Free Republic

Move comes amid concerns that Trump delegation could help Bolsonaro family cast doubt on electronic voting ahead of October’s presidential election SÃO PAULO—Brazil has denied visas to two senior Trump administration officials who were planning to travel to the country, amid concerns that they sought to undermine confidence in the electronic-voting system before October’s presidential election. The move comes as fears deepen in Brazil that the Bolsonaro family is working with President Trump and his allies to unseat leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and help return the Brazilian right to power. Former president Jair Bolsonaro is serving a...

Republicans will make even moderate opponents answer for the radical views of DSA candidates. I have no objection to the Democrats’ nominating an oysterman for a Senate seat. When I led our party’s effort to recapture the House in 2006, we made a point of recruiting candidates with “authentic” broad-based appeal. But that strategy, which flipped 31 seats during my tenure, and claimed 21 more in 2008, was predicated on a substantive premise: We needed to allay voters’ worries that Democrats were weak on national defense and culturally out of touch, vulnerabilities born from previous elections. If we could do...

The influx of troops, medics and weaponry follows the deaths of three American soldiers in Iranian weekend attack WASHINGTON—The U.S. is surging forces, medics and weaponry to the Middle East to give President Trump more muscular military options as he considers expanding the conflict against Iran, according to people familiar with the matter.In the past week, special-operations forces have deployed to the region from their U.S. bases, according to flight-tracking data and U.S. officials. Squadrons of jet fighters have been staged across the Middle East, and bomber aircraft at bases in the U.S. and U.K. are on high alert to...

Three days before his 2025 inauguration, Donald Trump launched a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP. That May, he dined with 220 of its largest holders, some of whom bought up the coin expressly to secure invitations. In October Mr. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a Binance co-founder who had been convicted of violating money-laundering laws. Binance had assigned a team to develop the stablecoin for World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture tied to the Trump family. The undertaking netted Mr. Trump hundreds of millions, part of $1 billion in crypto gains, while most token buyers lost money. Last year Paramount agreed to pay...

Israel paid at least $50 million to US-based firms to help its standing with Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. The report alleged that the Israeli government had retained at least six firms to help in its efforts to sway public opinion in the United States in its favor. It added that at least three dozen new people, many of them in the marketing industry, have registered as foreign agents for Israel. This comes as 42% of American adults hold an unfavorable opinion of Israeli people, and 69% hold an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, a July...

‘My whole life, all I do is deals,” President Trump said Wednesday, but Iran’s regime “is from a different school,” he had to admit. “They’re liars, they’re cheats, they’re sick people.” Mr. Trump cited the tens of thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime in January and explained how its word has proved worthless. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” he said.The President is so mercurial that it’s impossible to know if he’s serious that the cease-fire is “over,” as he said. He could declare it back on tomorrow. But he’s right that Iran’s regime has been wasting...

French President Emmanuel Macron said his country was willing to engage in a “shooting war” with the U.S. earlier this year, according to a report. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Macron made the decision earlier this year after American forces carried out a precision strike in Venezuela that led to the arrest of former dictator Nicolas Maduro. The French president reportedly made comments about fighting Americans over Greenland, the desolate Danish island that could prove crucial to keeping non-NATO powers out of the North Atlantic. With President Donald Trump expressing his desire to acquire the island as...

SNIP Summary: Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran following a Monday Situation Room meeting, rejecting both a resumption of bombing and acceptance of Iran's current proposal The blockade is aimed at forcing Tehran to dismantle its entire nuclear programme, with Trump demanding at minimum a 20-year suspension of enrichment Iran's three-step proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while deferring nuclear talks was rejected as evidence of bad faith The Strait of Hormuz is seeing its lowest transit levels since the conflict began, driving up energy costs and weighing on Trump's poll numbers ahead...

In December of 2016, President Obama turned to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan with a request to change the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and blame the Russians for election interference in the prior presidential election. Brennan gave the task of assembling the fraudulent intel to a CIA analyst named Julia Gurganus. Subsequently, inside the CIA the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and the Directorate of Analysis began working on a pretext that would create the impression for the misleading Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) as demanded by Obama, Clapper and Brennan; ultimately it was constructed by...

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at “feeding” the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.I. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony “Kamikaze Boats,” shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don’t exist — It’s all false information to show how “tough” their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that...

Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.

Tuesday’s State of the Union address gives President Trump a big platform to tout the economy’s performance on his watch. He has already given himself a grade—“A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” he told Politico in December. The report card for the economy is a bit more mixed, however, after his first year back in office. Here are the grades for some key metrics. JobsNeeds improvement It is rough out there for job seekers, unless they are looking for work in healthcare. U.S. employers added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, down sharply from the prior year to the lowest figure outside of a recession in...

A new poll shows 76% of Greenlanders say they wouldn’t benefit from becoming part of the U.S., noting their concerns about exchanging the Danish welfare system for American healthcare, elder care and education. Only 3% of Greenlanders had a “very positive” view of U.S. government-provided benefits, while 59% held a mainly or very negative view of it, the poll shows. The U.S. has some of the highest healthcare costs in the world. In a new survey conducted by Verian in Denmark for Berlingske and Sermitsiaq, Greenlanders are asked: "Do you want Greenland to leave Denmark and become part of the...

President Trump has complained to aides repeatedly in recent weeks about Attorney General Pam Bondi, describing her as weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda, administration officials and other people familiar with his complaints said. The criticisms appear to be part of an intense campaign by Trump to pressure the Justice Department to more aggressively pursue his priorities, some of the officials said. Trump has previously criticized Bondi at times but his vocal concerns about his attorney general have grown more frequent in recent months, officials said. This month, Trump has talked with allies about how he could appoint...

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing preliminary plans for an attack on Iran, including the option of large-scale airstrikes. Officials are considering how to follow through on President Trump’s recent elevated threats against the Islamic Republic, including what sites might be targeted, insiders told the Wall Street Journal. A massive aerial strike campaign on multiple Iranian military targets is one option being considered — although Washington has not reached consensus on a plan of action. No military equipment or personnel have been moved for a potential attack, the insiders said. The conversations do not indicate that the US will strike,...

When Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez gave a speech condemning the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro, she was accompanied by two men who can make or break the regime’s future. Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino command Venezuela’s police and military, the forces that kept Maduro in power for more than a decade with deadly crackdowns on dissent. Trump said Rodríguez is the de facto leader of Venezuela. She is someone who despite her anti-U.S. rhetoric has privately assured Washington that she will do its bidding with Maduro facing prison, Trump said on Saturday. But Cabello and...

The 2026 midterms are coming, and Republicans have work to do if they want to hold Congress. Yet the nation’s MAGA minds are still looking back at 2020 and stretching to justify President Trump’s delusion of a stolen election. The latest involves the embarrassing news that Fulton County, Ga., failed to have its poll workers sign many of the tabulator tapes for early voting. “I have not seen the tapes myself, but we do not dispute that the tapes were not signed,” an attorney for Fulton County told the Georgia State Election Board during a December hearing. “It was a...

The public unveiling of the Biden administration’s lawfare campaign against a past president and political rival came on Aug. 8, 2022, the day the FBI descended on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents. It was a shocking moment, the first time in history federal law-enforcement had acted against a former president. More shocking: It didn’t have to be that way. The Justice Department insisted on it. That’s the disturbing information contained in emails released this week by the Senate Judiciary Committee. In missives spanning the summer of 2022, FBI officials expressed alarm and forcefully pushed back against...

The blueprint details how as many as 800,000 German, U.S. and other NATO troops would be ferried eastward toward the front line. It maps the ports, rivers, railways and roads they would travel, and how they would be supplied and protected on the way.

It has been almost 20 years since Shelby Steele published the best-known of his five books on race, “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.” A lot has happened since. In 2006 “we hadn’t had President Obama, Ferguson, Trump, George Floyd, DEI, Black Lives Matter, President Biden,” Mr. Steele says. “We also hadn’t had Oct. 7.” Mr. Steele, 79, is one of America’s foremost black conservative thinkers, recently retired as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is still hard at work, on a film made by his son, Eli Steele,...