Jacob Heilbrunn

The luck of the Irish was finally with Joseph Biden. Dismissed as a loser by much of the US political class, Biden had never won a primary until South Carolina. Next he had a super-duper day on Super Tuesday, clobbering Bernie Sanders in state after state. Sanders may take Texas and California, but Bernie is

It’s time for Donald Trump to take a leaf from Boris Johnson, for the master to take tuition from his pupil. Instead of trying to placate his critics, Trump should prorogue the American Congress. The approval rating of Congress is somewhere in the teens, even lower than Trump’s, so most Americans would likely greet such a move

Is Mitt Romney the mouse that roared? Or does he pose a real threat to President Trump? In his Washington Post op-ed, Romney bludgeons Trump: ‘the president has not risen to the mantle of his office.’ Move over Elizabeth Warren. It looks like the real civil war will be in the Republican, not the Democratic, party. Romney

As soon as Donald Trump says ‘I’ll be honest,’ which he did at his press conference today, you know he’s about to tell a lie. The media, he proclaimed, ‘really does bring disunity.’ No, it doesn’t. What it brings is coverage of his administration rather than the beatification that he craves. Trump’s performance was more

Today’s midterm election is bound to put a bit of swagger back into the steps of Democrats. If polls are anything to go by — and since when have they ever led anyone astray? — it will be a dolorous evening for Republicans as they watch state legislatures, governors, and Congress turn Democratic. CNN has

This is the beginning of the end of the Donald Trump presidency. The double whammy of Michael Cohen, his former fixer, pleading guilty on eight counts, including illegal hush money payments, or, to put it more precisely, campaign contributions, to two women at Trump’s personal direction for ‘the purpose of influencing the election,’ coupled with

After reciting the usual homilies about the need to interpret the American Constitution as it was written, President Trump appeared visibly bored once his nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, took the podium. Who could blame him? There was little Trump could do to inject much excitement into the proceedings and it’s never as

For the Democrats, the mounting furore over forcibly separating children from their parents at the border offers a golden opportunity before the midterm elections to tar Donald Trump as a heartless autocrat, a modern-day Baron Bomburst ruling over Vulgaria with his very own Child Catcher. Do a Caratacus Potts and Truly Scrumptious lurk in the

The reviews are coming in for Donald Trump’s performance in Singapore and they aren’t pretty. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times says Trump was ‘hoodwinked’. Ari Fleischer, the former press spokesman for George W. Bush, says ‘This feels like the Agreed Framework of the 90s all over again. NK gave its word to abandon

So much for the “World Peace” that Donald Trump bragged he would create at the June 12th Singapore summit. In a wildly inappropriate letter that veered between a bullying and lachrymose tone, Trump bowed to the inevitable in canceling the summit with Kim Jong-un. He had to do it before Kim did. Already Kim had the upper

Washington, DC It was a petulant Donald Trump who appeared at a White House press briefing on Tuesday with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in. When a reporter asked if Trump had confidence in the deputy attorney-general, Rod Rosenstein, given the latest complicated twists in the investigation into collusion with Russia, Trump snapped that Moon

Washington, DC. With Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, American foreign policy is getting radioactive. “We cannot prevent a nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the agreement,” Trump declared with his habitual understatement. The only thing missing was another shot at Barack Obama for bothering to negotiate with