Enjoying the view from Limbo
The mistake that Donald Trump’s admirers and defenders have consistently made since 2015 may be reduced to one fundamental error of confirmation bias: They saw his flouting of ordinary party politics, ordinary presidential rhetoric, ordinary administrative state regulations, and ordinary Republican establishment conciliation, as evidence that he saw the corruption of modern American politics the way they did, and that he was standing...
A group of highly credentialed conservative lawyers is publicly arguing that Donald Trump is constitutionally disqualified from running for the presidency ever again, on the grounds of his “participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.” Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz, the most distinguished liberal lawyer of the past forty years, has spent the past seven of those years so deep in the...
Within hours of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the machinery of U.S. federal politics was churning on in all its glory — or rather, gory. Mitch McConnell was insisting that the senate would vote on Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg, although he would of course do everything in his power to prevent the same thing from happening if a justice died so close to...
Donald Trump, a progressive populist demagogue, is officially running for reelection, and the Republican Party establishment’s media wing (aka “the conservative media”) is apoplectic with joyful enthusiasm — at the prospect of finishing off any last remnants of genuine constitutional conservatism still breathing in America. National debt: Growing faster than ever! Executive fiat: Yuuuge! Government-run health care: A central plank of the Republican...
The best thing about fearless predictions is that even a coward can make them. After all, no one will remember what you predicted anyway, or would care even if they did remember, so the “fearless” part of a fearless prediction is purely a vanity claim. With that as a preface and qualification, I will now venture to make a FEARLESS PREDICTION for the...
Everyone knows that the reason Donald Trump is President of the United States today — leaving aside the obvious Russian propaganda campaign on his behalf (oh, lighten up, folks, you all knew it before it became out of bounds to mention it anymore) — is that Hillary Clinton is such an unlikeable hag that even her ideological allies, even the radical feminists, even...
The Republican Party’s McConnell-Trump brain trust — a dusty, echo-filled cavern — believes it has hit upon a brilliant new strategy for the 2020 election: “Do what we always do!” Specifically, according to the New York Times, the aim is to portray their Democratic opponents in Washington’s intramural game of electoral tiddlywinks as “extreme” and as “socialists.” In other words, the Republicans are...
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