About Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart is an American columnist, journalist, and political commentator. A former editor of The New Republic, he has also written for Time, and The New York Times among other periodicals. He is also the author of three books. You can follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/peterbeinart, and on Substack at: https://peterbeinart.substack.com

Trump’s Peculiar Sympathy for White South Africans

Donald Trump, who generally admires dictators and ignores their victims, has finally found a human-rights issue he cares about: the plight of white South Africans. On Wednesday, he tweeted a demand that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “closely study” the South African government’s “seizing [of] land from white farmers.” …

2018-09-04T08:50:58-04:00By |

Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt

On Wednesday morning, the lead story on FoxNews.com was not Michael Cohen’s admission that Donald Trump had instructed him to violate campaign-finance laws by paying hush money to two of Trump’s mistresses. It was the alleged murder of a white Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant, Cristhian Rivera. On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa ...

2018-09-04T08:45:35-04:00By |

We’re All Michael Cohen

For years, Michael Cohen delighted in doing an awful job. He cleaned up Donald Trump’s messes. Cohen first came to President Trump’s attention more than a decade ago when a group of apartment owners in Trump World Tower, a glass skyscraper across from the United Nations, accused Trump of “financial impropriety.” Cohen, who was the treasurer of the board, took Trump’s side against his fellow owners and ...

2018-08-20T10:17:19-04:00By |

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Has Abdicated His Moral Responsibility

I’ve never met Jonathan Sacks. But his writing has had a deeper impact on my life than any other rabbi’s. I first came across it in a London synagogue in November 2010. Stapled together was Sacks’s commentary on the week’s Torah portion, Parshat Vayetzei, in which Jacob — after tricking his brother and father — flees to the house of his uncle. …

2018-07-27T10:51:51-04:00By |

The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling

Last Sunday morning, CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewed Kentucky Senator Rand Paul about Russian interference in the 2016 election. At 7:40 AM, a CNN analyst named Josh Campbell tweeted some of Paul’s comments. He quoted the senator as declaring that the Russians “are going to spy on us, they do spy on us, they’re going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same … We all do it. ...

2018-07-27T10:42:37-04:00By |

Donald Trump Is No Patriot

In 1945, George Orwell distinguished between “nationalism” and “patriotism.” Nationalism, he argued, is the belief that your nation should dominate others. It “is inseparable from the desire for power.” A nationalist, Orwell argued, “thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige … his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.” Patriotism, by contrast, involves “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of ...

2018-07-27T10:35:20-04:00By |

The ‘To Be Sure’ Conservatives

Donald Trump’s brazen violation of principles American conservatives were once thought to cherish—from free trade to family values to a hard line against America’s foes—has split right-leaning pundits into three camps. At one extreme are the pure sycophants. For them, conservatism is whatever Trump says it is. Many, like Sebastian Gorka, were unknown until Trump’s presidency, which means they can applaud whatever he does without ...

2018-07-13T21:46:37-04:00By |

What’s the Point of NATO, Anyway?

In his repeated attacks on the Western alliance—culminating in a head-spinning morning with reports of Trump threatening to “go his own way,” followed by his declaration that “I believe in NATO”—Donald Trump has raised an important question: What’s the point of NATO anyway? Today, even asking that question places you on the outer fringes of American foreign-policy debate. But that wasn’t always so. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s former ...

2018-07-13T11:07:07-04:00By |
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