Free Republic

The past two months of electoral losses for the Trump GOP feel very familiar. Newly elected president Barack Obama’s party lost off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and suffered a stunning upset in a Senate race it had no business losing, in Massachusetts. Trump’s party lost off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and suffered a stunning upset in a Senate race it had no business losing, in Alabama. We don’t know if Trump will experience a midterm shellacking on par with Obama’s in 2010, or, getting more speculative, go on to win reelection anyway. But every...

In his Alabama appearance for Roy Moore, Steve Bannon turned in an intellectually and morally putrid performance even by his standards. There is a partisan case for voting for Moore, which is simply that Republicans can’t afford to lose a Senate seat over the next three years and Moore’s failings must be ignored or rationalized away for the larger good of the party. This isn’t an elevated line of reasoning and is not obviously correct on its own terms. With Democrats throwing John Conyers and and Al Franken overboard, Senate Republicans would be welcoming into their ranks a potent symbol...

The president of the United States wakes up some mornings seemingly determined to convince as many people as possible that he’s unsuited to high office. Fortunately for him, he has a Twitter account, allowing him to act on this impulse immediately and without any filter. On Wednesday, Trump retweeted three videos from an apparatchik of an extremist party in Britain purporting to show acts of violence by Muslims. One of them is reportedly fake — it’s not clear the perpetrator is a Muslim. He then defended himself in a tweet to UK Prime Minister Theresa May — or, at least,...

Roy Moore is the Steve Bannon project in a nutshell. For the former Trump operative, the Alabama Senate candidate’s tattered credibility is a feature, not a bug. If Moore had well-considered political and legal views, good judgment and a sterling reputation, he’d almost by definition be part of the establishment that Bannon so loathes. Since Moore has none of those things, he’s nearly an ideal representative of the Bannon insurgency. Events in Alabama make it clear that Bannon’s dime-store Leninism — burn everything down, including perhaps the Republican Senate majority — comes at a considerable cost. In this project, the...

Donald Trump is the first president in US history to have been baited into undermining his own negotiating position by negative TV coverage. Less than 12 hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions explained that the administration is ending DACA because it’s unconstitutional, Trump tweeted that he might revive the program if Congress doesn’t act. This was an implicit admission that he’s bluffing on DACA, which gives Democrats every incentive not to trade anything meaningful for a codification of the program. Why make any painful concessions to save DACA if the president is loath to truly terminate it? Surely, Trump wasn’t...

When President Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller stepped to the podium of the White House briefing room on Wednesday to defend a plan for reducing levels of legal immigration, Jim Acosta of CNN was aghast and let everyone know it. Put aside that Acosta believed it was his role as a reporter to argue one side of a hot-button political issue (this is how journalism works in 2017). The exchange illustrated how advocates of high levels of immigration are often the ones who — despite their self-image as the rational bulwark against runaway populism — rely on an ignorant emotionalism...

The American coastal elites are living in a different country than they thought and it has a powerful voice in the new president Donald Trump is an unlikely president. He is also an unlikely cultural warrior. That hasn’t stopped him from becoming both. Besides throwing American politics into a tumult that won’t end in the near future, President Trump has reoriented and reinvigorated the American culture war. He has wrenched it away from its decades-long focus on issues related to religion and sexual morality and created another axis around populism and nationalism. The issues involved in this new culture war...

The best thing that happened to Donald Trump all week is that BuzzFeed published the raw Russia dossier about him. ... By publishing the uncorroborated dossier, BuzzFeed has associated the Russia issue with fantastical rumors and hearsay. ... BuzzFeed’s incredible act of journalistic irresponsibility represented the press leading with its chin. ... Its decision to post the document has to be considered another chapter in the ongoing saga of the media and Democrats losing their collective minds.

If Democrats are starting to panic, they should. What else do they have to throw at him? If you aren’t seriously contemplating the biggest black swan event in American electoral history, you aren’t paying attention. Fifteen months ago, Donald Trump was a reality-TV star with a spotty business record and a weird penchant for proclaiming he was on the verge of running for president. Now, he’s perhaps a few big breaks and a couple of sterling debate performances away from being elected 45th president of the United States. Trump has no experience in elected office, and unlike past nonpoliticians elected...

January 23, 2016An Actuarial Look At The Closing Pace of GOP Presidential Politics - Glenn Beck Endorses Ted Cruz, and Prefers Bernie Sanders? by sundance Most of you knew this was going to be a wild ride. Heck, many knew back in June 2015 when candidate Donald Trump entered the race this was going to be unlike anything we’d ever seen. Boy howdy, was that ever an understatementGoing all the way back to the spring of 2014 those who didn’t fall into the emotional chasm, which surrounds candidate advocacy, saw the makings of a really strange situation possible. Today many...

Beck's speech continued by urging Iowans to support someone like Cruz, who he argued would take risks to bring as many Marxist atheists—like Cruz's father was when he came in from Cuba- as possible into America from foreign lands on the off chance they might end up seeing the light and becoming conservative Christians. "So when we look at immigration, let's remember that people-if they want to come here and want to be Americans—they renew us," Beck said. "And you never know what somebody might do. There was a Marxist, a Marxist who didn't really realize how Marxist he was...

Beck said he had never endorsed a presidential candidate in his 40 years of broadcasting, but he made an exception because of the urgency of the moment. He said he even prefers Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" running in the Democratic presidential primary, to Trump. "Honesty, faith and truth are basic requirements. And quite honestly, I have to tell you, this probably isn't going to go over very well, that's why I like Bernie Sanders," he said. "Bernie Sanders is like, 'Yep, I'm a socialist.' "I can actually sit at a table with a man who says,...

A little over three months ago, National Review endorsed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for Speaker of the House. In doing so, National Review helped place a man with a two-decade history of pushing open borders immigration policies in charge of the Republican Party’s entire legislative agenda. Ten weeks after that endorsement helped Paul Ryan secure the Speakership, Ryan proceeded to swiftly pass an omnibus spending bill that funded and expanded President Obama’s immigration agenda.

~ SNIPS~ Ailes is mad at Lowry because this move means, in the ongoing war between Fox News and Trump, Fox News has now "given up the moral high ground." Essentially, Ailes understands, that means his network looks like the unfair aggressor that Trump has accused it of being -rather than a neutral arbiter of the news - all while Trump continues soaring in the 2016 GOP primary polls. But on Wednesday evening, Lowry appearing on Kelly's program compromised Fox's position in the war by veering down a vulgar path in his attack on Trump. Even Kelly, who also dislikes...

It’s one thing to publish an editorial denouncing Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump; any news outlet can do that, and plenty have. It’s another to get almost two dozen leading conservative thinkers to write essays arguing against the Manhattan billionaire’s nomination and agree to print them under a single banner: “Against Trump.”

The lazy conventional wisdom is that Ted Cruz is the new Barry Goldwater, doomed to suffer an electoral landslide defeat should he win the Republican nomination. Not only is this wrong about Cruz's general-election chances, it may compare Cruz to the wrong 20th-century Republican forebear. The better analogue for Cruz might be Richard Nixon, not in the crudely pejorative sense, but as another surpassingly shrewd and ambitious politician who lacked a personal touch but found a way to win nonetheless. First, all the caveats. Obviously and most importantly, Cruz is not a paranoiac. He's more ideological than Nixon. And he...

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, the two most popular and broadly acceptable candidates in the field are perhaps the most talented and most reliably conservative. Oh, and by the way, they are Hispanics in their 40s. If the race eventually has Rubio and Cruz among the finalists, or winnows down to a Rubio-Cruz fight, it will feature supremely skilled campaigners who are eloquent and sure-footed and represent the best next-generation politicians the party has to offer. A Cruz-Rubio race would play as the grass roots vs. the establishment, although Rubio in the establishment slot would be an enormous victory...

Colin CampbellSeptember 25, 2015 Real-estate magnate Donald Trump fired off multiple furious tweets Wednesday night after a crude remark was used against him on Fox News. Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative magazine National Review, declared that the Republican presidential front-runner is attacking rival Carly Fiorina because she emasculated him at last week's presidential debate. "Part of what's going on here is that last debate. Let's be honest: Carly cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon and he knows it," Lowry said during a Fox News interview, according to video posted by Mediaite. Host Megyn Kelly...

The media world was waiting for it and Donald Trump delivered Wednesday night, performing his now nightly Twitter assault on Fox News after announcing his boycott of the network earlier in the day. This time, the GOP frontrunner’s outrage came after the National Review’s Rich Lowry suggested that Carly Fiorina “cut [Trump’s] balls off with the precision of a surgeon” at the CNN Republican debate, much to host Megyn Kelly’s shock. “You can’t say that,” Kelly said. For once, she and Trump agreed.

With Europe’s Muslim 'immigrants' come ancient hatreds and a revival of anti-Semitism. The Bergische Synagogue in the German town of Wuppertal has a history with arson. The nearly 120-year-old synagogue was burned down during Kristallnacht in 1938. Rebuilt after World War II, it was targeted again about a week ago by arsonists who threw Molotov cocktails at the house of worship (although, thankfully, they failed to set it aflame). Welcome to the New Europe, where the street thugs have learned a lot from the Old Europe. Their protests of the Gaza War during the past few weeks haven’t been anti-Israel...