Politics

The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry has raised many questions. Did President Trump withhold military aid to Ukraine because he wanted the country’s new president to investigate possible 2020 rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter? Was the whistleblower who alerted the country to the phone call between the two TV star presidents politically motivated? And what is it like to be Rudy Giuliani, the man outside the administration at the center of it all? I can offer some insight into that last one. The day after House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry, I sat across from Giuliani on a train from New York City to Washington. The three-hour ride was a rollicking one, with the former mayor of NYC indicating he was more than ready to rumble.

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.

Oops. Donald Trump has another nettlesome whistleblower on his hands that he’s going to have to try and drown out.  The latest revelation: a career Internal Revenue Service official has filed a complaint alleging that a Treasury Department official sought to tamper with the annual audit of Donald Trump or Mike Pence’s tax returns. Which official do you think is more likely to have sought to intervene?According to the Washington Post, which broke the story, the whistleblower’s account focuses on 'the integrity of the government’s system for auditing the president and vice president’s tax returns.' Needless to say, the process is supposed to be inviolate.

The Democratic party and the chattering classes are playing a dangerous game with impeachment. Their are two modern precedents — Nixon’s resignation before his probable impeachment in 1974 and Bill Clinton’s actual impeachment in 1998. But neither is comparable to the contemplated impeachment of Donald Trump. All impeachments are partisan, but this one is in doubly bad faith: it has no chance of succeeding in removing Trump, and it has no chance of acquitting him in a way that will strengthen faith in the country’s institutions. The only outcome possible is to confirm for Democrats and Republicans alike the idea that 2020 is a regime-change moment, for reasons that go far beyond Trump.

There’s a story about Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign that, apocryphal or not, explains why he’s now facing a Congressional impeachment inquiry. Trump got some debate prep from Roger Ailes, the former boss of Fox News, and someone who had been helping to run presidential campaigns since he was Nixon’s ‘TV wunderkind’ in 1960. But Trump wouldn’t open his briefing books, wouldn’t practice, wouldn’t be told anything at all. It was so bad that campaign staff had to follow Trump around his golf course at Bedminster holding up little, typed cue cards, hoping he’d absorb something – anything – in between holes. Ailes was exasperated and, fearing he’d be blamed for the inevitable disaster he saw coming, he quit. That was the rational thing to do.

Freshman Democrat Rep. Max Rose must steel himself for a tough re-election scrum in his Republican-leaning district. An unconventional, Trumpian contender, Joseph 'Joey Salads' Saladino, could make for quite an upset to both parties.New York’s 11th district covers Staten Island and a sliver of Brooklyn. Staten Island, New York City’s last GOP bastion, went for Trump over Hillary by 15 points in 2016. The district gave Rose’s Republican predecessor, Dan Donovan, a 26.1-point margin of victory in 2016 before Rose bested him by six points — just over 10,000 votes — in 2018.Seeing an opportunity to reclaim one of the three US congressional seats they lost in 2018, New York’s Republicans are mobilizing to oppose Rose.

She’s back. Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump, lashes into him in a CBS News interview that was released on Thursday, declaring that he’s an 'illegitimate president'. She also laced into him on Thursday night in an appearance before the National Abortion Rights Action League, not to mention an appearance on Friday at Georgetown University, where she said that Trump has transformed American foreign policy into 'an extortion racket' and 'stabbed in the back' career foreign service officers. Them’s fightin’ words! The ostensible purpose of her CBS interview was to promote her new tome, The Book of Gutsy Women, co-written with her daughter Chelsea.

We’re told over and over by fair-weather constitutional scholars that impeachment is a 'political process.' Which is to say: it’s not strictly to do with statutes being violated or any narrow legalistic calculation, but rather a wholesale consideration of the power dynamics within the American system of government. Let’s therefore examine one of the central political arguments presented by advocates of impeachment, namely Nancy Pelosi, whose about-face on the issue this week has ensured several months of all-consuming national melodrama. Announcing that a formal impeachment inquiry has been initiated, Pelosi declared that Donald Trump had 'betrayed' the country.

Poor Joseph Maguire. The acting head of the intelligence agencies sure was in an awful predicament as he testified before the House Intelligence Committee. The former Navy SEAL was thrashing about to avoid becoming entangled in the net of the Democratic inquiry, swimming in murkier waters than he had ever encountered before. Indeed, at one point he confessed that he never would have accepted his post had he been aware of the whistleblower report that sounded an alarm about what Adam Schiff deemed the ‘nefarious’ activities about President Trump and his top aides.How different from Corey Lewandowski, who appears to be headed to the White House to help lead the defense of Trump!

I am not thinking of that scene at the beginning of Dickens’s novel where Mr Blotton says he regards Mr Pickwick as a 'humbug'. That was nice, especially when Mr Pickwick angrily demands to know whether the Rt. Honorable gentleman called him a humbug in its ordinary or 'common sense'. No, no responded Mr Blotton, he had 'merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view'. Well, that’s all right then, rejoined Mr Pickwick, and peace and amity reigned once more among the members of the Pickwick Club. There is a lesson in there somewhere for the Democrats, but when it comes to their virulent case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, more pertinent is the episode describing the case of Bardell v. Pickwick.