Thursday

Kelly Jane Torrance

Nancy Pelosi says she isn’t going anywhere. But why not?

Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. That’s an old proverb but one that the 78-year-old Nancy Pelosi never seems to have heard. The House Democratic leader gave an interview yesterday to the Boston Globe in which she was by turns doubtless, defensive, and defiant. “Nancy Pelosi wants you to know she’s not going anywhere,” the Globe’s story began, and that encapsulates the congresswoman’s attitude. She is confident the Democrats will retake the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections, and she is confident she will remain leader and thus become the speaker of the House when that happens.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Robert Mueller is out of control. He should be shut down. Now.

Pop quiz: how many branches of government are there in the United States? If you said “Four,” go to the head of the class. As of May 17, 2017, the traditional three branches of  Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, are joined by the Office of Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel in charge of destroying the president. It’s been a fun year. It’s not everyone, after all, who so thoroughly commands the police power of the state that he can order a predawn, guns-drawn raid on people he doesn’t like. Usually, that drama is reserved for dangerous criminals—terrorists, murders, major drug dealers. But Paul Manafort, a businessman, was close to Donald Trump, so he and his wife got the SWAT-team treatment on suspicion of a white-collar crime.

Tuesday

Dominic Green

Peace in Korea doesn’t make war with Iran more likely

Readers of Spectator’s USA’s mothership, the venerable yet sprightly London Spectator, will know that one of the secrets of the Spectator’s endurance and popularity is the promiscuity—ideological, of course—of its columnists.Turn the page from Matthew Parris to Rod Liddle, and you undergo a whiplash of the most bracing kind. Parris is an ex-Conservative MP who, if not one of the ‘wets’ that Margaret Thatcher dismissed for ideological ploppiness, is certainly well irrigated with metropolitan manners. Rod Liddle, having worked at the BBC and being a member of the Labour Party, is on a Genghis Khan-like rampage against political correctness, Islamism and the decline of pop music.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s presidency is in for a long, difficult summer

So it’s true. Donald Trump is going bonkers. This morning he used the British term in a tweet slamming “phony Witch Hunts” and lauding the “great Energy and unending Stamina” of the White House.There is plenty to arouse Trump’s ire. Yesterday the press that Trump loves to decry revealed that White House chief of staff John Kelly regards the president as an “idiot” who persuaded Trump last fall not to withdraw American troops unilaterally from South Korea, a move that would essentially have handed it over to the North on a silver platter.The last person to talk about Trump like that was former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson whom Trump sacked on Twitter. It’s only a matter of time before Kelly becomes Tillersoned.

Daniel McCarthy

Anarchy in the White House — it’s a good thing

The John Kelly era in the Trump White House is drawing to a close. No one expects the chief of staff to hang on much longer, though if Rex Tillerson’s protracted exit from the State Department is any kind of precedent, Kelly may linger for weeks, even months. The end is in sight nonetheless: tales abound of the president circumventing his chief of staff to talk to people Kelly has banned from the Oval Office. The president evidently feels hemmed in by Kelly, who in turn, according to recent leaks, thinks the president is “an idiot” and “unhinged.” Kelly denies using those words. Even if Trump believes him, though, the fact that other people think the chief of staff described the president that way is damaging enough. Trump has little reason to keep Kelly on.