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Every so often, a political candidate rises to the fore fueled by the grievances of people who are seriously annoyed. Donald Trump, for example, stoked the fires of an America in perceived decline. Ron Paul in 2008 capitalized on the backlash to the costly military interventions of the Bush era. In 2016, Bernie Sanders drew together a coalition of the young, the far-left, and the people who didn’t want to cast a vote for a Clinton ever again.
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.
This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. One thing is now as obvious as a brick through a window: politics is the new comedy. Who in America believes that the road to 2020 will be paved with prudence, solemnity and fair campaigning? Nobody does. This election season will be defined by below-the-belt hits, salty jokes and juvenile comebacks, all delivered with the subtlety of an air horn blast. Already we have seen doddery Joe Biden challenge the president to a push-up contest on national television, while Bernie Sanders wants to take on Trump at a mile-long footrace. The president, according to the cerebral Andrew Yang, is ‘so fat’. This is not an American phenomenon.
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.
This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Dear Democrats, I’m mad at you. I was raised a die-hard, bleeding-heart liberal. My grandmother was an Irish Catholic New Englander who worshipped JFK almost as much as Jesus. My dad and his nine siblings sang for the Kennedys at Hammersmith Farm. For decades, I was a loyal regular at your bar until suddenly you started ignoring me. You took my support for granted and dismissed my concerns, focusing instead on courting the young city hipsters with their scooters and their designer weed and their craft beers. You began overlooking pragmatic moderates and catering to loud extremists who favor rewriting the Constitution and accelerating our lurch towards socialism.
As several hundred climate change activists shut down DC streets and held up morning commutes on Monday morning, a fellow progressive activist, Amy Siskind, was blasting the mainstream media to her 370,000+ Twitter followers: '50 neo-Nazis go to Portland to encourage violence and the media will cover them endlessly for days,' claimed the former Wall Street executive. 'Thousands peacefully protest and march to the Capitol, nothing from the media.'Siskind wasn’t referring to the climate protest taking place that morning. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, ABC, and CBS all covered the activists linking arms and punishing Washington commuters for their climate sins. She was referring, instead, to her own protest that took place Saturday.
Is Donald Trump going to be impeached? Nancy Pelosi is not giving herself much room to maneuver: once a Democratic-led committee of inquiry is assembled, its results are a foregone conclusion. It will recommend impeachment — to fail to do so would only strengthen the president and make Democrats look stupid on the eve of an election. As things are, Pelosi evidently found the pressure from within her party already too great to withstand: her sense of the political risks of impeachment was outweighed by her sense of the danger to her own position from continuing to resist it. So the die is cast. Perhaps this tells us, too, that Joe Biden’s support for the Democratic nomination is dwindling behind the scenes.
Donald Trump’s true opponent is not Joe Biden or any of the other Democrats vying for the nomination. It’s Nancy Pelosi. Her announcement that a formal impeachment inquiry is beginning should come as a nasty shock to Trump. Pelosi is the one Democrat he has been unable to cow and bully. Instead, she has repeatedly outmaneuvered him. In her lapidary statement today she emphasized that 'no one is above the law'. That was basically it. The message was clear. She came across as calm, reassuring and understated. No doubt Trump may have inadvertently bolstered Biden’s chances to gain the nomination by targeting his candidacy for destruction with the help of the Ukrainian government. If he plays his cards right, Biden can go on the offense.
Spin the magic wheel: click, click, click, click, click — click — click: Ukraine! We’re all going to Ukraine! Another week, another pseudo-scandal fomented by anonymous anti-Trump actors in the 'intelligence community' and fanned into attention-grabbing headlines by an impatient, irresponsible press. Can anyone keep them all straight? They rise like noxious bubbles from the cauldron of deep-state anti-Trump sentiment, only to pass away almost immediately, carried off by their own insubstantiality and the contrasting bright-light series of real achievements on the part of the Trump administration.
The paradox of Joe Biden is well known. How does the experienced, effective, formidable politician turn into such a fiasco-stalked jellyfish every time he goes for the presidency? Given his advanced state of decomposition, there has been something almost moving about watching Biden being wheeled around another campaign this year. Every Biden event, every meet ’n’ greet, every New Hampshire stroll has generated a micro-gaffe or viral mini-controversy. And each word, each gesture is combed for evidence of sexism or racism. Biden’s most laudable, nay, heroic effort so far to live up to this reputation came during the third debate in Houston.
This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. ‘He ran twice for president and lost when he didn’t have dementia,’ a veteran Democratic party operative remarked to me earlier in the year apropos Joe Biden. ‘So why should we think he’d win now he does have dementia?’ It was a fair question, to which the answer could be: (a) maybe he does have dementia, but so what? Ronald Reagan had dementia for at least part of his presidency (how early this manifested is open to argument — first or second term?
