Victor Davis Hanson is surely convinced that the Trump presidency has been, by and large, a good and necessary thing for America. But whether or not a Trump presidency will turn out to be a good thing for one Donald J. Trump is another matter entirely. The Case for Trump, by Victor Davis Hanson (400 [...]
President Trump recently took $60 million away from Planned Parenthood, the first president ever to do so. This and other unique pro-life initiatives of his turned my mind to certain claims made by the pro-life Smart Set back in those crazy days of the 2016 campaign. In March 2016, a group of old and very [...]
While Tucker Carlson’s rhetorical reach may not stretch as far and wide as William F. Buckley’s, he evokes the same gaily combative spirit that young conservatives of the 1960s admired in the founder of National Review. The Bill Buckley of the paleoconservatives has arrived, and just in time for the Trump era. While Tucker Carlson’s [...]
How often have we not seen, even in our own lives, that actions we take to preserve something we cherish end up destroying that which we seek to protect? Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the desire for security and the yearning for justice are forever the final refuge of tyrants. [...]
If James K. Polk can be credited with adding a huge swath of territory to the American empire, might Donald Trump one day be credited with preserving that long ago victory by reversing the gradual makeover of the southwestern United States? The game of presidential parallels can be endlessly fascinating. Sometimes it can also be [...]
When Donald Trump caught so many political commentators off guard, we looked for an explanation amid the closing factories, but we should have been looking for the closing churches… If you’ve ever been to a Donald Trump rally, you’ll notice it doesn’t match the impression left by the media coverage of the president’s base. [...]
President Trump has an uncanny knack for energizing his supporters and riling his adversaries, but to have a lasting positive impact on American society he will need to find a way to inspire a majority of the American people... Like most first-time visitors, I rambled as if in a trance through the temple complex at [...]
My concern was that once the shutdown began, it would be difficult to end it just as it is difficult to prevent a needless bloodbath once blood begins to spill. What most of the public—including most of my former colleagues in government service—don’t seem to understand is that this shutdown is unlike all those that [...]
President Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, if it holds, is one of the few genuinely courageous acts of his presidency… My first thought when I heard that President Trump was finally taking our troops out of the quagmire called Syria was that he was not really serious. Given how frequently and unpredictably [...]
When I bought The Conservative Mind in 1994, I thought it was probably a book about how bad President Bill Clinton and the Democrats were—because that’s what I thought conservatism was. I was nineteen, a high school graduate with no intention of attending university, and thought “conservative” simply meant whatever Rush Limbaugh had talked about that day. [...]
It was Donald Trump’s sense of fraternity that most incensed his opponents. For the liberals, it was his solidarity with people they thought deplorable. For the libertarians, it was the safety net he’d offer Americans. For both he was toxic, but his fraternity brought him to the sweet spot in American presidential politics, the place [...]
Immigrants who come to America today have no mystic chords of memory to bind them to our common culture. If we do not weave these imaginative chords, their view of America will be ideological—and dictated by the Left. If we do not weave them for young people, they will be severed from the past and [...]
Russia is resurrected from the dead, rising from the tomb in which communism had placed it. It is emerging as a Christian country at a time when other erstwhile Christian countries seem intent on abandoning their faith in order to embrace the suicidal culture of death... Patrick Buchanan’s succinct and penetrating essay on President Trump’s [...]
Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.” He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.” It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, President Trump has signaled a historic shift in [...]