Politics

Last Monday, Rep. Peter T. King announced his retirement at the end of this, his 14th term. The candidates now running to succeed him will have more than just a congressional seat to fill. You see, Pete King is a New York legend. With his rip-roaring rhetoric and unabashed Irish Catholicism, and without airbrushing or a filter, King has been an enduring holdout of old school New York politics. Moreover, his commitment to national security and justice for 9/11 victims made him a powerful, if controversial, advocate for his Long Island constituency. The 2018 midterms, not great for House Republicans, still saw King returned with a firm six percent majority. His past victory margins ranged up to 45 percent (in 2002).

A grave matter — the future of American fashion — rests in the hands of President Trump. The foremost promoter of the drape cut, or soft shoulder suit, pioneered by Savile Row tailor Anderson & Sheppard, is Roger Stone, who was found guilty Friday of obstructing Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and lying to Congress. If Stone heads to the hoosegow because of his Wikileaks shenanigans, then he won’t be able to wear his flamboyant A & S suits and cutaway collars, let alone maintain his fashion blog. It will be prison stripes, not pinstripes, for him as he prepares to join his former business partner Paul Manafort behind bars. So will Trump heed the pleas of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and pardon Stone, his chum since the 1980s?

Nikki Haley, the first female governor of South Carolina, has a book out this week. Titled With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace, Haley has been making the rounds to promote it and has managed the rarest balancing act of the Trump era: criticizing him when necessary but not going into full-on Trump Derangement Syndrome.Haley appeared on NBC News with Savannah Guthrie this week and the clip went viral because of how hard Guthrie went after Haley. Liberals on Twitter applauded but the clip also made the rounds of my non-political Facebook universe commending Haley for her calm demeanor and grace under pressure. Guthrie focused most of her questions not on Haley’s book but on Haley’s opinion of Donald Trump and Haley swatted them easily.

Today marks the official beginning of the Schiff Show Impeachment Follies. It is therefore fitting that I take as my text for today’s meditation Matthew 7:5: 'Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.' What do I mean? I’ll tell you. The ostensible predicate of this spectacle is President Trump’s alleged effort to influence the 2020 election. Specifically, the allegation is that Trump made aid to Ukraine (the quid) conditional on Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden’s demand (the quo) that the prosecutor investigating a company on which his son, Hunter, sat be fired. Biden’s demand is not controverted.

The Green party of the United States is selecting its 2020 presidential nominee. Its primary voters, however, may be denied a meaningful choice. Some Green activists think that the current front-runner, Howie Hawkins, only leads thanks to his supporters’ machinations. GPUS co-chair Gloria Mattera promised me ‘an exciting and a radically-democratic primary process’. Still, since we spoke in mid-September, the field has remained the same. Then and now, only two candidates — Hawkins and Dario Hunter — have received the national party’s recognition, which is required to be nominated.

Who would you like to see better represented in the already-crowded Democratic primary? Septuagenarians? Centrists? Or billionaires? For those of you who answered 'all three', you may be in luck, as the New York Times reports that former New York mayor and current 17th richest person in the world Michael Bloomberg is set to file paperwork in Alabama designating himself a presidential candidate. Bloomberg has sat on the sidelines over the past few months. He has watched once-respected politicians address near-empty tents in New Hampshire and seen Tom Steyer splurge his own cash on TV and internet ads to distort the proportion of his popularity. It takes real guts to observe that and think 'I too would like to get 3 percent in a poll — how much of my money would you like?

It’s been a refreshing time for Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, hotel magnate and, not least, $1 million donor to the Trump inaugural committee. It's a long way from Brussels, where Sondland was stationed, to Kiev, but Sondland, who testified before the House Intelligence Committee a few weeks ago that he didn’t really know anything about a quid pro quo, has apparently provided several pages of new testimony that was released today in which he suddenly 'refreshed my recollection'. Sondland, in other words, has recollected that nefarious things were happening or, to put it more precisely, wants to save his own hide. He's flipped. Donald Trump holds strong views about this kind of behavior.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Donald Trump will probably be reelected in 2020 – not because he is a good president, smart, or has good policies. He will win, I believe, because the Democrats are awful. The party that is meant to be ‘for the people’ has completely lost touch with the people. Rather than address real issues, the Democrats have resorted to virtue signaling. Take, for instance, the recent LGBTQ Democratic presidential town hall hosted by CNN. Candidate after candidate stood up and repeated the words ‘transwomen of color’ as many times as they could manage, hoping that this would win over voters. Have they learned nothing from the last election?

Oh no, the pipes in Stephen Miller's office are leaking again. We need to fix them and apparently it’s up to me stop the place flooding. I’m pretty sure this is not what I majored in polisci at UVA for, but whatever. Miller’s burst pipes end up dampening everyone who is trying to make immigration reform happen. Word is that Kirstjen Nielsen and Kevin McAleenan both suffered a dousing. Miller’s been told to keep his office in better order. He looks a bit upset. Could be worse, I wanted to tell him, at least his sprayed-on hair didn’t get wet. Another day passes without Hogan Gidley doing a press conference. The hacks are started to mock him openly. The deputy press secretary has been in his role since 2017, and still hasn’t made it to the podium.

The House of Representatives passed two important bills this week amid deteriorating US-Turkey relations, one imposing sanctions on Turkish military and government officials over Ankara’s incursions against the Kurds in northeast Syria, the other officially recognizing the Armenian genocide. The latter is largely symbolic, finally acknowledging what scholars have long reached an overwhelming consensus on: that during World War One, amid the fading embers of the Ottoman Empire, 1.5 million Armenians were systematically exterminated. Turkey’s longstanding denial of this atrocity stands in stark contrast with how Germany has handled the moral stain of the Holocaust and continues to rob the Armenian people of dignity and closure.

The Republican party is trying to box the Democrats in over impeachment. This morning, as the Washington Post reports, the National Republican Congressional Committee hand-delivered moving boxes to House Democrats such as Virginia’s Jennifer Wexton and Abigail Spanberger. Committee spokesman Chris Pack explained, ‘We gave moving boxes to the Democrats who are going to be packing up their offices next November due to their obsession with impeachment.’ But the person who actually appears to be moving on is President Trump himself. It seems he filed papers in September to change his official residence from New York to Florida, which has no state income tax. Ivanka, Jared, Don Jr.