Free Republic

The final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, held on Thursday evening, was the first one of the entire campaign that actually felt like a debate. The first debate was a chaotic disaster thanks to Trump’s constant interruptions... This time around, better moderation and the handy use of a mute button allowed both candidates to express their thoughts — leading to a mix of actual substantive policy exchanges and personal mudslinging. The format seems to have suited Biden, who seemed energized and on-target — getting in a number of strong attacks on Trump’s record on...

After Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination on Tuesday night, the BBC rounded up the reactions from the global press to Trump's victory. Aside from some gloating in authoritarian Russia and China, the reaction was pretty shocked. "The craziest US presidential election campaign begins," Germany's Die Welt daily wrote. "The unthinkable has come to pass."

Not many Muslims support Republicans, but those who do support Trump Updated by Zack Beauchamp on February 3, 2016, 8:50 a.m. ET @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com Donald Trump wants to ban any more Muslims from entering the United States. Yet among Muslim Americans, he's the most popular Republican candidate for president — although that may say more about the rest of the GOP field than about Trump, given that he's polling "first" among Republicans with only 7.5 percent Muslim American support. That's according to a new survey of Muslim Americans from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), conducted among 2,000 Muslims in...

When Russia started bombing in Syria last week, it said it was targeting ISIS — a claim it's stuck to pretty consistently in the past week. But this map of Russian airstrikes in Syria so far, put together by the Levantine Group, tells a very different story. The Levantine Group's analysts used a proprietary network of sources, cross-checked with open-source media and information released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, to determine the locations hit by Russian planes. This map shows those strikes overlaid on territory controlled by Bashar al-Assad's regime, by anti-Assad rebels, by ISIS, and by Kurdish forces....

Late in the second Republican debate, "high energy" Donald Trump was sounding sleepy. When moderator Jake Tapper asked him about his history of flubbing it on basic foreign policy issues, he just sounded tired. "The world is blowing up around us," Trump rotely responded. "We will have great teams and great people." Sen. Marco Rubio, whose campaign trail attack on Trump prompted Tapper's questions, pounced. "You should ask him questions in detail about the foreign policy issues our president will confront, because you had better be able to lead our country on the first day," Rubio said to Tapper. "Not...

The Republican foreign policy debate usually gets described as a divide between Rand Paul and ... basically everyone else. But Ted Cruz wants to change that, positioning himself as a sort of "third way" between Paul's non-interventionism and Bush-style neoconservatism. Cruz's approach seems like it should be popular, but it also illustrates one of the central problems in his candidacy: there isn't really a natural Cruz constituency. Cruz's position on the use of force is hawkish: he wants the US to be far more aggressive than the Obama administration has been when facing threats. But he's also skeptical of nation...

"More specifically, Netanyahu's Likud Party won by siphoning voters away from the other right parties who will become its coalition partners. Mainstream Israeli opinion has shifted to the right: to win, Likud didn't need to win over a swath of centrist voters. It needed to jazz up the Right with nasty rhetoric about Palestinians and Arabs." "Meanwhile, Likud is going through a process that some observers have referred to as Tea Party-ization. Younger Israelis tend to be more conservative, increasingly empowering the more right-wing factions inside Likud. That causes center-right voters to defect to centrist parties, pushing the party ever...