Watching the GOP convention, you could be forgiven for believing that almost all the brightest stars in the Republican firmament are Trumps. Members of the Trump family were among the best, most high-profile performers. During the first two nights of the convention, the hall began to empty as soon as the Trumps left the stage, […]

President Barack Obama is a lawyer, not a statistician, and it shows. After the controversial officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, Obama unloosed a series of statistics in his remarks in Warsaw, Poland, to show “racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system” — in other words, racial bias by […]

Hillary Clinton has scored a highly characteristic political “victory” — namely, not getting indicted. During a political season when “rigged” has been the most emotive description of the economy and political system, Hillary and her enablers have conducted what appears to be a seminar in Rigged 101. First, Bill Clinton had an impromptu “social” meeting […]

Donald Trump is an optimist. He believes there is nothing wrong with America that autarky can’t fix. Trump’s trade speech was a high-octane assault on the American free-trade regime that has been a matter of a bipartisan consensus for decades and a bulwark of the post-World War II international order — not to mention an […]

Democracy is too important to be left to the people. That is the global elite’s collective reaction to Britain’s vote to exit the European Union, which is being portrayed as the work of ill-informed xenophobes who never should have been entrusted with a decision of such world-historical importance. Judging by their dismissive tone, critics of […]

One of Donald Trump’s political skills is giving widely condemned speeches. His post-Orlando jeremiad fit the pattern, but the speech was a little like Wagner’s music as described in the famous Mark Twain line: Not as bad as it sounds. There is something so inherently inflammatory in Trump’s delivery that he could read the Gettysburg […]

Almost as soon as the massacre at the Orlando nightclub Pulse ended, Democrats took up their push to forbid people on the terrorism watch list from purchasing guns. The timing, in the wake of the awful shock of the Orlando attack, was right, and the talking points wrote themselves. The polling was, of course, very […]

President Barack Obama desperately wanted to be a peacetime president, yet is ending his second term with Islamic terror attacks looming larger than at any time since 9/11. The tide of war isn’t receding, as he famously contended in a speech on the Afghan drawdown in 2011; it is lapping onto our shores. The left […]

The astonishing spectacle of a speaker of the House not endorsing a presidential nominee of his own party has been supplanted by the astonishing spectacle of a speaker of the House declaring that the nominee he endorsed said something racist. Paul Ryan endorsed Donald Trump just in time for the Gonzalo Curiel furor. Ryan unloaded […]