donald trrump Archives

Monday

June 24, 2019

After 30 years of bad wars, who thinks one with Iran will be good?

Don’t believe the hawks who tell you they don’t want a war with Iran. Instead, ask them if they’d go to war to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, or if they’d prefer war to peace if peace meant the mullahs’ regime could cling to power. War is a means to an end, and the hawks believe the ends of regime change and nuclear nonproliferation justify war, if it comes to that. Peace too is only a means to an end, and war is what happens when the means of peace are deemed insufficient.President Trump has a cooler head than most of his critics when it comes to nuclear weapons, as he’s proved so far with his North Korea policy. And North Korea actually has the bomb, which Iran is some distance from possessing.

Friday

June 21, 2019

Curt Mills

The untenability of President Bolton

The president of the United States weighed retaliatory airstrikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran before pulling back at the eleventh hour, he confirmed Friday morning. 'We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it,' Donald Trump tweeted. He said the planned response was not 'proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone,' referring to the recent malign activity from the regime. 'I am in no hurry,' he caveated. 'He just tweeted it out,' Alex Ward, defense reporter at Vox, joked. Ward refers to a swirl of chatter that engulfed Washington Thursday night.

Wednesday

June 19, 2019

Curt Mills

Trumpworld Orlando, where dreams come true

Why did Donald Trump choose Orlando, near Disney World, for his campaign kickoff Tuesday night? Because he appears to be living in a fantasy land.Trump reached the White House by promising a border wall, a national industrial policy and a restrained foreign policy. He has delivered near none of those things, but the Mickey Mouse president is running for re-election anyway.Trump repeated some familiar cartoons on Tuesday, ridiculing Hillary Clinton a mere three years after defeating her. But it was a night for the hits. He also served up an old slapstick favorite, claiming that the media deflate his crowd sizes. The New York Times confirmed the number in attendance to be north of 20,000. Trump's goofy claim that there were 'over 100,000 requests' to get in remains unconfirmed.

Tuesday

June 18, 2019

Lara Prendergast

Breakfast is the dullest meal of the day

‘I’m not a breakfast guy at all, fortunately,’ Donald Trump explained in a recent interview. ‘I like the lunches but the dinners is what I really like.’ The US president is right. In the English-speaking world, breakfast is a drag. Devotees explain solemnly that it’s the most important meal of the day. It’s certainly the most boring. In Britain and America, there is rarely any joy in breakfast food and that is deliberate. The puritanical believe that a clean house is godly – and the same is true for their gut. To me, however, it would have been far more unnerving if Trump had said he enjoyed a five-grain bowl every morning, washed down with a glass of wheatgrass. And hold the dairy – almond milk only, please.

James Adams

President Trump is a whimsical hawk

President Trump was elected as a dove who swore that he would extract America from expensive conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Yet more than two years later, America remains mired in those wars and the US has come closer to conflicts that could have caused tens of millions of casualties. This covert hawkishness, which has largely remained hidden from public scrutiny, has not been driven by any ideological quest to re-establish American global predominance. Instead it is war driven by whim. This has led to an almost total collapse in confidence between the US intelligence community and the Pentagon, on the one hand, and the president on the other.

Monday

June 17, 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is far from finished

Donald Trump is on the skids. It won’t take much to knock him out. So far, Democrats appear to be sticking with Joe Biden rather than casting more than flirtatious glances at other, more left wing candidates. Not so fast. As Henry Olsen reminds us in the Washington Post today, Trump is far from finished. The heck with the popular vote. The only votes that count are getting to 270 in the electoral college. Trump squeaked by in 2016. He could do it again. Trump, after all, may be most dangerous when he appears to be on the ropes. Tomorrow night Trump will kick off his re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida. He’ll be pumped. Fox News says that his supporters are already lining up to see the great man. Trump has a lot to prove.

Wednesday

June 12, 2019

Curt Mills

Is Matt Gaetz the future of Trump foreign policy?

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump favorite and Fox News star, may have just fired the first loud shot of a new ideological war that may be heard around the world. 'The "fog of war" is no fog to me, or any of the 700,000 people I serve,' Gaetz clarified to a surprised Washington crowd of lefties and libertarians last month. 'It is not hazy,’ said Gaetz, whose North Florida district has the highest concentration of active-duty military in America. 'We see the impact of war every day among the people we love who shape our lives. It is a stark reminder that the unmatched freedoms we enjoy are not free — they are bought with the blood of American patriots.

Harry J. Kazianis

Ignore the scorn, Trump has been proved right on North Korea

Don’t believe the Trump-haters when they trash the Singapore summit between America and North Korea, which we mark the first anniversary of today. This was a win for everyone who wants to see a stable peace on the Korean Peninsula. And the alternative remains too horrific to imagine. Some will say the summit accomplished nothing but a vague statement of goals and principles, with nothing delivered and no schedule for future deliveries. The pundits will pontificate that Trump was duped, that he shied from going toe-to-toe with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – and that Washington has done the worst thing possible, and legitimized a state whose human rights record is surely the worst of any on the planet. That’s just wrong.

Friday

June 7, 2019

Curt Mills

Joe Biden is a Trump Republican

If Joe Biden snatches the White House from Donald Trump in 2020, he will govern as a modern liberal. This week’s Hyde Amendment snafu is proof positive. But only Mr Biden knows if his beliefs have really changed. It doesn’t matter, because his party has. The famously gaffe-prone Biden would lead a censorious party. Whatever he thinks of the new Trump line on China, it’s clear that the elder statesman — who has considered running in nearly every presidential race since 1980 isn’t going to let his best shot yet — and his last shot — get mired in the details. Joe Biden, architect of the 1994 crime bill, will not reverse Trump’s reform of it.

Tuesday

June 4, 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s Mexican tariffs could wipe out his 2017 tax cut

Donald Trump likes to brag about his deal-making prowess. During his visit to the United Kingdom, he’s touting the prospects for a ‘very, very substantial trade deal.’ But even as he dangles sugarplums before the British, he’s blowing up another agreement that he wanted to complete before the 2020 election — the United-States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is supposed to supplant NAFTA.His attempt to fuse national security and nationalism in the form of a tariff on Mexico could end up torching his own presidency. Trump’s big idea — concocted by his aide Stephen Miller — is that he can pressure Mexico to crack down on immigration by pressuring it with tariffs.

Monday

June 3, 2019

Jarvis Dupont

Trump is not the UK’s president

At approximately 8:30am on Monday morning I awoke in a cold sweat. My alarm was not set to go off until 1:30pm. What had disturbed my sleep? Something felt wrong, like an unseen force of evil was spreading its insidious influence across the land. I was confused, nauseous. Waves of anxiety were crashing against the shores of my usual stoic calm. I sat up in bed, straightened my man bun and resolved to find the source of this malevolent aura. I grabbed my phone from my bedside table and opened the Twitter app. Almost immediately, my eyes were drawn towards a news article, the headline of which made me almost vomit into my mouth: ‘Donald Trump has landed in the UK’. Of course.

Melanie McDonagh

Sadiq Khan’s anti-Trump crusade is dull and reductive

Perfectly nice man normally, Sadiq Khan, mayor of London. Ambitious as Lucifer, obviously, but unpompous and cheerful in his manner, which is always good. But on Trump, he’s lost it, hasn’t he? Yesterday he was complaining about Trump and other far-right leaders ‘using the same divisive tropes of fascists of the 20th century’. You don’t use the f-word lightly if you’re grown up. And you hesitate, if you’ve got any sense, before using it about a US president who’s here to commemorate the contribution of US forces to the D-Day landings. Trump was wholly unfazed by the observations. In a tweet, he replied: ‘He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me...

Thursday

May 16, 2019

Ross Clark

Trump has made America less racist

The election of Donald Trump has, of course, unleashed the latent racist which lurks within millions of Americans. We know this because enlightened opinion keeps telling us so. The New Yorker, for example, ran a piece in November 2016 declaring ‘Hate on rise since Trump’s election’, and quoting a list of incidents collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center – including the experience of a girl in Colorado who was allegedly told by a white man: ‘Now that Trump is president I am going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find’. TIME magazine, too, ran a story in the same month announcing ‘Racist incidents are up since Donald Trump’s election’.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is right to pardon Conrad Black

Granting a full pardon to Conrad Black is the first sensible thing that Donald Trump has done. Black is being depicted as a ‘fraudster’ by his detractors but I see something entirely different — a brave, fearless, and audacious intellect that has refused to truckle to the dictates of political correctness. When it comes to the verdicts against Black, as Matt Gurney observes in the National Post, Black’s adversaries never even stop to contemplate whether or not they were just. Ever since Trump was elected, I’ve been waiting for him to efface this lamentable stain on Black’s escutcheon. The surprising thing is not that he did it, but that it took Trump this long.

Wednesday

May 15, 2019

Will Lloyd

If Trump goes to war with Iran, he will lose in 2020

Here’s a vexing question for Republicans. Does Donald Trump know why he won the presidency in 2016? As the chances of war with Iran – war by design or war by miscalculation – appear to increase, this question grows ever more pressing.In 2016, Trump ran on such an anti-interventionist platform that you half expected to wake up and find that he’d received all-important endorsements from Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis and the ghost of Susan Sontag. This was Trump at his best. He launched an astonishing broadside against the Bush family in South Carolina: ‘We should’ve never been in Iraq. We’ve destabilised the Middle East… they lied.

Tuesday

May 14, 2019

Alan Tonelson

How I learned to stop worrying and love Trump’s trade war

Alarmist news reports and panicky stock sell-offs. A threat to impose tariffs on US goods in retaliation for President Trump’s threatened levies. You’d think that Beijing had just ruthlessly shut down a major engine of American growth. But the truth is that tariff fear-mongering reveals the gulf between America’s financial markets and its real economy that provides everyday goods and services. The Chinese economy has grown spectacularly since Beijing turned away from Maoism in the 1980s. It’s true that major American industries from aircraft to agriculture have profited handsomely from supplying Chinese demand. The offshoring model supercharged by China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002 has been especially lucrative.

Friday

May 10, 2019

Jeffrey R. Wilson

Trump is Satan

Donald Trump is Satan. The Satan in question is perhaps the greatest literary character in the finest epic poem in the English language, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. That makes Washington Republicans the other fallen angels. In 2016, Republicans made a deal with the devil. Like Dr Faustus, they sold their souls for power. Now they stifle their consciences, never speak ill of President Trump, hug him closely, fearing the wrath of his base. The same Lindsey Graham who in 2016 wrote, ‘If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it,’ recently said, ‘To every Republican, if you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand behind you.

Wednesday

May 8, 2019

Darren J. Beattie

When populism fails

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Donald J. Trump ran his insurgency presidential campaign against the coordinated opposition of every single powerful institution in the Western world. The single decisive factor working in Trump’s favor was his ability to appeal to the millions of ‘forgotten’ Americans who felt particularly ill-served by these institutions. Trump’s shock victory was therefore simultaneously a stinging indictment of America’s elite institutions and a surprising vindication of the functional legitimacy of our democracy. After all, if a candidate is able to win in spite of near-unanimous opposition of a country’s elite institutions, this says something reassuring about the workings of democracy per se.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump faces at-tax from all sides

Give Donald Trump credit for being sporting about the fresh revelation in the New York Times that he racked up a cool $1 billion in losses during the 1990s, a sum that earned him the distinction of being the number one financial loser in America. ‘It was sport,’ he announced on Twitter. Indeed it was. Not everyone gets to play with the sums of money that Trump has splashed about in for decades. Unlike Scrooge McDuck, however, who wallowed in his swimming pool, Trump has followed a rather different ethos. He’s spent his way into bankruptcy repeatedly, only to be bailed out of his predicament by...who?

Monday

May 6, 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Kim Jong-un is doing to Trump what Trump is trying to do to China

Will he stay or will he go? Speculation about President Trump’s future began with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment this past weekend that she worried in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections that Trump wouldn’t accept a close result and deem it a Democratic hoax. Now she’s indicating that she’s not convinced that he will abide by the results of the 2020 election if they are close and he’s the loser. As it happens, Trump amplified those concerns with a tweet riffing on Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s contention that he deserves an extra two years added to his first term because an attempted deep state putsch, led by Robert Mueller and his minions in the FBI, deprived him of the ability to govern effectively over the past two.