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.” …
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Donald Trump makes everyone else look mature. So it’s easy to forget that, sometimes, he’s not the only one who’s wrong. His establishment critics are, too. …
Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have a lot in common. They’re both courteous, charismatic and wonky. They’re both people of color who rose from modest means in part because their mothers fought to get them a decent education. They were both community organizers. And at tender ages they both challenged older, entrenched House Democrats, though Obama—in his 2000 race against Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush—lost. …
There are plenty of reasons to downplay the ideological significance of 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset win yesterday over House Democratic powerbroker Joseph Crowley. Even by the standards of congressional primaries, turnout was low. In a district of roughly 650,000 people, Ocasio-Cortez won with only 16,000 votes. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory can also be chalked up to ethnic succession. Crowley is an Irish American representing a district, in Queens ...