Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario. Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated
What are Donald Trump's chances for re-election in 2020? If history is any guide, pretty good. In early 1994, Bill Clinton's approval rating after two years in office hovered around a dismal 40 percent. The first midterm elections of the Clinton presidency were an utter disaster. A new generation of younger, more conservative
Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves. We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases. One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate
Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens. A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about
Imagine the following: The IRS sends you, John Q. Citizen, a letter alleging you have not complied with U.S. tax law. In the next paragraph, the tax agency then informs you that it needs a series of personal and business documents. Indeed, it will be sending agents out to discuss your dilemma and
The year 2018 will be deplored by pundits as a bad year of more unpredictable Donald Trump, headlined by wild stock market gyrations, the melodramas of the Robert Mueller investigation, and the musical-chair tenures of officials in the Trump Administration. The government is still shut down. Talk of impeachment by the newly Democrat-controlled
The unlikely 2016 election of Donald Trump—the first president without either prior political or military office—was a repudiation of the American “aristocracy.” By “rule of the best” I mean the ancien régime was no longer understood to suggest wealth and birth (alone), but instead envisioned itself as a supposed national meritocracy of those
After 19 months, special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation has charged a number of targets with almost every conceivable sin—except collusion with Russia to throw an election. Yet suspicion of collusion was the reason that Mueller was appointed in the first place.President Trump's former consigliere, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. But as
Certainly, no one should defend a top-ranking federal employee’s lying to federal investigators or to his superiors in the Trump Administration, if that is what former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn did, as evidenced by his own confession. Note if Flynn lied to President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence about details of
There was likely never going to be "comprehensive immigration reform" or any deal amnestying the DACA recipients in exchange for building the wall. Democrats in the present political landscape will not consent to a wall. For them, a successful border wall is now considered bad politics in almost every manner imaginable. Yet 12
