To their credit, many of the Republican Party’s biggest Jewish donors—including hedge funders Paul Singer and Seth Klarman – refuse to back Donald Trump. Most high profile Jewish conservative commentators — David Brooks, William Kristol, David Frum, Bret Stephens, Dan Senor, Jennifer Rubin, Jonah Goldberg — won’t either. But there’s one mammoth exception: Sheldon Adelson, who not only supports Trump, but has lobbied other Jewish ...
I opened my Twitter feed on Tuesday night to find liberals ridiculing Bill Kristol. Nothing unusual there. But this time, they had fresh ammunition: The news that Kristol’s much-hyped third-party presidential candidate will be little-known National Review contributor David French. By Thursday morning, the mockery had migrated to television. On Morning Joe, the mere mention of Kristol’s name evoked laughter. “Bill needs to take a ...
After writing critically about Donald Trump in recent weeks, a series of Jewish journalists have expressed astonishment at the level of anti-Semitic vitriol directed their way. “I have never received the amount of anti-Semitic hate I currently do each day for the crime of criticizing The Great Trump,” noted conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Another Trump critic, Bethany Mandel, recently wrote an essay entitled, “My Trump ...
Commentators often call Donald Trump a threat to American democracy. That’s not quite right. Trump is a threat to the institutions that keep American democracy liberal. It’s unlikely that Trump would strip Americans of the right to elect their leaders. It’s more likely that he’d undermine those institutions that restrain the power of the leaders Americans elect. He’d undermine the institutions that limit presidential power ...
In a February 23 hearing on a Freedom of Information Act request for Hillary Clinton’s official State Department emails—emails that don’t exist because Hillary Clinton secretly conducted email on a private Blackberrry connected to a private server—District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan exclaimed, “How in the world could this happen?” …
On Tuesday, the Clinton and Trump campaigns did what they will do pretty much every day between now and November: try to define their opponent in the media. Hillary Clinton’s message for the day was: Donald Trump screws the little guy. At a campaign rally, Clinton herself attacked Trump for having said he hoped the housing bubble would pop, because “people like me would go ...
When it comes to Israel, Bernie Sanders is already changing the Democratic Party. In 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign chose the committee that drafted the party’s platform. On the 15-member panel, three of the four people who focused on Middle East issues espoused fairly conventional “Pro-Israel” views: former congressman Robert Wexler, then-congressman Barney Frank and Obama administration foreign policy official Colin Kahl. Wexler, Frank and Kahl ...
Roughly five minutes into his interview on Wednesday night with Fox’s Megyn Kelly, Donald Trump said something that’s crucial to understanding his political success. Kelly asked him about being a bully. Trump responded that, “I’m a counterpuncher, you understand. I’m responding. I respond by maybe, times ten. I don’t know. I respond pretty strongly. But in just about all cases I’ve been responding to what ...
Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP U.S. presidential nominee because he saw a market that wasn’t being served. The market was for a Republican who opposed free trade, opposed immigration, opposed the Iraq War and denounced America’s political system as corrupt. The market wasn’t new. For years, polls had showed that ordinary Republicans liked economic globalization, military occupations and big money donations less than GOP ...
On Saturday, Donald Trump ally and confidante Roger Stone declared that CNN “is not a news organization but an advocacy group” and that “when Donald Trump is president, he should turn off their FCC license.” (Full disclosure: I’m a CNN contributor.) …