Roger Kimball

I am pretty sure it is not intended to be an exercise in comedy, but there are a few amusing passages in my friend Ron Radosh’s latest anti-Trump effusion. Writing about the scandal that President Trump and others have denominated “Spygate,” Ron writes that:  . . . it is becoming apparent that the FBI source (since exposed as academic Stefan Halper) was not put into Trump’s campaign for political purposes but was part of a legitimate counterintelligence operation investigating Russia’s election interference in the U.S. elections and involved three of his campaign aides, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis, whom Halper interviewed.

The only time I met Donald Trump was at a small event for politically mature journalists at the White House last April. After milling about with my fellow scribes in the press room—it’s a lot smaller and shabbier than it looks on TV, like Jim Acosta—we were ushered into the Roosevelt Room near the Oval Office. The President, secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross, and a few aides (Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Reince Priebus: wot larks!) soon joined us. After a brief presentation, the President took questions. Mine was about Iran.   During the campaign, I noted, the President had regularly decried the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e, the 2015 Obama Iran deal in which the U.S.

Pop quiz: how many branches of government are there in the United States? If you said “Four,” go to the head of the class. As of May 17, 2017, the traditional three branches of  Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, are joined by the Office of Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel in charge of destroying the president. It’s been a fun year. It’s not everyone, after all, who so thoroughly commands the police power of the state that he can order a predawn, guns-drawn raid on people he doesn’t like. Usually, that drama is reserved for dangerous criminals—terrorists, murders, major drug dealers. But Paul Manafort, a businessman, was close to Donald Trump, so he and his wife got the SWAT-team treatment on suspicion of a white-collar crime.

Is Donald Trump intemperate? You betcha. The latest episode in the Trump Reality Show was his twenty-minute fugue, via telephone, on Fox & Friends Thursday morning. It was a breathless, manic performance in which the President inveighed against “leakin’, lyin’ James Comey,” the Justice Department, and the murderous regime of Iran. He dilated on the prospects for peace and denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. He talked about the travails of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, whose home, hotel room, and business have been raided by the FBI. He also, in response to one question, graded his job performance at the 1 year, 3 month mark: A+. The word that many commentators employed to describe the President’s comments was “unhinged.

Absorbing the handholding—we were not party to anything so standoffish as handshakes here—the kisses, and the hugs, I thought of Paradise Lost: “They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,/ Through DC took their solitary way.” I quote from memory. Macron and Trump, Donald and Emmanuel: the state visit was nothing if not a bromance, at least in its pas de deux. I think it was in Ars amatoria that Ovid recommends that suitors take every opportunity to touch the objects of their interest. If you are sitting at the games with your date and a speck of dust—or dandruff—falls on her dress, flick it off with your hand. If no speck of dust falls, flick it off anyway. Then she’ll be perfect.

Inquiring minds want to know: What is James Comey’s favourite snippet from Gilbert & Sullivan? My candidate is this bit from one of the “susceptible” Chancellor’s songs in Iolanthe: “The law is the true embodiment/ Of everything that’s excellent/ It has no kind of fault or flaw/ And I my Lords embody the law.

Is a big blue Democratic wave poised to sweep the Republicans out of Congress in the 2018 mid-term election? To listen to much of the media, you might think so. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post quoted Nate Silver, the Yoda of Dem pollsters, who suggested that the “Democratic wave in 2018 may be swelled substantially by the enthusiasm gap into a tsunami.” Last month, when the conservative Democrat Conor Lamb eked out a narrow victory over Rick Saccone in a special Congressional election in Pennsylvania, CNN gleefully reported that “Lamb’s performance is ominous for Republicans as the November midterm elections approach.

The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure who makes Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove look like Albert Schweitzer after a nap. 'Yes', screamed an editorial in The New York Times, 'John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous'. Bolton is a 'hawk’s hawk', an 'extreme ideologue' and 'warmonger' whose appointment 'scares people' and 'puts us on a path to war'.