Free Republic

I was not going to write about Oliver Anthony’s brilliant song, Rich Men North of Richmond, because I have nothing worthy to add. The video puts all other commentary to shame. North of Richmond refers to the federal government, which is too large, too powerful and too uncaring. But Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor of the Never Trump National Review, butted in with a Learn-to-Code column attacking Anthony for daring to complain about DC’s treatment of the working class. It lectured Anthony to be more like Woody Guthrie, the Nazi apologist and communist. Anthony’s song says: I’ve been sellin’ my...

John Davidson asks at the Federalist, “Does DeSantis Know What Time It Is? Didn’t Sound Like It In That NBC Interview.” Responding to DeSantis’s assertion that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was in large part responsible for allowing Covid-driven rules changes that helped Democrats collect a lot of mail-in votes, this is Davidson’s thesis: "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020. . . . No issue is more important for DeSantis (and the entire GOP...

A new poll conducted for the Wall Street Journal by the polling firm run by Tony Fabrizio, the pollster for Donald Trump, finds Ron DeSantis leading Joe Biden by three points but Trump trailing Biden by three points: 🇺🇲 2024 Presidential Election Poll (D) Biden: 48% (+3) (R) Trump: 45% . (R) DeSantis: 48% (+3) (D) Biden: 45% Wall Street Journal | Apr 11-17 | 1,740 RV — InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) April 21, 2023 The good news for Trump is that the same poll finds Trump regaining his lead over DeSantis in a head-to-head GOP primary matchup. After the midterm elections,...

Donald Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday night, heavy with the odor of a man fighting the last war. But politics is all about matching the man to the moment. Trump’s moment was six years ago. The nation’s voters have moved on, and if early signs are any indication, Republican primary voters are ready to consider doing so as well. The 2022 midterms were about as decisive a failure for Trump as it was possible for them to be. Consider, as one item of evidence, the exit polls. Exit polls are not perfect; even though they should have the...

Florida governor Ron DeSantis led former president Donald Trump by eleven points in a new poll of likely Republican primary voters by the Republican Party of Texas. The survey, conducted by CWS Research on November 12 and 13 among likely GOP voters statewide, asked respondents, “If the upcoming 2024 Republican Primary for president were held today, and the candidates were Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, for whom would you vote?” Forty-three percent of respondents said they would support DeSantis, while Trump followed in second with 32 percent of the vote. Thirteen percent...

Brian Kemp is a winner. Though his margin of victory was large, his win was not inevitable. Donald Trump made it a mission to defeat Kemp after he refused to play along with Trump’s stolen-election nonsense in 2020. He endorsed David Perdue, the former Georgia senator, in the Republican primary. Going up against the former president, who remains the most prominent personality in the Republican Party, was no small task. But Kemp approached his reelection campaign intentionally and with considerable skill. First step: Defeat Perdue. Already a known quantity statewide, Perdue could have defeated Kemp. Many other Republicans who faced...

Two days ago, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” In response, many figures on the right inserted their fingers into their ears and started screaming about fake news. Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office...

I’m a libertarian-minded Republican. I hate taxes. Especially the income tax. But I pay all required taxes. I suspect you also pay your taxes. And like most Americans, you probably don’t cheat or lie. For that reason, even though an IRS audit might annoy you and cause you some stress, you’d eventually realize that you have nothing to fear as long as the audit is done fairly and properly. But you’d likely feel differently if the IRS outsourced the audit to someone who: Had no applicable professional credentials Had never previously run a tax audit Believed that Hugo Chavez had...

You guys know he lost, right? Representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) is (probably) being pushed out of her leadership position, most likely in favor of Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), because Representative Cheney is insufficiently Trump-loving and Stefanik is superabundantly Trump-loving. It’s that familiar Republican strategy: a purge for unity. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and other like-minded Republicans complain that it will be difficult for Cheney to do her job effectively in the current political environment, meaning the infantile emotional climate in which some number of Republicans stamp their feet and hold their breath like Veruca Salt...

Pennsylvania received about 10,000 mail-in ballots between Election Day and the extended deadline of November 6, the state’s top election official announced on Tuesday. The Pennsylvania supreme court ruled before the elections to extend the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots to November 6. President Trump and Republican allies have criticized the ruling, and Trump himself has claimed that votes received after November 3 should not be counted because they are “illegal.” Republicans challenged the ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court, however the justices decided not to rule on the case before Election Day due to time constraints. However, as of...

So, what crime would you charge, Mr. President? The closing weeks of the campaign find President Trump berating William Barr, the attorney general who has served him and the country well. Trump’s increasingly strident complaints relate to the probe of his 2016 campaign, launched by the Obama administration. At Barr’s direction, the genesis and conduct of that probe have been under investigation since early 2019 by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham, a well-regarded career prosecutor.

The sources of the Russia investigation should, as a matter of basic accountability, be established and disclosed. But no one who is not already a Trump voter cares about dubious investigatory decisions from four years ago. Nor is anyone as exercised as the president about critical things said about him on cable-TV programs. Trump has waged a low-intensity campaign against masks, for no good reason. By setting himself against them, largely on aesthetic grounds, Trump further opened himself up to charges that he doesn’t take the virus seriously — even before his illness and the White House outbreak.