Politics

Rand Paul just made the most bracing speech of his career. It was about the absurdity of the new effort to convene a Senate trial to impeach Donald Trump. I’ll come back to Sen. Paul’s speech in a moment. First, let’s take a moment to talk about the man everyone is talking about today. I mean the former president of the Untied States, Donald J. Trump. Addiction can be a terrible curse. It can make people do all manner of irrational things. Consider the Democrats and their addiction to Donald Trump. Has any junkie been more abject in trying to score his fix? Like many addicts, the Dems hate the thing to which they are addicted. Yet they are ineluctably drawn to it. The Democrats and their media enablers have spent the last four years railing against Donald Trump.

With Rob Portman’s announcement that he will not seek a third term in the US Senate, the two questions of the hour are: can Democrats do what they did in Georgia to take the seat? And who will run for his seat? The first is easy to answer: no. Ohio isn’t Georgia, as it lacks a mega-city such as Atlanta where Democrats can run up huge numbers. With the population exoduses out of Democratic strongholds Cleveland, Toledo and Akron-Canton over the last 20 years married to the conversion of blue-collar Democrats to Trump Republicans, winning statewide in Ohio for the first time would be very hard for Democrats. Plus, the Democratic bench in Ohio is wafer thin, with only Rep. Tim Ryan being possibly viable statewide.

Joe Manchin could be the most powerful man in the Senate. The senior senator from West Virginia is the last Democrat hanging onto federal office in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump by 40 points, but he doesn’t always toe the party line. Of the ‘defund the police’ movement that gained traction on the Left over the summer, Manchin says, ‘Defund my butt.’ If you were unsure about federal funding of his posterior, he went on to elaborate: ‘We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.’ Manchin described a Democratic proposal to continue trying to impeach Trump after the 45th president leaves office as ‘so ill-advised’. Yet he did not vote to acquit Trump in his Senate trial last year.

January 20, 2021 saw Joe Biden become the second Catholic to be inaugurated as president. His installation was hailed by many as an historic moment of progress for Catholics in American public life. The New York Times today labeled him 'perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century'. To be sure, his campaign for the White House made every effort to play up his religion, a far cry from the almost apologetic tone John Kennedy was made to strike more than 50 years ago. Some too, perhaps inevitably, have compared Biden to Al Smith, the New York governor who in 1928 became the first Catholic to lead a party ticket for the White House. But make no mistake, Biden is no Smith — indeed, they differ wildly on their vision for religion and the public square.

If you thought the thinly sourced stories from anonymous 'administration officials' would end once Trump left office, think again: CNN is now indistinguishable from President Biden's press shop. The new administration sought to plant a story that preemptively blamed former president Donald Trump for any hiccups in its COVID-19 vaccine distribution program, and it found the perfect patsy in CNN reporter MJ Lee. Anonymous Biden administration officials claimed to Lee that the Trump administration had no plan for actually distributing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines it worked so quickly to approve through the FDA. 'There is nothing for us to rework.

Has the coup happened yet? You have the advantage over me. It was supposed to have taken place on Sunday. Then it slipped back to Monday morning. When Monday morning came and went in a markedly coup-less state the date was revised to Wednesday. Anyway, there was to be a worldwide media blackout after which President Donald Trump — for it is he — would announce to the world that he was still in control and that Joe Biden and a whole bunch of others had been arrested for their various roles in covering up election fraud. The rapidly shifting date of this coup reminds me a little of my mother-in-law’s frequent assertions that the world is going to end on, for example, October 12.

Since I had written speeches for Trump and his family in 2016, I was asked to provide an inauguration address for him. What I came up with was the kind of speech that Biden delivered today, a healing speech that reached back to earlier ones that had been given by Martin Luther King and JFK. But when I listened to Trump’s inaugural speech, from the balcony of the Canadian Embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue, I knew that my speechwriting days were over. Trump’s address was an angry, Bannonite screed devoid of any sense of graciousness. Biden’s halting delivery today reminded us why a majority of Americans had supported him. It wasn’t his sparkling personality. Rather, he was Chance the gardener, the un-Trump.

Senate Republicans have the opportunity to not only convict Donald Trump of 'incitement of insurrection’, but also punish him with a ban on ever running for political office again, so he could never again be president or the standard-bearer of the Republican party. If you are a Republican who believes Trump is a figurative cancer on the GOP, then this is your best chance to remove the tumor. The problem, as with any operation, is that the procedure comes with risk. For one thing, the surgeon might not remove all of the cancerous growth. What if Trump and Trumpism have already spread too widely inside the party?

Matt Labash Chris, thanks for stepping with me inside the squared circle, the Octagon or whatever they call the place where the kids like to fight these days. (The Capitol Rotunda?) Ordinarily, in one of these types of dialogues, this is the part where we’d exchange pleasantries, make throat-clearing small talk, and tell each other how much we admire each other’s work. But let’s skip it, because I’m feeling a bit vexed. Can’t quite put my finger on why. Oh yes, I just flipped on ‘MSDNC’ and opened my Failing New York Times, and now I remember: because I’ve been watching my country set ablaze, and Donald Trump and his faithful Trumpsters are holding the flamethrower.

In January of 2017, the news outlet I was working for at the time asked me to go to downtown DC and cover the protests during President Trump's inauguration ceremony. #DisruptJ20, an activist group with ties to the violent left-wing group antifa, was planning 'bold mobilization' and 'widespread civil resistance' during the event. What I saw there was horrifying. Rioters dressed head-to-toe in black and wearing bandanas over their faces smashed storefronts, set fires, harassed and threatened Trump supporters and attacked police officers. I watched from about 10 yards away as one antifa member grabbed a metal pole off the ground and swung it at a cop, who responded by pepper-spraying the area. Over 200 people were arrested that day.

On the eve of making Donald Trump the first twice-impeached president in American history, the Democratic House majority attempted a clever workaround: passing a resolution exhorting Vice President Mike Pence to invoke an obscure constitutional provision for dealing with presidential disability to remove Trump himself. The 25th Amendment was ratified in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in order to clarify presidential succession and establish continuity of government in the event that a sitting president became incapacitated. It normally involves the temporary, voluntary transfer of power to the vice president during presidential colonoscopies and other medical procedures involving anesthetics.

Andrew Cuomo, the Emmy-award winning governor of New York, made a dangerous U-turn into the cold-hearted world of Trumpism during a speech and series of online posts Monday, in which he appeared to advocate for the wholesale slaughter of more old people in his state. The comments, which but a few months ago would have got any doctor or plebeian banned from social media and branded a heartless granny-killer, were a statement of the obvious: lockdowns aren’t working and New York has held its citizens hostage in an economic and mental vice-grip over nothing. Well, not nothing. The timing of Cuomo’s hard-right shift cannot be ignored.

You’ve got to admire the left. Granted, they own the internet, the media, the courts (apparently) and now the government, so it’s not like they’re working against insurmountable odds. But still, it’s remarkable that they’ve managed to achieve the seemingly impossible: uniting America. I beg your pardon? Oh yes, they’ve united America — or the America that counts, anyway: the ruling class — and in the cleverest way imaginable. Instead of issuing boring platitudes like 'we must unite for the sake of our nation’ and 'this is not a time for stoking divisions’, they’ve found a scapegoat we can all come together in condemning. No, not Donald Trump; a good half of the country still likes him and clearly isn’t about to change its mind.

There was a glimmer of hope amid the events at the US Capitol building on Wednesday. Could this be the moment of American political violence that causes a revolt against over-heated rhetoric? After such an embarrassing display of emotional incontinence, cooler heads might now prevail across both political aisles and in the media. That glimmer has been quickly extinguished. Democrats were handed another opportunity to impeach Trump on a silver platter, and the media gleefully, and perhaps rightfully, indulged their West Wing fantasies about invoking the 25th Amendment. Common sense melted instantly like the face of a Nazi staring at the Ark of the Covenant. We are right back at Ludicrous Speed.