“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
“What is America’s mission?” is a question that has been debated since George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1797. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, President Joe Biden laid out his vision as to what is America’s mission. And the contrast with the mission enunciated by George W. Bush in his second inaugural could not have...
Is President Joe Biden prepared to preside over the worst U.S. strategic defeat since the fall of Saigon in 1975? For that may be what’s at stake if Biden follows through on the 2020 peace deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1—just two months from now. ...
“Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun.” So said Citizen Trump Saturday on his acquittal by the Senate of the impeachment article of “incitement of insurrection” in the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol. “I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together...
It has been a dreadful three months for the Grand Old Party. On Nov. 3, President Donald Trump seemed to have lost the White House by narrowly losing three crucial blue states he had won in 2016—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and Georgia and Arizona as well. Trump immediately mounted an acrimonious two-month...
To Parliament, in the London of George III, the Boston Massacre of 1770, and the Tea Party of 1773 were not seen in the same light as they were by the Sons of Liberty in the Massachusetts colony. To Parliament, this was mob violence, and the shooting and killing at Lexington and Concord were acts...
When it was learned in 2016 that Russia may have hacked the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and passed the fruits on to WikiLeaks to aid candidate Donald Trump, mighty was the outrage of the American establishment. If Russia’s security services filched those emails, and a troll farm in Saint Petersburg sent tweets and...
“Never allow a good crisis (to) go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.” Thus did chief of staff Rahm Emanuel advise Barack Obama on the financial crisis he inherited in 2009. Following the Capitol riot by a mob of pro-Donald Trump protesters,...
As soon as the Senate received the lone article of impeachment accusing President Donald Trump of “incitement of insurrection” in the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol, Rand Paul rose to object. The Senate, he said, has no right to try a private citizen, which Trump now is. Thus, what we are about to...
“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States… does not challenge that position.” Thus did President Nixon, in the Shanghai Communique of 1972, accept China’s territorial claim to the island of Taiwan....
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo, half a century ago, about what we Americans were doing to our environment. Rereading President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, Pogo’s remark comes to mind. Biden began on a lofty, hopeful and familiar note: “This is a...
That mob that split off from the Donald Trump rally of Jan. 6 to invade the Capitol has proven a godsend to the left. The death of a Capitol cop has enabled the left—which spent the summer after George Floyd’s death trashing “racist cops” and shouting, “Defund the Police!”—to posture as fighting allies of the...
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled this mob and lit the flame of this attack.” So alleged Liz Cheney, third-ranking Republican in the House, as she led nine GOP colleagues to vote for a second impeachment of Donald Trump. The House Republican caucus voted 19-1 against impeachment. House Democrats voted lockstep, 222-0,...
Donald Trump has stumbled and fallen, and the establishment is not going to let slip this last opportunity to stomp him and his movement to death. On Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a startling ultimatum: Either Vice President Mike Pence and the Trump Cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment, declare the president “unfit”...
President Donald Trump, it turns out, was being quite literal when he told us Jan. 6 would be “wild.” And so Wednesday was, but it was also disastrous for the party and the movement Trump has led for the last five years. Wednesday, the defeats of Senators Kelly Loeffler and David...
A week from today, Joe Biden will still be on his inexorable course to become the 46th president of the United States. Why, then, the hysteria that has suddenly gripped this city? The triggering event was the announcement by GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Despite Leader Mitch McConnell’s plea, Hawley said he...
In its most recent exercise of liberal democracy, the state senate of Massachusetts voted 32-8 to override Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto of what is called the Roe Act. One day earlier, Monday, the state house had voted to override. The Roe Act is now law in the Bay State. And what does it say? ...
Who could have predicted how dreadful a year 2020 would be? By this New Year’s Eve, 19 million to 20 million Americans will have contracted a deadly virus in a pandemic that exploded out of China to carry off 333,000 Americans, one of every 1,000 of us. As 2021 begins, Americans will be dying at...
Denouncing the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill as a parsimonious “disgrace” and hinting at an Alamo-style finish on Jan. 6, when Congress votes to declare Joe Biden the next president, Donald Trump is not going to go quietly. The anti-Trumpers and “Never Trumpers” celebrating at Christmas 2020, in this “dark winter” of Joe Biden’s depiction,...
If America were a company and not a country, we would have long ago dissolved the corporation, split the blanket, and gone our separate ways. What still holds this disputatious and divided people together? Consider. In announcing the $900 billion stimulus bill to deal with the pandemic, Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not mention...
First, they came for the Confederates. And that purge is far from over. Jefferson Davis Highway in Arlington, named for the president of the Confederacy, has been re-christened Richmond Highway. An Arlington group is calling for the removal of Robert E. Lee’s name from Lee Highway to be replaced by “Mildred & Richard Loving Avenue.”...
Two thousand twenty will surely qualify as an “annus horribilis” in the history of the Republic. By New Year’s, one in every 1,000 Americans, 330,000, will be dead from the worst pandemic in 100 years. The U.S. economy will have sustained a blow to rival the worst year of the Great Depression. And by the...
When the Electoral College meets Monday, it will almost surely certify former Vice President Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. And he will take the oath of office Jan. 20. There is, nationally, a growing if grudging realization of that reality. Yet millions of Americans will refuse to accept the legitimacy...
The Biden-Harris administration will confront “a pandemic, an economic crisis, calls for racial justice and climate change. The team being assembled will meet these challenges on Day One.” So declares the transition team of Joe Biden, to echo what he’s defined as the lead items on his presidential agenda. And if this is his agenda,...
In early August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait and declared it to be his nation’s lost 19th province. Said George H. W. Bush, “This will not stand!” Translation: Get out of Kuwait, Saddam, or we will come over there and throw you out. Six months later, after a five-week air assault...
If Israel, as is universally believed and has not been denied, was behind the assassination of Iran’s leading nuclear scientist, questions arise: Why would the Israelis kill him? And why would they do it now? The scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, it is conceded, was a leader in Iran’s nuclear bomb program, but that program was disbanded...
In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist. This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed....
Dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election remains undecided, Joe Biden has begun to name his national security team. Right now, it looks Democratic establishment all the way. Antony Blinken, a longtime foreign policy aide, is Biden’s choice for secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is said to...
With the Pentagon’s announcement that U.S. forces in Afghanistan will be cut in half—to 2,500—by inauguration day, after 19 years, it appears the end to America’s longest war may be in sight. The Pentagon also announced a reduction of U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 2,500 by mid-January. In 2003, we invaded and occupied Iraq...
Because of Donald Trump, Vice President Joe Biden thundered during the campaign, the U.S. “is more isolated in the world than we’ve ever been … America First has made America alone.” Biden promised to repair relations with America’s allies. And he appears to have gone some distance to do so in the congratulatory phone call...
For Republicans, the returns were mixed on Nov. 3. Though he carried burdens unrivaled by a president since Herbert Hoover—a plague that has killed 230,000 Americans in eight months and crashed the economy to depths not seen since the ’30s—Donald J. Trump amassed 72 million votes, the largest total in Republican Party history. And while...
“In victory, magnanimity… in defeat, defiance.” That counsel about human conflict comes from Winston Churchill. And President Donald Trump, given all he has endured for five years from those piously pleading now for a “time of healing,” cannot be faulted for his defiant resolve to unearth any and all high crimes or misdemeanors committed in the...
Donald Trump may end up losing the 2020 election in the Electoral College, but he won the campaign that ended on Nov. 3. Democrats had been talking of a “sweep,” a “blowout,” a “blue wave” washing the Republicans out of power, capturing the Senate, and bringing in an enlarged Democratic majority in Nancy Pelosi’s House....
On the last days of the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump was holding four and five rallies a day in battleground states, drawing thousands upon thousands of loyalists to every one. Waiting for hours, sometimes in the cold, to cheer their champion on, these rallygoers love Trump as few presidents have been loved. This writer...
Of the presidents in the modern era, many have been dealt a difficult hand by history, but perhaps none more so than Donald Trump. In 1952, Harry Truman was in his third year of a stalemated war in Korea that was costing 200 American lives every week. He lost the New Hampshire primary to Sen....
If Joe Biden loses on Nov. 3, public interest in whether his son Hunter exploited the family name to rake in millions of dollars from foreign donors will likely fade away. It will not matter, and no one will care. But if Joe Biden wins the presidency, a prediction: By the Ides of March 2021,...
When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was taken aback by the Notre Dame law professor’s Catholic convictions about the right to life. “Professor,” said Feinstein, “when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within...
In fiscal year 2020, which ended on Sept. 30, the U.S. government set some impressive new records. The deficit came in at $3.1 trillion, twice the previous record of $1.4 trillion in 2009, which was set during the Great Recession, and three times the 2019 deficit of about $1 trillion. Federal spending hit $6.5 trillion,...
“Apres moi, la deluge,” predicted Louis XV after his army’s stunning defeat by Prussia’s Frederick the Great at the Battle of Rossbach in 1757. “La deluge,” the Revolution, came, three decades later, to wash the Bourbon monarchy away in blood and to send Louis XV’s grandson, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, to the...
“The Indians are seeing 60,000 Chinese soldiers on their northern border,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo ominously warned on Friday. He spelled out what he meant to commentator Larry O’Connor: “The Chinese have now begun to amass huge forces against India in the north. … They absolutely need the United States to be their ally...
Before the first Trump-Biden debate, moderator Chris Wallace listed the six subjects that would be covered: The Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race, and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election. According to a recent Gallup survey, Wallace’s topics tracked the public’s concerns—the top seven of which...
What a difference a week can make. Saturday, Sept. 26, was among the best days of the Trump presidency, or so some of us thought watching the president introduce in the Rose Garden his sterling candidate for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. The academic and professional credentials of Amy Coney Barrett, 48,...
In their first debate, the president of the United States, challenged by the former vice president, performed poorly—even by his own estimation. If memory serves, an instant poll showed that the American people, by 47-43, thought Walter Mondale had bested Ronald Reagan in the Louisville debate where the president made such gaffes as citing the...
By nominating Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump kept his word, and more than that. Should she be confirmed, he will have made history. Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors—even Ronald Reagan, who filled three court vacancies—fell short. Trump’s achievement—victory in the...
“As everyone knows, I made it clear that my first choice for the Supreme Court will make history as the first African American woman justice.” So Joe Biden promised. Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, Biden has refused to produce a list of Black female judges and scholars whom he would consider...
President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are on the cusp of making history. With Trump having named two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, they have an opening to elevate a third justice to fill the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thereby securing the constitutionalism of the...
Having presided over the recognition of Israel by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, President Donald Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize amid talk of peace breaking out across the region. Assuredly, this is a major diplomatic breakthrough, and Nancy’s Pelosi’s sour-grapes dismissal of the deal as a “distraction” testifies to that...
“There is no… sound reason for the United States to continue sacrificing precious lives and treasure in a conflict not directly connected to our safety or other vital national interests.” So said William Ruger about Afghanistan, our longest war. What makes this statement significant is that President Donald Trump has ordered a drawdown by mid-October...
If Donald Trump loses the election, history will attribute his defeat to a pandemic that killed 200,000 Americans during his reelection campaign, and a historic depression deliberately induced to put the economy in a coma as the nation suffered through that pandemic. But despite the worst hand dealt a sitting president since Herbert Hoover in...
When U.S. cities erupted after the death of George Floyd, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the vanguard of the protests, renaming a section of downtown Black Lives Matter Plaza, and painting the name in letters on the street so huge they could be seen from space. Thursday, however, Bowser awoke to those same BLM...