Columnist.
The conservative commentariat is full of suggestions these days for how Donald Trump can salvage his first 100 days.
I've heard numerous versions of this story, but I'll go with the one reportedly told by Dr. Abraham Twerski, a renowned psychiatrist and Orthodox rabbi. (I've trimmed and paraphrased it a bit.)
President Trump should walk across a Havana ballroom like Michael Corleone in "The Godfather Part II," kiss Ryan on the mouth and say, "I know it was you, Paul. You broke my heart."
Every society has its rituals. Indeed, while the details vary from place to place and time to time, ritual itself is a human universal, according to anthropologist Donald Brown.
Monday's House Intelligence Committee hearing, billed as the first public inquiry into Russia's election meddling, was a spectacle with an obvious lesson: Offense is easier than defense.
"We all want progress," C.S. Lewis wrote, "but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive." This has always been one of my favorite distillations of conservatism. In principle, I still believe it, passionately.
Dystopia is in the air these days. George Orwell's "1984" is selling like hotcakes — if hotcakes still sold well in this low-carb world. Is the president to blame?
"Polarize" is a funny word. I hear it all the time, including from my own mouth. The country is polarized. The parties are polarized. President Trump is polarizing. I think that's true, but I don't think the word means what people think it means.
It was just last week that Donald Trump had the finest moment of his short presidency — his address to a joint session of Congress. Even many of his harshest critics praised his speech or reluctantly conceded that it was "presidential."
Donald Trump gave a good speech the other night before a joint session of Congress. It was not, as some commentators have suggested, one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the halls of the Capitol. One test: Can you remember a single line just a few days later? Can you identify any passages that you honestly believe will be remembered a decade from now?
The first thing to say is that Sunday night's bizarreness fits into a more general trend of universal weirdness. It's as if at some point we took the wrong exit into a parallel universe, and the bungled Oscars are just the latest example that we're strangers in a strange land (as John Podhoretz joked on Twitter, "The Man in the High Envelope").
Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," had an unfortunate turn of phrase the other day. She said it's the mission of the press to "control exactly what people think."
From the outset, many on the Right who do not consider themselves part of the Cult of Milo opposed his CPAC invitation. The disturbing thing is that, absent these videos, we would have lost the fight.
There's been a lot of talk about how Trump is a "disruptor," overturning conventional wisdom, throwing out the playbook, tearing down the establishment, transgressing "democratic norms" and a dozen other similar cliches. There's little debate about whether or not Trump has done these things, but there's a massive divide out there about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. That debate itself is part of the problem. It's not either/or but both/and.
I heard a TV news anchor say over the weekend that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington this week he will discuss a path to resolving the "Middle East conflict" with the new American president.
This talk of refusing to interview Conway is baffling and bizarre.
CNN has grave concerns about White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway's credibility and even refused to have her on its Sunday show recently, apparently to protect viewers from her Jedi mind trick powers.
By now you may have noticed the difficulty many conservatives have defending everything President Trump does and says. I'm not just referring to the big policy moves, most of which conservatives can support fairly easily (so far). I mean the whole whiplash-inducing spectacle: the unfiltered, impulsive tweeting, bizarre interview non sequiturs, glib insults and distractions.
Once again, President Trump has come to Russian President Vladimir Putin's defense by throwing America under the bus.
After successfully delivering the secret knock and password, a beleaguered, unshaven older man walks into the bunker, stomping out the cold from his feet on the way in. He walks over to one of the garbage-can fires, where his younger yet battle-hardened comrades are gathered, strategizing about the fight to come. As the grizzled veteran rubs his hands over the flames, his eyes glinting in the firelight, he says to them, wistfully, "You know, Supreme Court nomination fights weren't always like this." It's not quite that bad yet in Washington, but the year is young and the fight over Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, has just begun.
