“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn. Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen...
President Donald Trump announced late on Wednesday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study South African land and farm seizures and killing of farm owners, by implication of white race. The African National Congress (ANC)-controlled government in Pretoria accused the President of stoking racial divisions in the country, while his haters...
Entryism: the very word is like a knell. It conjures up the many efforts by Moscow Central to take over British politics. They had successes. In the general election of 1945, two Communist M.P.s were returned to Westminster. They were heavily backed by Moscow, not unreasonably, considering the vast numbers of Communists in France and Italy. But those two had...
In backing John Brennan’s right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to recognize that Sunday when he conceded that ex-CIA Director Brennan had the subtlety of “a freight...
Is anyone really surprised by New York governor Andrew Cuomo saying, “We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.” The Left has been saying that, if not quite so bluntly, for decades. The only difference is that many more Americans now hold that view, including a disconcerting number of putative...
History never repeats itself but can offer echoes and rhymes. One rhyme coming shortly is Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. The old man had retired, deeply wounded by Disraeli’s victory of 1874. He was enticed back by the difficulties of that Government, and Gladstone made a barnstorming attack on the misdeeds of the Ottomans. “The Turks one...
If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance. He would have been challenged to a duel and shot. “Trump’s . . . performance in Helsinki,” Brennan had said, “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It...
The United States has created “chaos” in its management of foreign affairs, Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu said on August 13. “There is confusion in the U.S. administration, and no one knows who is doing what,” Çavusoglu said after meeting his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Ankara. “We are at a turning point in the...
Boris. Only one politician in the land is universally known by his first name. “Boris Johnson” is unnecessary. He is now the center of a political storm, since he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column last week that burka-wearers looked like letter-boxes and bank robbers. They do, actually, but this truthful observation did not save...
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can’t get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can’t go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley. The supposed “nationalist” rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was...
Friday, deep into the 17th year of America’s longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar. The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle. “As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to...
Over lunch last week, a friend told me about a bumper sticker he had just seen: “F*ck Trump and f*ck you for voting for him.” (There were no asterisks in the original). I imagine the owner of the car will face as much censure as Robert DeNiro did for repeating the first part of the...
Is it any of Canada’s business whether Saudi women have the right to drive? Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business. Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh’s arrest of women’s rights advocate Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in diplomatic relations. “Reprehensible” said Riyadh of Freeland’s tweeted attack. Canada...
On August 8th, 1918, the battle of Amiens began, with stunning success. It was a masterpiece of planning and execution, utterly different from the blood-soaked failures of previous attacks—which included the Kaiserschlacht of July 1918. Amiens was a surprise attack led by some 500 tanks, with infantry following 200 yards behind the creeping barrage. No artillery had opened up before...
Special Ops, Generational Struggle, and the Cooperstown of Commandos Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.) A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.) Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.) While so much about...
On August 7 President Donald Trump issued a strong warning to countries trading with Iran, following his re-imposition of sanctions on the country. “Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States,” he tweeted. Some reimposed sanctions took effect overnight, while additional, more punitive ones—relating to oil exports and central...
On meeting with the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump tweeted: “Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade.” Did Larry Kudlow somehow get access to Trump’s phone? We know not. But, on hearing this, Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Arthur...
“In office but not in power.” That came from Norman Lamont in his resignation speech, on John Major’s hapless Government. The line is famous but misleading, for the implication is that what matters is power, and office is mere trappings. It is not so. For all European nations, political power is a chimera. The leader...
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man. Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea? Looking back at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, wars we began or plunged into, what was gained to justify the...
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened...
S.O.T. is the latest acronym to come out of Liberal HQ: Save Our Terrorists. The unco guid are outraged because Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, has written to the US Justice to confirm that he has no objection to the American authorities trying two nominally British jihadists for their crimes—and without lodging the standard reservation, that if found guilty they...
On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation’s Basic Law. Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and national home of the Jewish people. Hebrew is to be the state language. Angry reactions, not only among Israeli Arabs and Jews, came swift. Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism...
Chronicles has lost a longtime writer and friend, Egon Richard Tausch, who passed away on July 27. In Egon was found both brilliance and humility, a rare combination reflecting his Christian faith. He was also a man of fierce loyalty, unmoved by the patricidal demands of the politically correct and faithful to his inheritance as...
On July 26 Vice President Michael (“Mike”) Pence addressed the first “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom” in Washington D.C. Pence opened his remarks by asserting that “religious freedom is a top priority of this administration,” that this “most fundamental of freedoms . . . is in the interest of the peace and security of the...
Chronicles and The Rockford Institute have sustained a dreadful personal and institutional loss with the death of our dear friend and irreplaceable contributor Claude Polin, who died early on the morning of July 23 at his flat in Paris in the presence of his beloved wife, Nancy. He had been ill for several years, during...
“Make America Great Again!” will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history. Yet it raises a question: How did America first become the world’s greatest economic power? In 1998, in The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to...
One of the really cool things about democracy is that voters tend to get what they want—which, um, can also turn out to be one of the really uncool things about democracy. A thing of real terror, if you want the truth. I tiptoe past the presidential election of 2016 on my way to look...
“The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.” —Henry Ward Beecher For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II. In 1969, The Emerging Republican Majority argued that American politics runs through periodic...
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump. To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from...
Does anyone in the media read Alexis de Tocqueville? Many will have gone to college, and some have encountered a reading list that includes Democracy in America. It is the best book ever written on America, and because of its time the best that ever will be written. Tocqueville makes this astonishing forecast: There are...
“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached. And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all. Trump’s refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin’s claim at Helsinki—that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign—has been called treason, a...
Five days after the Helsinki summit I am inclined to believe that President Donald Trump either knows exactly what he is doing—that there is uncanny finesse and foresight behind his bluster—or else that he is guided by an almost unfailing intuition, with similar results. Trump’s refusal to parrot the Intel-deepstaters’ “Russiagate” narrative at last Monday’s...
With the sole exception of his unfortunate misstep during his joint news conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki when he seemed to take Putin’s word over American intelligence regarding the Kremlin’s interference in the American elections two years ago, President Trump’s foray abroad last week was a triumph. (Even so, his subsequent claim on his...
Donald Trump is crude, vulgar, egotistical, even narcissistic. He is, at best, verbally maladroit, and his attempts to backtrack from statements that cause outrage are often embarrassing, even cringeworthy. Still, all in all, Trump often reminds me of what Abraham Lincoln said of another deeply flawed individual, Ulysses Grant, after the bloodbath at Shiloh: “I...
The Global Growth of U.S. Special Operations Forces Early last month, at a tiny military post near the tumbledown town of Jamaame in Somalia, small arms fire began to ring out as mortar shells crashed down. When the attack was over, one Somali soldier had been wounded—and had that been the extent of the casualties,...
The hysterical media/establishment/Deep State reaction to President Trump’s comments in Helsinki is based on a lie. U.S. intelligence chiefs, current and former, fire back at Trump—a sample offering from the NPR—quotes Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats as saying the U.S. intelligence community has been “clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016...
“England,” said Roy Strong, “is the last ancien regime.” President Trump visited three visible proofs over this weekend. Blenheim Palace was built by a grateful nation to commemorate a day which dawned on France as the greatest military power in Europe and ended with the French commander in Marlborough’s coach together with two other generals....
Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.” He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.” It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled an historic shift in U.S. foreign...
Of President Donald Trump’s explosion at Angela Merkel’s Germany during the NATO summit, it needs to be said: It is long past time we raised our voices. America pays more for NATO, an alliance created 69 years ago to defend Europe, than do the Europeans. And as Europe free-rides off our defense effort, the EU...
From the October 2011 issue of Chronicles. Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892. They might be shocked to learn that it was written by a Christian socialist, and the sanctifying words “under God”...
In the spring and summer of 1968 a wave of student protests erupted on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Their immediate causes were different, but they had two significant common features: contagious denial of the legitimacy of authority and a distaste for established norms of behavior and thought. The process was spiritually comparable to...
“Britain is in turmoil” said Donald Trump. He is right. The country is perfectly happy with its World Cup entertainment, and a prolonged heat wave, but the political class is distraught. Theresa May’s grand Plan for Brexit, put forward at Chequers to a locked-in Cabinet, has collapsed following the resignation of the two leading Brexiteers—Boris...
If Mitch McConnell’s Senate can confirm his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all three branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party. Not bad for a rookie. And the lamentations on the left are surely justified. For liberalism’s great strategic ally and asset of...
Exeter Goes to Waugh I was lately in Exeter, hoping to see something of the Islamic Centre at the University. As it was a Sunday when I visited, I thought they might have been open for business. But the doors were locked and no access was possible. I did however read a massive plaque outside,...
With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Pelosi to save us, some painful truths need to be restated. The Republican Party of Bush I and II, of Bob Dole and John McCain, is history. It’s not coming back. Unlike the Bourbons after the Revolution and the Terror, after...
Emerald Robinson recently wrote a witty piece for The American Spectator puncturing the pomposity of the Never Trump wing of the conservative movement. At least one member of that wing, the thin-skinned Jonah Goldberg, now the holder of the “Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute,” was not amused, and he let...
Neat! We know what the Supreme Court debate is all about—the debate, that is to say, over who shall take retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat. The debate is about abortion. Or so declares Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican moderate from Maine, whose vote could prove essential to confirmation of whatever nominee the White House puts...
For many years German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been regarded, with reason, as the most powerful woman in the world. Over the past few months Merkel’s authority has diminished precipitously, however, mainly due to her irrational immigration policy. That much became obvious at last weekend’s emergency EU summit on immigration. The meeting was hastily convened...
With Independence Day festivities approaching, Chronicles readers may be interested in a public lecture about patriotism which I gave in Louisville this past year. It has always seemed to me that before we can begin to intelligently discuss border control, Southern heritage, kneeling NFL linebackers, or any other given controversy, there is an even more...
“No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!” “Abolish ICE!” Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country. By last week, however, “Abolish ICE!” was no longer the...