Politics

Call it the Art of the Seal. When he spoke before several hundred youthful supporters at Tuesday's Turning Point USA Teen Action Student Summit at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, Donald Trump delivered a rousing talk with a large presidential seal looming behind him on a jumbo-tron. There was only one problem: the seal was fake, the creation of a 46-year-old NeverTrump Republican named Charles Leazott who is a graphic designer living in Richmond, Va.  His puckish seal was loaded, as the Washington Post noted, with phony symbols, including a Russian imperial eagle that is holding a wad of cash in its right talon and golf clubs in the other. Instead of 'E pluribus unum,' the seal states '45 es un titre — '45 is a puppet.'No one seems to know how it happened.

Robert Mueller’s appearance before two Congressional committees today was something close to a disaster for the Democrats. The former special counsel was halting, hesitant, at times unsure of himself or even confused. He looked weak and his testimony was weak. It often seemed as if there was some truth to the story broken by Cockburn in The Spectator USA that Mueller might be suffering from the early stages of dementia. I was watching CNN, where there was a slowly dawning horror about what seemed to be happening. Their anchor, Jake Tapper, said: ‘There were times in the hearing when he was sharp as a tack but there were times – we can’t avoid it – when he was not.’ Sharp as a tack, like the word ‘spry’, is something you say about the elderly and the infirm.

‘I met Josh Hawley 10 years ago, and he told me he would be president of the United States,’ a person who knows Missouri’s junior senator tells me. ‘It’s been terrifying to watch him to execute on that pledge perfectly ever since.’Joshua David Hawley, 39, is the upper chamber’s youngest member. Elected in 2018, a bad year as a whole for the GOP, Hawley would seem to be the Right’s answer to Pete Buttigieg: Xennial, Midwestern, Ivy League, sincerely religious, scary smart.Like almost everyone who matters on the Right, Hawley addressed this week’s National Conservatism Conference: ‘As we gather tonight, we face a nation divided, a political class paralyzed, the old political programs in shambles, the future uncertain.

When Politico reported Wednesday that President Donald Trump was considering having Sen. Rand Paul, meet diplomatically with Iranian officials, conservative talk show host Mark Levin wasn’t having it. Levin asked sarcastically on Twitter, 'Would Rand Paul be representing us or Iran?' Then Levin tore into Paul further, as reported by the neoconservative Washington Free Beacon. The talk host’s criticisms of the senator are so ideologically twisted, only decipherable through a dated Bush-Cheney-era foreign policy lens, that it’s hard to know where to begin. So let’s break his hysteria down sentence by sentence. 'I don't trust Rand Paul when it comes to foreign policy,' Levin said, 'because he's an ideologue.

How many times do pundits with conventional sensibilities have to be surprised before they twig to their own blindness? They were surprised by Brexit. They were surprised by Donald Trump. And now, while they’re distracted by Donald Trump’s latest tweets, they’re setting themselves up to be surprised by another nationalist miracle — the wholesale replacement of the decrepit conservative movement by a new national conservatism. The press missed the story of this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., an event organized by Yoram Hazony and his newly created Edmund Burke Foundation. The media hive mind had decided that Trump’s tweets were the axis around which political news must revolve for about 72 hours.

Peter Thiel. Tucker Carlson. John Bolton. What’s most striking about the trio headlining the National Conservatism Conference is that none of the three has ever been elected to anything.Bolton may be national security adviser, but judging by his recent exile to Outer Mongolia and his stymied efforts to force regime change in Iran, his influence is ebbing. He may be rejoining the civilian corps soon enough.So why is a major new conference so honoring these folks? The question could be inverted. Why aren’t we hearing from over 200 Republican members of Congress? Sen. Josh Hawley, a freshman, will close Tuesday night at the NCC, but his address seems to have been a late addition.

Fred Fleitz doesn’t like me. When I last saw national security adviser John Bolton’s former chief of staff, in January, he told me my journalism was ‘crap,’ that I was ‘crap,’ and that he ‘didn’t have anything to say’ to me. Fair enough. This was the second time I’d tangled with Fleitz, a career conservative, civil servant and intelligence officer. Our first interaction came before he became Bolton’s chief of staff in 2018. Fleitz had publicly condemned my profile of his ally and mentor, Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, controversial in his own right, has since been entirely decent to me. But Fleitz is both Gaffney and Bolton’s pitbull, and seems to have no time for less than obsequious journalists.

Over eight million Americans received an unsolicited marketing email on Tuesday. But unlike the random vacation offers and buy-one-get-one-free enticements that regularly flood the nation’s inboxes, this email arrived to announce the presidential campaign of a pious billionaire. Tom Steyer had very cleverly cultivated the email list for several years on false pretenses, putting himself front-and-center of a PR initiative to impeach Donald Trump well before most in the Democratic party were willing to entertain that notion. By October 2017, Steyer had already launched his ‘Need to Impeach’ organization, which exhorted the public to sign up for his email updates or else risk collapse of the American constitutional order.

Imagine that you’re Donald Trump for a day. You wake up, you ablute, you make the usual follicular adjustments, you shoot off a few tweets in the throne room, and then you mooch down to the West Wing. Here, you face a choice. Do you dive into the fate-of-nations stuff and open the files marked ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Iranistan’, like John Bolton has asked? Or do you spend the day compiling a guest list for a White House event on anti-conservative bias in Big Tech, at which the talking points will be as tired and old as the curly cheese sandwiches? The answer depends on which Trump-for-a-day you prefer to be.

Now here is a dubious image: Wednesday January 20, 2021. A low grey sky and persistent drizzle over Washington, as 'billionaire activist' and President-elect Tom Steyer takes the hallowed oaths of office on the steps of the Capitol building. Who, besides Steyer himself and the squad of creeping, over-remunerated sycophants who advise him, really pictures that happening? Every schmuck in America with enough money to buy the actual moon seems to have considered running for president lately. Consider Mark 'Augustus' Zuckerberg’s weird 50-state listening tour back in 2017.