The most bizarre and unsettling moment in President Trump’s bizarre and unsettling press conference this Thursday came near the end. Trump, who had been insulting the journalists questioning him for more than 90 minutes, declared that, “I want to find a friendly reporter.” Then he spied Jake Turx of the magazine Ami, a bearded man attired in the white shirt and black velvet kippa (skullcap) ...
Nothing Donald Trump has done since becoming President is particularly surprising. The attacks on judges and the press, the clash of civilizations worldview, the ignorance of public policy, the blurring of government service and private gain, the endless lying, the incompetence, the chaos—all were vividly foreshadowed during the campaign. The Republican-led Congress’ refusal to challenge Trump was foreseeable too. The number of Republicans willing to ...
Several weeks into the Trump presidency, one can divide the reaction among conservative commentators into three categories. …
In an interview that aired on Sunday, Bill O’Reilly alleged that Vladimir “Putin is a killer.” Donald Trump replied, “We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?” Journalists reacted with disbelief. During the Obama administration, conservatives sometimes suggested that, in his heart, President Obama didn’t consider the United States to be morally exceptional. Now Trump is saying so baldly. ...
Among the many terrifying questions that Donald Trump’s presidency poses is this: How do you oppose an indecent leader while still behaving decently yourself? When it comes to the habits of deference extended to previous presidents, I’m fine with breaking the rules. If Democrats want to oppose all of Trump’s nominees on the basis that he himself is dangerous and illegitimate, that strikes me as ...
Daniel Drezner argues in The Washington Post that Donald “Trump’s brand of nativism could be the death knell for American exceptionalism.” I disagree. American exceptionalism is not a set of enduring national characteristics that a president can undermine. American exceptionalism is a story that America’s leaders tell about what makes America different from Europe. As realities on both continents change, and different American leaders emerge, ...
Why did Donald Trump decide last Friday to temporarily ban immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and suspend all refugee admissions for 120 days? It all goes back to the war in Iraq. For the last few years, the establishment conservative answer for why America lost the Iraq War has been: Barack Obama. George W. Bush’s “surge” had belatedly won the war, the argument goes, until ...
Inaugural addresses are, in part, catechisms. The new president signals that he’ll take the country in a new direction. But he casts that new direction as consistent with old and cherished national principles, from which the country has strayed, and to which it must return. Since Woodrow Wilson, and certainly Franklin Roosevelt, part of the catechism has been America’s mission to defend freedom around the ...
Monday’s horrors—the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin and the assassination of a Russian diplomat in Ankara—offer a natural experiment. Since they occurred during the brief window every four or eight years in which America has both a president and a president-elect, they provoked two sets of statements, one from the outgoing administration and another from its soon-to-be successor. The differences are revealing. ...
To understand why Donald Trump chose David Friedman to be his ambassador to Israel, it’s worth reading a story written by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Uriel Heilman this April. With the New York Republican primary only days away, a group of Orthodox Jewish activists came to meet Trump at his office. According to Heilman, “One of the first things Trump did when he sat down ...