Free Republic

The media keeps going out of its way to fact check President Trump’s claims as false. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump is one of many journalists who can’t be bothered with considering the most obvious interpretations of what Trump says. Instead, he ventures into the nonsensical.

I missed this when it was published Thursday. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump did a fact-check of sorts on a claim made by President Trump: “You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” he said. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of 20. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.” It’s not clear how Trump is defining “most dangerous” in this context. So let’s look at two related sets of data compiled by the FBI: most violent...

There is not, as of writing, any medication which has been shown in controlled trials to significantly hasten recovery from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus that's become a global pandemic. Last week, there were nonetheless some new developments on that front. One drug seems to show signs of promise. Another has seen red flags raised. The one that's raised hopes isn't the one that President Donald Trump has been hyping. Again: It is not the case that we have new, incontrovertible proof of a drug's efficacy. But news of a trial demonstrating some benefit for covid-19 patients from...

<p>Before President Trump came to the stage at his rally in Cincinnati on Thursday, several other speakers warmed up the crowd.</p> <p>One was Brandon Straka, founder of the “Walk Away” movement. Straka was a liberal, until, as he told the crowd, he learned that the media falsely reported that Trump had mocked a disabled reporter during the 2016 campaign. (Trump did do that.) Straka is a minority within Trump’s coalition, a gay Democrat-turned-Trump-supporter, and he presented himself to the audience as a validator for Trump’s relationship with non-majority groups.</p>

From a distance, Quinnipiac University’s new national poll looking at the 2020 Democratic primary looks fairly familiar. There’s former vice president Joe Biden atop the field, with a 19-point lead over the next-closest candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The rest of the top tier includes familiar names, too: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. When we look at how the top tier has evolved, though, things get interesting.

Bump [Philip Bump, WaPo] quotes Ford as telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I did see Mark Judge once at the Potomac Village Safeway after the time of the attack, and it would be helpful with anyone’s resources if – to figure out when he worked there if people are wanting more details from me about when the attack occurred.” Now Bump announces his Eureka moment. He can pinpoint Ford’s timeline thanks to Mark Judge himself. Bump quotes from Judge’s 1997 book “Wasted.” Judge wrote, “It was the summer before senior year, and by now, even though I wasn’t drinking every...

There are two immediate reasons that President Trump might have decided that, after weeks of holding his fire, it was worth disparaging Christine Blasey Ford during a rally in Mississippi on Tuesday night. The first is that Ford’s allegation that Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett M. Kavanaugh, had assaulted her when the two were in high school was putting Kavanaugh’s nomination at risk. Trump insists that he punches his opponents only after they punch him first, which isn’t true, but it’s certainly unusual for him to incur political damage without lashing out. On Tuesday, that moment arrived for...

In the flood of stories about how people close to President Trump sought to leverage their relationships for personal gain earlier this year, one story didn’t attract as much attention as it might otherwise have. That was the story about how Republican Party fundraiser Elliott Broidy, then already in the news for a more titillating reason, had allegedly tried to deliver a prized encounter for one of his clients. Broidy’s private defense company was seeking a contract with the government of Malaysia and its prime minister, Najib Razak. Apparently, to build a better relationship with Najib, Broidy attempted to set...

Earlier this year, the political world was gripped by a stunning accusation from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that the government’s application for a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was born of bias and almost entirely reliant on a dossier of information compiled on the dime of Democratic operatives. He had a memo that made that argument; eventually, and probably without much goading, President Trump was persuaded to release it publicly. Even based on what was known then, the hype surrounding Nunes’s memo seemed to oversell the point. In short order, other revelations about the warrant application...

One short, newly revealed email from a Manhattan banker just made it much more likely that the $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election violated federal law. NBC News on Friday reported that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime ally and attorney, had used a Trump Organization email address as he worked to secure the payment to Daniels. Daniels alleges the money was paid to keep her from telling the media about a sexual relationship she had with Trump; Cohen and Trump continue to deny that relationship. NBC received a copy of an email from banker...

To date, four people have pleaded guilty to charges brought against them by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team. Two were ancillary characters: a businessman who apparently sold bank account numbers to Russian trolls and a lawyer who’d worked with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime partner Rick Gates. Two were closer to the campaign. One is campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, whose connections to Russia-linked characters helped spur the initial investigation in July 2016 into whether President Trump’s campaign had aided Russian interference efforts. And then there’s Michael Flynn, a campaign aide who wound...

rump has won every state touching any of the states that voted on Tuesday, save Ohio. Rhode Island and Connecticut are hemmed in by New York and Massachusetts, which Trump won by 35 and 31 points, respectively. Maryland and Delaware are closer to Virginia, which Trump won by a narrower margin -- but that was back on (the original) Super Tuesday, when Marco Rubio was around to chew up 32 percent of the vote. Geographically, this is Trump territory. If you wanted to drive from Trump Tower to any point in the five states, the most it would take you...

How bad was Cruz’s night? He’s losing to Ben Carson in some places — a guy who hasn’t been in the race in weeks. Cruz can still win the nomination on the first convention ballot, mind you, but he needs to win about 88.5 percent of the outstanding delegates, bound or unbound, per Daniel Nichanian’s excellent calculations. That's not likely to happen either. Trump isn’t the only big winner tonight! Congratulations to John Kasich, who will almost certainly end up with his first delegate in more than a month. Can Kasich pull off a come-from-behind victory? No. The end.

The goal of the nebulous, sort-of-a-thing "never Trump" campaign is to do whatever is possible to stand between Donald Trump and the 1,237 delegates he needs in order to claim the Republican party's nomination on the first ballot at the convention. The informal effort has resulted in a lot more anti-Trump ads, and has benefited from the businessman's own natural inability to organize on-the-ground efforts in critical states. But the overarching idea, that the Republican base would slowly turn against Trump, doesn't seem to be paying off. In fact, a new CBS News poll suggests that Republicans are pretty comfortable...

There is no evidence that Ted Cruz attacked Donald Trump's wife. In a normal election year, this statement would be relatively uncontroversial. After all, it's true. Yes, there was an ad that ran in Utah, suggesting that because she had posed for provocative modeling photos, she was somehow unfit to be first lady. But, no, that ad was not from the Cruz campaign. It was from the Make America Awesome super PAC, a group that raises and spends money without input from any candidate, including Cruz. How do I know that? Well, I know that if such a political action...

Donald Trump Is Not Beating Hillary Clinton In The Polls, No Matter How Many Times He Says It By Philip Bump March 24 Donald Trump legitimately does not care about what polls actually say; he cares about what he can say about the polls. He likes to talk about polls because polls are usually pretty good for him, at least since last July when he stormed into the lead in the Republican field. Polls serve as validation for his dominance, and so he talks about them as a slightly more subtle way of calling himself a winner. Last September, he...

Hispanic Republicans Like Hillary Clinton And Bernie Sanders Better By Philip Bump March 12 The Washington Post and Univision News asked Hispanic voters which 2016 presidential candidates they prefer, which issues matter to them and whether they think the country is on the right track. Here's how they responded. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) Donald Trump has regularly insisted that, despite his rhetoric about illegal immigrants, he would win the support of Hispanic voters in a general election. This argument was bolstered by the results of the voting in Nevada, where he won nearly half the Latino vote, according to entrance...

And then there's Nevada. It, too, was a closed caucus. And Trump won by a wide margin. It's clear that Cruz has done better in states that are holding closed caucuses, but it's not necessarily clear why. It is not the case, though, that Trump is leading in the contest for the nomination because he's being pushed there by independents. Trump's claim that he's bolstering the Republican Party may be exaggerated, but it's clear that an awful lot of Republicans want him to be the party's nominee. As much as other members of the party may not like it.

Donald Trump is very self-conscious about his hands. If you didn't know that before right this second, I'd have to describe you as someone paying only casual attention to the campaign; the subject of the length of Trump's fingers has been raised repeatedly by the media, by Trump's opponents and by Trump. It stems from a story told by Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair.

What Christie offers Trump, then, isn't voters, and it probably isn't the emotional appeal of a beloved character. As the announcement press conference made clear, Christie will over the short term continue to play the other role he played effectively while a candidate: serial bully toward Marco Rubio.