Columnist.
Donald Trump won fair and square and, as Hillary Clinton said in her concession speech, is owed an open mind and a chance to lead. It is therefore incumbent upon conservatives (like me) who have been highly critical of Trump to think through how to make a success of the coming years of Republican rule.
Rule of thumb for a presidential campaign where the two candidates have the highest unfavorable ratings in the history of polling: If you're the center of attention, you're losing. As Election Day approaches, Hillary Clinton cannot shake the spotlight. She is still ahead in the polls, but you know she's slipping when she shows up at a Florida campaign event with a week to go accompanied by the former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado. The original plan was for Clinton to pivot in the final week of the campaign from relentless criticism of Donald Trump to making a positive case for herself. Instead, she reached back for a six-week-old charge that played well when it first emerged back then but now feels stale and recycled.
Obama and the UN seek to rewrite Jewish history.
Last week, the U.N.'s premier cultural agency, UNESCO, approved a resolution viciously condemning Israel (referred to as "the Occupying Power") for various alleged trespasses and violations of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Except that the resolution never uses that term for Judaism's holiest shrine. It refers to and treats it as an exclusively Muslim site, a deliberate attempt to eradicate its connection — let alone its centrality — to the Jewish people and Jewish history.
The case against Hillary Clinton could have been written before the recent WikiLeaks and FBI disclosures. But these documents do provide hard textual backup. The most sensational disclosure was the proposed deal between the State Department and the FBI in which the FBI would declassify a Hillary Clinton email and State would give the FBI more slots in overseas stations. What made it sensational was the rare appearance in an official account of the phrase "quid pro quo," which is the currently agreed-upon dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable corruption.
The second presidential debate — bloody, muddy and raucous — was just enough to save Donald Trump's campaign from extinction, but not enough to restore his chances of winning, barring an act of God (a medical calamity) or of Putin (a cosmically incriminating WikiLeak). That Trump crashed because of a sex-talk tape is odd. It should have been a surprise to no one. His views on women have been on open display for years. And he'd offered a dazzling array of other reasons for disqualification: habitual mendacity, pathological narcissism, profound ignorance and an astonishing dearth of basic human empathy.
Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, aka Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.
"This campaign is sinking to somewhere between zany and totally insane."
And now, less than six weeks from the election, what is the main event of the day? A fight between the GOP presidential nominee and a former Miss Universe, whom he had 20 years ago called Miss Piggy and other choice pejoratives. Just a few weeks earlier, we were seized by a transient hysteria over a minor Hillary Clinton lung infection hyped to near-mortal status. The latest curiosity is Donald Trump's 37 sniffles during the first presidential debate. (People count this sort of thing.) Dr. Howard Dean has suggested a possible cocaine addiction.
If you are the status quo candidate in a change election in which the national mood is sour and two-thirds of the electorate think the country is on the wrong track, what do you do? Attack. Relentlessly. Paint your opponent as extremist, volatile, clueless, unfit, dangerous. Indeed, Hillary Clinton's latest national ad, featuring major Republican politicians echoing that indictment of Donald Trump, ends thus: "Unfit. Dangerous. Even for Republicans." That was the theme of Clinton's famous open "alt-right" speech and of much of her $100 million worth of ads. Problem is, it's not working.
The president of the United States lands with all the majesty of Air Force One, waiting to exit the front door and stride down the rolling staircase to the red-carpeted tarmac. Except that there is no rolling staircase. He is forced to exit — as one China expert put it rather undiplomatically — through "the ass" of the plane. This happened Saturday at Hangzhou airport. Yes, in China. If the Chinese didn't invent diplomatic protocol, they surely are its most venerable and experienced practitioners. They've been at it for 4,000 years. They are the masters of every tributary gesture, every nuance of hierarchical ritual. In a land so exquisitely sensitive to protocol, rolling staircases don't just disappear at arrival ceremonies. Indeed, not one of the other G-20 world leaders was left stranded on his plane upon arrival.
The one great service of Donald Trump's extended peregrinations on immigration policy is to have demonstrated how, in the end, there's only one place to go. You can rail for a year about the squishy soft, weak-kneed and stupid politicians who have opened our borders to the wretched refuse of Mexico. You can promise to round them up — the refuse, that is, not the politicians (they're next) — and deport them. And that may win you a plurality of Republican primary votes. But eventually you have to let it go. For all his incendiary language and clanging contradictions, Trump did exactly that in Phoenix on Wednesday. His "deportation task force" will be hunting ... criminal aliens. Isn't that the enforcement priority of President Obama, heretofore excoriated as the ultimate immigration patsy?
"The real question wasn't classification but: Why did she have a private server in the first place?"
Bernie Sanders never understood the epic quality of the Clinton scandals. In his first debate, he famously dismissed the email issue, it being beneath the dignity of a great revolutionary to deal in things so tawdry and straightforward. Sanders failed to understand that Clinton scandals are sprawling, multilayered, complex things. They defy time and space. They grow and burrow. The central problem with Hillary Clinton's emails was not the classified material. It wasn't the headline-making charge by the FBI director of her extreme carelessness in handling it. That's a serious offense, to be sure, and could very well have been grounds for indictment. And it did damage her politically, exposing her sense of above-the-law entitlement and — in her dodges and prevarications, her parsing and evasions — demonstrating her arm's-length relationship with the truth.
"The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace."
This week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran's intensely nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to operate from its soil. Until now. The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That's what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That's what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on Syria.
You may be thrilled by the feats of Katie Ledecky, mesmerized by the grace of the women gymnasts, startled by Rio spectators mocking U.S. soccer star Hope Solo with chants of "Zika! Zika!" (the first recorded instance, noted one wit, of a stadium rocking to the invocation of a virus). Allow me, however, to interrupt the prepackaged, heart-tugging, tape-delayed Olympic coverage to bring you the real sporting news of the year. It has just been announced that on November 11 in New York City the World Chess Championship will begin. You scoff, of course. For years, I've had to put up with amused puzzlement at my taste in entertainment. (Old joke: How do you do the wave at a chess match? With your eyebrows.) But I remain undaunted.
Donald Trump, the man who defied every political rule and prevailed to win his party's nomination, last week took on perhaps the most sacred political rule of all: Never attack a Gold Star family. Not just because it alienates a vital constituency but because it reveals a shocking absence of elementary decency and of natural empathy for the most profound of human sorrows — parental grief. Why did Trump do it? It wasn't a mistake. It was a revelation. It's that he can't help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is "nice" to Trump.
"The best darn change-maker I ever met in my entire life." So said Bill Clinton in making the case for his wife at the Democratic National Convention. Considering that Bernie Sanders ran as the author of a political revolution and Donald Trump as the man who would "kick over the table" (to quote Newt Gingrich) in Washington, "change-maker" does not exactly make the heart race. Which is the fundamental problem with the Clinton campaign. What precisely is it about? Why is she running in the first place? Like most dynastic candidates (most famously Ted Kennedy in 1979), she really doesn't know. She seeks the office because, well, it's the next — the final — step on the ladder.
The main purpose of the modern political convention is to produce four days of televised propaganda. The subsidiary function, now that nominees are invariably chosen in advance, is structural: Unify the party before the final battle. In Cleveland, the Republicans achieved not unity, but only a rough facsimile. The internal opposition consisted of two factions. The more flamboyant was led by Ted Cruz. Its first operation — an undermanned, underplanned, mini-rebellion over convention rules — was ruthlessly steamrolled on Day One. Its other operation was Cruz's Wednesday night convention speech in which, against all expectation, he refused to endorse Donald Trump.
