Trump administration

Dr. Oz’s war on Armenian medical fraud

As Gangs of New York showed us, those who’ve settled in America have a tendency to bring Old World grudges over with them. Judging by a recent video put out by Dr. Mehmet Oz – now serving as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services – one of these ancient feuds may now be playing out at the highest levels. American politics has been rocked by evidence of medical fraud to the tune of billions being committed by, inter alia, Somalis in Minneapolis. Naturally, the good doctor was sent to investigate. Then he made a second stop. Oz and his staff descended on the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles to investigate a similar

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How far can bravado take the US?

Operation Absolute Resolve, Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, was a brilliantly executed coup. The audacious raid did not undermine international law, as many European and Democratic politicians have said. But it did expose the weakness and pomposity of the world’s multilateral bodies. Maduro traded oil for loans with China while helping Moscow avoid sanctions. He permitted the terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran to operate and build drones within his jurisdiction. He rigged elections and had opposition activists shot in the street. He allowed and enabled weapons, fentanyl and illegal migrants to flood towards America’s southern border. Yet it wasn’t the International Criminal Court that arrested Maduro to

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marco rubio

Could the Donroe Doctrine turn Marco Rubio into the president-in-waiting?

It required an incredible amount of sophistication to achieve the desired result in Caracas: a dictator detained and transported alive. The mission had been planned and mapped out for months, worked and reworked at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief. No American casualties would be tolerated. Special Forces had been circling and at the ready for weeks. The helicopters were easy targets, so a vital part of the mission was to eliminate Nicolás Maduro’s ground- to-air response beforehand and claim total air superiority. There must have been any number of worries that such a risky mission could go wrong, yet mere hours before it started, Marco Rubio was calmly sitting at

America’s new war on drugs will be tough to win

On New Year’s Eve a few years ago, I was in Medellín, Colombia, the city that gave its name to one of the world’s most notorious drugs cartels. Our taxi driver offered us some cocaine to fuel the party we were heading to: $10 for a gram; $15 for the “luxury” product. Our group decided to splash out and get a gram of the really good stuff. I’d tried coke a couple of times in London. It was like snorting drain cleaner. Whoosh… I found that half a line of Medellín’s best was enough to keep you going until sunrise. But the next day it was difficult to be within

Alice Marie Johnson and clemency in the Trump era

Late in his first term, Donald Trump pardoned a Memphis woman named Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving life in prison without parole. While in prison, Johnson was a more than exemplary inmate, becoming a certified hospice worker for the dying, writing plays and acting as a spiritual leader and mentor to her fellow female prisoners. Alice Marie Johnson is a voice for people, especially women, who are in jail for the wrong reasons After her release, Johnson published a book called After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom and became a public advocate for clemency. In February last year, Trump named her the US’s first-ever “pardon czar,” an

‘Regime influence’: Trump’s foreign-policy third way

At 2 a.m. on Saturday, President Trump gave a New Year’s kinetic expression to his recently published National Security Strategy and what it means in the American hemisphere. If we take President Trump at his blustering word – which those in the administration’s Maduro-adjacent crosshairs should – this is just the first, big, shock-and-awe move by the United States in a resetting of the rules-based order that has governed our hemisphere. This time on America First terms. In Europe, those who take Trump seriously and see the long-term upside in his policies, call him “Daddy.” Last weekend Trump showed the “Papi” side of this national security strategy in our hemisphere. The Venezuelan people woke up

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Donald Trump's end-of-year victory lap

As a mighty US armada bobs in the Caribbean off the shores of Venezuela, President Trump just addressed the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House. With characteristic delicacy and understatement, he outlined the accomplishments of the first 11 months of his second term in office, lightly criticized his predecessor and cautiously opined about what the future held in store for the United States of America in the coming semiquincentennial year.  Well, some viewers may wish to dispute my emphases and assessments of tone. But let’s just say that the President’s short speech was vintage Trump. It was hyperbolic, yes, over the top, indubitably, but in essence 100 percent true.

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