ossibly by accident, there are preliminary signs, green shoots, that the president is by experimentation moving toward the campaign strategy most appropriate for the summer. It is Donald Trump, even more than Joe Biden, who should be practically silent. Because the looming presidential nominee of the Democrats is completely unfeasible, inarticulate, and incoherent, the Democratic […]
he current speculation about a likely Joe Biden victory in the November presidential election ignores a number of extraordinary factors. Since the speculation is in the media and the media is overwhelmingly hostile to President Trump, there is a spontaneous urge to consider his declining fortunes in the polls as a vindication of both their […]
oe Biden’s present lead in the polls is a levitation. These are the dangling entrails of the panic that the national political media, which are unofficially conducting the Democratic campaign in the unheroic absence of the putative nominee, have sown about the coronavirus and the impression, desperately promoted, identifying Trump with the recent chaos. A […]
hen President Trump got a good look at the coronavirus in late January, and listened to the opening choruses of the Democratic attack on him as “anti-science,” he evidently concluded there was nothing for it but a two to three month shut-down followed by a declaration of partial victory in the public health crisis along […]
n the clangorous pre-electoral atmosphere created by the COVID-19 crisis, its economic consequences, and the disorders that have followed the apparent murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there have been some important foreign policy developments, though they are largely ignored by the media. The Trump Administration’s exasperation with the conduct of Germany and China, as […]
he final stage of the election campaign and its result will depend on four factors: management of the balance between demand for police reform and concern for the maintenance of public order; whether there is a significant revival of COVID-19; the swiftness of the economic recovery; and the resolution of questions about Joe Biden’s apparent […]
he current inflamed condition of political debate presents opportunities as great as its challenges. There is some merit in both the Democratic and, as far as they are now known, the Republican proposals for reform of police techniques. No doubt many American police forces have habitually and excessively harassed African Americans. That community accounts for […]
ll the stops have now been pulled out in the necessarily unorthodox Democratic presidential campaign. The Democrats are simultaneously blaming the president for blundering into the coronavirus crisis, (though how isn’t explained beyond deficiencies of testing, which has nothing to do with prevention or cure); and with failing to extend the lockdown long enough (meaning […]
o president since Abraham Lincoln has had such a relentless sequence of crises to deal with as President Trump has had. Franklin D. Roosevelt had constant overarching crises: the Great Depression and the recovery from it, the approach of a world war, and the war itself. But never in his more than 12 years as […]
resident Trump faces the greatest challenge of his very eventful life, and also an immense opportunity to silence his detractors. Not since Charles de Gaulle faced a prolonged general strike in France in 1968 has the leader of a large Western democracy faced something so closely approximating an insurrection as the situation President Trump faces […]
s the coronavirus crisis unfolds and the 2016 election and post-electoral scandals ooze into the open, God is affronted and false gods disintegrate. The discussion over the opening of churches is generally presented as a public health issue, coupled with a First Amendment freedom of religion argument. But, in many cases, it is an outright […]
he battle lines on the issue of ending the economic shutdown are drawn more sharply each week. The terror campaign conducted by the media when the coronavirus outbreak began effectively compelled President Trump and most governors to follow the advice of the audible scientists and “flatten the curve” with a comprehensive shutdown requiring huge numbers […]
n the immense and multifaceted controversy over the coronavirus pandemic, and in the midst of tumultuous pre-electoral events in the United States, the role of the Chinese government in inflicting this economic and public health disaster on the world has been the subject of comparative restraint. Were it not for these other preoccupations in this […]
s the debate between those who want an unlimited lockdown and those who want to reopen America as quickly as possible becomes more clangorous every day, months of intensive study and sad experience with the coronavirus enable us to determine the best course and resolve the argument. The shutdown must end in all but severely […]
o judge from campaign oratory, it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that the Democrats and Republicans are contesting for the honor of governing the same country this election year. The Democrats describe a country where, if the administration had acted more quickly and subjected the entire population to constant testing for the coronavirus even […]
resident Trump’s almost total silence on the matters being investigated by special counsel John Durham, and his gentlemanly remark concerning the allegations against Joe Biden coming from his former aide, Tara Reade, that sometimes people make false allegations, is an enactment of Napoleon’s advice not to interrupt an enemy while he is making a mistake. […]
he coronavirus has had, at least, the unanticipated benefit of obscuring and diminishing the very tedious public clamoring about climate change. It is a slightly redeeming virtue of crises that they tend to supersede and diminish previous crises; if a crisis is serious, public opinion can rarely worry about more than one menace at a […]
t is not too soon to examine the shifting strategic balance in the world in the light of the unfolding coronavirus crisis and its economic and political consequences. Though he gets little credit for it—even from his supporters, who tend not to be overly sophisticated foreign policy specialists—President Trump has carefully developed a subtle foreign […]
he Democrats are taking their stand on the coronavirus crisis in an untenable position. It is like building a defensive redoubt in a valley surrounded by hills in the hands of the enemy (like the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1955, as President Eisenhower warned them). Whether this is tactical stupidity by the president’s […]
nti-Trump bias in the American media is profound and ultimately dangerous, because free media are essential to a functioning democracy, and the level of bias that has bedeviled this president is undermining the standing of the press and the public’s faith in the need for such untrustworthy media. In this sense, they are, as the […]