Free Republic

He has presided over two years of remarkable success. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I was afraid his obviously improvised campaign, imprecise explanations concerning how he planned to achieve his policy goals, and unsettling antics presaged a disastrous one-term presidency if he somehow managed to win. Unlike Bill Kristol and his ilk, however, I never considered voting for the execrable Hillary Clinton. So, knowing that Trump would win my deep red state anyway, I voted for what’s-his-name from New Mexico. Predictably, I was surprised when Trump won. But that was nothing compared to the astonishment I experienced when it...

A truism of the midterm elections is that women in the suburbs revolted against Donald Trump—or were revolted by Mr. Trump—and took it out on Republican candidates. Surveying the carnage among incumbent Republicans, there is little reason to challenge this conventional wisdom. Still, some of us on principle don’t feel at home with the conventional wisdom, even as we admit its undeniable reality. So this week we are going to spend some time with what may be America’s most determined political outliers—the women who love Trump....

President Donald Trump is planning to roll out an unprecedented structure for his 2020 reelection, a streamlined organization that incorporates the Republican National Committee and the president’s campaign into a single entity. It’s a stark expression of Trump’s stranglehold over the Republican Party: Traditionally, a presidential reelection committee has worked in tandem with the national party committee, not subsumed it. Under the plan, which has been in the works for several weeks, the Trump reelection campaign and the RNC will merge their field and fundraising programs into a joint outfit dubbed Trump Victory. The two teams will also share office...

Number of the week: A new Fox News poll finds that only 38% of voters said they would re-elect President Donald Trump if the election were held today. A majority, 55%, said they would vote for someone else. That's in line with previous Fox News polls, which also found that a majority of voters wanted someone else to be president. What's the point: The findings of Fox News are no surprise. The President has consistently had a negative net approval rating (approval rating minus disapproval rating). The re-election question is merely an offshoot of that and indicates that voters are...

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire -- Congressman and likely presidential candidate Eric Swalwell predicts that when the Democrats take over the majority in the House of Representatives next month, President Donald Trump “will be held accountable.” And in a conversation with Fox News and local New Hampshire news organizations, the California Democrat highlighted that he’s “seriously looking at running for president” and added that his potential White House bid would not be “some vanity project.” Discussing Trump, Swalwell said, “we now have more evidence than ever that he – the president – was associated with a criminal campaign and a criminal transition...

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): After a midterm election, it’s not unusual for a president to reassess strategy and approach and make appeals to the “middle” or to “reach across the aisle.” But we’re talking about President Trump, who currently doesn’t have a good track record of working with Democrats. So, what evidence do we have that he will try a different approach? And is trying a more bipartisan approach even a good idea? geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): We’ve been waiting for the fabled “Trump pivot” for, what, two years now? I’m not counting on it happening next year....

No one knows when President Trump will leave office. Possibly January 2021 when his first term ends; possibly not before January 2025 when a second term would end. Ultimately, however, he will leave office sometime to be succeeded by the next president. But who will that be? That intriguing question increasingly occupies the attention of politicians from both parties. Already there is conjecture he may be challenged from within the GOP — an action always fraught with peril for the incumbent party. Even more speculation has centered on a formidable list of Democratic aspirants. At least two dozen potential Democrats...

2028 WATCH … OVERHEARD Thursday at a POLITICO photoshoot at Harvard: REP.-ELECT ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.) joking about running for president. PHOTOG: “What are you, twenty...?” AOC: “29. I just turned 29.” PHOTOG: “Happy birthday.” AOC: “Thank you! Thank you!” PHOTOG: “You can’t even run for president for another six years.” AOC: “No, not for a long time. Thank God. Although we’ve been joking that because the Equal Rights Amendment hasn’t been passed yet, the Constitution technically says he cannot run unless he’s 35. … So what we’ll do is we’ll force the Republican Party to pass the Equal Rights Amendment...

President Donald Trump’s economic officials are reassuring investors about recent white-knuckle stock market volatility, while Trump’s political advisers are increasingly alarmed that the economy could present a stiff 2020 campaign headwind. Many of Trump’s political allies acknowledge that his reelection prospects hinge in large part on how Americans judge their economic prospects at the time of the next election. And many independent analysts say that recent market turbulence is a warning sign that the U.S. economy will likely slow and maybe even tip into recession by 2020. At the moment, that scenario could be the biggest threat to Trump’s chances...

He says he's Lyin’ Ted no more. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, declared on Saturday night that the ignominious nickname bestowed on him by President Trump during the 2016 campaign season has been relegated to the annals of history -- as has the feud between Cruz and Trump. "This was also a breakthrough year in which my presidential sobriquet went from 'Lyin’ Ted' to 'Beautiful Ted,'" Cruz joked during a speech at the Gridiron Club. Cruz was joking, in the spirit of the roast. He also quipped: “I gotta say, that new pet name felt like it really hit the mark....

With most of the votes from the midterm election tallied, we now have a better sense of the scale of the Democratic victory. It is historic. Thus far, Democrats have earned more than 8.8 million more votes than Republicans, flipped 39 seats, and are poised to win a 40th as election officials continue counting ballots in California. In terms of their House margin, this makes 2018 the Democratic Party’s strongest midterm performance since Watergate. The popular vote margin is also a record high for Democrats, representing a decisive repudiation of the president and his party. This should make concrete a...

BILOXI, MS (WLOX) - President Donald Trump will make his second appearance in South Mississippi. This time, it’s for a rally in support of incumbent candidate Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, and preparations are a little more intense this time around. While the Secret Service and White House are in charge, Executive Director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Coliseum Matt McDonnell and his team have to do the leg work. “It’s definitely not something we encounter on a frequent basis,” he said. McDonnell went through a similar process in 2016 when Trump appeared as a candidate, but things have changed, and the...

Together the two have generated some of the most vital moments of democratic change in the modern era Religion and populism have become dirty words in progressive circles, but despite common assumptions, their combination could serve as a resource for the sort of democratic renewal many societies need. There is plenty of evidence to support the view that religion and populism are bad enough in themselves and even worse when combined. The so-called “Christian-Democracy” of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, widespread support of Donald Trump by white evangelicals in the United States, the Hindu nationalism of Modi, and the Islamo-Kemalism of Erdoğan...

Poll of the week: A CBS News poll finds that President Donald Trump's approval rating on his handling of the economy is 52%. His disapproval rating on this metric is 41%. The same poll shows that Trump's overall job approval rating stands at just 39% to a disapproval rating of 55%. Put another way, his net approval rating on the economy is +11 points and his net approval overall is -16 points, which makes for a difference of -27 points. What's the point: The CBS News poll is merely the latest one to show that a majority of Americans approve...

Thanks to a rare unscripted moment for Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ big secret is out: It’s not only President Donald Trump and his supporters who loath immigrants knocking at our doors. Too many Democrats also reject “migration,” she reminds us. How could I forget? Before Bill Clinton was president, we were called Cuban refugees. Even during the unruly Mariel boatlift of 1980 that brought 125,000 people to South Florida during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, it remained so. But as Clinton faced the challenge of thousands of Cubans taking to the seas in rickety homemade rafts — 35,000 by the exodus’ end...

As the Trump Dynasty stumbles into misrule and failure, how long before the first well-known journalist gets murdered? With the president designating the news media as “enemies of the people,” unstable personalities like pipe-bomb mailer Cesar Sayoc and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter have been shaken loose from their moorings. Imitators surely will follow. Not that there’s anything new about it. Soreheads have been menacing journalists since the invention of newspapers. Recently, a man in Mountain Home, Arkansas, was charged with terroristic threatening after repeated phone calls targeting CNN’s Don Lemon. I wondered if he was the same idiot who used...

Hillary Clinton popped back into the news cycle on Thanksgiving in the worst possible way, after the Guardian quoted her as saying, basically, that Europe needs to get harsher on migrants and refugees or else people like Donald Trump will keep winning elections. Just to reiterate this is a bad and terrible stance that only some kind of ultra-warped center-think could come up with. The interview took place before the midterms, according to the Guardian, and was published as part of the paper’s new “The New Populism” series, which might explain why they decided to drop the quotes on Thanksgiving...

There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on how much you focus on the number of votes versus the number of seats, the House versus the Senate versus governorships, and so forth. Personally, I’d rank the 2018 wave a tick behind both 1994, which represented a historic shift after years of Democratic dominance of the House, and 2010, which reflected an especially ferocious shift against then-President Barack Obama after he’d been elected in a landslide two years earlier. But I’d put...

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow referenced the “House popular vote” in an effort to explain how the Nov. 6th midterm elections really did represent the “blue wave” many Democrats had been hoping to create. “As of this morning, the Democratic lead in the US House popular vote is up to 7.3%, from 7.2% yesterday. For comparison purposes, note that in 2010 – which was widely seen as a GOP ‘wave’ cycle – Republicans won the US House popular vote by 6.6%,” Maddow tweeted. (TWEET-AT-LINK)What Maddow was saying was that overall, more nationwide votes were cast for Democrats in House seats than for...

Being mayor of Portland, Ore., may have gotten to Ted Wheeler. On Thursday, after finishing a speech at the Oregon Health Forum in which he was heckled, Wheeler mumbled, “I can’t wait for the next 24 months to be over,” indicating he may not seek re-election, the Oregonian reported. (TWEET-AT-LINK) "If you know me, you know I mutter quite a bit,” Wheeler said in a statement issued later in the day. “Not one of my most redeeming qualities. I will make a decision next year with my family if I am running for re-election." In previous media interviews, Wheeler has...