Donald trrump

A Cheney imperiled

Kemmerer, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has the political brain of a sucked egg, as her egregiously self-destructive decision to join her Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach President Trump following the events at the US Capitol on January 6 showed. In terms of personability and charm, Cheney is the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton. And in a state with a population of 581,024 people spread across 97,914 square miles where politics has always been something like a family affair, she is very much an outsider, even a stranger. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she lived in the Cowboy State for only a year or so when she was a sixth- and seventh-grade student in the 1970s.

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No one elected Mark Milley

A coup by any other name and maybe even a little light treason. Those are the accusations flying over revelations in a new Bob Woodward book about what Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley did after the January 6 Capitol riots. Milley reportedly held several phone calls shortly after January 6, with both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with his counterpart in China. According to Woodward, the general gave assurances to Gen. Li Zuocheng that he would alert the Chinese to any possible coming attack, nuclear or otherwise. There is no evidence President Trump was planning any kind of strike against China, or Iran, or Florida. No battle plans were being drawn. Miller supposedly took these actions after Trump signed an executive order removing US forces from Afghanistan.

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Gavin Newsom won in California, but so did Trumpism

The California dream turned into a nightmare for Republicans on Tuesday night after a blowout victory saved the formerly embattled Gov. Gavin Newsom. Instead of licking their wounds in silence, however, Republicans are eating their own. From the day he took office in 2018, conservatives were seeking to oust Newsom. The former mayor of San Francisco's lockdown orders gave life to their efforts. Out of all the scandals in which elected officials broke their own quarantine mandates, Newsom's power meal at the French Laundry restaurant with state lobbyists in Napa Valley was by far the most infamous. It gave Republicans enough ammo to push the recall over the 1.5 million signature requirement, thanks also in part to a four-month extension to the deadline.

The Democrats damned Biden by impeaching Trump

Joe Biden is officially a victim of the new rules that every Democratic president is going to face from here on out. That's thanks to his party’s overzealously tying an impeachment around Donald Trump’s neck before the 2020 election. Both Biden and the Democrats are not going to like where those new rules lead when the Republican party, in all likelihood, takes back the House of Representatives in early 2023. Traveling back in time for a moment, remember that Donald Trump’s first impeachment was based on a third-party whistleblower who notified Rep. Adam Schiff of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

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Who wins the Afghanistan Dumbest Take Award?

It’s a national disgrace, a catastrophe nearly two decades in the making. In a just society, everyone involved would be severely punished, but in the fallen state of modern America there will be no consequences, only more humiliation. Cockburn refers, of course, to Twitter, that monstrous invention where America’s politicians, journalists, ‘experts’, and ordinary people compete with one another to see who can be the most profoundly pathetic, unimpressive, and cringeworthy. Naturally, the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan allowed every player to put in their best performance.

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I think Donald Trump’s email team is trying to murder me

I remember well the day this all began. The rain was slanting through the gray air and drops were plinking against my office window. I was sitting at my computer, checking my email, when I noticed I had a new message. I opened it and saw that it had been typed in sporadic red and blue fonts, like someone had clipped each letter out of a magazine. ‘Don't let President Trump think he's lost your support,’ it read. ‘He has EXTENDED your PERSONAL 500%-MATCH DEADLINE FOR 1 MORE HOUR… This is your last chance.’ I sat back in my chair and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. I had been receiving Donald Trump’s fundraising emails for years and certainly the language had always been insistent. But this was a new level of aggression altogether. My last chance, I thought.

Has Mike Lindell lost it?

What is it about Donald Trump that his closest associates seem to all go irredeemably insane? On Thursday, the CEO and chief priest of MyPillow Mike Lindell announced that he is suspending his advertising on Fox, 'immediately and indefinitely'. This is no minor boycott or tiff. MyPillow and Fox News are tethered together like no sponsor and sponsee since Michael Jordan spiritually merged his consciousness with Nike. Lindell claims his firm bought $50 million in ads on Fox in 2020, meaning he supplies almost two percent of Fox’s revenue. Fox doesn’t just market Lindell’s cushions, but also his life: the channel has aired the ad for his self-published memoir, What Are The Odds?

Just how America First is the America First Policy Institute?

Two roads have diverged in the America First wood. On the one hand, the populist, grassroots, anti-establishment caravan; on the other, the establishment, grifter and, most importantly, official movement. The ironically named 'America First Policy Institute' and its dunces are leading the latter. Its newest ambassador, Daniel Di Martino, is illustrative of their type. Di Martino is a Venezuelan immigrant and activist in the United States on a student visa, telling Americans that they're racist for disagreeing with him about how to run their country. After then-president Donald Trump issued an immigration ban amid the pandemic last year, the Daily Caller hosted a debate on its implications between populist author Ryan Girdusky and Di Martino.

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NYT dogged by snarling anti-Trumpers

'Can We Drop a Dog Walker for Her Political Opinions?' asks a letter-writer to this week’s edition of the New York Times’s ethicist column. The writer laments that they have hired a 'reliable, responsible, and kind' person to walk the family dog. The problem? Beneath the visage of humanity, the dog walker is actually a monstrous Trump voter. Rather than stop and ponder the implications of a Trump voter being, in fact, a rather decent human being, the writer gets right to the meat of the matter: Should they fire the dog walker immediately? Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYT’s ethicist, was relatively measured in his response. 'A manager who penalizes a regular employee for her political views is exercising workplace tyranny,' Kwame writes.

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Trouble for the US at the Woke-yo Olympics

Can Trumpists still believe in ‘America First’ if they root against America in the Olympics? Yes, apparently. The US team had a rough start in the opening week of the Tokyo Olympics. For the first time in 50 years, not a single US athlete won a gold medal on day one of the Summer Games. So who was kicking our butts? That’s right, Asia. Eleven gold medals were handed out Saturday, with the first being won by Yang Qian from China for the 10-meter air rifle competition. She bested Mary Tucker, the American ranked second in the world, who ended up placing sixth. American Eli Dershwitz lost the bronze to Kim Jung-hwan of South Korea for saber despite also being No. 2 in the world.

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Old Glory, new anger

America is no longer just angry. We have become a nation of wrath. It is a risky emotional condition, recognizable by our desire to obliterate our opponents. Wrath doesn’t seek reconciliation. It wants revenge. Nor does wrath want to accommodate what it can’t control. It wants to rub the slate clean. There is a wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters. But as the left is ascendant in the seats of power, it can pursue its effort to extinguish its opposition via the instruments of state. The wrathfulness on the political right is another story. Wrath reaches its zenith when people feel not just abused but hopeless in the pursuit of any redress.

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We conspiracists, we happy few

What makes America America? An answer available to most of us is our shared dedication to the principles of liberty and equality. We are ‘the land of the free’. Or at least we were until five minutes ago. Our freedom these days seems a little shaky. And in the world of higher education, those simple declarations are especially faint. By the time they arrive as freshmen (or ‘first years’ in today’s man-phobic argot) students are generally well-versed in all the ways we aren’t ‘free’ and most of the reasons why ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ are doubtful propositions. ‘America’ is increasingly defined for this generation as a place where some really bad things happened and continue to happen.

My coup would have been better than your coup

Donald Trump has issued another statement after being criticized by his former staffers in recent days. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.’ Sorry, that was George Washington. I must have mixed up my notes. Here’s Trump: ‘Many say I am the greatest star-maker of all time. But some of the stars I produced are actually made of garbage.’ There’s the elder statesman we all know and love! That may be the closest thing to an admission of error I’ve yet seen from our 45th president. And certainly Trump is correct in even the most literal sense.

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Tucker blames Trump for 2020 election loss

Tucker Carlson has never shied from diverging with the GOP orthodoxy. In a recent interview with the prestigious Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche, the Fox News host blamed Donald Trump for the ‘unfair’ 2020 election and doubts he can make a comeback in 2024. Carlson told Die Weltwoche that Trump inflamed the political left during his four years in office but allowed them to join forces and ‘change the system’. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, both Republican and Democratic states passed measures to ensure people could vote by mail instead of in-person before election day. 'He made them self-consciously his opponents, and then he didn't neutralize them,’ Carlson said. 'There's no question that Trump inflamed his enemies. He's allowed them to coalesce, to organize.

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Ron DeSantis, the Great Right Hope

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is carrying an enormous burden, whether he knows it or not. As of right now, he is single-handedly carrying the GOP and its still somewhat loyal Trump base on his back and away from Donald Trump in four years. There is a buzz around DeSantis and a possible 2024 presidential run that hasn’t been seen or felt since perhaps Chris Christie circa 2010. Everyone saw how that worked out. DeSantis would find himself in a precarious position by crossing Trump, who as of now seems to be refusing to retire quietly and settle into a role as the GOP kingmaker. The king wants his crown back.

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Why is Trump banned from Twitter when the Taliban isn’t?

As we approach the final withdrawal of all US and Nato forces from Afghanistan, it’s worth pointing out a shocking double-standard that has so far gone strangely unnoticed. How can it be that Twitter has banned a US president, who even in defeat garnered more than 74 million votes in 2020, yet still allows the Taliban to pump out propaganda on its platform? Let’s be clear. The Taliban is a hard-line Islamist group that extols jihad, opposes democracy and is engaged in a brutal war of attrition against a democratically elected government in Afghanistan. As Paul Wood noted in these pages on June 24, Twitter is the Taliban's preferred social media platform.

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Trump has lost his magic

The summertime auguries bode badly for former president Donald Trump, who has made a business of harmlessly splashing his feet in the Rubicon. He has reportedly made up his mind about running for president again in 2024 but won't say whether he'll cross the river yet — so you'll just have to keep giving him your money to find out. Naturally, people are growing bored and frustrated with the spectacle. QAnon supporters are probably Trump's most fervent followers, and they received his recent rally in Wellington, Ohio, with a sigh of ennui. Apart from the standard artillery blasting traitorous RINOs, Trump railed against the rising tide of crime and ridiculed 'woke' generals. But the diehards snored.

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What makes Jason Miller’s new social media app different?

GETTR, a new social media app helmed by former Trump senior adviser Jason Miller, officially launched on July 4 to much fanfare, with more than 500,000 users creating accounts in just a few hours. The app was created in response to gratuitous censorship by Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and promises not to censor users for their political opinions. Then president Donald Trump was notably banned from these platforms in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol Building. Miller told me during a phone interview the day before the launch that GETTR was 'founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought and rejecting the political censorship and cancel culture that we've seen in US politics in the US media’.

Jason Miller (/Getty Images)

Time to end the MAGA madness

The Republicans need to separate the MAGA from the message. The Democrats are already doing this. While congressional Republicans pander to MAGA, which is now a racket for conspiracy theorists and the con artists who exploit them, the Biden administration is lifting Trump’s policies and stealing the Republicans’ thunder. Trump’s ‘America First’ has become Biden’s ‘Made in America’. The Democrats now offer almost everything that Trump promised — and sometimes more. At home, infrastructure spending, rebuilding the industrial base and reshoring essential supply chains; plus subsidies for the wallet-sapping disaster that is Obamacare.

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America isn’t back. Global grandstanding is

'America is back at the table,’ Joe Biden wants us to know. ‘Diplomacy is back.’ After four years of Donald Trump, the new President seems rather too desperate to tell the world that the United States is on their side. It all sounds very positive, but what has Biden’s return to the global table actually achieved? What, if anything, is he likely to achieve over the next four years? Last month’s G7 summit in Cornwall, England, was full of grand talk of international cooperation, defending democratic values, confronting China and more.

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