Donald trrump

America’s allies don’t like Trump. So what?

So, the Pew Research Center polled more than a dozen allies and, guess what, the allies — from the UK and France to Germany, Japan and Australia — don’t like Donald Trump. I know, you are as astonished as I am. The Pew Research Center is reporting that people abroad — and not only people abroad, Americans, too: really everybody — dislikes Donald Trump. ‘The United States’ image has soured within the international community, hitting all-time lows among key allies,’ Business Insider reports in its précis of Pew’s findings. Other key points: ‘The results showed that people have less confidence in Trump as a leader than Russia's Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping’ — sounds bad, what?

allies

What Bahrain’s deal with Israel really means

On September 15, representatives from the oil-rich Kingdom of Bahrain will meet Israeli leaders at the White House to sign a historic peace deal. It will normalize relations between the Muslim state and the Jewish one, not long after the United Arab Emirates concluded a similar pact. Expect more such 'normalization deals'. They supplement other White House initiatives, such as the deal it brokered between Serbia and Kosovo, which includes both countries establishing closer relations with Israel. The deals are significant for several reasons. First, they represent a common regional front against the Iranian threat, which has been developing beneath the surface for some time.

bahrain

Leading vs lying

At his short Thursday news briefing, President Trump laid out the many successes that the United States has enjoyed in its battle against the Chinese virus compared with the record in Europe and other parts of the world. Trump’s decision to end air travel between China United States at the end of January was roundly derided as overkill and 'xenophobic' by the entire Democratic establishment from Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on down. But that decision is now widely credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.

donald trump leading

What the hell happened to Bob Woodward?

Famed reporter Bob Woodward is dropping his new book about President Trump, Rage, next week. Woodward has already leaked the book's juiciest excerpts to the media, such as the the President telling him during an interview on March 19 that he wanted to 'play down' the severity of the coronavirus in order to avoid a panic among the American people. This comment has led Trump's critics to call for his resignation or for him to be impeached a second time. Rage, however, is perhaps more revelatory about its author than its subject. Let's assume that the critics are right, and that Trump's decision to portray calm in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was wrong and cost thousands of lives.

bob woodward

What will happen in the debates?

From late September through to mid-October, Americans will get to watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate three times. Mike Pence and Kamala Harris will face off once. The debates may not matter, but if one candidate is going to commit a significant gaffe, it likely would occur in one of televisual spectacles. Brace yourselves. Both parties already are trying to shape expectations before the debates begin. On that front, Trump and his allies have made a major mistake. For months Americans have been inundated with claims from Trump, his son and countless media allies that Biden suffers from some type of mental deficiency such as dementia. Biden’s countless gaffes and resistance to doing unscripted interviews have fed into this belief.

debates

People trust the media less than Trump on COVID. Here’s why

The national media is now less trusted than President Trump to provide accurate information and analysis about COVID-19, according to a CBS poll of registered voters. Think about the sheer hubris and raw effort that must have taken! All those months of politicizing public health, downplaying the spread of the virus through protests and riots, doubting coronavirus treatments, and trying to get Anthony Fauci to bad-mouth the President, have finally paid off. Take a bow everyone. In terms of trust, the national media ranked dead last at 35 percent, behind the President, the CDC and the governors of those polled in individual states. Trump, a man who essentially suggested people go stand out in the sun for a bit to help treat a COVID infection, came in five points higher.

media
legal

Courting favor: is Trump remaking the conservative legal movement?

President Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that he was adding 20 new names to his previous list of potential Supreme Court nominees in the event of a vacancy. The new list included three very familiar political names: Sens. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley. Those names alone indicated that the president is bucking his 2016 method of allowing the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, to dictate his judicial choices. After a string of Supreme Court rulings that went against conservatives, who felt spurned that they could not get the outcomes they wanted even with a stacked court, the President is perhaps signaling to his base that he will nominate an avowed social conservative, rather than just a textualist or originalist.

Is Donald Trump really anti-abortion?

At the Republican National Convention last month, Donald Trump was repeatedly described as the ‘most pro-life President ever’. According to some rather sensational leaked official notes in Sunday’s Daily Telegraph, however, Trump has said he regards abortion as ‘such a tough issue’. Addressing the then British prime minister Theresa May, who is childless, Trump said in January 2017: ‘Imagine some animal with tattoos raping your daughter, and then she gets pregnant.’ Aside from the staggering crassness of this remark to a woman who is on the record about her inability to have children, it also suggests that Trump is not as pro-life as many in his party would have voters believe.

trump abortion

Sources: Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg weeps in his office ‘all the time’

This week, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg dropped what could be his biggest piece since he won a major award for drawing bogus links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The piece claims that during a 2018 visit to France President Trump canceled a visit to an American war cemetery, dismissing the dead who lie there as 'suckers' and 'losers' unworthy of passing beneath his presidential shadow. Outsiders have expressed skepticism of the story for many reasons. For starters, in Goldberg’s account, Trump also questioned America’s pointless and enormously costly involvement in World War One. If Trump really said that, it would be an unprecedented display of historical knowledge and insight on the President’s part.

What does ‘without evidence’ mean?

President Trump spoke mildly in defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse on Tuesday, saying that the 17-year-old seemed to be defending himself when he shot three people, killing two of them. NPR, fresh off of interviewing In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil, had something stern to say about that, tweeting 'President Trump declined to condemn the actions of the suspected 17-year-old shooter of three protesters against police brutality in Kenosha — claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense.’ https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1300614359236964358 Without evidence!

without evidence

Blaming Trump for the riots is a Democratic disaster

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

The terrifying truth — neither party cares about law and order

This week CNN’s Don Lemon finally made an observation that should have been obvious three months ago but somehow wasn’t: Democrats might want to stop encouraging rioters and looters in American cities. Not because they were hurting people, or risking wider political violence, or undermining public morale, or making cities uglier, but rather because it turns out nihilistic violence isn’t popular. Lemon’s remarks were quickly seized upon by the right as the gift that they were. It is not often that your political opponent openly admits to cynically evaluating an issue — not based on right or wrong, but on the RealClearPolitics polling average.

law climate

After the RNC, I am confident Trump will triumph

In most cases, prediction in politics is a mug’s game. Maybe that is why it is such a popular game. I forbear to speculate. But if you step back from the fray and ponder, I think you’ll agree that politics (like most human things) is so fraught with uncertainties that accurate prediction is well nigh impossible. Of course, you might be right in any given case. And if you make more than a couple of correct guesses, you can look forward to being hailed as a genius. But deep down you know that your predictions, whatever elaborate models you deployed to lend them an air of inevitability, remain but guesses.  Luck, not rational probability, is the primary motor of your success.

trump
trump 2020 speech

Full transcript of President Trump’s RNC 2020 speech

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.Friends, delegates and distinguished guests, please. I stand before you tonight honored by your support, proud of the extraordinary progress we have made together over the last four incredible years and blooming with confidence in the bright future we will build for America over the next four years.We begin this evening — our thoughts are with the wonderful people who have just come through the wrath of hurricane Laura. We are working closely with state and local officials in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi. Sparing no effort to save lives while the hurricane was fierce, one of the strongest to make landfall in 150 years. The casualties and damage were far less than thought possible only 24 hours ago.

Populist Trump can win

The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in the hope of offering voters an alternative to the unfocused, self-serving Democratic counterpart that took place last week. President Trump's best chance of accomplishing this lies in following the blueprint of a speech he gave in Pennsylvania this past Thursday. The Democratic party's convention attempted to appeal to everyone and thus appealed to no one, stacking excessively woke and anti-American screeds in the daytime with establishment figures giving vapid, hyperbolic anti-Trump speeches during the primetime national broadcast. Missing was an expression of a cohesive policy platform, which would seem key in a year where a division between the moderates and progressive left defined the primary.

rnc
donald trump

The right stuff

No matter what the pundits say, no matter how the polls look, November’s presidential election is very much up for grabs. In a year as chaotic as 2020, nothing is certain. In another sense, however, the election’s outcome is predetermined: even if he wins another four-year term, Donald Trump’s political moment has all but vanished. For the right, the time has already come to look beyond Trump. The last US issue of The Spectator asked what a Biden presidency might mean. This one asks what might happen to the political right once Trump leaves the White House — be that in 2021 or 2025. Donald Trump may be a real estate tycoon, yet his real skill is in marketing.

Who really wants to delegitimize the election result?

On Thursday afternoon, prior to the final night of the Democratic convention, four New York Times opinion columnists gathered to discuss the political landscape. Of course, millions of people do that every single day. The special conceit of the Times opinion staff is that it believes its discussions are worth broadcasting to the world. The special curse for the rest of us is that many find them worth listening to. The theme of Thursday’s discussion was the awful, terrifying, unspeakable, unthinkable idea that a major presidential candidate might delegitimize an election outcome.

bari weiss election

A country for old men

When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington in 2018, he probably didn’t expect it to go viral on Weibo. (You wonder, rather cruelly, if the congressman is familiar with the term ‘viral’ at all.) But it did go viral — gleefully and potently viral — on Chinese social media. Why? The picture showed two delegations at a table. The Chinese look young, or at least they do when sat opposite the Americans. They look grizzled in the original sense of the word: like gray-haired old men. This image was cannily juxtaposed on Weibo with another one, taken in 1901 in Beijing, at the close of the Boxer Rebellion.

old men gerontocracy

Poll: half of Americans support Trump bypassing Congress for COVID relief

More than half of registered voters support President Trump using executive action to bypass Congress and extend coronavirus relief measures, according to a new poll. Trump opted to sign a series of executive orders this past Saturday rather than wait for Congress to reach an agreement on legislation as a prior relief package was set to expire. Democrats and the White House met repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, but despite making 'progress' both sides said they were still too far away to be even close to making a deal. A new poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies and provided exclusively to The Spectator found that 51 percent of voters agreed that it was right for Trump to take executive action under these circumstances, while just 24 percent disagreed.

executive
minnesota

Will Trump win Minnesota?

Sen. Amy Klobuchar may have to eat her words after declaring last year that Donald Trump will 'never win Minnesota'. A new Emerson College poll released Tuesday shows the President trailing Joe Biden by just three percentage points. The poll has Trump within the margin of error, meaning the state is effectively a toss-up at this point. The President is reportedly planning to visit the state on Monday in an attempt to provide counter-programming for the Democratic National Convention, which was meant to take place across the state line in Wisconsin, and to capitalize on his recent gains in the polls. The prospect of winning Minnesota is certainly giddying for Trump, who frequently laments that he just barely lost the state in 2016. Hillary Clinton carried the state by a mere 1.