Columns, pieces and posts
It was at dinner a month ago in a Manhattan restaurant. Old friends who live far apart had come together on a leisurely spring night. But it turned testy fast. I note here that the style of anti-Trumpers is often highhanded and manipulative, while the style of pro-Trumpers can be brutalist and patronizing. One couple, […]
London Quickly on the presidential race, then to Brexit. Hillary Clinton has been given a great gift by Donald Trump. She hadn’t been able to explain the purpose or meaning of her candidacy. She tried out various themes and slogans, but nothing ever took or seemed real. Everything came down to I’m Hillary and I […]
This first month of summer I see movement and no-movement. No movement: Donald Trump. He’s like someone caught in the first act who lurches into a second act—a solid, prepared speech, a subdued interview—then scrambles back to first-act antics. It’s easy to guess he’s surrounded by friends and supporters who know more is needed than […]
The most interesting thing Donald Trump has said recently isn’t his taunting of Hillary Clinton, it’s his comment to Bloomberg’s Joshua Green. Mr. Green writes: “Many politicians, Trump told me, had privately confessed to being amazed that his policies, and his lacerating criticism of party leaders, had proved such potent electoral medicine.” Mr. Trump seemed […]
Let’s begin with a prophecy: It is not only the Republican Party that is breaking and perhaps re-forming. The Democratic Party is also starting to come apart. We’re seeing the first signs of it now. A significant part of the base is going left. Bernie Sanders took off because they want a socialist. The party […]
What is needed among Republicans in Washington now is patience, soberness of thought, and a kind of heroic fairness. Reflection and humility wouldn’t hurt either. One of our two great parties is either shattering or reconstituting itself. It is not united and has not been since the George W. Bush era. As the pollster Kellyanne […]
God bless our beloved country as it again undergoes one of its quiet upheavals. Donald Trump will receive the Republican nomination for the presidency and nothing will be the same. How we do politics in America is changed and will not be going back. The usual standards and expectations have been turned on their head, […]
The wind is at Donald Trump’s back, and it’s the kind that doesn’t lessen but build. Last week he won the New York primary with an astounding 60% of the vote to John Kasich’s 25% and Ted Cruz’s 15%. This week he swept the five-state Northeast regional primaries with numbers that neared or surpassed the […]
Have you had your 2016 Moment? I think you probably have, or will. The Moment is that sliver of time in which you fully realize something epochal is happening in politics, that there has never been a presidential year like 2016, and suddenly you are aware of it in a new, true and personal way. […]
In Wisconsin and in the weeks leading up to it Donald Trump got wounded. Big animals get wounded and come back. The question is whether he’s a big animal or something smaller that skittered around the forest and finally picked the wrong fight. Wisconsin almost certainly foreclosed his chance to walk into Cleveland with enough […]