Roger Kimball

At this point, we can relegate the admonitions and advisories to the small print reserved for the disclaimers about possible side effects on bottles of medicine and past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-returns notices on mutual-fund prospectuses. Sure, it is possible that Donald Trump will lose the presidential election in 2020. It is also possible that he will choose not to run. Many things are possible. But as I have explained in these virtual pages — taking care to post those cautionary bulletins — it is likely that Donald Trump will run again for the presidency in 2020 and it is very likely that he will win and win by a much larger margin than his victory in 2016. I set forth my thoughts on the subject at the end of March.

Thursday, and press report And one clear call for me. And may there be no moaning of the Barr When we set out to see. —Apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson OK, Possums, here it is in redact and white (drum roll, please): The Mueller Report, 448 color-coded pages, replete with almost 900 redactions. Who says the government isn’t effective at education: over the last months it expanded the vocabulary of many Americans by putting that nice word into general circulation. So quickly was the report edited and rushed into print that the Surgeon General’s warning against operating heavy machinery while or shortly after dosing up on the report was omitted. So let me supply the defect and warn you: the report is boring.

While we all ponder the mysteries of the Notre-Dame fire, let me say a word or two about a golden nugget of domestic news. Donald Trump, in the first quarter of 2019, raised over $30 million for his re-election campaign, more than the top two Democratic candidates combined. According to the AP news story, the overwhelming majority of donations were $200 or less, with an average donation of $34.26. You can look that up under ‘Populism, 21st-century American.’ All told, the Trump campaign has almost $41 million on hand (in addition to the $45 million brought in by the Republican National Committee). As a point of comparison, the Obama campaign at this point in the 2012 election cycle had about $2 million stashed away.

There are some furrowed brows (as well as some furtive giggles) over Tucker Carlson’s recent hypothetical musings about what the president might do should he decide he wanted to lose his 2020 reelection campaign. Maybe he would cut funds for E-Verify, gratifying businesses that profit from exploiting the low-wage labor of illegal immigrants (that’s ‘undocumented workers’ in weeny-speak), but hurting American workers. Maybe he would make cuts to Medicare. Maybe — most deadly — he would raise taxes on gasoline, something that would matter hardly at all to those East coast elites who don’t drive much but that would have an immediate effect on those in the heartland who tend to drive more and are on a tight budget.

Harold Wilson was right that ‘a week is a long time in politics.’ But, hey, watching the president in Grand Rapids the other night, and taking a gander at some recent polls, I am willing to ascend pretty high up the old backyard oak, shimmy along a well placed branch and say, with confidence if not quite certainty, that Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election, and win handily. But, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chris Matthews, James Comey, John Brennan, Cher, CNN, those pathetic females on The View, college professors across the country, George Conway, Maxine Waters, Mad Max Boot, Twitter-addled Bill Kristol and writers for his novelty web site The Bulsomething all tell me that’s impossible. A formidable phalanx of contrary opinion.

Well, I am going to miss the full-bore SWAT-team raids at dawn against aging political factota like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. It was really very courteous of CNN to have been parked outside the homes of those hapless victims so that television audiences all across the country could all be edified by these exhibitions of the coercive arm of state power in action. Mr Mueller could just have had one of his 17 Obama-and-Hillary supporting prosecutors ring up the latest mark and ask him to pop down to headquarters. But that would not have been as dramatic, as expensive, or as cruel. All good things come to an end, however, and yesterday, after 674 days, the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S.

I had lunch yesterday with a friend from London who brought grim tidings from Albion. Like me, he is an advocate of national sovereignty. He thinks the people of the United Kingdom ought to be allowed to govern themselves. So he, again like me, is an advocate for Brexit. He had no idea what was going to happen with Brexit. Yesterday was a busy day. I also chatted with friends about the crisis at our southern border. All honest people acknowledge that there is a crisis, that thousands upon thousands of people, most without English and without skills, are pouring over the border.

Jeb! We hardly knew ye. The 2016 election seems soooo long ago. There was a time, for about 15 minutes, when some wise people regarded Jeb! Bush as the front-runner. He had the name. The camera liked him more than it liked George W. And he had the money. Lots and lots of money. (One of my favorite photoshopped images from the campaign altered the text of a huge billboard from ‘Donald Trump is a moron. —Jeb Bush’ to ‘Burn all our donors’ money. —Mike Murphy,’ Murphy being Jeb!’s campaign manager.) There was so much money sloshing around in Bush campaign coffers that it was hard to keep track of it all.

What does desperation smell like? It smells like House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, who is reprising his ‘Impeach Trump!’ act from 2017, this time with a gavel in his hand. No one knows when Robert Mueller will deliver his report to Attorney General William Barr, and no one knows what portions, if any, General Barr will make public. But the hissing sound you have heard over the last several weeks is the air going out of Mueller’s Get Trump probe as story after story has been crafted to manage expectations down regarding ‘Individual 1,’ aka Donald J. Trump.

Remember the Cretan liar paradox? Epimenides the Cretan says ‘All Cretans are liars.’ But if it is true that all Cretans are liars, then his statement must be false. But if it is false, then Epimenides is telling the truth. So, Epimenides is both truthful and a liar. Ouch. There are solutions to this paradox—for example, to say that ‘all Cretans are liars’ does not entail that they all lie all the time — but what are we to make of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, emphasis on the word ‘former’? Cohen is being measured for his orange jumpsuit in preparation for his sojourn in the Big House as a guest of the government. His tort? Lying to Congress.

I reckon that editors at our former paper of record have been thinking wistfully of the Mikado’s song, in particular this bit about the fate of the billiard sharp who’s ‘made to dwell/ In a dungeon cell/ On a spot that’s always barred.’ And there he plays extravagant matches In fitless finger-stalls On a cloth untrue With a twisted cue And elliptical billiard balls!

Donald Trump is not always as charming as P.G. Wodehouse. Nevertheless, his magnificent State of the Union Address tonight put me in mind of this remark from the preface of Plum’s great novel Summer Lightning: ‘A certain critic,’ Wodehouse wrote, ‘made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.”’ Waxing utopian, Wodehouse wondered whether, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha, that critic had by now been eaten by bears. Had he survived, though, said critic would not be able to make the same complaint about Summer Lightning.

There are at least two tasty dishes in the smorgasbord today: one is the latest action of the fourth branch of the US government, the one run by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller. The other is an announcement from the head of the second branch, the executive, that the month-long government furlough would be suspended for three weeks, until February 15, while House leaders pretend to negotiate with President Trump over the issue of border security and, in particular, appropriating funds to build a wall along vulnerable parts of our Southern border. Both dishes look promising, so let’s take a taste of both. First, the Stone soup, or perhaps I should say Stone in soup, for that would seem to be where Roger Stone, colorful Trump ally and Wikileaks expert, has been firmly placed.

I have bad news for you. Somewhere in the this country, right now, teenage boys are acting like jerks. Yes, it’s true. Some are taunting their little sisters. Others are picking on a funny looking kid in their class. Still others are grandstanding for the benefit of the cute girl who happens to be part of their clique. It’s not new. Mitt Romney, the Grecian-formula candidate, was bullied by The New York Times and other subsidiaries of the Democratic party for bullying a kid in high school who, the Times reported, later turned out to be gay. Fine doubled, Mr Romney: you should have known. The episode might have sunk Romney’s Presidential bid but, with the customary bureaucratic efficiency of the 53 percent, he saw to that himself.

It wasn’t quite the Cena Trimalchionis, but the robust, non-sissy feast that the President of the United States laid on for the Clemson Tigers — the college football team that just won the national championship — would in its own way have been the envy of Petronius’s diners. No larks’ tongues, but plenty of Big Macs, Whoppers, French fries, and pizza, all served up on gleaming White House china with the condiment proffered from silver bowls. Donald Trump paid for the repast himself — 1,000 hamburgers he said at one point, though fact checkers at the publicity arm of the Democratic National Committee said that there were probably no more than 300.

In his late essay ‘Perpetual Peace,’ Immanuel Kant lauded the ideal of ‘universal hospitality.’ In his first Oval Office speech Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took issue with Kant (though not by name), noting that the porous Southern border of the United States represented a serious humanitarian and security crisis. Everyone who can spell ‘Google’ knows that the Democrats, until November 7, 2016, supported robust border security and, indeed, a physical barrier — otherwise known as a wall — to retard the flow of illegal immigrants into this country.