2020 election

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

This is a story about some kittens and a groundhog, and a politician who should not be allowed to go near kittens and groundhogs. Or anywhere near politics, for that matter. We begin in a very liberal enclave of very liberal Brooklyn, whereupon this Thursday evening, I hosted a group discussion in my backyard to talk about climate change. Because there are still a bunch of Democrats running for president, including several that I am very sick of hearing about, I instituted a ground rule: anyone who derailed the discussion by hyping up a presidential candidate had to put a dollar in the ‘Bill de Blasio Jar’ and it would be donated to his presidential campaign. I took this very seriously.

Conservative sadbois like two things: hot moms and Middle Eastern despots. Enter Tulsi Gabbard, the comely representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district. The single lock of gray hair tucked behind her ear and her array of red pants-suits give her an almost Palinesque allure. Her secret friendship with Bashar al-Assad and visceral hatred for the House of Saud brings us all back to our political puberty: hiding copies of The American Conservative under our beds, taking them out only when our parents weren’t home and fantasizing madly about the end of American Empire. Knowing only that, we can hardly blame an aging fogey who finds himself crushing on Rep. Gabbard.

The symptoms of age-related cognitive decline include being unable to remember whether you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and what the talking points of your own presidential campaign are, but recalling exactly what you said nearly 60 years ago when you had a summer job as a lifeguard at a pool in Wilmington, Del. and a ‘bad dude’ called Corn Pop took umbrage when you ordered him to put on a shower cap so he looked like an old lady and then, to further emasculate him in front of his ‘boys’, called him ‘Esther’.