Uh-oh. President Trump is wading into diplomatic waters in North Korea that he may have trouble navigating. Yesterday, he proudly revealed that talks with North Korea have been taking place at the “highest levels.” He also gave his blessing to the prospect of a peace treaty between the two Koreas, which currently only enjoy an … Read more
Donald Trump finally had something positive to say on Twitter. After nearly a week of dithering, the president made a decision and announced it, to a fair amount of surprise, on national television on Friday night: The United States, in concert with the United Kingdom and France, would launch targeted strikes on Syrian chemical weapons … Read more
Poor Paul Manafort. Manafort, who tried to extricate himself from the Mueller investigation by filing a civil case alleging prosecutorial overreach, was skewered by federal judge Amy Berman on Wednesday. By the time Manafort showed up in court, his lawyer was furiously back-pedalling about what they were demanding. ‘I don’t really understand,’ Berman said, ‘what … Read more
California, once a citadel of conservatism, now a bastion of liberal progressivism, continues to harbour a few intellectual redoubts on the right. Up north you can find the Hoover Institution, which is located on the Stanford University campus. And down south, near Los Angeles, there is the Claremont Institute, another scholarly outfit which also happens … Read more
The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure … Read more
This week marks 15 years since the start of America’s war in Iraq. Regime change was George W. Bush’s objective, and Saddam Hussein was duly removed, tried, and executed. But Bush could not have counted on how much regime change would also come to Washington as a result of the war. It contributed to the … Read more
Yesterday, Donald Trump went to New Hampshire, the ‘Granite State’ or, as he calls it, a ‘drug-infested den’. He has launched an initiative against prescription opioid addiction, and would like to execute drug dealers. He has not specified whether he would prefer to do this in the manner of Dirty Harry, or by a legal … Read more
Throughout the course of the inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, White House lawyers have attempted to drill a message into the president’s head. It is a simple one: whatever you do, don’t go after Robert Mueller personally or suggest in any way that you will shut down the investigation. You … Read more
But they’ll miss the ‘improvisational jazz’ of the Tillerson-Trump partnership
The Trump administration’s foreign-policy team is beginning to look a lot like a Marco Rubio foreign policy team. It’s not hard to imagine a generally hawkish Republican like Mike Pompeo serving as Secretary of State under Little Marco, and John Bolton – widely tipped to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser – would have … Read more
President Trump continues to shake up his White House team. As early as tomorrow he plans to name Larry Kudlow, a senior contributor to CNBC, to replace Gary Cohn as his National Economic Council chief. Kudlow is an old chum of Trump’s and an inveterate supply-sider whose gospel is that the more you lower tax … Read more
The special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District has ended in a photo finish. There are absentee ballots still to be counted, perhaps a recount to be demanded. But it looks as if the Democrat, Conor Lamb, has won in this district that just two years ago voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by … Read more
Robert Mueller, the former Director of the FBI and special counsel in the soap opera that is the Russia collusion investigation, has been on the case for ten months now. His team of attorneys and Washington prosecutors has interviewed dozens of witnesses, scanned hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, sent an unknown number of … Read more
For two years we’ve been hearing that Donald Trump is an ‘isolationist’, whatever that word is supposed to mean. Only now two op-ed writers in the New York Times have discovered that he isn’t — instead, Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim write, ‘Let’s call Mr. Trump’s vision what it is: radical American imperialism.’ Let’s not, … Read more
I can understand some people not liking the current president of the United States. As Conrad Black put it recently, ‘Donald Trump is a strange cat and an acquired taste.’ What I don’t understand is people who should know better being afraid of Donald Trump. For example, how can it be that among all the … Read more
In my reporting on John Bolton, the hardline former US Ambassador to the UN, I have noticed a trend. Bolton very clearly wants in. And he has a very specific way of going about it. Some context: despite being a George W. Bush alum, Bolton has largely vociferously backed President Donald Trump. Bolton has been … Read more
The AIPAC conference, that annual celebration of the triangular romance between America, Israel and American Jews, concluded last night with the traditional protestations of undying love, democratic compatibility and common values. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s identity crisis deepens, and a redefinition of the goals of the American-Israeli relationship looms. AIPAC is studiously bipartisan, but the maladroit policies … Read more
The weeping and wailing that is greeting Trump’s imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum products entering the US is evidence that no one in America knows anything about the history of the Grand Old Party. Paul Ryan and the libertarian right are acting as if the President is betraying some long and distinguished tradition. … Read more
If accounts in the press are to be believed, President Trump has reached a fresh nadir. “These are the darkest days in at least half a year,” reports The Washington Post. “Sources close to President Trump say he is in a bad place,” chimes in the impressively-sourced Axios. Buried in the Post story is a … Read more
