Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — As former President Donald Trump braces for a potential indictment related to hush money payments made on his behalf during his 2016 campaign, Republicans blasting the case as politically motivated are blaming a frequent target: George Soros. The 92-year-old billionaire investor and philanthropist — who has been falsely accused of everything from hiring violent rioters to committing election crimes — doesn’t know and didn’t donate directly to the New York prosecutor steering the probe. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and other high-profile Republicans from accusing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who convened the grand jury investigating...

The police who responded to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last May held off on confronting the shooter inside the classroom out of concern over the AR-15 rifle he used, according to a report. A new investigation from the Texas Tribune found that officers decided that “immediately confronting the gunman” and the assault-style weapon “would be too dangerous,” although some of the officers on-scene were equipped with the same rifle.

A network of bots have been busily singing the praises of former President Donald Trump while targeting his political rivals Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — as well as trolling critics like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to a report on Monday. The fake accounts — estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands — are behind popularizing the suggestion that DeSantis, 44, would be unable to defeat Trump, 76, for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination but would make a good running mate. They also attacked Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations in the...

Former President Trump plans to attack Bush-era Republicans in his remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday and urge those in attendance to finish the job of transforming the GOP by backing him for the White House in 2024. Trump is expected to deliver CPAC’s keynote address at roughly 5:30 p.m. in remarks that are expected to last roughly 90 minutes. Trump has been a staple of the annual gathering for years, delivering marquee speeches during and after his presidency. The event, this year in National Harbor, Maryland, is now dominated by his most ardent supporters and he is...

Through both his private-sector career and his time in politics, Donald Trump has earned a reputation for thinking big (or “big league”). While not all of The Donald’s visionary ideas have come to pass, the 45th president doesn’t let that deter him from continuing to push the envelope, taking things with an “aim for the moon so you land among the stars” attitude. With the 2024 election amping up and a likely primary challenge from popular Republican Governor Ron DeSantis on the horizon, Trump finds himself faced with the need to draft a platform that will not only distinguish him...

What President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) “deplored more than each other’s political philosophy was stalemate, and a country that was so polarized by ideology and party politics that it could not move forward. There were tough words and important disagreements. . . yet a stronger commitment to getting things done.” That observation came from O’Neill’s oldest son, Thomas P. O’Neill, in a 2012 New York Times column entitled, “Frenemies: A Love Story” regarding his Democratic father’s relationship with the Republican president. O’Neill and Reagan were both of Irish descent. And when disagreements got heated between the...

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact. Early in the Trump era, news organizations were torn over whether to refer to Donald Trump’s false statements as lies, because it is difficult to know an individual’s state of mind, to know what they know. In the throes of insecurity, ideological conviction, or carelessness, people can make statements that are false without malicious intent. The argument over what...

The Trump administration has finalized a roll back of Obama-era regulations for oil trains. The rules, which date back to 2015, required railroads carrying crude oil or other flammable liquids to outfit their trains with more responsive electronic braking systems. The rules came in response to concerns about explosions and spills from mile-long trains of crude and ethanol. In the Northwest, those trains move along the Columbia River and through cities to coastal refineries. The U.S. Department of Transportation, which has been working on rescinding the rules since last December, said in statement this week that its analysis showed the...

Politics aside, if you study the data trends, the 13 “Keys to the White House, ” created by analyst and historian Allan J. Lichtman, have demonstrated an uncanny knack for calling U.S. presidential elections. There have been a few hiccups, where it called Al Gore over George W. Bush in 2000, with Gore winning the popular vote and Bush winning the Electoral College. When a reverse phenomenon occurred in 2016, it correctly called Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, with Trump winning the Electoral College and Clinton winning the popular vote. The key’s predictions now focus solely on the...

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prizes preparation and the way it allows him to control his political narrative. But suddenly, he was on the verge of going off message. He had traveled to a Central Florida warehouse this past week to promote a $2 billion tax cut proposal when he was confronted with the inevitable: an especially ugly attack from former President Donald J. Trump that seemed to warrant a strong response. Mr. Trump had insinuated on social media that Mr. DeSantis behaved inappropriately with high school girls while he was a teacher in his early 20s. As a reporter...

Was I the only journalist in America who thought President Biden’s State of the Union speech Tuesday was hard to watch? At least until he departed from his script and began sparring with the nation’s rudest Republicans?Sometimes when Biden starts to speak, I involuntarily hold my breath, waiting for him to stumble over his words, or slur them or otherwise mangle his text in a way that will show up in clips on Fox News or MAGA Twitter. See, he’s incompetent! Worrying about this detracts from the pleasure of having a solid Democratic president after four years of Trumpian chaos...

Journalist Chris Wallace said Republicans did President Biden a favor with their heckling of him during the State of the Union address Tuesday. “I mean, they literally played into his hands. You know, I don’t know if the people at the White House as they were drafting it at Camp David this weekend envisioned that happening the way it did, but it played out perfectly,” Wallace said on CNN following the speech. Republicans heckled Biden after he accused some in the GOP of wanting to cut funding for Social Security and Medicare, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) shouting “liar”...

A new poll found that a majority of Black voters approve of President Biden’s job performance and think he should run for reelection in 2024. HIT Strategies’ first BlackTrack survey since the 2022 midterms found that 59 percent of Black voters say Biden should run for President in 2024 while 74 percent approve of his job performance. These numbers come before Biden has announced his plans for 2024 and ahead of his second State of the Union address on Tuesday. Biden’s approval spans across generational lines, with 66 percent of Black voters 50 years and older approving of the president...

As the late great poet Maya Angelou might have said had she thought it was necessary, “When someone shows you over and over and over again that they are a traitor, believe them.”For further, completely appropriate emphasis, she might have elaborated: “When someone shows you over and over and over again, for their entire lives, in business and in government, that they are not only traitors, but corrupt, ignorant, pathologically dishonest, coup-plotting, racist, misogynist traitors, then seriously, I’m not kidding about this, believe them!”But, of course, as we have all witnessed during the past half-century of Donald Trump’s life (unless...

Former President Donald Trump lashed out at evangelicals for not supporting his latest presidential campaign, saying it was a “sign of disloyalty” after he appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices and made their long-held dream of overturning Roe v. Wade possible. Trump, 76, told Real America’s Voice’s “The Water Cooler” Monday that the religious bloc of voters who were key to his 2016 victory have not yet come out to back his 2024 White House bid. “That’s a sign of disloyalty,” Trump told host David Brody. “There’s great disloyalty in the world of politics, and that’s a sign of disloyalty.”

Electric car batteries could be used to boost power storage in the future, injecting electricity into the grid during times of scarcity or storing electricity during periods of excess, a new study found Tuesday. Renewable energy is essential for the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below two degrees Celsius, but the need to scale up quickly and the intermittency of wind and solar have raised concerns about meeting electricity demand. One way to help solve this problem is boosting the storage capacity of electricity grids, so that even when there is no sun or wind energy...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s restrictive new election law significantly shortens the window for mailed ballots to be received — despite no evidence that the extended timeline has led to fraud or any other problems — and that change is angering active-duty members of the military and their families because of its potential to disenfranchise them. The pace of ballot counting after Election Day has become a target of conservatives egged on by former President Donald Trump. He has promoted a false narrative since losing the 2020 election that fluctuating results as late-arriving mail-in ballots are tallied is a sign...

In 2020, America elected Joe Biden to be not-Trump—a role for which he seemed well-suited. In 2016, the country voted for burn-it-all-down upheaval. Trump was the tribune of those who felt betrayed and misled and mistreated. Four chaotic years later, alarmed voters fled into the arms of an aging former vice-president and senator—a man they had twice rejected as a presidential contender—who seemed the personification of the steady hand. No one expected Biden to be transformational or extraordinary, but we did need him to be the anti-Trump in the most important ways. We needed him to be sober and responsible,...

The calendar says 2023, but politically, it’s 2024. Therefore, at the beginning of this volatile two-year presidential campaign cycle, expect at least half of the predictions and prognostications to be inoperative by January 2024. (But we don’t know which half!)My speculation about a small fraction of the half likely to be valid a year from now concerns two names on The Hill’s recent report, “GOP Rankings: The Republicans most likely to be the party’s 2024 presidential nominee.” Ranked fifth was former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who leads former Vice President Mike Pence, in seventh place.These distinguished “formers” from President...

The Hill predicted Sunday that Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis will secure the 2024 GOP presidential nomination with former President Donald Trump as the runner-up contender.DeSantis was picked as the top candidate for his double-digit reelection during the midterms and what The Hill calls "his embrace of culture war issues and his opposition to COVID-19–related lockdowns." Explaining why Trump was ranked as the second most likely 2024 nominee, the outlet said: "Trump would have been the runaway favorite had these rankings been drawn up the day before the midterm elections. Since then, virtually everything the president has touched has turned...