Columnist.
The presidency has been occupied by lawyers, ex-generals, a former actor and even a peanut farmer, but never before by a pitchman. Donald Trump seeks to become the first. He is the Billy Mays of the GOP, doing what the late, ubiquitous celebrity pitchman never could dream of: making the sale to a major political party and, he hopes, to the nation. Trump fashions himself a builder, but he is really a marketer and, more than that, a salesman, with methods that have their roots in infomercials and before that on boardwalks and at carnivals.
It was the "excuse me" that echoed around Democratic politics. In their intense Flint, Michigan, debate, Bernie Sanders pointedly said to Hillary Clinton in the heat of one exchange, "Excuse me, I'm talking." Sanders has an $18 trillion unicorns-dancing-on-rainbows spending program and a paranoiac's view of Wall Street, but nothing is quite as disqualifying for the feminist left as his alleged "condescension" in this moment and a couple of others (in two other instances, he asked if he could finish, please).
If there's anything we thought we knew about the GOP, it is that it is the party of Reagan. Paying obeisance to Ronald Reagan — his memory, his accomplishments, his policies — has long been the price of entry to Republican presidential politics. Yet here comes Donald Trump, who gives no indication of caring the slightest about Reagan's legacy, and he has rampaged to front-runner status anyway.
Donald Trump will never be mistaken for a cosmopolitan, but he will bring a distinctively European flavor to the 2016 presidential election, should he win the Republican nomination. As in continental Europe, the two parties in a Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton race would accept the basic parameters of the welfare state, and the debate about the size of government — so central to American politics for decades — would fade to the background.
The anti-Trump onslaught is coming. Perhaps within weeks. Just not necessarily from Republicans. Almost as soon as Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee — which may be as early as March 15 — Democrats will surely start to churn out their negative ads. They will attack Trump's credentials as a tribune of the little guy by focusing on a money-grubbing venture like Trump University, designed to extract as much cash as possible from people who thought they would learn something from the shell of a school.
One school of thought years ago was that the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous contraption built to bash particles together, might inadvertently become a doomsday device. The collider has been in operation since 2008 and hasn't yet destroyed the Earth by creating microscopic black holes or wreaking other planetary mayhem. But now, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, an almost equally dangerous threat has emerged: that the iconic tech company might cooperate with the FBI in a terrorism investigation.
Donald Trump is running riot in the GOP china shop and gleefully tearing the place up. Consider the strength of Trump's position: If he wins South Carolina by a big margin, he goes into Nevada with momentum, and the latest poll there has him leading by 26 points. If he enters Super Tuesday a week later having won three out of the past three states — and with Ted Cruz diminished by a South Carolina loss and Marco Rubio having won nowhere — he could easily win, say, 10 contests that day.
According to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the future of the republic teeters in the balance. Unless the United States Senate bows to the will of President Barack Obama and approves his replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, everything we hold dear will be lost. A refusal to get with the program, Warren insists, "would threaten both the Constitution and our democracy itself. It would also prove that all the Republican talk about loving the Constitution is just that — empty talk."
Donald Trump's crushing across-the-board victory in New Hampshire had the breadth and depth that one would expect of a future nominee. If the result doesn't shake the lazy complacency about Trump that has held in Republican circles for months — and was reinforced by his disappointing Iowa finish — nothing will. The question is no longer whether Trump will fade. It's whether he can be stopped and who is actually going to do it and on what terms.
In the blink of an eye, we've gone from opening combat jobs to women to Republican presidential candidates endorsing registering women for a draft. Hide your daughters — our deluded and cowardly political elites are a clear and present danger to common sense. A proposal from the chief of staff of the Army and the commandant of the Marine Corps to require that women register with Selective Service seemed at first like an effort to highlight the absurd endpoint of the rush to women in combat, but top Republicans duly saluted and fell in line.
Donald Trump's loss in Iowa wasn't just a victory for conservatives, but a loss for the mogul's routinely low and dishonest style of campaigning. There was nothing subtle about his disgraceful attacks on Ted Cruz's eligibility to run for president, although Trump at times tried to wrap them in a hilariously transparent tissue of concern about Cruz's welfare. He accused Cruz of being in the back pocket of Goldman Sachs for an above-board loan (Cruz failed to disclose it on one form, but reported it on others) even though Trump's own highly leveraged business career would have been impossible without ungodly bank loans. He pandered all he could on ethanol, stopping just short of promising to fuel Trump Force One with the stuff.
We live in the age of working-class discontent, which, if it wasn't obvious before, has been made plain by the passions roiling 2016 presidential politics. The media's preferred description of the average Republican voter has often been "the angry white male." This was crudely simplistic and meant to be pejorative. If the press wants to update the descriptor, it should refer to "the despairing white male." Or more accurately, the despairing white working class. Two of the most illuminating and alarming books of the past few years — "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray and "Our Kids" by Robert Putnam — described the struggles of working-class America. This is the year that the facts and figures in the pages of those books have made themselves palpably felt in our politics, both left and right.
Few expected Donald Trump would be in a dominant position days before the Iowa caucuses. Fewer still expected the Republican establishment would be among the mogul's deluded enablers. As if to validate every insult ever hurled at it, the GOP elite is putting on a display of fecklessness that has to surprise even its most vociferous critics. It is the quisling establishment. All signs are that Beltway Republicans are ready and willing to accept their new Trumpian overlord.
Ted Cruz has dared to provoke the ire one of the most ruthless and vengeful political forces on the planet, and it's not Donald Trump. The Texas senator has crossed the ethanol industry in Iowa, which is a little like getting on the wrong side of the Catholic Church in Vatican City. Cruz's core theme is fighting the "Washington cartel," which would be a lot easier if its tentacles didn't extend all the way into the state crucial to Cruz's presidential hopes.
At the moment, the Republican establishment is relevant to the presidential-nomination battle only as an epithet. Less than two weeks from the Iowa caucus, the fight for the Republican nomination isn't so much a vicious brawl between the grass roots and the establishment as it is a bitter struggle between traditional conservatism and populism that few could have foreseen. Conservatism has always had a populist element, encapsulated by the oft-quoted William F. Buckley Jr. line that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But the populism was tethered to, and in the service of, an ideology of limited-government constitutionalism.
The children of political candidates are useful adornments in campaign literature and ads, and when they are older, as character witnesses on the campaign trail. Rarely are they used as attack dogs, let alone armed with shameless talking points to try to dampen the rise of an inspirational political rival. But nothing is beneath Bill and Hillary Clinton. So they trotted out their daughter, Chelsea, to warn about the dastardly designs that Bernie Sanders has for ending Medicare as we know it.
The Obama administration was right when it insisted that the capture and release of 10 American sailors by Iran showed the benefits of a cooperative relationship with Tehran. The crux of the arrangement is simple: The Iranians agree to humiliate us (and pursue their long war against the United States and their hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East), and we agree not to care. It is, as Secretary of State John Kerry says, diplomacy at its best.
The establishment features prominently in the GOP presidential race. It is what Donald Trump and Ted Cruz rail against. It is hated by a significant portion of the Republican electorate. It is a ready term of abuse. The establishment is a matter of obsession, but is almost nowhere to be seen, as its initial choice, Jeb Bush, languishes in the polls, and Trump and Cruz rise essentially untouched.
The lazy conventional wisdom is that Ted Cruz is the new Barry Goldwater, doomed to suffer an electoral landslide defeat should he win the Republican nomination. Not only is this wrong about Cruz's general-election chances, it may compare Cruz to the wrong 20th-century Republican forebear. The better analogue for Cruz might be Richard Nixon, not in the crudely pejorative sense, but as another surpassingly shrewd and ambitious politician who lacked a personal touch but found a way to win nonetheless.
The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge hasn't heretofore been known as a locus of government tyranny or much of anything else. Saying that the refuge, established in 1908 by Theodore Roosevelt, is in the middle of nowhere makes it sound too centrally located. It is in Southeastern Oregon, about 30 miles from the nearest town of Burns, population 2,722. Now the Bundy family — notorious for its standoff with the feds at the family's Nevada ranch last year — and sundry anti-government protesters have occupied the refuge and pronounced it the staging ground for an offensive against an oppressive federal government.
