Politics

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. More official reports, reprimands and (probably) indictments are to come in the Great Get Trump imbroglio of 2016 to 2019. But it is not too early to begin an autopsy of the greatest political scandal in American history. The patient is dead, dead, dead, and the last doctors in the room are the pathologists. The lawyers crowding the corridor outside the operating theater are interested not in resuscitating the corpse but in distributing and gorging upon its assets.

With the appointment of Robert C. O’Brien to serve as national security adviser, Donald Trump will once more disappoint his America First backers. They were hoping that Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor would get the nod. Instead, Trump has gone with a Republican establishment figure who views China as the biggest threat to American national security. As always, Trump was bullish on his new hire: 'I have worked long & hard with Robert. He will do a great job!' As Trump national security adviser number 4, O’Brien is expected to bring some calm to the roiling waters of the NSC, where its heads have repeatedly capsized, whether it's Michael Flynn, H.R. McMaster, or John Bolton.

Conservative sadbois like two things: hot moms and Middle Eastern despots. Enter Tulsi Gabbard, the comely representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district. The single lock of gray hair tucked behind her ear and her array of red pants-suits give her an almost Palinesque allure. Her secret friendship with Bashar al-Assad and visceral hatred for the House of Saud brings us all back to our political puberty: hiding copies of The American Conservative under our beds, taking them out only when our parents weren’t home and fantasizing madly about the end of American Empire. Knowing only that, we can hardly blame an aging fogey who finds himself crushing on Rep. Gabbard.

The symptoms of age-related cognitive decline include being unable to remember whether you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and what the talking points of your own presidential campaign are, but recalling exactly what you said nearly 60 years ago when you had a summer job as a lifeguard at a pool in Wilmington, Del. and a ‘bad dude’ called Corn Pop took umbrage when you ordered him to put on a shower cap so he looked like an old lady and then, to further emasculate him in front of his ‘boys’, called him ‘Esther’.

I guess that The New York Times didn’t get the memo. Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court last fall. He is sitting there (officially, I mean) right now, as I write. Despite the most disgusting, ad hominem, evidence-free effort at character assassination of a Supreme Court nominee in history, the combined forces of The New York Times and other cesspool media organs like The New Yorker, bottom-feeding Senate Democrats, feminazis of various stripes, and other woke constituencies on the left, Kavanaugh made it.

Donald Trump has called the Iraq war the ‘worst single mistake’ in US history. Most Americans, including our military, agree with the president. That grand mistake should be an example to all of the tragic unintended consequences inherent in regime change. It should be an enduring reminder of the misery that can be unleashed when our leaders don’t think soberly about what happens after they start a war. The Iraq war was started by Dick Cheney along with President George W. Bush in 2003. In the 16 years he’s had to reflect, the former vice president has been clear for many years that he would not hesitate to do it all over again. His daughter, Rep.

Get your skates on! The Democrats on Ice roadshow rolls into Houston this evening, and the media are poised for a slip-up. Tonight is the night Brooklyn-based content creators have been yearning for: when Joe Biden finally lines up alongside the Anointed One, Elizabeth Warren. Surely it's here, they speculate, that Uncle Joe will commit one blunder too many and the era of Elizabeth will be ushered in. How's he gonna mess it up? Will he call Cory Booker 'Barack'? Maybe both eyeballs will explode this time? Gosh I can't wait! Liberals online are so fixated on the narrative of 'Biden gaffe-Warren competent', that they're not considering a series of other possibilities.

John Bolton has left the White House and those of us who desire some modicum of peace in this world can breathe a sigh of relief. Bolton was appointed to serve as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser barely a year and a half ago, succeeding H.R. McMaster. It was always a strange choice: Trump’s foreign policy is premised largely on hard-nosed (and often hard-of-luck) deal brokering, while Bolton’s preferred method is to bomb other countries. This is the man who has no regrets about the calamitous occupation of Iraq, who wanted to assassinate Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who seemed to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and who lamented that we didn’t destroy the Syrian regime all the way back in 2003.

Donald Trump is declaring that he has fired John Bolton as national security adviser. Bolton is saying he offered to resign. It’s par for the course for the Trump administration where no one really gets to leave on their own terms. How long before Bolton writes his own tell-all? Or did he sign an NDA?Trump, who views staffing his administration as a kind of casting call, was never comfortable with Bolton’s 'I am the Walrus' mustache but after tiring of H.R. McMaster, he tapped him for the job of national security adviser. Now, Trump is declaring that he 'strongly disagreed with many of his suggestions.' This is probably the precursor to a future tweet declaring how Bolton was a loser and bum whom Trump never wanted on the premises in the first place but begged for a post.

MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted in July what, at surface level, seems an obvious point: 'If I were the DNC, I would be spending a lot of money learning basically everything I could about 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016.' Considering how much Hayes and others on the mainstream left have invested into debunking the current administration, there’s no surprise that, when the rubber meets the road, the Democrats let their collective hatred of Trump cloud their political judgement. Look no further than their treatment of Tulsi Gabbard.

There’s a presidential primary race afoot in the Libertarian party, America’s third largest. In 2016, the Libertarians nominated former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and as his running mate, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Their ticket received 3.28 percent of the national popular vote, the largest third-party vote share since 1996 and the best ever Libertarian performance. For 2020, party leaders hope to break that record. Dan Fishman, executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, says the goal is to crest 5 percent of the popular vote, the share above which a minor party becomes eligible for federal campaign funding. ‘The numbers could be even higher,’ Fishman said.