Free Republic

When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise. For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer. In July, Mr. Trump dubbed the fresh-faced lawmaker “Pee-wee Herman.” The next month, upset over Mr. Ossoff’s criticism of the president, one aide called Mr. Ossoff a “feminine theater kid” and a “lightweight loser,” and another derided him as “a miserable person” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while deploying a sexually explicit moniker unfit for a family-friendly publication. Mr. Ossoff...

In recent weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has visited firehouses around New York City as part of an effort to direct the public’s attention toward the victims, and away from himself. Three days before the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, conservative politicians stood with victims’ relatives on the steps of City Hall to repeat their demand that Mayor Zohran Mamdani not participate in the formal ceremony on Friday memorializing the tragedy. But in truth, Mr. Mamdani has been commemorating the anniversary for weeks. He met with firefighters at firehouses that suffered grave losses on that day, including Ladder 118 in Brooklyn...

The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, according to government documents. President Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals wielding knives or box cutters for damage to the pool’s “American flag blue” liner, even after the Justice Department dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the national landmark. But the documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found...

The conflict may have slowed, but not stopped, Iran’s nuclear program, officials and experts said. Chief among President Trump’s reasons for launching the war in Iran was preventing it from building a nuclear weapon. More than five months in, officials and experts say, the conflict may have slowed Iran’s nuclear program but not stopped it. Because Iran has barred U.N. inspections of its most sensitive nuclear sites — a key part of any eventual peace deal — the precise fate of its highly enriched nuclear fuel is unknown. And despite strikes on three key nuclear sites in 2025 and 2026,...

The lobbying group has more than doubled its spending on political campaigns, while rarely mentioning Israel. It has placed a large financial bet on today’s Michigan Senate primary. In less than five years, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has become one of the biggest spenders in American elections, flooding the airwaves in congressional races across the country. Since its first involvement in elections, the amount of money AIPAC-affiliated political action committees have spent on campaign advertising and outreach to voters has more than doubled, from $29.3 million to $67.2 million, with much of it spent in Democratic primaries. The...

His online minions attack me fiercely over last week’s column. They should hear what my kids call me. Over many years of writing pieces critical of politicians, my Republican targets mostly took the beatings like men, many going so far as to acknowledge—if only in confidence—that they probably deserved it. Not so Vice President JD Vance, and his dreary band of online enforcers. This egotism—or rather, insecurity—is worth analyzing. This column reported last week on the bitterness Mr. Vance’s congressional colleagues are feeling over his continual absence. In recent administrations, governing majorities have come to rely on the vice president—who...

When President Trump tried to undermine and overturn the election results in 2020, he ran into stiff pushback — not just in the courts, but from many officials in his own government.He made sure there would be little room for such dissent when he returned to the White House. Those seeking to join Mr. Trump’s second administration had to pass a key litmus test: Did they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump?With like-minded allies now positioned in key roles throughout the government, Mr. Trump has trained the full arsenal of the federal government on one of his...

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s slain supreme leader, had seemed immovable for decades, a man whose authority had become so deeply woven into Iran’s political and religious life that imagining the country without him felt almost impossible. Now Tehran — the capital from which he ruled, where he was killed and which had shaped his life — is the center of his final journey, filled with mourners for funeral ceremonies taking place across several days, which are part farewell, part spectacle and part turning point. In the days leading up to the first public mourning, the city changed. First gradually, and...

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025. Once a crypto skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced the profit-making opportunity of digital currencies in 2024, while he was running for...

“It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” That lament heard this week from New York Times opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman could well be the Democratic Party’s epitaph. Spiegelman was interviewing two left-wing influencers about how everything from shoplifting to murder may be excusable today in light of the unfairness they see in society. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” That lament heard this week from New York Times opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman could well be the Democratic Party’s epitaph. Spiegelman was interviewing two left-wing influencers about how everything from...

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and her top aides and family members routinely sent personal messages and requests to young staff members that are now under review by the department’s inspector general. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her former deputy chief of staff sent texts asking employees to bring wine to them during trips for the department. Sometimes the requests came in the middle of the workday. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s husband exchanged text messages with young female staff members, as did her father. Some of the young women were instructed by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and the former deputy chief of staff to “pay attention” to...

The story behind the New York Times’ 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is even worse than it looks. Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility. The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with...

Did The New York Times publish a headline saying "A North American Treaty Organization Without America?" Yes, that's true: The mistake appeared in the April 3, 2026, print edition of the paper. Instead of saying "North American Treaty Organization," it should have said "North Atlantic Treaty Organization." The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by the @sissenberg account on X on April 3, 2026. It read: " Does the @nytimes know what NATO stands for?" snip

In 1991, American officials flew to Israel to keep the country from retaliating against Scud missile attacks and joining the Gulf War. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned it would be “in Israel’s overwhelming best interests not to get involved” in the looming invasion of Iraq. In 2026, the United States went to war alongside Israel. “It’s the first time,” said Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, “that Israel is going to war together with a superpower.” The United States has been the Jewish state’s most important backer for decades, providing it with weaponry and working...

On an icy Friday morning, Mahad Omar watched armed federal agents run down the street and tackle one of his neighbors to the ground. They handcuffed the man and put him inside a black-tinted S.U.V. Mr. Omar, 28, an Uber driver, immigrated to Minneapolis from Somalia two decades ago. He had never imagined seeing something like that in his community. “Minneapolis is a great city,” Mr. Omar said after the agents had left and residents emerged from their homes to discuss in hushed voices what they had seen from their yards and windows. Several women wept. “It’s never been like...

President Trump has found a powerful but obscure bulwark in the appeals court judges he appointed during his first term. They have voted overwhelmingly in his favor when his administration’s actions have been challenged in court in his current term, a New York Times analysis of their 2025 records shows. Time and again, appellate judges chosen by Mr. Trump in his first term reversed rulings made by district court judges in his second, clearing the way for his policies and gradually eroding a perception early last year that the legal system was thwarting his efforts to amass presidential power. When...

President Trump again threatened on Friday to forcibly annex Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.” In a White House event discussing his plans to have American companies exploit Venezuela’s vast oil reserves under the threat of a military blockade, Mr. Trump advanced an imperialist vision of American foreign policy, where the U.S. must dominate strategically important neighboring countries because of the perceived possibility that rival powers might do so first. “If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland,” Mr. Trump said, falsely suggesting that Greenland,...

The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation. Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! Thank you for you attention to this matter. PRESIDENT DJT

A package of U.S. cruise missiles is among the first shipments of purchases by NATO allies to be sent to the embattled country.Europe has begun buying American weapons for Ukraine in earnest, only weeks after President Trump struck a deal with NATO allies to do so.The latest sale, announced by the State Department on Thursday, will send 3,500 extended-range cruise missiles and GPS navigation kits to Ukraine once Congress formally approves it, as expected. They cost $825 million, paid for by Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway, with some unspecified financial assistance from the Pentagon.The missiles can be fired from fighter...

This was the (top part of) front page of the New York Times on July 25 featuring what appears to be a starving, emaciated Gaza child.I just went through the front pages of the New York Times for the past 365 days. Not once has it positioned a photo in this extraordinary way.Usually the NYT will feature a photo that is four columns wide, and that photo is always wider than it is tall (landscape). For example, here is the front page from yesterday, illustrating the mass shooting in Manhattan.Once every couple of months it has a feature photo that...