Free Republic

Hey, Lyin’ Ted and Sleepy Joe: Meet Toxic Trump. You know, if the former president had any self-knowledge or even the slightest ability to be self-deprecating, he might consider giving himself this alliterative nickname.After three straight national tallies in which either he or his party or both were hammered by the national electorate, it’s time for even his stans to accept the truth: Toxic Trump is the political equivalent of a can of Raid......

“I have been humiliated by my own decay.” Thus spoke Winston Churchill in 1953 during his second stint as Britain’s prime minister. Churchill, perhaps the greatest democratic figure of the 20th century, had been sworn in 18 months earlier — just a few weeks shy of his 77th birthday. Joe Biden was sworn in as president two months after his 78th birthday. The humiliation for Churchill came from an argument he lost with the American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who was shockingly dismissive of his concerns. Churchill’s “decay” was a serious concern. Joe Biden is 79 now —...

He is alive! Norman Podhoretz is alive, and he agreed to an interview with The Wall Street Journal's very perceptive Barton Swaim this weekend. He says that many of his peers are now deceased but not him, and he certainly did not sound deceased. Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol have given up the ghost, and American political commentary is the poorer for their passing, but Norman is still with us, and at 91 -- almost 92 -- he is full of fire. He went on for almost a full page of the Journal, and I agreed with every word. In...

There was a time—roughly from the mid-1960s to the rise of Donald Trump in 2015—when the American right was more or less definable. No more. Major political parties are always riven by internal disputes, but even during George W. Bush’s second term, at the nadir of the Iraq war, the Republican coalition seemed to hang together better than it has these past six years. Mr. Trump’s candidacy was a sign of that fracturing rather than its cause, but his presidency wasn’t marked by unity in the GOP. Quite the opposite. A significant faction of the party now advocates aggressive industrial...

It’s sobriety time for Trump partisans who were feeling wildly upbeat in the wake of the self-destructive Democratic failure with impeachment and from polls showing most Americans expected the president to win a second term. The primary results Tuesday night in Michigan should be setting off alarm bells in Trump Land. They are so suggestive of a possible Democratic path to victory in November that they remind me of the expert speaking in the midst of a crisis on a TV chat show in the Pixar classic “Monsters, Inc.” He is a talking pencil who speaks with a Viennese accent...

Forget Lincoln and Douglas. Forget Nixon and Kennedy. Hell, forget the Athenians and the Melians back during the Peloponnesian War. Last night’s Democratic primary slagfest in Nevada was the greatest debate in all of human history. Oh, was it glorious — the sheer raging hostility spraying across the stage as every campaign besides the Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg bids face the desperate possibility each might fade into the woodwork against the Bernie surge and the Bloomberg billions. It’s not that the gloves were off. No, my friends, everybody was wearing steel-tipped boots and going right for the crotch. Those...

CRB: Your own attitude towards Trump as a political figure has changed over time. How would you describe that evolution? NP: Well, when he first appeared on the scene, I disliked him because he resembled one of the figures that I dislike most in American politics and with whom I had tangled, namely Pat Buchanan—I had tangled with him in print and I had accused him of anti-Semitism. And he came back at me, and I came back at him. And it was a real street fight. And I said to my wife: “This guy [Trump] is Buchanan without the...

The same day two monsters murdered three people in cold blood in a Jersey City kosher supermarket—next door to a yeshiva housing 50 defenseless children, which was apparently the original target—the Trump administration announced it would extend anti-discrimination protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to American Jews. The juxtaposition is important, because one was an unspeakable act of anti-Semitic evil and the other an act of philo-Semitic friendship. And yet listen to the executive director of the Central Conference of American Rabbis speaking about this: “I’ve heard people say this feels like the first step toward us wearing...

In 2013, I commissioned and published an apology to a writer who I felt had been mistreated in the pages of COMMENTARY—and by my father, no less! “How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk” was the name of the article by Michael J. Lewis, and the occasion for it was the fact that the then-97-year-old Wouk had just published a new novel called The Lawgiver—a comic epistolary novel, no less, concerning the making of a movie about the life of Moses in which Wouk himself appears as a character. As Lewis wrote, “Wouk adapts the form to the modern world of...

**SNIP** The weird thing: Since what Republicans were trying to do was save the president’s hide, they should actually have hoisted Cohen on their shoulders, sung “Hava Nagila” and done a nine-hour hora. His testimony and answers actually helped the president when it came to the matter of Trump’s possible impeachment. It turns out his lawyer-fixer doesn’t have the goods. Early reports on what Cohen might say suggested he was ­going to tell the committee that Trump told him to lie to Congress about his alleged porn-star payoffs. That would have meant the president had suborned perjury - a serious...

The Weekly Standard will be no more. There is no real reason we are witnessing the magazine’s demise other than deep pettiness and a personal desire for bureaucratic revenge on the part of a penny-ante Machiavellian who works for its parent company. There would at least be a larger meaning to the Standard’s end if it were being killed because it was hostile to Donald Trump. But I do not believe that is the case. Rather, I believe the fissures in the conservative movement and the Republican party that have opened up since Trump’s rise provided the company man with...

The synagogue in Pittsburgh is called the Tree of Life. The name is a translation into English of the Hebrew phrase etz chaim. We sing those words as the Torah is put away on every Shabbat. They are words from the Book of Proverbs: “She is a tree of life for those that cling to her and all who do are happy.” The “she” in that sentence is “wisdom,” and the verse that precedes it is especially poignant in light of what has happened: “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” Today the paths of...

At 12:30 in the afternoon on September 27, I don’t think there were many serious political thinkers or activists on the Right who thought Brett Kavanaugh would survive that morning’s testimony by his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. Eight days later—today—Kavanaugh all but secured his appointment. The question is, how did this happen. The answer is: Kavanaugh happened. In his unprecedented speech following Ford’s testimony, Kavanaugh not only blasted the process but made no pretense when it came to those who had manipulated it—liberal groups, people angry with Donald Trump, people wanting to take revenge for the Clintons. The speech electrified...

Look, I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so — on Sept. 27 of last year. That’s when I wrote these words: “If any figure in the United States bears watching over the next couple of years as our political culture continues the radical transformation that led to the election of Donald Trump, it’s Oprah. I believe she’s uniquely positioned, should she wish to commit herself, to seek the Democratic nomination for president and challenge Trump in 2020.” I think Oprah Winfrey made it clear on Sunday night at the Golden Globes that, absent a...

The veteran journalist Michael Wolff set off a bomb yesterday in the middle of Trumpworld when details emerged from his new inside-the-White-House book, “Fire and Fury.” In The Guardian, the world read with dropped jaw about how former chief strategist Steve Bannon used the words “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to describe Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russians in July 2016 and said there was “zero” chance the son hadn’t brought the Russians to meet his father. This meeting is a key event in the so-called “Russian collusion” timeline the president and his supporters say was a meaningless dead end. Then an...

The cold wasn’t the only thing that hammered the Northeast in the final fortnight of 2017 — and we can thank our extreme political polarization for the traumas New Yorkers and New Jerseyans are about to suffer. On the last night of the year, the Trump administration informed New York and New Jersey that there was no longer a deal with the federal government to help fund the desperately needed new rail tunnel between the two states — a $13 billion hit. Before that came the signing of the tax bill, whose limitations on the mortgage-interest and state- and local-tax...

America dodged a bullet in Alabama last night. A man who was twice removed from his state’s Supreme Court for defying judicial orders, who said Muslims should not be allowed to serve in elective office, who suggested the black family was better off under slavery, and who declared that homosexuality should be illegal — this man will not be in the United States Senate. Thank God. Note that I didn’t bring up the teenagers. Roy Moore was horribly unfit for high office — for any office — even if you put to one side the credible allegations against him for...

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona on Tuesday issued an unprecedented indictment of the behavior and practices of the president of the United States, who also happens to be the leader of Flake’s own party. Flake declared that “none of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal.” This has been a common refrain since November 2016 — the sentiment that what we are living through is not “normal” but is instead an aberration, an unwarranted usurpation of a consensus about what American public life is supposed to be like. In essence, we are being told...

On Tuesday afternoon we learned yet again that the president of the United States is against neo-Nazis, which is nice. They’re “very rough,” he said at an impromptu Trump Tower press conference — by which he likely meant some of the people he saw on TV in Charlottesville this past Saturday had beards and leather jackets and swastika tattoos and were overweight. The night before, by contrast, Trump said there had been some “very good people” rallying with “a permit” by a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville. Maybe he thought so because the photographs we all saw showed...

For the past seven months, fellow conservatives have pointed to Donald TrumpÂ’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and the deregulatory efforts of the Trump White House, among other things, and then demanded to know why my view of this presidency has remained negative. Charlottesville is why. There are policies the administration has pursued with which I disagree. And there have been incompetencies in the pursuit of policies like the repeal of ObamaCare IÂ’ve found disheartening. But these are disagreements and failings I could live with, I think, when I consider what the policy alternatives might have been...