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Can Russian Meddling Really Swing the Midterms?
On Tuesday morning, the heads of America’s intelligence agencies publicly warned that the Russians are seeking to meddle in this year’s midterm elections. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the Russians aim ...
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Will the Economy Trump the President’s Behavior?
Trump scandals aren’t a once-a-week phenomenon.
This week began under the cloud of the debate over dueling House Intelligence Committee memos about the origins of the Russia-collusion investigation. Then the president referred to the refusal of congressional Democrats to ...
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Can the Gang of Eight Nostalgia
Since the end of his disastrous 2016 presidential run Jeb Bush hasn’t been getting much attention from the media. So there Bush was recently, criticizing Senator Marco Rubio for his low profile in the immigration debate. Bush’s attack on ...
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Will Tom Steyer Trump the Democrats?
Like most Republicans, the overwhelming majority of Democrats were taken completely by surprise by the rise of Donald Trump. Yet while they continue to rail at the man who seized control of the GOP from its establishment and improbably wound ...
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Return of the Ultimate Swamp Creature
It got lost amid the rave reviews President Trump got for behaving like a normal president for an hour-long meeting with members of Congress and then was buried completely by his vile remarks about immigration from some sh**ty countries ...
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How Not to Report on Iran
Anti-government protests in Iran continued this past week, and along with it a rising toll of demonstrators who have been killed and injured by security forces seeking to suppress dissent. But while the protesters appear motivated by disgust over the ...
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Media Blackout on Obama’s Hezbollah Scandal Revives the Iran-Deal ‘Echo Chamber’
In May 2016, deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes took a victory lap in the New York Times to celebrate the Obama administration’s signature foreign-policy win. Rhodes had helped orchestrate the campaign to ensure that Congress would fail to stop President ...
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Nikki Haley’s Right: Time to Start ‘Taking Names’ at the U.N.
United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s recent threat — that the United States would be “taking names” of those who vote against it in the U.N. General Assembly — summed up everything liberals and the foreign-policy establishment hate about the Trump ...
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Who’s Playing Politics on Israel?
As far as the New York Times was concerned, it was simply a matter of fact: The only possible explanation for President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was politics, pure and simple. A ...
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Trump Exposes the Cause of Palestinian Rage
The reaction from the foreign-policy establishment and America’s European and Arab allies is unanimous. All are opposed to President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Moreover, the very real possibility of violence from the ...
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The New York Times’ dropping the pretense of objectivity in its crusade against the GOP tax plan should remind wavering Republicans that surrendering to liberal rhetoric is a guarantee of defeat.
We all know that President Donald Trump has often ...
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A Liberal Judge Rediscovers the Tenth Amendment — So Should Conservatives
Sanctuary cities are appalling. But using extra-constitutional means to defund them is still wrong.
One of the odd staples of American political life in the mid 1990s was Bob Dole’s love affair with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution ...
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Who’s the More Effective Conservative?
According to Steve Bannon, the Republican establishment is blocking President Donald Trump’s agenda. That’s why he’s leading an insurgency whose ambitious goal is nothing less than the transformation of the GOP from a coalition led by mainstream ...
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Still Waiting for the Apocalypse
One year into the Trump presidency, predictions of democracy’s end are laughable. He’s often inappropriate but the Constitution is in less danger than it was under Obama.
Some of President Donald Trump’s opponents marked the one-year anniversary ...
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Brazile Blowback: Democrats Circle the Wagons and Defend Their Party
Donna Brazile probably wasn’t seeking to start a revolution in the Democratic party when she wrote her new book Hacks, whose excerpts published last week in Politico unleashed a bitter controversy about the 2016 presidential election. In telling her story, ...
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The Politics of Assumption
As far as most of President Donald Trump’s critics are concerned, his supporters are united by one common characteristic: an indifference to the truth. Along the lines of Salena Zito’s famous insight, they take him seriously but not ...
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Jeff Flake and the Republican Resistance
Jeff Flake’s retreat from the Senate while skewering Trump won’t advance conservatism. With impeachment a left-wing obsession, Republicans must pick a side.
Senator Jeff Flake is clearly a realist. But it’s far from clear that he’s ...
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When President Donald Trump boasts, the nation rolls its collective eyes. From his first moments in office, Americans on both sides of the political aisle understood that his claims of triumph usually had little to do with the facts. That ...
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What Russia’s Facebook War Didn’t Do
For those Democrats waiting for some evidence that will prove the Russians stole the 2016 presidential election, it’s not much but better than nothing: The revelations that Russian agents ran hundreds of fake Facebook accounts trafficking divisive stories as well ...
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On Late-Term Abortion, Liberals Are the Real Science Deniers
For years, liberals have tarred those who question climate-change research as “deniers” of scientific facts. The label was meant to equate disagreeing with computer models that predict a rise in temperatures with denying the Holocaust. It’s a clever tactic ...
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Is the GOP Steve Bannon’s Party Now?
A number of reasons having nothing to do with national politics may explain Judge Roy Moore’s resounding defeat of Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican Senate primary runoff race on Tuesday. But there’s no denying that the victory ...
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Trumpian Rhetoric and U.S. Imperatives
The language was shocking.
Who could have imagined the president of the United States calling another world leader “rocket man” or threatening “to totally destroy” a country from the podium of the General Assembly of the United Nations? Who could ...
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Why Trump Is Right and the Experts Are Still Wrong about the Iran Deal
The experts all agree. They are very nervous about the Trump administration’s continued dithering about whether it will again certify Iran’s compliance in the nuclear deal. As the New York Times helpfully pointed out in an article about ...
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A Tradition that Deserves to Be Nuked
Editor’s Note: This piece has been amended since its initial publication.
The time when the Senate’s treatment of Judge Merrick Garland was the subject of intense national debate seems a distant memory, but it was only a year ...
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How ‘Fake but Accurate’ Stories Sunk Liberal Journalism
When CNN had to retract a story about a Trump campaign adviser named Anthony Scaramucci and his alleged ties to Russians this past June, the president crowed. This was before Scaramucci’s brief comic turn as White House communications director, ...
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Will Comey’s Deception Cause Republicans to Rally around Trump?
As Hillary Clinton might say, “At this point, what difference does it make?”
That’s the reaction many Americans might have to the revelation that former FBI director James Comey was preparing to exonerate the Democratic presidential candidate in the ...
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Weather Is Politics by Other Means
Weather emergencies on the scale of Hurricane Harvey ought to be about common humanity, not politics. Americans have been saddened at the losses suffered by those affected by the storm, have cheered the efforts of rescuers, and have reached into ...
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The Democrats Suddenly Need Menendez
It seems like such a long time ago. Back in the early months of 2015, Democratic leaders could barely contain their glee at news that one of their own was in legal trouble. Indeed, as far as President Obama was concerned, ...
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Trump Can’t Win a War on McConnell
If you believe the New York Times, President Donald Trump hasn’t spoken to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in weeks, and their last phone call was an angry exchange that “quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.” While neither ...
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Don’t Blame Arthur Finkelstein for the State of American Politics
Arthur Finkelstein didn’t break American politics.
Finkelstein, who died last Friday at the age of 72, was one of the world’s most successful pollsters and political consultants. His career encompassed the rise of the modern conservative movement from the 1970...
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Democrats Who Want to Be President Back Away from Israel
The shift to the left by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York demonstrates the power of a party base that is abandoning the Jewish state.
Both were once rock-solid supporters of Israel. But ...
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The Affirmative-Action Test
There are so many reasons for liberals to be apoplectic about the Trump administration that one more good reason almost passed unnoticed. In a week when chaos reigns in the West Wing — and stories about a new immigration policy and ...
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Who Killed Obamacare Repeal? Blame Trump.
The dismal saga of the Republican party’s effort to repeal Obamacare reached what appeared to be the end of the line this week when the Senate voted down a partial-repeal plan 51–49. There are a lot of reasons for the ...
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The U.S. Should Violate the Iran Deal
Throughout the long and contentious debate over the nuclear deal with Iran, the question of Iranian compliance with any agreement was one of the most contentious. The pact was bitterly criticized for setting up an inspection process that was far ...
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How Trump Got CNN Off the Hook
Just when the Trump administration was putting its media opponents on the defensive, the president swept in to rescue the very people he and his fans have labeled as purveyors of “fake news.” That was the net effect of the ...
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Is Immigration to the U.S. an Entitlement?
The real debate about immigration isn’t about the terms of Trump’s travel order. It’s an effort to treat entry to the U.S. as a right.
For the past six months, the debate about immigration has centered ...
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Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Sinking Democratic Brand
A lack of self-confidence is not one of House minority leader Nancy Pelosi’s problems. But Pelosi’s unabashed use of open threats and her death grip on power are a very big problem for her party.
Pelosi’s performance ...
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The Democrats’ Resistance Temptation
In retrospect, it’s clear that Democrats invested too heavily in the special election in Georgia’s sixth district. Despite an attractive centrist candidate, enough money to launch a small war, and the millstone of President Donald Trump’s White ...
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Is Kamala Harris the Future of American Politics?
Democrats may not have gotten everything they wanted out of a series of recent televised Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that ostensibly concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. But as the party of the ‘resistance’ shifted its focus from alleged collusion ...
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Nixon, Trump, and a Bifurcated Media
The New York Times is worried, and it thinks its liberal readership should be just as scared. The source of this fear is the possibility that President Donald Trump might escape retribution for the crime of being unfit for an ...
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Reality Winner and the ‘Resistance’ That’s Out of Touch with Reality
Efforts to portray the NSA leaker as a victim as well as a punchline on late-night television won’t wash. She’s just an impotent criminal who deserves to be prosecuted.
When the name of the first person to be ...
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Will the Left Help Republicans Get Their Health-Care Mojo Back?
The only thing that can save the GOP from being sunk by its Obamacare repeal is the Democrats’ embrace of a single-payer scheme.
Health care was the making of the current Republican congressional majorities and a key factor in Donald ...
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The Problem with ‘Lock Them Up’ Politics
For a year, Democrats listened to crowds at Trump rallies and even the delegates at the Republican National Convention engage in chants of “lock her up.” Today, the Internet is reverberating with Democrats engaging in some virtual revenge as the ...
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Blame Clinton for Monica Lewinsky’s Woes, Not Ailes
Monica Lewinsky is entitled to hold a grudge. No one, especially no one in their early 20s, should be subjected to the sort of scrutiny she faced as her affair with President Clinton exploded into a scandal of unprecedented proportions.
...
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The Trump Tipping Point for Conservatives?
The anti-Trump resistance — especially its mainstream-liberal-media battalion — wakes up every day and turns on the news expecting to hear that Republicans are finally abandoning the president en masse. It hasn’t happened yet, and it may not ever happen.
The ...
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Stop Talking, President Trump
The virulent antipathy President Trump inspires among his political foes and critics may well exceed that of any president in the history of our republic. But if there is anything to be learned from what has happened in the days ...
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Comey’s Firing and the Price of Blind Partisanship
If there was one sentiment that had rippled through the bases of both major political parties by the end of the 2016 election cycle, it was that FBI Director James Comey should be fired. The trouble was that it had never ...
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Trump Isn’t Flip-Flopping on Iran
When the Trump administration acknowledged this past week that Iran is currently in compliance with the nuclear deal concluded by its predecessor, the response from its critics was predictable. Obama administration veterans smirked and liberals guffawed at what they saw ...
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Trump’s Critics Right and Left: The Conspiracy Factor
The inability of the Left and the alt-right to view Trump’s decisions outside the context of conspiracy theories illustrates the derangement of political discourse
Explaining President Donald Trump’s willingness to abandon positions he took during the election campaign ...
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Trump’s Syria Strike Altered Perceptions of His Presidency — and Highlighted the Failures of Obama’s
Donald Trump’s many detractors tend to forget something important: The power of his office is such that simply by deploying the military might of the United States, he can change the national conversation in an instant. By ordering a ...
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Will Pelosi Sink Democrats’ Midterm Hopes?
This should be a big year for Democrats. With Republicans sagging under the weight of an unpopular incumbent president, an often-dysfunctional administration, and the burden of controlling both houses of Congress while getting relatively little done, the 2018 midterms promise huge ...
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State of the Union: Imagine CNN for an Hour without Russia
For an hour and 20 minutes on Tuesday evening, the world stood still for CNN and MSNBC. Despite setting a record for length during the televised era, President Trump gave a fairly normal version of the State of the Union ritual, ...
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What Syria Teaches Us About ‘America First’
The slogan Donald Trump embraced during his campaign for president sent shivers down the spines of many Americans with a sense of history. “America First” was a phrase that seemed indelibly linked to pre–World War II isolationists. The America ...
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How Not to Defend the Free Press
Following the November 2016 election, many of those deeply shocked by Donald Trump’s victory engaged in hysterical commentary about the imminent end of American freedom. This theme was frequently repeated prior to his taking office and helped generate a massive ...
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The Ideal Candidate and Her Toxic Platform
Oprah Winfrey may be the perfect Democratic presidential contender, but her Hollywood cheerleaders compromise her chances.
Will Sunday evening’s Golden Globes Awards show turn out to have been a pivotal moment that shaped the 2020 presidential race? The wagonload of ...
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Judge Trump by His Record, Not Gossip
We didn’t have to wait until the publication of excerpts of Michael Wolff’s book detailing behind-the-scenes White House staff score-settling to know that President Donald Trump isn’t like any of his predecessors. The voters gave the most ...
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Criticism of Mueller Isn’t a Threat to the Rule of Law
When Senator Mark Warner (D., Va.) took to the floor of the Senate on Wednesday afternoon to warn against what he called “troubling signs” that President Donald Trump would fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Democrats and liberals cheered. They’ve ...
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Has Trump Really Isolated the U.S.?
In the days since President Donald Trump made his historic announcement about Jerusalem, the foreign-policy establishment has fumed about his decision. But even though all the predictions from the so-called “wise men,” as well as the “adults” in the administration, ...
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Bannon’s Ill-Conceived War on the Establishment
We already know Steve Bannon believes that politics is war. But during the course of his speech at an Alabama rally for Roy Moore this week, he gave the country an ugly lesson in what scorched-earth political warfare really entails. ...
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The Kennedy Center Honors Reveal Why Trump Won
The Kennedy Center Honors isn’t shy about proclaiming its importance. According to its website, getting tapped at its annual ceremony is the moral equivalent of a British knighthood or the French Legion d’Honneur.
When the honors began in 1978, ...
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The Consequences of Trump Being Trump
Nearly two and half years since his political career began, and more than ten months since his inauguration, does anyone really think the latest outrageous thing done or said by President Donald Trump matters anymore? The answer from his core ...
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Al Franken Gives Liberals Another Chance at Virtue
In the last week, some liberals have been having public second thoughts about their defenses of Bill Clinton. In the wake of the #metoo movement and the avalanche of accusations of sexual harassment and assault being made against prominent figures ...
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Roy Moore Proves Outrage May Not Be Dead
In refusing to back down in the face of accusations of sexual misconduct, Judge Roy Moore may feel he has nothing to lose. But that is not the case with some of his most prominent supporters. Steve Bannon’s campaign ...
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Chris Christie: From Landslide Victory to Object Lesson
It seems as if it happened sometime in the last century, but it was really just four years ago. On November 5, 2013, Chris Christie was reelected as governor of New Jersey in a landslide of epic proportions. The Republican’s 60.3 percent ...
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What Needed to Be Said after New York
Those who called President Trump a hypocrite for blaming Tuesday’s Manhattan terror attack on Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer weren’t wrong. Trump was doing the same thing that he had condemned only a few weeks earlier, when he ...
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An Earthquake That Shouldn’t Shake Trump
In any normal administration, the announcement of an indictment of the man who had managed the election campaign of the president would be a political earthquake. That is how the mainstream media are treating the indictments of Paul Manafort, who ...
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Trump Is Right about 401(k) Contribution Limits
Perhaps congressional Republicans would never have really decided to pay for upper-bracket tax cuts by lowering the amount Americans could put into their 401(k) retirement accounts. But the fact that Republican leaders chose not to comment on the possibility once ...
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Chicago Repeals Its Soda Tax
It didn’t take long for Chicagoans to send the message to their legislators. Though the tax went into effect only on August 2, the general outrage over the one-cent-per-once surcharge on soda and sugary drinks was sufficient to force the ...
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Democrats’ Choice: Dreamers or the Resistance
Democrats and their mainstream-media cheering section are panning the Trump administration’s latest terms for granting legal status to the “Dreamers” — illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors and are covered under President Obama’s Deferred Action ...
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Playing Politics with the Weather
In his responses to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, President Trump showed real political acumen. Though Democrats were waiting to pounce at the least sign of inaction, incompetence, or indifference to suffering from the White House, the administration managed to avoid ...
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Trump Should Buck the Consensus on the Kurds
We all know President Donald Trump isn’t a fan of the foreign-policy establishment, either in Washington or at the United Nations. To the contrary, he delights in confounding the experts and defying the international consensus on a variety of ...
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Pop Culture’s Acceptable and Unacceptable Lies
Liberals think the Emmy Awards “normalized” Sean Spicer’s lying for Trump, but they forget how their echo chamber aided Barack Obama’s Iran Deal deceptions.
In the partisan culture wars, no quarter is to be given, not even in ...
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Trump’s Republican Civil War
Trump’s not becoming an independent. His deals with Democrats and Bannon’s threats are signs that the hostile takeover of the GOP is just getting started.
There is no precedent for President Trump’s political maneuverings at the expense ...
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Why Trump’s Betrayal Won’t Matter
Even in an administration that is always breaking new ground in terms of unorthodox presidential behavior, Wednesday’s Oval Office ambush was a shocker. At a meeting with congressional leaders that the Republicans thought was merely a photo op, President ...
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Worry about Kim Jong-un, Not Trump
So far, the assumption that Trump is bungling or exacerbating the crisis with North Korea isn’t justified.
Ever since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower that fateful day in June 2015, President Trump’s critics have worried that ...
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The Press Must Take It as Well as Dish It Out
In the country where United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein grew up, the government doesn’t criticize the press. Why would it, since in his native Jordan, the family (of which he happens to ...
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The Joe Arpaio Pardon Won’t Destroy Democracy
If the best thing you can say for a presidential action is that it is no worse than things previous presidents have done that you condemned, perhaps it would be better not to have done it at all. That’s ...
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Attacking the Press Doesn’t Make You a Nazi
If we are to judge the importance of a threat by the amount of time President Donald Trump spends attacking it and the harsh things he says, the greatest peril facing the United States doesn’t come from Islamist terrorists, ...
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Trump’s Failures on the Easy Stuff Overshadow His Successes on the Hard Stuff
The last week was the Trump presidency in a nutshell. When faced with a situation that called for him to do one of the many easy things Americans expect of their president, he repeatedly failed. But when asked to do ...
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How to Give Jeff Flake’s Senate Seat to a Democrat
President Donald Trump’s tweet yesterday morning endorsing a primary challenger to Arizona senator Jeff Flake was hardly a surprise. Trump likes to call himself a counter-puncher, so from his frame of reference, Flake had been asking for it by ...
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The debate between Stephen Miller and CNN’s Jim Acosta proved that turning the daily White House press briefing into a TV show is a dangerous thing for journalism.
When the Trump administration temporarily refused permission for televising the daily ...
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Trump’s Deal with the Establishment Is Over
With the firing/resignation of Anthony Scaramucci, the widespread skepticism about new White House chief of staff John Kelly has been replaced with respect for his decisiveness and his ability to get the president to give him leeway to run ...
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Trump’s Dangerous Veto Temptation
There were mixed signals this past weekend from the Trump administration as a new round of sanctions on Russia made its way through Congress. But if the president and his chaotic administration know what’s good for them, they’ll ...
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Are We Connecting Dots Again on Speech and Violence?
The rules keep changing. In the wake of the general hysteria that broke out in much of the mainstream media over the holiday weekend about President Donald Trump’s tweet of a comic GIF showing him beating up the CNN ...
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Is Nikki Haley the Alternative Secretary of State?
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson doesn’t seem to enjoy being America’s top diplomat. He finds himself isolated in Foggy Bottom and not getting much love or cooperation from the White House. President Donald Trump often contradicts Tillerson’s ...
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Who Knew Governing Was This Hard?
More than five months after a Republican president was inaugurated and began to work with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, it’s time to ask the party a question: Would they like to hand the reins of government ...
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On Russia, Can Congress Save Trump from Himself?
It doesn’t happen very often, but on at least one issue, Donald Trump is acting like a normal president. Unfortunately, in this rare instance, he’s actually doing something not only wrongheaded but self-destructive. Instead of letting Trump have ...
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Can Conservatives Be a Loyal Opposition?
What hope is left for conservatives who oppose Donald Trump? If Michael Gerson is a reliable barometer of what the Never Trump crowd is thinking these days, it’s clear from his latest Washington Post column that he has as ...
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Democrats Move the Russia Goalposts
Attorney General Jeff Session’s impassioned denial that he was involved in colluding with Russia during the 2016 campaign was the most memorable quote from Tuesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. But if Senate Democrats seeking to bait and interrogate him ...
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Why the GOP’s Bipartisan Tone Is Trouble for Trump
President Trump may claim that former FBI director James Comey’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee brought him “complete vindication.” But as he well knows, this was just one of the first shots fired in what will likely be ...
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A Revolt at the State Department?
This week David A. Rank, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, did the right thing. Finding himself unable to carry out his duties in support of the policies of the elected government of the nation ...
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Is Trump All Talk on Iran?
During his trip to the Middle East last week, President Donald Trump had one consistent theme and he never wavered from it: The region needs to unite to stop Iran. Mutual antipathy for Tehran has driven Arab regimes such as ...
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While Donald Trump’s political foes continued to make the most of his ill-advised statements about the Russia investigation, Trump had some of the best days of his presidency this week. Though he is a man who can’t seem ...
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The Latest Trump Controversy Shows Why Israel Is Not a Charity Case
When the Washington Post reported that President Trump had revealed to the Russians classified intelligence obtained from an ally in the Middle East, speculation immediately began about the source of the information. It wasn’t long before the answer was ...
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Where do you draw the line between the right of voters to vent their anger at public officials whose policies they oppose and actual violence? The answer is pretty obvious: at the point where verbal abuse turns to action that ...
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Against a Special Prosecutor
The last thing the country needs is another out-of-control probe that won’t give us the answers we need about Russia and Trump.
President Donald Trump may have made a mess out of the firing of FBI director, but there’...
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Why Trump Can Still Win While Losing
Is anyone surprised by a new ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows Donald Trump is the least popular president approaching 100 days in office since they started taking such surveys? Trump won the office while losing the popular vote and ...
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This April 22nd won’t be your normal Earth Day. Since it was first celebrated in 1970, that date has been used to promote environmental causes. By now, the day has become a tame secular festival of tree hugging, and its ...
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The Democrats’ Weakest Trump Talking Point
President Donald Trump confounded most of his critics and even some of his supporters last week by attacking Syria. Trump came into office promising to stay out of foreign entanglements and advocating outreach to Russia. So the decision to punish ...
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The Only Way to Get Back to Nine
The vote was held and the sky didn’t fall. Though liberals solemnly proclaimed that tradition and even the fabric of democracy were in peril, when the Senate moved to change the rules to allow a simple majority to get ...
