Elon Musk is right about USAID
I suspect few people outside the Washington nexus had ever heard of the United States Agency for International Development, or…
How will Trump take on the administrative state?
By the time you read this, the first raft or two of Donald Trump’s executive orders will have been promulgated.…
The best winter wines
Winter is a natural moment for a little recherche du temps perdu. For my band of serious thinkers, the usual…
Trump is not fooling this time
It is said that the adage “he who hesitates is lost” is an adaptation of a line from Joseph Addison’s…
Trump’s speech was one of the most rousing and substantive in American history
The mood in Washington, at least in the quarters I frequented, has been almost giddy these past few days. I watched…
Heading to Washington, DC to celebrate two zero hours
I am on my way to Washington, DC for zero hour, which as I write is a scant twenty-four hours…
Trump was elected to change the status quo
It turns out that the campaign was the easy part. For Donald Trump, winning the election was just securing the…
The master Kyè
Last month we took a quick trip to Tuscany. Among the wines we sampled was Sassicaia, the fabled Cabernet blend…
The ever-Continuing Resolution
In the 1870s, Gustave Flaubert assembled Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues, a humorous collection of “received ideas” and clichés then current…
Why Americans fear for Britain
As an American Anglophile, I find it difficult not to look upon the news emanating from Great Britain and despair.…
The three reasons Trump won
Bishop Butler once observed that probability is “the very guide of life.” This is true. It follows that possibility is cheap,…
Trump is Team MAGA’s last chance
Elon Musk has often commented that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election.” He often adds that, “far…
Trump and his lawyers take on the Syndicate
Who has better lawyers: Donald Trump or the Syndicate? The fate of the election, and hence the fate of the country, may well come down to the answer to that question. By “the Syndicate” (what I sometimes call “the Committee”),…
Trump calls for America’s New Golden Age at Madison Square Garden
No one with an open mind — you can even scratch the adjective — no sentient sapiens period can have…
Why Kamala Harris will lose
When you look back on the 2024 presidential election and try to understand why it was that Kamala Harris lost,…
A vindication for our polling obsession
One of the entertainments that every election season brings revolves around polling. Every season seems to bring more and more…
Democrats shouldn’t be surprised by Trump’s would-be assassins
What happens when you continually demonize someone as “Hitler,” insist that he is “a dictator” and “a threat to democracy?”…
Facing down the Democratic legal tsunami
Sydney Smith (1771-1845), the great English wit and Anglican divine, once said that he never read a book before reviewing…
Portuguese wines are back
Regular readers will recall my fondness for Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change, it is…
ABC News is the big loser of the Trump-Harris debate
The main takeaway from the ABC News ambus— er, presidential debate last night? That someone should sue the network for…
There is a little bit of Frank Sinatra in Donald Trump
Unless you are drinking from the cistern that Bill Kristol and his herd top off daily, you will have been…
The ‘real’ Kamala
I write at the end of July, just on the threshold of the “silly season,” “the months of August and…
Don’t be fooled by Tim Walz’s blandness
OK, it’s August 6, the anniversary of the detonation of Little Boy over the city of Hiroshima in 1945. That marked…
We should be grateful that Biden is going nowhere… for now
The question going into Joe Biden’s address to the national from the Oval Office tonight was: will he, having announced…
The Democrats do not care a whit about democracy
The events of the last few days have made incontrovertible something that candid observers have known for some time now:…
