Free Republic

Officers, members of YAF, Young Americans for Freedom, first of all let me thank you for allowing me share in this meeting with you in this manner, and at the same time express my regret that it was impossible for me to be there with you in person. You know you never cease to amaze me, you have followed a philosophy in spite of the fact that you spent your lives growing up in a nation that was characterized by an atmosphere of tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. The era of the free lunch and the...

SIMI VALLEY, California — Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, drew parallels Thursday morning between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan, casting Trump as the inheritor of Reagan’s political legacy.

Editor's note: Phyllis Schlafly passed away on September 5 at the age of 92. She will be missed. Donald Trump’s surprise visit to Mexico, where he met the Mexican president and discussed the many contentious issues between our two countries, reminds me of President Reagan’s important trip to Geneva in 1985. Reagan was more than willing to sit down with the Communist leader in an effort to build a personal connection between the two men without sacrificing America’s vital interests in the Cold War. The 1985 Geneva summit was highly advertised as a potential showdown between Reagan and Gorbachev, the...

GUTHRIE: Do you believe in raising taxes on the wealthy? TRUMP: I do. I do – including myself. I do. That was...this morning, in an interview that featured some other controversial statements.  In fairness to Trump, he's been using the "raise taxes on rich people like me" line for months, embracing Obama-style class warfare tax gimmicks like the 'Buffet Rule.'  But raising taxes on anyone, an outcome Trump just re-endorsed, is not what his formal policy agenda proposes.  Just the opposite.  As we've seen on issues such immigration, abortion and foreign policy, Trump routinely makes clear that he isn't familiar with his own positions.  His stances aren't...

History is the most effective teacher we will have in our lives, because it gives us the answers to life's situations. This is especially true with war stories, as they tell of great courage in the face of even greater despair. Allow me to take you back in time to when a fierce battle was talking place between the armies of the Philistines and armies of Israel. As we study the history of this battle, we find both armies atop separate mountains with a great valley separating them. As Goliath, the leader of the Palestinian army, mocks the nation of...

If you think the Trump campaign is full of amateurs, you are correct. Donald Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino, eager to prove that his boss was an expert on tax reform, posted a link to an appearance Trump made in 1991 before the House Budget Committee: There’s one problem: in his testimony, not only did Trump bash Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, calling it a catastrophe and saying income taxes should be raised to increase investment in real estate, but Trump actually compared the United States to the Soviet Union. Why, you’d almost think Trump is a...

It has been hard enough for me, as a Reagan scholar, to forebear claims by Trump supporters of alleged commonalities between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Some lost soul, in a fit of madness, composed a list of 15 uncanny “similarities” between the two. The list has gone viral and has been sent to me too many times. I’ve resisted responding to it, and -- pray God -- I will not need to. But speaking of God, other analogies are being made by Trump supporters that wrench my stomach so hard that I need to vent as a form of...

About half a dozen times in the past few weeks I have been taken aside by a 20-something who’s looking for reassurance that the republic will not end. There has never been any campaign like this in the history of the nation, they say, and they know this is true because they’ve read it everywhere. “We have officially hit a new low in political discourse,” declared Stephen Colbert (after Trump’s penis allusion on national television). Next, the Huffington Post warned, “Recent violence at Trump rallies marks a new low for American politics.” Not long after that, the Financial Times said:...

Veteran political strategist and informal adviser for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump Roger Stone warns on Breitbart News Daily that the loss in Wisconsin should be a “wakeup call” for the Trump campaign, which he says should invest in campaign infrastructure to sew up the party’s nomination. “It’s an early wakeup call, as it were, for the Trump campaign,” Stone, who predicted earlier that Trump would lose Wisconsin, tells Stephen K. Bannon. Trump’s campaign has been fueled, from the beginning, with these hot button issues and an extraordinary communications-based strategy, where you utilize these huge rallies, the incredible media coverage they...

By this time, everyone with a television, a smart phone or a computer has already seen the MSNBC town hall exchange between Chris Matthews and Donald Trump where the abortion question came up. (Even if you lack all three of those modern devices, you may have caught wind of it via the screams of horror emanating from the windows of your neighbors, both Democrat and Republican.) But on the odd chance that you were in a coma for the past sixteen hours and happened to turn to Hot Air before doing anything else this morning, here’s the short but brutal...

When Donald Trump threatened to “break” the North American Free Trade Agreement, auto industry workers offered up some of the loudest cheers. Mr. Trump easily won the Republican primary in Michigan this month. The state, home base for the American auto industry, also delivered an upset victory to Bernie Sanders, the Democratic anti-NAFTA standard-bearer. But the autoworkers’ animosity is aiming at the wrong target. There are still more than 800,000 jobs in the American auto sector. And there is a good case to be made that without NAFTA, there might not be much left of Detroit at all. “Without the...

The next president will take office as this year’s $544 billion deficit pushes up the U. S. national debt to nearly $20 trillion. Scary, but mere chicken feed compared to the way more than one hundred trillion bucks in unfunded liabilities has already been racked up by our entitlement state. And, on top of that, add our outrageous world policeman fees. The Washington Post reports that, “thanks to various treaties and deals set up since 1945, the U.S. government might be legally obligated to defend countries containing 25 percent of the world’s population.” And boy, has America, World Policeman, been active! The...

In Donald Trump’s Worldview, America Comes First, and Everybody Else Pays By DAVID E. SANGER and MAGGIE HABERMANMARCH 26, 2016 Mr. Trump’s views, as he explained them, fit nowhere into the recent history of the Republican Party: He is not in the internationalist camp of President George Bush, nor does he favor President George W. Bush’s call to make it the United States’ mission to spread democracy around the world. He agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might be summed up as “America First.” “Not isolationist, but I am America First,” he said. “I like the expression.” He said...

Bill Kristol, founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, tells Newsmax TV he hopes a third-party candidate will emerge if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are anointed the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees. "I just don't think [Trump] has the character or temperament to be president of the United States ... [and] we're certainly not going to vote for Hillary," Kristol said Friday to J.D. Hayworth on "Newsmax Prime." "There are a lot of fine Republicans and conservatives in the country, some of them are retired generals, some of them are businessmen, some of them are civic leaders, some of...

Welcome to Our Post-Literate Political Culture By Ian Tuttle March 24, 2016 Donald Trump’s decision not only to threaten Ted Cruz’s wife but, now, to double down and mock her is the most loathsome moment yet in a campaign characterized by vulgarity and bullying. About Trump’s penchant for bullying I wrote yesterday. But about his misogyny, an additional thought. The caption to Trump’s repulsive retweet reads A picture is worth 1000 words, which is generally a stupid thing people say to excuse themselves from the hard work of plumbing their mind for words. In reality, the pictures of Mrs. Trump...

The nation's Republicans are working against the clock to answer two key questions: Can conservative Ronald Reagan possibly attract enough independent and Democratic votes to win in November? "Reagan is the opponent of choice for Carter," says I. A. Lewis, director of the Los Angeles Times Poll, a point on which most analysts agree. "But Reagan can reach across and cause mischief in the Democratic constituency," Mr. Lewis says. "Reagan appeals to blue collar, working-class voters. He can win Democratic votes..."

Thousands of Massachusetts Democrats have denounced their party affiliations since January 1 to jump across the aisle and join the ranks of Independent or Republicans. Nearly 20,000 Bay State Democrats, or 1.3 percent of the party's Masachussetts population, left to vote in the Republican primary Tuesday. More than 16,300 of that group have "unenrolled" or become Independent voters, while 3,500 have joined the GOP. Mass. Secretary of State William Glavin attributed the switches to the "Trump phenomenon." The billionaire candidate has a significant lead over fellow top contenders Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in recent state polls. "The tenor of...