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Few critics ever analyzed why Trump’s appearance and comportment resonated with his base and intrigued neutrals who otherwise might have been repelled by his agenda and personal history. American men in their sixties and seventies often do strange things to retain their youth and vibrancy. They can dye their hair, tan their skin, remove their wrinkles, or substitute loud clothes for a declining physique. Trump did all that and more. He appeared loutish to the Beltway establishment. But unlike aging Hollywood celebrities, he became more rather than less resonant and empathetic to the middle class for the strained effort, as if proof that even aging billionaires were patched together creaky everymen and insecure humans after all.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.

The most fascinating thing about the Michael Cohen hearing may not be what Michael Cohen said, but what Republicans didn’t. They made no attempt to defend Donald Trump other than to disparage Cohen’s character with metronomic regularity. Cohen was a liar. A bad man. He enriched himself. But how do you derogate someone who has already confessed to swimming happily in Trump’s swampy waters? The other tack they pursued was to declare the hearing a circus or a charade. Protestations were profuse. O tempora o mores! Washington, we were told, is a ‘hellhole.’ (At least Republican lawmakers forbore from deeming it a shithole.

Later this week, the Conservative Political Action Conference will convene for its annual gathering. Spectator USA has obtained a final copy of its official schedule. We are reprinting it here for the first time, in its entirety, and without comment.

The New Jersey State Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill Thursday to require presidential candidates to release five years’ worth of tax returns in exchange for a place on the state’s ballot. The measure passed along party lines 23-11. Sitting President Donald Trump famously bucked modern tradition when refusing to release his tax returns, so the NJ measure could effectively keep Donald Trump off the ballot. The Democrat-dominated New Jersey legislature passed the same requirement in 2017, but Republican Gov. Chris Christie refused to sign it.

Andrew McCabe, second-in-command at James Comey’s FBI, is at it again. First, he and his boss shredded the Bureau’s reputation as the world’s leading law enforcement agency. Now, McCabe is compounding the damage by making wild, self-serving charges to sell his new book. In one TV interview, he said it is ‘possible’ that Donald Trump is a Russian agent. Serious charges need serious proof. Simple fairness demands it. But McCabe presents none. That’s par for the course. Simple fairness was not the hallmark of the Comey-McCabe era. No disinterested observers think the Bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server was treated the same way as the amorphous charges against the Trump campaign. That bias wasn’t the fault of FBI field agents.

In the past six months, Democrats have accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape, gone apoplectic over an awkwardly smiling 17-year-old boy, flirted with infanticide, embraced late-term abortion, and fallen all over themselves to endorse an absurd so-called ‘Green New Deal’ that calls for eliminating air travel, remodeling of every building in the United States, and, at long last, confronting the scourge of ‘farting cows.’ Where, in this great, big, moralizing, self-righteous, progressive mess that has become the Democratic party are the non-radical voters? Where are the moderates? The ‘blue dogs?’ Are there even any left? The answer seems to be no and obvious the conclusion is that the Democrats have gone off the rails.

It’s Friday evening and the sun set over three hours ago, which can only mean one thing: the time has arrived for another development in the Robert Mueller probe. This time around, the revelation is the Special Counsel’s recommendation of up to 24-and-a-half years in prison for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort is going down for the crimes of tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to file a foreign bank account report. The filing says that Manafort ‘acted for more than a decade as if he were above the law, and deprived the federal government of millions of dollars.’ The sentencing recommendation comes after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Manafort had lied to prosecutors on three different topics, breaching his plea deal.