Politics

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. How did Elizabeth Warren, a left-wing populist, become the candidate of Democrats who dislike left-wing populism? Why is it fine for Warren to menace the rich — but not for Bernie Sanders? With some polls placing her ahead of the former vice president Joe Biden, the Massachusetts senator is suddenly basking in praise from mainstream newspapers as well as ‘progressives’ like Emily Tisch Sussman, a ‘Democratic strategist’ who appears regularly on MSNBC. Led by its star hosts, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, MSNBC functions as the mouthpiece of an official Democratic party still dominated by the Clintons and Barack Obama.

We should be bored by now — perhaps we are. Certainly, the anger against Donald Trump’s tweets isn’t quite as vociferous as before. We are used to @realdonaldtrump now. Three years in, who cares if he sounds presidential? But the media outrage machine still limbers up, on demand, at every provocation. Today’s doozy: Trump compared the Democratic attempts to impeach him over Ukraine to a ‘lynching’. Sure enough, the media explainers did their job. Lynching, we are told by every wired copy monkey who has to file 600 words to their line editor, is a ‘racially charged/loaded term’ that refers to — here I quote the BBC — ‘historic extrajudicial executions by white mobs mainly against African Americans.

Andrew Yang claimed to be surprised that the media dubbed Tulsi Gabbard the first Asian American to run for the Democratic nomination. Of course Gabbard snagged this prize of the higher tokenism, first claimed by Patsy Mink in 1972. Yang may be doing better in the single-figure freakshow of the nomination race, but Gabbard looks better when encasing her policies in a tight wetsuit or engaging in Lycra-clad iron-pumping. https://twitter.com/tulsigabbard/status/1173605168841203712?lang=en This is not all the Gabbard candidacy has set a-pumping. No Democrat so quickens the blood of the red-meat, male-voice choir of Buchananites and Bannonites.

The new Pew report doesn’t mince words in its headline: 'In US, Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.' In 10 years, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians of any kind has declined by 12 percent. In 2009, just over 50 percent of Americans identified as Protestant; today only 43 percent do. Catholics have declined from 23 percent to 20 percent of the adult population. The biggest declines in Christian identification by demographic group have been among millennials (down 17 points) and Democrats (down 16 points). But dwindling Christian commitments are in evidence across all categories: 'white people, black people and Hispanics; men and women; in all regions of the country; and among college graduates and those with lower levels of educational attainment.

For a long time now, those of us who have the misfortune to have working eyes and ears have become deeply familiar with the activities of one family. This family is (still) taken very seriously by some very serious people, in spite of the fact that vast numbers of us would rather eat chlorine-flavored ice cream than ever hear from them again. Like some sort of deathless voodoo incantation, the name of this family echoes around the world. It echoes in high-altitude frosted glass conference rooms filled with international bores. It echoes in the frazzled minds of readers of the legacy press.

President Trump may be pulling out of Syria, but it’s bombs away in Washington. John Bolton’s likening Rudy Giuliani to a 'hand grenade' has now prompted America’s mayor to fire back that his old chum is an 'atomic bomb'. Both may be right.As the president complains about a lack of transparency in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, enough information is surfacing to make it clear that the testimony of former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill administered another body blow to Trump’s claim that his July telephone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fine and dandy. Hill apparently testified that Bolton wanted nothing to do with a Ukrainian scheme that he likened to a 'drug deal' and told her to speak with White House lawyers.

Felix Sater is mad at me. He telephones to say that after I called him a ‘mobster’ in The Spectator, his kids were unable to leave the house. ‘Paul, I am not a mobster. Do I know mobsters? Absolutely, lots of them...I was involved with all five [New York crime] families...I’ve known a lot of unsavory characters in my life...I was never a mobster.’ As one of the characters he’s known is Donald Trump — they were in business together — Sater’s life became public property as soon as Trump announced he was running for president. Since then, the labels stuck on Sater include: violent felon, stock fraudster, money-launderer, FBI informant, spy, double agent, triple agent, the Russian Mafia’s connection to the Trump Organization.

Bernie Sanders suffered a heart attack, but Joe Biden’s campaign may be the casualty. The 78-year-old Sanders’s physical condition renewed concerns about the 76-year-old Biden’s mental acuity, which had been temporarily scuppered by President Trump’s phone etiquette. Before the Ukrainian controversy, even former president Jimmy Carter hinted Biden had passed his expiration date. Biden’s rivals openly questioned whether his inexact grasp of facts, stilted speech, and apparent memory issues stemmed from his status as a mid-septuagenarian. As with most politicians’ analyses, they properly identify the problems but misjudge their cause and cure. Biden’s hazy habits are not products of senility; they stem from his status as a former idol of America's cult of youth worship.

President Trump is feeling miffed. A new poll from Fox indicating that a majority of registered voters wants to see him depart the presidency sooner rather than later has apparently bruised his feelings. In his inimitable fashion, Trump dismissed the news as so much hooey. He declared, 'From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews Poll. Whoever their Pollster is, they suck. But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days. With people like Andrew Napolitano, who wanted to be a Supreme....' He concluded, '...

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. As Donald Trump strides toward his fourth year in the White House, his enemies have yet to answer the most basic questions of 2016. Why is Trump president? Why not a nice Republican like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush? Two maps tell the tale. The first is the obvious one, the map of states whose electoral votes Trump won, a map that includes states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that no other Republican presidential aspirant had won since the 1980s. But the second map is even more important — it shows not why Trump won but why the Republican party was doomed to lose without Trump and Trumpism. It’s the map of George W.