Donald trrump

I believe that Maximinus Thrax, whose brief reign ran from 235 to 238 AD, was the first Roman emperor never to have set foot in Rome. The Thracian brute started a trend. As the years went by, more and more Roman emperors gave the city a miss. Diocletian (284-305), who brought the crisis of the third century to an end, hated the city. Some later emperors settled on Ravenna as the seat of power for the Western empire. Constantinople emerged as HQ for the East. Rome retained a certain ceremonial significance but was increasingly irrelevant to the business of empire. The turn away from Rome happened for many reasons.

President Joe Biden delivered one of the worst and most widely condemned speeches of his presidency earlier this week in Georgia while lobbying for a federal takeover of elections. He asserted that Americans who do not support the Democrats' bill are "domestic enemies" who stand on the side of segregationist George Wallace. White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the unifier-in-chief on Wednesday by asserting that Biden's foes had nothing to say about former President Donald Trump's controversial use of language. "I know there have been a lot of claims of the offensive nature of the speech yesterday, which is hilarious on many levels, given how many people sat silently over the last four years for the former president," Psaki argued.

It’s often said that memory is a fickle thing. Today, that fickleness has become a danger to the republic. If you turned on any of the major news networks over the past week, with the possible exception of Fox News, you’d have seen wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building. What’s concerning about this is all the misplaced lamentations. The travesty of the day was not the riot itself, though the assault was obviously horrific and a symbol of America’s democratic backsliding into an illiberal abyss. But the rampage was never an actual existential threat to the United States government and calling the attack an “insurrection” isn't accurate.

There are very few uncontroversial takes on what happened on January 6, 2021. Perhaps the only one is that that tumultuous day gave Americans a rare glimpse into what their republic looks like when its institutions fail. On the right, this would be taken to mean that the US election system, made up of fifty different state election regimes, failed to secure the ballot and that the mainstream media refused to report on obvious issues with the franchise. Even the judiciary, flush with judges appointed by President Trump, didn't hear the people. On the left, the same events are evidence that elections ought to be federalized to protect the vote, and that the Fourth Estate as a pillar of democracy requires buttressing against “disinformation” and outright sedition.

If you think politics was insufferable in 2021, just wait until the New Year. The midterms are around the corner, so before the incessant campaign ads begin, I’d like to suggest a few New Year’s resolutions for our political class. Let’s start at the top with the president of the United States, Joe Biden. Perhaps Joe, who as usual is on vacation in Delaware, could begin 2022 off by firing his speechwriters. I have long suspected that saboteurs lurk in the White House. Who in his right mind would put the word “Galapagos” into a Biden speech? There is a double agent in the Biden-Harris administration who is trying to trip up the 79-year-old — so whoever it is needs to hear two of the last president’s favorite words: “You’re fired.

We’ve all learnt to wash our hands more carefully over the last couple of years, but no one has soaped his dirty digits as fastidiously as Joe Biden. His announcement that “there is no federal solution” to Covid-19 puts him up there with history’s greatest handwashers. Like Pontius Pilate, Biden is leaving it to the mob: “this gets solved at the state level.” Unlike the procrastinating procurator who surrendered his responsibilities to the jeering Judeans, Biden’s got it right. But it won’t save him from the jeers — and nor should it. Biden won the presidency on a promise of the federal solution that he now says doesn’t exist. It didn’t exist in 2020, either.

Last night was Liz Cheney’s breakout moment. As Cheney read the various text messages from various Fox News luminaries and Donald Trump Jr. to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she milked the moment, lingering over memorable phrases such as "he’s got to condemn this shit ASAP." And yet Sonny boy's plea was ignored. The old man reveled in the feculent mayhem. Once seen as a neoconservative ogress, Cheney has now achieved full redemption, morphing into the darling of the mainstream media for her refusal to dismiss the mob on January 6 as a bunch of tourists who had accidentally strayed into the Capitol. This is Cheney’s High Noon.

Conservatives are taking a lot of heat these days regarding masculinity. David French in a recent piece at The Atlantic criticized Josh Hammer, David Azerrad, and Donald Trump, among others, for promoting what French labels a false view of manliness — namely, one that is unafraid to speak unpopular truths regardless of the consequences. It is a farcical “Trumpist toughness” that “treat[s] Twitter as their Omaha Beach.” Washington Post columnist Christine Emba, meanwhile, recently mocked Republican Senator Josh Hawley for being a “champion of masculine virtue” but failing “to engage more deeply on the level of policy and ideas.

Finding fault takes finesse. Oh, anybody can complain. We are a nation of complainers, carping at everything from breakfast vittles to late-night TV. We complain about our politicians, our prognosticators and our pop stars. But these complaints run like water down a windowpane in the same old channels to the same wet destination. Finding fault — finding new faults in a familiar subject — is much harder. It takes talent. It takes a critic. I am well aware that these days a lot of Americans complain that we are too divided. The nation bristles with parti pris. We revile the exponents of political views opposed to our own. We sneer at their provincialism, their pissant pettiness and their lack of civility, for which they should rightly be crushed.

Taco Bell Patron in the year 2032: "What would you say if I called you a brutish fossil, symbolic of a decayed era gratefully forgotten?" John Spartan: "I don’t know…thanks?" — Demolition Man “Right wing builds its own echo chamber,” warns the headline from a short piece in Axios about conservatives creating their own media outlets and other institutions like publishers and cryptocurrencies and social networks. The headline is a play on a trope of the Big Tech age (provided you believe Axios is capable of such self-awareness).

The Democrats' only possible path forward is to ensure that Trump does not run in 2024. So they want to lock him away in jail. With only three years left to go, the 2024 race is narrowing to Trump versus Some Democrat. By Election Day, President Biden will be a vaguely sentient eighty-two, VP Harris will likely have left the country, and the Dems' rainbow coalition of identity claimants will quickly winnow itself down to nobody as their collective lack of experience devalues their various claims of victimhood. What to do about Trump? You can convince some Americans for awhile that Trump is a Russian agent, or violated an Emoluments Clause thingie they'd never heard of before, just by saying it over and over.

Kid Rock feels like he emerged from a time capsule left for us in the Nineties, perhaps along with Dunkaroos and the decaying corpses of the Simpsons, who were replaced with inferior clones around the dawn of the millennium. In those heady days of nu-metal, Jackass and the Attitude Era, bored suburbanites and neglected “rednecks” unleashed their frustrations into jubilantly crass and confrontational entertainment that turned the raising of a middle finger into a kind of sacred ritual. Mr. Rock's breakout hit “Bawitdaba” hailed “the topless dancers” and “the...heroes at the methadone clinic,” and scorned “the crooked cops” and “all you bastards at the IRS.” Both he invited to, well, “Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.

When we focus on the rise of the Hispanic male Republican, we overlook the emergence of his consort and counterpart, the right-wing Latina. Donald Trump made gains across the board with Hispanics in the 2020 election, but the media fixated on “multiracial whiteness” and “toxic masculinity” in the voting choices of Hispanic men. Meanwhile, Trump gained more votes between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women than any other sector of the electorate. The woke tell themselves that Hispanic men, with their supposed chauvinism and machismo, control the lives and voting choices of the Latina. But the opposite is the case. The Latina, with her preternatural seduction skills, holds the power in the relationship. If her curves sway to the right, the men, as they always do, will follow along.

Congressman Adam Schiff is crowing. “It’s very positive,” he said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press about the indictment of sometime Trump adviser Steve Bannon on two counts of contempt of Congress. He has a point. The indictment was never really about Bannon but about trying to create some shock and awe when it comes to eliciting testimony from other Trump janissaries such as his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Bannon’s predicament, which he can try and spin to his personal advantage by portraying himself as a victim of the deep state, indicates that the January 6 commission is impeachment by other means.