Politics

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: the Bulwark is fretting that he who shall not be named might, sneaky devil that he is, try to exercise the legitimate powers of his office and nominate someone to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday at 87 after a long battle with cancer. Listen: ‘If Trump and Republicans replace Ginsburg it will destroy the remaining public legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Full stop.’ ‘Full stop’ indeed, but not quite in the way intended. What planet does this missive arrive from? ‘If Republicans choose this route, their ruthlessness would have resulted in not one, but two SCOTUS seats that will be widely regarded as stolen. And worse: stolen by a president who was himself elected despite a decisive loss in the popular vote.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87 on Friday due to complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and was the second woman to ever serve on the court after Sandra Day O'Connor. Her work for gender equality, such as launching the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Women's Rights Project, and her sharp dissents earned her the nickname the 'Notorious RBG'. A movie about her life, On the Basis of Sex was released in 2018 and earned over $30 million at the box office. Ginsburg's death will set up an intense political fight, having occurred less than two months out from the 2020 presidential election on November 3.

The toughest moment of Joe Biden’s year arrived in May. It was harder than seeing off Bernie Sanders, harder even than picking a VP. Here was the moment that truly tested Biden’s campaigning skills, built up over so many years in public life. He was trying to address the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Victory Fund when the great test arrived. Loud noises interrupted his Zoom speech. From the green shadows of the Delaware garden behind him: violent quacks, tuneless whines, squalls, bawls and fearsome honks. What was this? A protest? Didn’t they know he’d been a lifeguard at an inner city pool back in 1962?!Biden continued with his speech… Trump… honk!… was… honk!... hateful, I mean, Orange Man… HONK!...

There’s been lots of speculation, even in The Spectator, about the direction of the Republican party after Trump. But less attention has been paid to the other big question: what happens to the Democratic party if Joe Biden loses? The consequences could be very ugly. ​A good blueprint for the Democrats blowing everything up would be the fallout of the GOP after the 2012 election defeat. Biden himself is a Romney-esque type candidate — the guy whose turn in line it was, hoping to put across a message of good character and soul of the nation. Romney, like Biden, ran on a message of optimism in divided times. More so than Romney, Biden is today desperately attempting to hold off the radical barbarians at the gate of his party.

In 2016, I was one of the very few people who publicly stated the night before the election that, despite the polling data, Trump was going to win 280 to 258. I made that prediction because what I was seeing and hearing across Ohio didn’t match what the polling said would happen. I put out a detailed electoral map showing which states he’d win. I got every state right except Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which I called for Clinton, I thought New Hampshire would go for Trump. I let history overinfluence my call on Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as no Republican had won Wisconsin since 1984 and Pennsylvania since 1988. Right now, my gut is telling me something just isn’t right again between the polling and the facts on the ground.

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called 'closet Trump' voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories. Northern VirginiaI have always thought of myself as someone who is honest with others.

From late September through to mid-October, Americans will get to watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate three times. Mike Pence and Kamala Harris will face off once. The debates may not matter, but if one candidate is going to commit a significant gaffe, it likely would occur in one of televisual spectacles. Brace yourselves. Both parties already are trying to shape expectations before the debates begin. On that front, Trump and his allies have made a major mistake. For months Americans have been inundated with claims from Trump, his son and countless media allies that Biden suffers from some type of mental deficiency such as dementia. Biden’s countless gaffes and resistance to doing unscripted interviews have fed into this belief.

President Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that he was adding 20 new names to his previous list of potential Supreme Court nominees in the event of a vacancy. The new list included three very familiar political names: Sens. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley. Those names alone indicated that the president is bucking his 2016 method of allowing the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, to dictate his judicial choices. After a string of Supreme Court rulings that went against conservatives, who felt spurned that they could not get the outcomes they wanted even with a stacked court, the President is perhaps signaling to his base that he will nominate an avowed social conservative, rather than just a textualist or originalist.

‘While it is true I was abusive to my ex-girlfriend,’ writes Aaron Coleman, the improbable candidate for a seat in the Kansas State House, ‘I do not agree with the characterization being made about our experience in the hot tub the day after Christmas.’ This is such a morbidly evocative sentence. Abusive. Hot tub. Day after Christmas. It is a novel in 30 words.Coleman, who is 19, first came to prominence when he was found, in the aftermath of an underdog triumph in a Kansas primary, to have committed acts of bullying and ‘revenge porn’ five years previous. ‘He got one of my nudes and blackmailed me with it,’ said a victim:‘And told me if I didn’t send him more he would [send] it to all of my friends and family...

BaltimoreRepublicans are an oddity in Baltimore. Perhaps some older Americans remember Spiro Agnew, but that’s more or less it — until now.About a year ago, Kim Klacik was a local GOP leader in Baltimore County. Today, she has nearly 400,000 Twitter followers along with an endorsement from President Trump in her campaign for Maryland’s 7th district. What exactly sparked this fame? Klacik showcased the rat-infested, crime-ridden streets of Baltimore for the nation.‘Do you care about black lives?’ Klacik asked in a viral campaign video. ‘The people that run Baltimore don’t. I can prove it. Walk with me.

The Atlantic has stunk up an otherwise beautiful Labor Day weekend with a uniquely ugly story. Anti-Trump editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg claims that Donald Trump snubbed a World War One American cemetery in France because ‘it’s filled with losers’, and the Doughboys buried there are ‘suckers’. Goldberg also asserts that ‘Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain’ on November 10, 2018.President Trump categorically rejected the Atlantic’s tale. He called it a ‘total lie. It’s fake news. It’s a disgrace.’‘I was ready to go to a ceremony,’ Trump told journalists at Joint Air Base Andrews Thursday night.

At the Republican National Convention last month, Donald Trump was repeatedly described as the ‘most pro-life President ever’. According to some rather sensational leaked official notes in Sunday’s Daily Telegraph, however, Trump has said he regards abortion as ‘such a tough issue’. Addressing the then British prime minister Theresa May, who is childless, Trump said in January 2017: ‘Imagine some animal with tattoos raping your daughter, and then she gets pregnant.’ Aside from the staggering crassness of this remark to a woman who is on the record about her inability to have children, it also suggests that Trump is not as pro-life as many in his party would have voters believe.

Though Joe Biden has now accepted that violence is occurring in many major American cities and has started blaming Donald Trump for it, many of his supporters haven't gotten the memo. A new trend among some high-profile left-wingers is to gaslight Americans by posting daytime photos of well-to-do areas of cities undamaged by the riots as proof that the riots aren't real. Meanwhile, tear gas and fires engulf entire blocks at nighttime. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and CNN contributor, kicked off the trend by tweeting September 1: 'Good morning from wonderful Portland, where the city is not under siege and buildings are not burning to the ground. I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos.

For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism. Not only were Democrats barred from the Trump administration, but so were the most talented of Republicans who, having assumed Trump would lose, declared themselves in opposition to him and thus disqualified themselves from work in his administration.