The biggest political story of the last week has been Donald Trump’s flip-flop on deporting undocumented immigrants. This Sunday on CNN, Mike Pence filibustered his way through the subject for almost seven minutes before Jake Tapper finally declared, “You did not address the issue” and moved on. Chris Christie on ABC and Kellyanne Conway on CBS were no more coherent. The Daily Beast summed up ...
Donald Trump has just betrayed Ann Coulter. Which is a dangerous thing to do. This week, Coulter released her new book, In Trump We Trust. As the title suggests, it’s a defense of Trump. But more than that, it’s a defense of Trumpism. Most Trump surrogates contort themselves to defend whatever The Donald says, no matter its ideological content. They’re like communist party functionaries. They ...
By any reasonable definition, Democrats are now the more conservative of America’s two parties. They are more interested than Republicans in conserving America’s international relationships, cultural norms, and political and economic institutions as they are. …
The number of high-profile conservative commentators who enthusiastically support Donald Trump is relatively small. But the number of high-profile conservative commentators who enthusiastically support “Trumpism” is higher. Trumpism is the belief that Trump’s followers constitute the “real America” and that anyone who does not validate their grievances is an elitist who neither understands nor cares about ordinary folks. …
Logically, Donald Trump should have less support among intellectuals than he had a year ago. That’s because over the past year, he has made statements that expose him as both ignorant of public policy and contemptuous of liberal-democratic norms. He has proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, incited violence against protesters at his rallies, responded to The Washington Post’s critical coverage by warning ...
I’ve found the Khizr Khan vs. Donald Trump clash exhilarating. It’s the closest thing Americans have yet seen to the famed “Have you no sense of decency, sir,” riposte that helped doom Joseph McCarthy. But it’s disturbing, too. If it proves that America can overcome the bigotry and ignorance that Trump represents, it also shows how much Trump has already set America back. ...
The Democratic convention, which culminated on Thursday night with Hillary Clinton, was inverted. Usually, supporting actors cover policy specifics and flay the opposing candidate. The nominee comes on at the end and offers a vision. Hillary Clinton doesn’t do vision well. So, wisely, her campaign turned the paradigm on its head. The emotion, the vision, the rhetorical power came from others: from Barack Obama and ...
I love Bill Clinton. But I didn’t love his speech Tuesday night in Philadelphia. Given the job of humanizing his wife, he came across as genuinely smitten. But he failed to do what he’s done in every convention speech he’s delivered since 1992: tell a story about where America is today and what can be done to move it forward. He called his wife a ...
Many commentators, watching the two party’s conventions, have noted that Democrats and Republicans seemed to describing different countries. But if you listened carefully last night, you heard two groups of Democrats describing different countries too. …
In 2008, Barack Obama famously wanted a “team of rivals” in his administration. He began with his running mate, who was utterly unlike him. Obama was a political newcomer; Joe Biden was a Beltway veteran. Obama appealed to African Americans and upscale liberals; Biden appealed to blue collar whites. Obama was disciplined; Biden was unruly. Obama was cool; Biden was warm. …