
Columnist.
The news is filled with reports that Republicans in Washington are "attacking" the FBI over the Trump-Russia investigation.
Back in 2015, before the presidential primaries began, a voter asked candidate Donald Trump if he believed compromise should be part of politics.
The start of President Trump's second year in office has given Republicans and conservatives an opportunity to review a solid list of achievements: corporate and individual tax cuts; economic growth; wage growth; a conservative Supreme Court justice; a record number of circuit court confirmations; deregulation; the defeat of ISIS and more.
It's not a popular thing to defend Paul Manafort, the international influence peddler who ran Donald Trump's presidential campaign for a short time in 2016.
While Washington obsesses over a new book on White House intrigue, the Trump administration is reaching a critical point on the issue of immigration, one of the president's top priorities and the subject of his most often-repeated campaign promises.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has issued a subpoena to David Kramer, a former State Department official who, in late November 2016, traveled to London to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier from its author, former British spy Christopher Steele.
Something is happening in the final days of 2017. People are noticing that Donald Trump has gotten a lot done in his tumultuous first year in the White House. If in, say, 2014 a Republican of either the conservative or moderate variety predicted that in 2017 a newly elected GOP president and Congress would 1) cut corporate and individual taxes; 2) repeal the Obamacare individual mandate; 3) appoint a highly respected conservative to the Supreme Court; 4) appoint a one-year record number of judges to the circuit courts; 5) get rid of reams of unnecessary regulations; 6) destroy ISIS; and 7) approve pipeline projects and new oil drilling, then a lot of Republicans would probably have cheered. Loudly.
"Mr. Trump continues to exhibit paranoia about American intelligence agencies," wrote the NeverTrump conservative Max Boot in the New York Times a week or so before the president took office.
After all that has happened, the Alabama Senate race appears to be reverting to a fundamental political truth: A state that is one of the most Republican in the nation is likely to vote Republican.
It's one of the enduring misconceptions of the Trump-Russia affair. During the 2016 Republican convention, the story goes, the Trump campaign weakened a critical passage in the GOP platform to go easy on Russia.
"Given the unusual circumstances and very unusual personality involved, it's hard to see this working out well," one laconic Republican lawmaker said recently of the Roy Moore situation. The Alabama Senate race is shaping up as a catastrophe for the GOP, regardless of how it works out.
It's hard to exaggerate the praise heaped on Air Force Gen. Jay Silveria after his impassioned speech against racism went viral at the end of September.
Do you think Tony Podesta, the longtime Washington Democratic lobbyist, fixer and brother of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, colluded with Russia to allow Donald Trump to win the 2016 election?
Investigators looking into the Trump dossier were not surprised when news broke recently that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, working through the Democrats' law firm, Perkins Coie, financed the "salacious and unverified" compilation of allegations of Trump collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Have you noticed? In recent public comments, the lawmakers investigating the Trump-Russia affair, along with some of the commentators who dissect its every development, seem to be focusing more on the facts of Russia's attempts to interfere with the 2016 election and less on allegations that Donald Trump or his associates colluded with those efforts.
President Trump's most recent high-profile executive actions — on Obamacare, immigration and the Iran nuclear deal — do three big things.
The latest excitement in the Trump-Russia investigation is a set of Facebook ads linked to Russia, about 3,000 in all, that some of the president's adversaries hope will prove the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.
Whenever President Trump sets off a new controversy, there's always a period of hair-on-fire commentary, usually conducted in the absence of polls or other evidence of public opinion.
President Trump's speech in Alabama Friday night lasted one hour and 23 minutes. A transcript of his remarks runs to just over 12,000 words.
The entire politico-media complex had a nervous breakdown last week over President Trump's position on DACA.