Free Republic

Trump is so unpopular that El-Sayed might win in November. But the Michigan candidate carries a lot of baggage. Democratic primary voters in Michigan just made it harder for their party to flip the Senate. Abdul El-Sayed struggled mightily with the working-class voters he claims his policies would help. The Bernie Sanders acolyte badly underperformed pre-primary polls to eke out a victory in Tuesday’s Senate primary with less than 50 percent. A win is a win, but he carries heavy baggage into the general election. El-Sayed benefited from the strongly anti-establishment mood in the Democratic ranks to defeat Rep. Haley...

Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, sent written notification to senior Pentagon officials saying that without another Navy destroyer he will be forced to choose defense of the United States “homeland” over that of Israel, said the officials, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the correspondence. A U.S. defense official said Grynkewich’s notification appears consistent with past outreach to the Pentagon from the military’s top generals when they see certain risks that require Washington’s consideration. This can occur, the official said, as commanders compete for finite resources and weapons. The Pentagon...

The Trump administration rule, which took effect immediately, could transfer nearly 450,000 cases to immigration judges, who could dismiss the asylum petitions. The Trump administration launched a plan Tuesday to channel hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers directly into deportation proceedings, a change that some attorneys said could lead to people being removed from the United States without a hearing.Trump officials introduced a rule designed to reduce the 1.4 million asylum cases pending in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Department of Homeland Security agency that processes immigration applications, by nearly a third. The rule took effect immediately, before...

Sen. Ed Markey’s campaign released an ad this week meant to tout his progressive support. Instead, the ad — which featured quick cuts of his top endorsers, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), along with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) — only highlighted the progressive left’s gerontocracy problem that has dogged the Markey campaign for months. Markey is 80 and, after 53 years in elected office, is running for reelection to another six-year term, while Sanders, 84, and Warren, 77, are currently serving terms through 2030. The Democratic gerontocracy issue is well documented. There was Joe Biden’s forced departure...

As JD Vance prepares to make a decision about his 2028 plans, the vice president is facing a barrage of online attacks from within his party, criticism his allies say appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to poison the well for him politically.His detractors have adopted the “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media, especially over the past week, with attacks including claims that Vance is “unfit” to be vice president due to his efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. They have asserted, without evidence, that Vance is making policy decisions not supported by President Donald...

From the outside, this was shaping up as a strong year for wartime Ukraine. Ukrainian drones are burning Russia’s refineries and starving occupied Crimea of fuel. Moscow’s summer offensive has stalled on most parts of the front, and Ukraine is taking back territory. In Washington, a president who spent last year berating Kyiv has warmed to it again. But suddenly last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky dismantled what looked like a winning team — removing his popular defense minister, his prime minister and, late Tuesday, the acclaimed commander in chief of his armed forces. Zelensky, the comedian turned president who has...

Nearly half of Americans say they believe the Supreme Court is ruling on President Trump’s policies based on ideology instead of the law, according to a new poll. The Washington Post/Ipsos survey, conducted July 8-13, found that 46 percent of 2,648 respondents said they believe the nine justices are ruling on cases impacting the president’s agenda based on ideology. A quarter of respondents said the high court is ruling on those cases based on the law, while 28 percent had no opinion and 1 percent skipped the question.The Supreme Court has given Trump multiple unfavorable rulings during his second term....

Iran’s government is unlikely to feel significant impact or soften its negotiating position as a result of new rounds of U.S. military strikes like those now underway, according to a new intelligence assessment described by current and former U.S. officials.

Even people who dislike Donald Trump tend to give him credit for one thing: getting NATO to pay its fair share. American presidents have long grumbled about burden sharing. Trump has been crude, theatrical and transactional, but the sentiment he expressed was broadly shared. And Europeans got the message. Non-American NATO countries collectively spent 1.4 percent of their combined gross domestic product on defense in 2014; in 2025, it was close to 2.3 percent.But be careful what you wish for.The usual assumption is that if Europe spends more, the United States will spend less. This is demonstrably wrong. European defense...

The gap, between what the paper assumed its readers would feel and what they actually felt, is the most revealing thing about the piece. The American economy grew by 2 percent during the first three months of 2026, hardly the picture of collapse that critics of the Trump administration keep promising is just around the corner. The country has not tanked under Donald Trump, not even with tariffs in place. Trump has been accused of putting black women out of work by cutting positions in the federal government, and it is true that federal cuts have hit black women disproportionately...

U.S. policy used to jam up GPS. Now, those signals beam into your pocket.Shortly after the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000, a new type of Silicon Valley start-up began to crop up: companies specializing in GPS chips. At the time, GPS — the Global Positioning System, a constellation of satellites that provide location and time to receivers on Earth, courtesy of the American taxpayer — was still relatively niche for everyday people. This small handful of companies was founded on the basis of two gambles. One was that, like any other chip, GPS chips — at the time,...

John Stockwell, who publicly resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1977, accusing it of deceit and illegality, after a career as a covert operative in Vietnam and Africa, died this month in Austin, Texas. He was 88. .... Mr. Stockwell’s break with the C.I.A. — during a period when several former officers published damning exposés of what was informally known as “the Company” — was public and showy. His resignation letter ran in The Washington Post. He wrote a tell-all book, “In Search of Enemies” (1978), which the C.I.A. sought to suppress. He was interviewed on the CBS news...

Donald Trump told Israeli Prime Minister 'all the Jews are sick of you' during a shouting match regarding peace in the Middle East, according to a new book about the President's second term. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's 'Regime Change' details Trump's attempt to broker a Gaza peace deal between Israel and Hamas in September of 2025. The President was on the call with Netanyahu, son in law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff when they became frustrated with the prime minister following an Israeli strike on Qatar. That's when Trump unleashed, the book claims. 'Everybody's sick of you, Bibi....

Taxing the rich sounds good, until they move away.It has never been a better time in America to be a socialist. We aging Gen Xers who thought that socialism had been decisively refuted by the fall of the Berlin Wall have been refuted ourselves: Democratic socialists now run Seattle and New York City, and come January, probably D.C. too, where Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic primary that generally decides the district’s mayoral elections. It is a heady moment for the left, because socialism’s tainted brand has recovered from the vivid failures of the Soviet Union. Fully 66 percent of...

WASHINGTON — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called the Washington Post his worst investment in a conversation with President Trump months before gutting the newsroom, according to a new book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. "The people there are terrible," Bezos told Trump over dinner in December 2024, according to an excerpt obtained by The Post ahead of the June 23 release of "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump." "They don't listen. My other companies, they listen," Bezos said, focusing his ire at the business side of the publication after losing more than...

Ever gotten so deep in credit card debt that you stopped opening the bills because it felt hopeless and looking at the numbers simply stressed you out? If not, I congratulate you on your thrift and prudence. But a lot of people have reached that point, as you will discover if you spend much time on personal finance forums. If you are someone who pays off your credit card every month, it can be hard to understand why anyone would just stop opening their bills. Sure, it is hard to contemplate your financial problems. But contemplation, however unpleasant, is not...

President Donald Trump declared an end to his campaign against Iran’s leaders with an exhortation on Sunday: “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” With the Iranian regime still in place, he was celebrating a resumption of the way the world was on Feb. 27, the day before the United States and Israel attacked Iran. A return to a version of the status quo was a far cry from the original aims of a war effort that kicked off with a vow to come to the aid of the Iranian protesters who had taken to their...

Trump, who is trying to make progress on finalizing an Iran war deal in the coming days, is expected to have a busy schedule of one-on-one meetings with foreign leaders on the sidelines of the summit in the French lakeside town of Evian-les-Bains, according to senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House. The Republican president is expected to discuss with U.S. allies plans to remove mines from the Strait of Hormuz as confidence grows for a deal, one official said. Britain and France, both G7 members, have expressed...

When asked what the worst thing is about Republicans, the most common response among Americans is President Donald Trump or loyalty to him, while the most common response about Democrats is that they are weak and don’t stand up against Trump or for what’s right, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel conducted April 24 through 28. In the poll, Americans were asked what they disliked most about both the Democratic and Republican parties in an open-ended question. For each party, only one single response broke double-digits: 10% of Americans said that the worst thing about...

Surging gas prices have hit American drivers hard — but some much harder than others. For households in the bottom quarter of the income distribution — those earning roughly $40,000 a year or less — commuting fuel costs now consume an average of about 4 percent of their income, according to a Washington Post analysis. For households in the top quarter, earning $100,000 or more, the same costs amount to less than 1 percent. The gap has widened since March, as the U.S. war on Iran escalated and oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz stalled, with implications for global...