McConnell is the most talented majority leader in a generation. He has complete control of his caucus and understands and exploits their weaknesses, ambitions, and desires. In an impeachment trial where his members knew Trump's guilt was absolute and unequivocal, he bribed and browbeat them into submission.
I think Trump is so dangerous because the people that he appeals to the most have this sense of despair and oppression that has become a central defining characteristic of their lives. And they feel like only he is their avatar; only he will fight for them; only he will keep the wolf from the proverbial door.
Free-market capitalism doesn't pick economic winners and losers based on the president's economic nostalgia, and limited-government conservatism isn't marked a top-down ideological conformity strictly enforced by state media organs.
In 1974, Democrats gained 49 House seats and four Senate seats. It wasn't just the Watergate scandal that drove Democratic wins, but the sense that Republicans had defended corruption and criminality in the White House.
I was born in Florida. My first political campaign was as a field director for George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988.
It's not a secret that Ted Cruz isn't my first choice for the Republican nomination for president. His smug Poindexter affect, his smarm, sanctimony, and general derpiness all grate on me. There's no doubt he's smart, but while smart is necessary, it's not necessarily sufficient.
Clintons lie with facility, intent, and design.
Disasters happen. Nature refuses to cooperate with the best-laid plans of kings and lesser men alike.
Donald Trump's campaign is good at two things; hoovering up hundreds of millions of dollars from MAGA fans and spending them to move his poll numbers... nowhere.
The first two weeks of Donald Trump's Presidency made it clear: Trump's Gonna Trump. No newfound dignity for him.
As consequential and as deadly as the coronavirus pandemic has been, and will continue to be, the Trump media machine can't stop and won't stop its relentless propagandizing and historical revision. Trump is the hero.
In a depressing twist, many members of my party and ideological persuasion have become advocates for Donald Trump on a scale that ranges from grudging to toadying, for a simple reason that seems to overwhelm all other factors: He attacks the media. Many are willing to forgive almost any sin because of it.
When the 2010 election swept Republicans into office in a massive tidal wave, they were part of a philosophical and ideological change. They were bound by a set of limited-government principles. To be sure, sometimes loosely and imperfectly so, but the Tea Party wave was driven by ideas, not a singular, authoritarian personality.
Trump's 2016 effort could afford to be a shambolic circus; nothing was on the line. He never expected to win and so the rotating cast of campaign managers didn't really matter.
We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation's heart.
No bully ever turns down a free shot when his posse pins back your arms.
Trump's inability to relate actions to consequences, his profound intellectual ambivalence about history, strategy and facts, in addition to his notoriously delicate ego, combine to create a risk we've never seen in a President during a nuclear crisis.
If there's one thing no one will ever mistake Ted Cruz for, it's a charismatic cult leader. Cruz scans more as the accountant for the charismatic cult leader than the guy ladling out the Kool Aid.
I believed that the donor class would cringe at the vast threat Donald Trump poses to the entire Republican Party, its brand, its prospects for expansion, and the nation.
I'm not a squishy liberal Republican.
