Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest. He lives in Washington DC
Donald Trump has become the Conor McGregor of American politics. For weeks tensions have been mounting in the capital of the free world as Republicans and Democrats prepared to square off over the debt ceiling and a government shutdown. The climactic showdown was supposed to take place at the White House yesterday. But in the
Steve Bannon is out. H.R McMaster is in. It’s now starting to dawn upon some of Donald Trump’s most ardent admirers that they’ve been had. The main accomplishment of the Trump revolution has not been to forward populism. It has been to devour its own children. Trump entered office declaring that ‘this carnage ends now’. Not
On Sunday morning the White House, in an unsigned statement, came out swinging against ‘nephew-nazi and all extremist groups.’ Leave it to the Trump administration to bungle even the wording of neo-Nazi in its belated attempt to distance itself from the sanguinary events that took place on Saturday in the bucolic town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where
Wednesday marked the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender in a radio address, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. After 1945, Japan developed a pacifist movement and a so-called peace constitution. No country has deployed these
Today is the 72nd anniversary of the America atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a lovely port city that also served as a Japanese naval base during the second world war. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce in a radio address Japan’s surrender, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. The
That was fast. Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House communications director before he could even really begin communicating Donald Trump’s message. He was a kind of Trump mini-me, down to mastering his hand movements. But his wildly objurgatory language over the past week–directed primarily at former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and
Poor Reince Priebus. Or maybe not so poor. A munificent book deal surely looms in which he can chronicle his serial humiliations at the hands of Donald Trump who, as is his wont, made the announcement on Twitter that retired general John Kelly, the director of the Homeland Security, will now become White House chief of
Here we go again. NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump Jnr. somehow forgot to mention that a former Soviet counterintelligence officer was also present at his pow-wow with a Russian lawyer. The man in question, Rinat Akhmetsin, has denied ever being affiliated with Russian spy agencies. But as NBC politely put it, “the presence at the
Let there be no doubt: it’s turning into the political equivalent of Defcon 1, the highest level of nuclear alert, for the Trump administration. There can be no greater irony than that Donald Trump, who thundered about Hillary Clinton’s secret email server during the election campaign, could be undone by an email disseminated by his
Donald Trump is now referring to himself in his copious Twitter messages as ‘T’. Unlike the real Mr. T, who starred in the popular 1980s American television series The A-Team, however, President Trump is unable to muscle his way to victory. Quite the contrary. Thanks to majority leader Mitch McConnell’s sudden decision yesterday to abandon a
If Theresa May is ousted, or simply tires of her job as Prime Minister, might she consider emigrating to the United States and joining the Trump administration? For my part, I very much hope she does contemplate it. As big a challenge as Brexit may be, it likely pales in comparison to instilling a sense
Forget Russia. Georgia, as the song has it, should be on Donald Trump’s mind. A special election for the House of Representatives takes place there on June 20. The state’s 6th district congressional seat has been comfortably in Republican hands for decades. A hitherto obscure Democrat by the name of Jon Ossoff is leading by seven points
When Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, he fulfilled what is presumably the dream of George F. Will, one of America’s pre-eminent climate change deniers. Yet Will is not fond of Trump. In fact Will, America’s Tory manqué, is manifestly unhappy about the ascension of Donald
If, as seems increasingly likely, Jeremy Corbyn becomes British Prime Minister in June, his victory should be greeted not simply with incredulity in the United States, but also elation. A Corbyn triumph should arrive as soothing balm to Donald Trump’s wounded feelings. Corbyn stands for much of what Trump has espoused. Both men revile NATO,
In 1981, when President Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union, Washington Post columnist George F. Will went on to complain that the Reagan administration ‘loved commerce more than it loathed communism’. Well, yes. American conservatives have, more often than not, put commercial interests before ideological ones. Sometimes the two even coincide. For all
On Wednesday John Kerry managed to attract more attention with what amounted to a declaration of failure than any success he has achieved during his tenure as Secretary of State. In his speech blasting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which came on the heels of US abstention on a United Nations resolution condemning settlements, Kerry
Former State Department official Eliot A. Cohen is a prominent neoconservative who has led the ‘Never Trump’ faction of the Republican party. After Trump was elected, he suggested that younger Republican national security wonks might consider working for him. But it didn’t take long for Cohen to rescind that advice: ‘After exchange [with] Trump transition team,
Once upon a time Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being soft on Russia. Irving Kristol, writing in Commentary in 1952, famously allowed that Joseph McCarthy was a ‘vulgar demagogue’ but emphasised that ‘there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American
Poor Donald Trump. Even Utah, which has voted for Republican presidential candidates with metronomic regularity since 1964 and which I’m visiting for a few days, looks like it’s about to turn its back on the New York tycoon. There are no ‘Make America Great’ or Trump signs in Salt Lake City, the citadel of the
Washington, DC A few weeks ago, I attended the 40th gala dinner of a Washington think tank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the St Regis Hotel, just down the street from the White House. William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard and unrepentant champion of the Iraq War, was the MC
