Donald Trump’s presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run… After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” As Pence entered the [...]
The opportunity is at hand for the president-elect to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States. What should Mr. Trump say?… However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade [...]
“If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump. Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Mr. Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics. […]
Will Hillary Clinton clean out the nest of anti-Catholic bigots in her inner circle? Or is anti-Catholicism acceptable in her crowd? In a 2011 email on which Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was copied, John Halpin, a fellow at the Center for American Progress that Mr. Podesta founded, trashed Rupert Murdoch for raising his kids [...]
Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. For consider what the Associated Press reported this week: The surest way for a person with private interests to get a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, [...]
Issue one! To understand John McLaughlin, it was helpful to have been a 13-year-old entering an all-boys Jesuit school in the 1950s. For when John yelled “Wronnng” at me from his center chair of “The McLaughlin Group,” it hit with the same familiar finality I had heard, many times, from Jesuits at the front of the [...]
“I did it my way,” crooned Sinatra. Donald Trump is echoing Ol’ Blue Eyes with the latest additions to his staff. Should he lose, he prefers to go down to defeat as Donald Trump, and not as some synthetic creation of campaign consultants. “I am who I am,” Mr. Trump told a Wisconsin TV station, “It’s [...]
On September 30, the end of fiscal year 2016, the national debt is projected to reach $19.3 trillion. With spending on the four biggest budget items—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense—rising, and GDP growing at one percent, future deficits will exceed this year’s projected $600 billion. National bankruptcy, then, is among the existential threats to the republic, the [...]
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged,” Donald Trump told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve. “Dangerous,” “toxic,” came the recoil from the media. Mr. Trump is threatening to “delegitimize” the election results of 2016. Well, if that is what Mr. Trump is trying to do, he [...]
“Buchanan, if you ever hear of a group getting together to stop X, be sure to put your money on X.” So, Richard Nixon told me half a century ago, after he had been badly burned in just such a futile and failed enterprise. It was the Cleveland Governors Conference of 1964. Sen. Barry Goldwater had just [...]
Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words — xenophobe, racist, bigot — have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Mr. Trump was being called a fascist [...]
Recently, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosted a spirited discussion with Donald Trump on whether he was right in asserting that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the towers came down on 9/11. About Muslim celebrations in Berlin, however, there appears to be no doubt. In my chapter “Eurabia,” in State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion [...]
Was Richard Nixon paranoid, or was the “Georgetown set” out to get him? In his new biography Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Evan Thomas concedes a point. Richard Nixon, he writes, “was not paranoid; the press and the ‘Georgetown set’ really were out to get him.” Carl Bernstein’s review found Thomas’ book deficient in its [...]
“Pat, sometimes it seems like our friends want me to go over the cliff with flags flying,” President Reagan once told me. Today, it is “Bibi” Netanyahu and the neocons howling “kill the deal” and “bomb Iran” who are shoving the Republican Party toward the cliff. The question, which may decide 2016, may be framed [...]