of the insufferable Justin Trudeau, with talk of Canada becoming the “51st state,” perhaps only galvanized the Canadian left. It unfortunately may ensure that the only real hope for a Canadian return to normality, the election of Pierre Poilievre, may be lost. That said, does the...

The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad. The West prides itself in...

Did Donald Trump troll Canada into reigniting a dormant nationalism? Victor Davis Hanson argues that Trump's rhetoric has greatly impacted Canadian politics and suggests ways to resolve these tensions between them and America, including tariff adjustments and military collaborations in the Arctic. “That whole [Liberal] Party was headed toward defeat when Donald Trump started to troll them—'Art of the Deal’—sort of goad them in bombastic style that they should be the 51st state in the union of the United States. … And the result is that a Conservative politician, Pierre Poilievre, may lose the election. … We’ve got to correct...

We are witnessing the most radical counter-revolution in the last 100 years, as the Trump administration attempts to slash government spending and the federal bureaucracies. It insists on reciprocal tariffs with friendly, neutral, and hostile nations alike. It will vastly expand energy production, end once and for all illegal immigration, fire the DEI industry and its overt racism, reboot public health policies, redirect the Pentagon, and, in general, reexamine almost every entrenched left-wing government institution and policy of the last 50 years.

Democrats’ obsessive Trump hatred blinds them to their own unpopularity, making his counter-revolution seem inevitable—and even normal. Former Clinton strategist James Carville has reinvented himself at age 80 as a sage Democrat podcaster. His predictions—remember, a victorious Kamala Harris?—are usually wrong. He enjoys engaging in public duels with celebrities to gain online clicks and media appearances. Yet sometimes he appears judicious in his effort to return his party to the Clinton glory days of 1992-2000, before the takeover of the party by the lunatic left. That said, he too has become part of the new left nihilism he supposedly despises....

Why is it that reports of former President Joe Biden’s failing mental acuity are just now coming out? Victor Davis Hanson asks this question on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” “I don't know if you've noticed, everyone, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, they all knew about Joe Biden's dementia. Suddenly we're given all of these revealing quotes that he was completely physically and mentally unfit to carry out the oath of office. But we all knew that.

Trump pressured NATO, armed Ukraine, and imposed tough policies on Russia, while Europe postures without action—leaving real deterrence to the U.S. Fable One: Donald Trump Is Appeasing Russia?Who wiped out the Wagner group in Syria? Who sold offensive weapons to Ukraine first? Who warned Germany not to become dependent on the Russian Nord Stream II deal? Who withdrew from an unfair missile deal with the Russians? Who cajoled and berated NATO members to meet their military investment promises made following the 2014 invasion of Ukraine? In contrast, who originally conceived a Russian “reset” in 2009? Who publicly virtue-signaled pushing the...

The Left’s hate for Elon Musk seems to be increasing rapidly every day. In congress, certain Democrat politicians question Musk’s intentions since he is an immigrant. By normal leftist standards, that would make one “xenophobic” and “nativist” to think this way, but that logic doesn’t apply to Musk argues Victor Davis Hanson in this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” “ We had a congresswoman from Ohio, I think her name was Marcy Kaptur, she recently said that she wasn’t sure where Elon Musk’s loyalties lay because he’d only been a citizen for 22 years. … Remember,...

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, was fired from his post last month, along with several other high ranking military officials. Many of the Left rushed to say that President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were “politicizing” the Pentagon. However, “This is not the politicalization of the Pentagon. It's the depoliticalization”, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” “ They said, ‘This is reckless, it hurts morale, and it will depress recruitment.’ Let's analyze that just for a second. Recruitment reached near-record levels after...