Donald trrump

The media frets constantly that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric will lead to violence against Democrats and even — the horror! — journalists. But the same media is curiously silent when Republicans become the targets of hate. On Saturday, for instance, a Florida man drove his van through a Trump campaign volunteer tent because, as he told police, ‘someone had to take a stand’. The incident started when the man drove his van slowly up to the tent, according to a police report. Two volunteers approached the man’s van to chat with him when ‘the vehicle accelerated towards them and the tent.’ ‘Both victims had to move out of the way quickly in order to prevent themselves from being struck by the vehicle.

President Donald Trump successfully trolled Democrats once again Monday — hosting a packed rally the night before their New Hampshire primary election and successfully directing attention and energy away from Democratic campaigners desperate to interest voters. The near-overflowing arena at Southern New Hampshire University stood in stark contrast to the sparsely attended campaign trail events put on just around the corner by Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and the rest of the Democratic field. Bernie Sanders may have a rabid online fan base, but how many would camp out all night and day in the frigid February snow for a chance to see their political hero? Warren couldn’t even get hungry diners to glance up from their meals long enough to ask for their vote.

Craven audacity in US politics knows no bounds. Billionaire intruder Tom Steyer is currently running television ads in New Hampshire lamenting that Donald Trump has received a political boost from the Democrats’ botched impeachment crusade, which ended this week in failure and humiliation — as is true for most Democratic crusades. Trump is therefore going to be tougher to beat, he suggests in the new ad, and nominating an outsider like Tom is increasingly necessary. What Tom forgot to mention is that no single private individual in the entire country was more responsible than him for fomenting the hysterical drive toward impeachment.

It was all going so well for Donald Trump. Then came Mitt Romney. The Utah Republican stole the show. In announcing that he would vote to find Trump guilty of abuse of power, he blew up Trump’s plan to claim that impeachment was simply a partisan affair. The president, he said, was guilty of an 'appalling abuse of public trust'. One person Trump never trusted was Romney, whom he humiliated during the 2016 transition period when he forced him to eat frog legs at Jean-Georges restaurant in the Trump Tower and cursorily dangled the post of secretary of state before him. All along Romney, who denounced Trump during the campaign, has been a thorn in Trump’s side. He finally got his chance to ventilate his frustration with Trump on the last day of the impeachment trial.

One of the many things that F. Scott Fitzgerald said that sound good but isn’t true is this: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' Consider the life of Donald Trump. Five years ago he was a dubious real estate developer and professional celebrity. Now he is not only president of the United States, but he is, three years into his first term, the most ostentatiously successful president in memory. Donald Trump is a walking refutation of what is perhaps Fitzgerald’s second most quoted line. Possibly Fitzgerald’s first most quoted line is this: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' That isn’t true, either.

The Senate leaders have stated their positions clearly and constantly. Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democratic minority, is demanding that John Bolton testify. Mitch McConnell, who leads the Republicans’ narrow majority, responds that the Senate already has enough evidence to vote. If more was needed, the House should have gotten it when it had the chance. Anyway, the House managers have repeatedly boasted they have 'overwhelming evidence'. The president’s lawyers add that, if any witnesses are called, they want to call some, too. They want to hear from former Vice President Biden, his son Hunter, the whistleblower whose complaint started the impeachment, and Rep. Schiff and his staff, who apparently worked with the whistleblower.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Groupthink is the last thing a country needs when debating questions of war and peace. But groupthink is what America’s pundits have succumbed to once again. In 2003, voices of opposition to the Iraq War struggled to be heard, with even the progressive cable news channel MSNBC silencing its most outspoken critic (Phil Donahue) and telling a right-wing dissenter from President Bush’s war (Pat Buchanan) that he was expected to represent Republican opinion — which is to say, pro-war opinion. So much for press freedom. Today, groupthink is on the side of peace, or rather on the side of caricaturing President Trump as a warmonger.

The first day of impeachment hearings, and everyone has questions. I’m as confused as anyone else. So I phoned Alan Dershowitz, who’ll be testifying for President Trump’s team on the constitutional implications of impeachment, and cross-examined him on the case against Trump, the constitutional rights of the president, and whether he’d like to see Hunter Biden testify.DG: Adam Schiff says that you’re not a constitutional lawyer, you’re a criminal lawyer.AD: I’ve taught constitutional criminal procedure for nearly half a century. I’ve taught a seminar on impeachment, I’ve written three books on impeachment, I’ve written several other books on constitutional law and numerous articles.

The single most important thing to understand about the Senate impeachment trial is that it is all for show, meant to influence the November election. Yes, the House managers and president’s attorney will present formal arguments to the Senate. The real argument, though, is intended for the public in 10 months. It always has been. That argument will play out in the media and on the campaign trail.There are three sets of elections that matter: presidential ballots in six or seven contested states (the industrial Midwest, Florida, and a few others), Senate ballots in Maine, Colorado, Arizona, Iowa and North Carolina (where Republican incumbents are vulnerable), and about 30 Democratic House members in red districts, whose fate will decide the next Speaker.

When John Bolton was a student at Yale in 1969, he supported the Vietnam war but dodged the draft, joining the National Guard. He said: ‘I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war already lost.’ The former national security adviser is well known as an ideological warrior but he is not the kind of man to be on the losing side in any conflict, having no desire for glorious but pointless self-immolation. How then to interpret his willingness to testify in the trial of Donald Trump? Does he think that Trump is going down? Does he want to get revenge for being fired — by tweet, naturally — from a post he had waited his whole professional life to occupy?

We were four minutes in, somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who I crossed at The Spectator that I’m asked to watch these damn Democrat debates each month. Just 19 days before the Iowa caucuses, we finally reached the inevitable: Andrew Yang getting the boot, as the white savior party shed the last of its racial minority aspirants, having decided that none was qualified to take the helm this cycle. Better luck in 2024, blacks.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If we can’t be governed, we may as well be entertained. That’s become the ethos behind the Donald Trump presidency. The national debt might continue to bulge, our military might remain pointlessly overextended, our healthcare system might stay ablaze, but at least politics has become funny in a nothing-matters, Rick and Morty kind of way. Americans upvoted a man who’d spent hours on the Howard Stern show boasting about his sexual prowess, and we expect to be amused, dammit. So why has the news lately been so dreadfully boring? The fault certainly doesn’t lie with Trump.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. America has a problem, and it’s not Donald Trump. Suicides and deaths by overdose are up; life expectancy is down. The country that led its allies to definitive victory against both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in just four years has now been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly 20, with no end to the Taliban in sight. Wall Street prospers but young Americans are deep in debt, manufacturing employment is in decline, and the Great Recession of a decade ago revealed how fragile and irrational the whole financial system is. For all the talk we hear about ‘polarization’, the policies that led to these grim results were born of bipartisan consensus.