Curt Mills

If President Trump secures re-election next fall — a prospect growing less likely by the day — it won’t be because of his scintillating ability to staff his own government. On that score, he doesn’t seem to care. Personnel is the Achilles’ heel of this presidency. Trump sometimes describes the goings-on in the administration as if he were still a bystander in the American power game. His retweet of a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory this weekend is funny, but frustrating: to whom does the Department of Justice report, again? The personnel issue is partly by design. The president prefers a lean, freewheeling staff, like he had at his personal business, a former senior administration official said.

'Why are you so hooked on that?' Joe Biden asked a reporter in Iowa Thursday. She’d asked him to label President Donald Trump a white supremacist. 'You want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I’m not everybody else. I’m Joe Biden.' 'I’ve always been who I am,' the former vice president said. 'It’s like everybody wants everybody to call someone a liar. And then you say - "I don’t call people liars." I say they don’t tell the truth. You want me to say "liar" so you can put it out and you can say "Biden called someone a liar." That’s not who I am. You got the wrong guy.' https://twitter.com/JTHVerhovek/status/1159561051601612802 Of course, this prompted howls of indignation on social media.

Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic congresswoman of Hawaii and lefty presidential candidate, appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday. 'Here’s the bottom line: it’s really about the unchecked power these big tech monopolies have over our public discourse,' she said. 'We’re talking about Google, Facebook, Twitter, these are big tech monopolies that have this unchecked power.' With that, Gabbard, a pro-choice, slightly Hindu, fiercely anti-war Democrat earned yet more credibility among Fox News viewers. For the left and right, increasingly, Big Tech is the bête noir.  Sneering centrists might put Gabbard’s appeal on the Right down to a very simple fact: she’s a looker. That’s not lost on anyone.

‘I met Josh Hawley 10 years ago, and he told me he would be president of the United States,’ a person who knows Missouri’s junior senator tells me. ‘It’s been terrifying to watch him to execute on that pledge perfectly ever since.’Joshua David Hawley, 39, is the upper chamber’s youngest member. Elected in 2018, a bad year as a whole for the GOP, Hawley would seem to be the Right’s answer to Pete Buttigieg: Xennial, Midwestern, Ivy League, sincerely religious, scary smart.Like almost everyone who matters on the Right, Hawley addressed this week’s National Conservatism Conference: ‘As we gather tonight, we face a nation divided, a political class paralyzed, the old political programs in shambles, the future uncertain.

Peter Thiel. Tucker Carlson. John Bolton. What’s most striking about the trio headlining the National Conservatism Conference is that none of the three has ever been elected to anything.Bolton may be national security adviser, but judging by his recent exile to Outer Mongolia and his stymied efforts to force regime change in Iran, his influence is ebbing. He may be rejoining the civilian corps soon enough.So why is a major new conference so honoring these folks? The question could be inverted. Why aren’t we hearing from over 200 Republican members of Congress? Sen. Josh Hawley, a freshman, will close Tuesday night at the NCC, but his address seems to have been a late addition.

Fred Fleitz doesn’t like me. When I last saw national security adviser John Bolton’s former chief of staff, in January, he told me my journalism was ‘crap,’ that I was ‘crap,’ and that he ‘didn’t have anything to say’ to me. Fair enough. This was the second time I’d tangled with Fleitz, a career conservative, civil servant and intelligence officer. Our first interaction came before he became Bolton’s chief of staff in 2018. Fleitz had publicly condemned my profile of his ally and mentor, Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, controversial in his own right, has since been entirely decent to me. But Fleitz is both Gaffney and Bolton’s pitbull, and seems to have no time for less than obsequious journalists.

Justin Raimondo is dying. It’s October 2018 and I am headed to the ‘Raimondo Ranch’, in Sebastopol, northern California, to visit the home of the founder of Antiwar.com, the cult website that kept the faith in the early days of the net as Bill Clinton mindlessly bombed Yugoslavia, and George W. Bush leveled Iraq. No one cared, of course. And everyone else was wrong. Raimondo is a legend. The ‘ranch’ is no paleoconservative plantation. It’s a quaint shack with a garden that looks like it’s used to grow marijuana, but charmingly probably isn’t. The property will go to Yoshi, who Raimondo describes as his boyfriend, though in fact the pair are married.

Will President Trump switch up his ticket in 2020? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, bastion of the establishment right, certainly hopes so. A little over a week ago, it called for former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to replace the dutiful Mike Pence as vice president. But there’s well-placed chatter in Washington that suggests the president will take a different route. Trump does indeed feel he needs VP change, but it is not Nikki Haley he is considering. It is Fox News host Tucker Carlson.The Trump 2020 campaign needs panache, not more cash. If Trump wants to make a switch – as both his predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, flirted with doing – why would he lean further into the establishment?

You don’t get to pick which war you fight in. When Cory Booker burst onto the national scene earlier this decade as the do-good mayor of Newark, New Jersey, most thought he was presidential timber. He agreed. Doubtless he believed his best case scenario was landing on the 2016 ticket as Vice President, with a subsequent White House bid of his own. But by the time Booker joined the Senate in 2013, his odds were lengthening. Questions swirled about his management of Newark — or if he even truly lived there. And by the time Donald Trump seized the White House, Booker became better known for garnering buffoonish headlines — he wasn’t a future president or a thoroughbred. He was ‘Spartacus’.

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.

‘I have loyalty to ideas,’ said Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a network of young conservatives that has seen liftoff in the Trump era. ‘Of course I love the Grand Canyon. I love the Rocky Mountains. And I love Boston. And I love Chicago. But if all that disappeared, if all I had was ideas, and we were on an island, that’s America. That’s Israel.’ ‘And that’s what people have to realize,’ Kirk continued. ‘America’s just a placeholder for timeless ideas. And if you fall too in love with, oh, the specific place, and all this...that’s not what it is.’ For good measure, Kirk added: ‘Israel would be the exception. There is a holy connection to this land.’ You heard the man.

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.

Donald Trump dispensed with the services of his acting Defense chief Patrick Shanahan on Tuesday, amid scathing media coverage and ongoing tensions with Iran. Shanahan had filled the post on an interim basis since the sudden protest resignation of James Mattis in December. Trump had demurred for months on formally giving Shanahan the job, drawing out the interregnum long enough to raise questions of legality. Trump formally endorsed Shanahan in the spring, but soon after began second-guessing his own choice, reportedly asking several people on his June junket to Europe what they thought of his new Defense pick.

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.

In the outlandishly deep and diverse 2020 presidential field, Elizabeth Ann Warren cuts an anonymous figure. She’s female and running for the White House, but so are Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s a 69-year-old second term senator – not a green first-termer like Kamala Harris, but she’s no Joe Biden. She’s an economic populist, but so is, ostensibly, the president, not to mention her neighbor, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The only distinctive moments of her political life in recent months are embarrassments: the much-mocked claim of Native American heritage and a cringe-inducing beer swilling exercise. Long talked about as a nominee-in-waiting, Warren’s campaign so far has failed to establish any great momentum.