Columnist.
The Trump White House is engulfed in a firestorm of its own ignition. The Democrats and the media were only too happy to pour on more gasoline.
The U.S. has every right to secure its borders. But asking Mexico to pay for it literally adds injury to insult.
By all means, build a wall on the border, but don't make Mexico pay for it. It was a great — and by great I mean effective, not noble or heroic — applause line from then-candidate Trump on the campaign trail. Audiences loved it, particularly the call-and-response. Trump: "Who's going to pay for it?" The crowd: "MEXICO!" But the campaign is over and so is fun time. If the wall is worth having, it's worth paying for.
President Trump is something of a paradox. He roots himself in nostalgia for yesteryear — "Make America great again!" — but is remarkably unconcerned with history. He ransacks the past for rhetorical baubles but declines to carry their historical baggage too.
"David Gelernter, fiercely anti-intellectual computer scientist, is being eyed for Trump's science adviser" (Washington Post, Jan. 18). Um. Well, huh. For those unfamiliar with David Gelernter, he essentially created parallel computing, which sounds like witchcraft to me, but I'm told it's a really big deal. He was also one of the first people to see the internet coming, in his 1991 book "Mirror Worlds." Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, described Gelernter as "one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time." Ted Kaczynski — aka "the Unabomber" — agreed, which is why he maimed Gelernter with a letter bomb in a 1993 assassination attempt.
"For many years," Donald Trump tweeted Sunday afternoon, "our country has been divided, angry and untrusting. Many say it will never change, the hatred is too deep. IT WILL CHANGE!!!!" As persuasive as the ALL CAPS are, I have my doubts.
Barack Obama formally ended his presidency the way he came in, talking to adoring fans about how lucky we are to have him in our lives.
The political class is still coming to grips with what appears to be Donald Trump's novel management philosophy: Government by Twitter. Put aside the by-now-familiar weirdness of our president-elect's gloating over Arnold Schwarzenegger's poor "Celebrity Apprentice" ratings or swipes at Meryl Streep. Trump's Twitter addiction poses heretofore unnoticed challenges for his administration.
Of all Barack Obama's costumes, the most ill-fitting is that of the hawk. The guise doesn't work for all sorts of ideological and historical reasons. Plus there's the fact that he's rushing to put on the outfit as he's heading out the door. The new sanctions against Russia are fine with me on the merits, even if they are remarkably tardy and being sold in no small part for domestic, political reasons.
"I forgive you." I've lost count of how many people have told me that since Election Day. Of course, the number pales in comparison with the legions who've told me I was "wrong about everything" this year and that the election of Donald Trump will spell the end of my relevance, my career and, in a few trollish instances, my life. But it's the unsolicited forgiveness that stings more.
Here's a paradox for you. Whenever there's a terrorist attack, the immediate response from government officials and the media is: "Let's not jump to conclusions." Yet when there are breaking reports that Muslim or Arab Americans were allegedly victimized by bigots in some hate crime, the response is instant credulity, outrage and hand-wringing.
It's one of the greatest examples of "careful what you wish for" in political history: President Obama is going to be replaced by the kind of Republican he's always said he wanted. For the entirety of his presidency, Obama has insisted that he is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Indeed, he seems to think that ideology is a dirty word. "What is required," Obama declared the day before his first inauguration, "is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels."
The net worth of Donald Trump's Cabinet appointments so far reportedly exceeds $14.5 billion (if you include Trump's deputy commerce secretary pick, Todd Ricketts). As someone utterly immune to plutophobia — fear of wealth — I have no problem with this. (For what it's worth, I know Todd Ricketts and think he's a great pick.) Rich people can be fine public servants. And if liberals want to argue otherwise, we're going to have to revisit the records of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, not to mention plutocrats like Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Jon Corzine and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton. Surely even Green Party gadfly Dr. Jill Stein would be ecstatic if the Constitution permitted billionaire George Soros to be president of the United States.
Of course Donald Trump thinks it's "ridiculous" to claim the Russians rigged the election for him. Even if Vladimir Putin confessed to the crime on Russia Today, Trump would not believe it, because to do so is not in his nature. I do not want to shock the reader, but Trump has a very high opinion of himself and a tendency to reject evidence that contradicts that opinion, combined with an eagerness to find corroboration of his self-regard wherever possible. For instance, during the campaign he could never concede that online polls weren't scientific, because the results of these polls confirmed that Trump was terrific, fabulous and tremendous.
There's a wonderful exchange in "A Man for All Seasons" in which Thomas More debates young idealist William Roper about the need for laws and giving the accused the benefit of the doubt.
It would make a perfect clickbait ad "Learn this one simple trick to stop worrying about Donald Trump and Make America Great Again." What's the trick? All you have to do is take Trump seriously, but not literally. The formulation is credited to reporter Salena Zito, who, in an article for the Atlantic last September, noted that the news media take Trump's more outlandish statements literally but not seriously, while his supporters do the inverse.
It's time for an open and frank national conversation about bear propaganda. Having grown up in New York City, I had not been made aware of the problem until fairly late in life. This was remedied by my lovely wife, who grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, where bears are not an abstraction. In policy terms, I was an idealist and she was a realist.
Fidel Castro died as he lived: to the sound of useful idiots making allowances for his crimes. (That's not my term: It was Lenin who called liberal apologists for Communism "useful idiots.")
Most conservatives are not, in fact, opposed to infrastructure spending. What rankles them are inefficient, wholly political expenditures designed to reward political constituencies — like so much of Obama's 2009 stimulus.
The war on normalization has begun. "The media is starting to normalize Donald Trump, and it should make you very scared," proclaims a headline at Salon. HBO's haughty in-house mocker, John Oliver, says, "Optimism is nice if you can swing it, but you've got to be careful, because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump — and he's not normal."
