Donald trrump

Get it yet? The point of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the January 6 hearings is all about one man. Nope, not Donald Trump: Merrick Garland. Either the FBI is trying to get Garland to indict Trump for something, and failing that to indict the highest ranking person near Trump, or Garland is already on the case himself. The reason for this is that nothing else worked. Democrats pointed the full national security apparatus at Trump, with the FBI doing yeoman-like work. They turned Robert Mueller loose with unlimited resources for a full year, going as far as to suggest Trump had obstructed an investigation that found him innocent. Alice in Wonderland stuff, that.

Since the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound on Monday, the Democratic Party’s resistance leaders have been tumescent. Former Justice Department officials are going on television to give an expert gloss to the prospect of the 45th president finally getting prosecuted. Former solicitor general Neil Katyal, for example, told MSNBC on Monday evening that if he was the former president’s lawyer, he would tell him to prepare for prison time. Marc Elias, the Democratic Party lawyer who commissioned the infamous Steele Dossier, went on Twitter to suggest the raid might mean Trump was guilty of destroying government property and thus ineligible to run in 2024. It feels like 2017 all over again. And that is what makes this latest episode of Get Trump a farce.

Dallas, Texas Howdy from the Lone Star State, where Cockburn is braving 100-degree heat, overpriced IPAs and America First applause lines to bring you coverage of CPAC Texas. The conservative conference has come to the Hilton Anatole in Dallas for the second year — and is once again headlined by former president Donald Trump, set to speak this evening. Appropriately, the hotel’s two bars are called “Media” and “Gossip,” as if they’d been purpose-built for your intrepid correspondent. Cockburn managed to finagle his way into the $375-a-head Cattleman’s Ball for free on Friday night, where he sat at a table with a cadre of fellow hacks, chief among them John Fredericks, the “Godzilla of Truth.

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.

Cast your mind back to the 1990s for a moment. The left, dispirited at their generation-long rout at the hands of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and enraged by the ratification of limited-government trends at the hands of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, were looking for a new rallying point. By the end of the decade, the intellectual left had settled upon a new epithet: “neoliberalism.” Although the term was not brand new, it exploded in popularity in left academic journals and soon in left media too. Simply put, “neoliberalism” means “democratic capitalism.

In all likelihood, Donald Trump will soon announce his re-entry into the presidential stakes — a decision that, with the exception of Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt, is largely unique to American history. In so doing, he plans to build on the success he had in office, the Supreme Court's decisions on abortion and other matters, and the Biden administration's mistreatment of the economy, the border and the culture. But one thing that will absolutely prove to be problematic for Trump when it comes to a primary — which he will absolutely have, given the machinations of multiple politicians who take issue with his approach or who will seek to supplant him — is a defense of his own performance in the last year of his presidency, facing a global pandemic.

On Thursday, a man jumped onstage and tried to kill one of the two candidates running for New York governor. Fortunately, he failed. Even so, the incident was terrifying, not only because it endangered Representative Lee Zeldin but because it underscores two grave problems facing America. One is the failure of our law enforcement system to treat serious crimes seriously, both to deter them and punish the offenders. This failure makes it a misnomer to speak of our “criminal justice” system. It’s not providing justice, and it's not deterring crime, especially violent crime. The second is the danger violence poses to our established constitutional order, beyond its danger to any individual.

Joe Biden and Bennie Thompson may be laid up with Covid, but the January 6 committee, to borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, was ready to fight like hell on Thursday. “Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued, the dam has begun to break,” declared Representative Liz Cheney at the outset. “He chose not to act,” added Representative Adam Kinzinger, slamming “Trump’s dishonor and dereliction of duty.” Speaking of slamming, it was the footage of Trump smacking the lectern on January 7, as he stumbled through a video intended to display his displeasure with the violence that he fomented, that displayed the real Trump. Vexed, exasperated, distressed. “Yesterday’s a hard word for me,” he announced. “I don’t want to say the election is over.

The New York Times and the Washington Post sent up flares last weekend: one way or another, they said, Joe Biden is on borrowed time. The last man standing who ended up the answer to Anyone But Trump turned out so inadequate for the job that Deep State media gave him a vote of no confidence and said he should go. The Times wrote a scathing summary of What Everyone Knows: that Biden at 79 is a wreck. In their words, the man "is testing the boundaries of age and the presidency." He can barely walk unassisted. He has zombie moments on stage. He is fully dependent on wife Jill to nudge him onward, redirect him, get him back on the TelePrompTer — and even then he will read anything there, including stage directions, Ron Burgundy-like. Not a pretty picture.