https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/feedPJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usSun, 12 Apr 2026 01:27:07 -0400<![CDATA[I feel I must hand it to those stalwart souls investigating the devastating conflagration at the Cathedral of Notre Dame Monday. The flames were not quenched at the 12th-century masterpiece of Gothic architecture when the authorities announced that they had ruled out arson as the cause of the blaze. (Some reports hedged their bets by adding “for now”; most were more apodictic.)]]>Wed, 17 Apr 2019 07:41:22 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2019/04/17/why-were-authorities-so-quick-to-rule-out-arson-in-the-notre-dame-conflagration-n118857<![CDATA[Being of a charitable disposition, I early on decided that the kindest response to The Bulwark, the NeverTrump redoubt started by Bill Kristol following the implosion of the Weekly Standard, was silence. If this tiny cohort of bitter and unhappy souls was determined to embarrass themselves in public, the best we could do was turn away. Non ragioniam di lor, as Dante says in another context, ma guarda e passa. It would be cruel to let daylight in upon madness.]]>Thu, 14 Mar 2019 08:45:07 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2019/03/14/the-bulwark-embarrasses-itself-further-with-attack-on-victor-davis-hanson-n118849<![CDATA[I have no doubt that some theatrical director specializing in the work of Samuel Beckett has been eying the investigation of Robert Mueller with envy. After all, what the nation calls “Waiting for Mueller” has been running nearly two years and, just as in the famous Beckett absurdity, the title character never shows up. We’re told that may be coming to an end, that finally, at last, Mueller really will deliver the goods, as soon as next week, CNN reported. But then it was CNN that reported it, so of course it turned out not to be true but just another installment of its fake news machine. Still, soon, soon, he’ll be wrapping up “soon,” just as he was last spring, this past summer, and all through the fall. He’s shedding lawyers, he’s wrapping up, he’ll be done &#8230; soon.]]>Wed, 27 Feb 2019 08:19:59 -0500<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2019/02/27/democrats-are-interminably-waiting-for-mueller-just-as-in-samuel-becketts-absurdity-n118845<![CDATA[Familiarity, it is said, breeds contempt. It also breeds indifference. For almost three years now, the intelligence services and police apparatus of the deep state have worked tirelessly to undermine Donald Trump. Beginning sometime in the late winter of 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was showing unexpected signs of strength, John Brennan—the Communist-voting apparatchik turned media mouthpiece whom it pleased Barack Obama to appoint as director of the CIA—began ringing alarm bells about Trump’s possible relations with the Kremlin. His concern was based on two things. One was a report, spurious as it turned out, about “contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians.” The other was that brittle sense of entitlement, fired by paranoia, that membership in the higher echelons of the deep state’s nomenklatura breeds.]]>Mon, 14 Jan 2019 09:33:32 -0500<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]><![CDATA[Donald Trump]]><![CDATA[FBI]]><![CDATA[Russia]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2019/01/14/watergate-by-any-other-name-n118842<![CDATA[In June 2016, I was in London and reported extensively on the Brexit referendum in these pages (see here, for example, and here, here, here, and here). It was, briefly, an ebullient moment. I had been assured by everyone from taxicab drivers to Tory ministers that Brexit hadn’t a chance in hell of passing, and a good thing, too, because it represented “nativist,” “racist,” and “xenophobic” (not to mention Islamophobic and economically illiterate) elements of the population.]]>Fri, 16 Nov 2018 12:28:03 -0500<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/11/16/just-brexit-the-uks-future-is-with-the-anglosphere-n118835<![CDATA[As I write, the 2018 midterm elections are just a week away. What is at stake? There have been lakes of ink, and whatever the digital equivalent of ink is, spilt pondering that question.]]>Wed, 31 Oct 2018 11:34:32 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/10/31/they-cant-bear-the-thought-that-trumps-win-was-no-anomaly-n118830<![CDATA[As the spurious case against Brett Kavanaugh disintegrates, splinters, and re-forms into a cacophony of whiny, irrelevant expostulations, it is instructive to step back and survey the field upon which this battle took place.]]>Wed, 03 Oct 2018 09:30:33 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/10/03/its-all-gone-the-democrats-dead-ideals-n118827<![CDATA[Anyone who doubts that those in charge of the operation of Providence have a sly sense of humor needs only to ponder the sweet declarations emitted by our more pampered celebrities on the subject of socialism.  Consider, for example, the actor Jim Carrey, who recently told Bill Maher that “we have to say yes to socialism — to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing.”]]>Mon, 10 Sep 2018 13:12:12 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/09/10/the-intoxicating-effects-of-socialist-benevolence-n118816<![CDATA[One the strangest features of our political life in the United States today is the reckless abandon of our rhetoric. “Oh, that’s because Donald Trump has debased political discourse,” you say. “He calls women ‘dogs,&#8217; he refers to Kim Jong-un as ‘Rocket Man,’ he says the press is ‘fake news’ and the ‘enemy of the people,’” etc., etc. But that’s not the whole story, is it?  Some diligent scribe should do a little historical digging and tabulate where, in each case of rhetorical Trumpery, the insults and opprobrium started.  Did Donald Trump start the abuse?  Or did his targets open hostilities? In many, maybe most (maybe all) cases I suspect you will find that Trump’s invectives were rejoinders, i.e., responses to earlier provocations and expressions of contempt.  Trump made fun of “low-energy Jeb,” but wasn’t that after Jeb said some pretty disagreeable things about Trump? In any event, however the matter of precedent shakes out, there is also the issue of extreme rhetoric feeding extreme feelings and extreme actions. Simply put, the anti-Trump chorus has worked itself into a frenzy of trembling rage and hysterical overstatement.  Trump is Hitler (literally); his behavior is “treasonous” (or, as The New York Times put it, he is a “treasonous traitor”); he is a “fascist,” a “moron,&#8221; a “tyrant” who (as tyrants tend to do) is taking the United States down “the path to tyranny.” Et very much cetera. Now in one sense this is just business as usual when a Republican is in office.  Every GOP president going back at least to Nixon has been compared to Hitler. If Hitler hadn’t existed, the Left would have had to invent him.  Even squeaky clean Mitt Romney was Hitler for a Day, an evil man who (maybe) once bullied a classmate in high school and later put the family dog in a cage on the roof of his car.  Horrors! All this is well-trod ground.  If you’re conservative, you’re evil by definition and its open season as far as the mainstream media is concerned. But the reaction to Donald Trump, although it began by following this playbook, has mutated into something different and more toxic. One expression of that toxic difference is the cabal of former high-ranking government officials who, in a marked departure from past practice, have embarked on very public campaigns against the president. One thinks of jabbering John Brennan, Obama’s head of the CIA, for example. Brennan’s incontinent ravings on Twitter and on MSNBC have been as embarrassing as they are alarming.  James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, has not been far behind in his commentary at CNN.  And then there is the smarmiest of them all, Obama’s FBI director, the moist James Comey, who wrote a bestselling book about how noble and high-minded he is and how horrible and misguided is President Trump. Once upon a time, and it was not a long time ago, people who had been entrusted with such august responsibilities would have maintained a dignified silence upon leaving office.  Donald Trump has catalyzed them (as he has catalyzed Hillary Clinton) into an embarrassing emunctory garrulousness. (There is also the little matter of lucre: those contracts with CNN and MSNBC, those book advances and royalties.) But there is something else, something darker and more twisted, at work here. In the Republic, Socrates notes that while many people may lie with abandon, the one thing no one can countenance is the “lie in the soul” that makes it impossible to distinguish reliably between truth and falsehood. I suspect that anti-Trump hyperbole has insinuated such a reality-distorting lozenge into the hearts of many of the anti-Trump brethren. Examples are legion, but let me offer just one, by Eliot Cohen, the crusading neo-conservative, from “How This Will End,” his most recent essay for The Atlantic. The column carries the sub-head “Sooner or later, tyrants are always abandoned by their followers.” “Tyrants,” forsooth. Authors often are not responsible for the titles or headings that are attached to their pieces.  But in this instance the headings accurately reflect the tenor of the column. According to Cohen, Donald Trump is a “tyrant” who will eventually (and probably soon) be abandoned by his disillusioned followers. Cohen begins his exposition by recalling Watergate and the disintegration of the Nixon administration and isolation of the president. Comparisons between Watergate and whatever unholy grail Robert Mueller is pursuing have been a staple of anti-Trump commentary since the investigation began. I think the comparison is strained and unconvincing, but it has become a standard trope and no one at this point can blame Eliot Cohen from inserting it as a throat-clearer at the beginning of his column. But the comparison with Nixon is just the warm-up.  The personage that Cohen thinks Trump really resembles is Macbeth, the regicide tyrant and usurper, the murderer of the families of rivals and all-round power-mad evil doer. Just like Macbeth, Cohen suggests, Trump will find himself scorned and abandoned by his followers. Actually, for Cohen, Trump is much worse than Macbeth, who at least was “faithful to his wife, has a conscience (that he overcomes), knows guilt and remorse, and has self-knowledge. He also has a pretty good command of the English language. In all these respects he is as unlike Trump as one can be.” Okee-doke. “Really [to] get the feel for the Trump administration’s end,” Cohen writes, “we must turn to the finest political psychologist of them all, William Shakespeare.” Cohen then quotes this bit: Those he commands move only in command,Nothing in love. Now does he feel his titleHang loose about him, like a giant’s robeUpon a dwarfish thief. It would be interesting to ask Mike Pompeo or John Bolton or Jim Mattis about this characterization. But more revelatory, though inadvertently so, is Cohen’s comment that if “for the moment . . .  the Republicans will not turn on Trump” it is because “they fear a peasant revolt.” A “peasant revolt,” you see, a revolt of all those “deplorable” and “irredeemable” people that finer folk like Eliot Cohen somehow and mistakenly entrusted with the franchise. They—we—voted the wrong way but the tyrant, Trump, will soon disintegrate and then the rats (that would be us) will crowd along the gangways to abandon the ship.  Once Eliot Cohen gets going, he really lets it go.  Donald Trump is not only worse than Macbeth, he is slotted for something worse than Mussolini’s fate, too.  Musso “at least had his mistress, Claretta Petacci, with him at his ignominious end,” Cohen writes, but “Melania’s affections are considerably less certain.” What the hell does Eliot Cohen know about Melania Trump? Anyway, in his fevered dream, “This is going to happen to Trump at some point,” Cohen predicts.  He then quotes from the end of Macbeth where Macduff taunts the king before their final battle. If he won’t fight, then he will be humiliated and “Live to be the show and gaze o’ th’ time./ We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,/ Painted upon a pole, and underwrit / ‘Here may you see the tyrant’.” This, according to Eliot Cohen, is how the Trump administration is likely to end, “as Americans gaze back and wonder how on earth this rare monster, now deposed, ended up as their president.” What do you think of Cohen’s analysis and prognostication?  I think it is insane. It possesses a certain dramatic urgency, granted.  But it is based on a surreal misreading of what President Trump has actually done. Unlike Macbeth, he has not murdered anyone to become or remain our leader. He was elected in a free, open, and democratic election. Think about it: Trump has actually governed not as a tyrant but as an energetic democrat. Under his watch, the economy is booming, unemployment is at historic lows, consumer confidence is skyrocketing.  He has made scores of enlightened judicial appointments and is on the threshold of rescuing the Supreme Court from its long flirtation with with radical jurisprudence.  He has taken major steps to rebuild our military, roll back the regulatory state, and reassert the prestige of the United States on the world stage. I suspect that, come 2024, when President Trump completes his second successful term, Americans will indeed look back, but to the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of a second President Clinton in 2016. They will then wonder how they could have been so misguided as to have elected a naive, anti-American race-hustler like Barack Obama not once but twice, and they will thank their lucky stars that they dodged the bullet of a Hillary Clinton administration, which would have completed the anti-freedom agenda of the deep state and assured generations of economic lassitude and dependency. Cohen is correct that Shakespeare is relevant to the Trump administration. But the pertinent play is The Tempest, not Macbeth. In Act II, a few of the shipwrecked men are taking stock of their situation on Prospero’s enchanted island. It soon becomes clear that the island appears very different to different characters: ADRIAN: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.SEBASTIAN: As if it had lungs and rotten ones.ANTONIO: Or as &#8217;twere perfumed by a fen.GONZALO: Here is everything advantageous to life.ANTONIO: True; save means to live.SEBASTIAN: Of that there&#8217;s none, or little.GONZALO: How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!ANTONIO: The ground indeed is tawny.SEBASTIAN: With an eye of green in&#8217;t.ANTONIO: He misses not much.SEBASTIAN: No; he doth but mistake the truth totally. As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that Gonzalo sees the world aright while Antonio and Sebastian are caught in the grip of a fevered delusion.  Their animus and hatred blinded them to reality. The increasingly fanatic and hysterical anti-Trump chorus would do well to reflect on that phenomenon. Their hyperbole has begotten an alarming disconnection from the real world of solid political accomplishment.  The situation is pitiable as well as contemptible. But the malignancy of their vituperation disarms pity before it can even engage. All that is left is contempt, leavened by anger.]]>Sat, 25 Aug 2018 22:22:39 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/08/25/how-anti-trump-hyperbole-fosters-insanity-n118812<![CDATA[I liked what the great Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch had to say about the heavily redacted 400-page DOJ document dump regarding the FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page. It is, he said, a “self-licking ice cream cone.” The image is appropriately surreal.]]>Sun, 22 Jul 2018 18:35:41 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/07/22/its-oakland-in-muellerville-n118806<![CDATA[“To every thing,” observed the sage of Ecclesiastes, “there is a season&#8230;. A time to be born, and a time to die; &#8230; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up,” et cetera. What this estimable observer of human life omitted from his bracing catalogue of oppositions is the fact that one side of these partnerships tends to be much easier to accomplish than the other.]]>Tue, 03 Jul 2018 09:20:54 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/07/03/as-trump-builds-the-resistance-shouts-destroy-n118803<![CDATA[What William Faulkner said about the past &#8212; it isn’t dead: it isn’t even past &#8212; seems especially true about that convulsive decade, the 1960s. For many observers, 1968 was the annus mirabilis (or perhaps “horribilis” would be more accurate) and the month of May, with its many protests, student demonstrations, acts of violence, and drug-related spectacles, was the epicenter of the year. Now that the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968 is upon us, what does the wisdom of hindsight tell us about that curious moment?]]>Tue, 29 May 2018 10:46:01 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/05/29/the-long-march-reckoning-with-1968s-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-n118798<![CDATA[It has been a yeasty couple of weeks for President Trump. Last Monday, he, like the rest of us, learned that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had his home, office, hotel, and safe deposit box hoovered by gumshoes at the direction of prosecutors from the Southern District of New York. They carried away the stuff by the boatload—documents, computers, cell phones, tablets: the lot. If you discerned the dogged hand of Special Counsel Robert Mueller in this breathtaking episode, you would not be wrong. Although carried out by feds in N.Y., who apparently had been investigating Cohen “for months,” it was done at the behest of the special counsel.]]>Sat, 14 Apr 2018 22:55:29 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/04/14/robert-muellers-excellent-adventure-n118793<![CDATA[Fish got to swim, birds got to fly, I gotta get one man till I die, Can&#8217;t help nabbin’ dat man of mine. &#8212; Adapted from Showboat]]>Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:16:12 -0500<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/03/06/robert-mueller-vacuum-activities-n118788<![CDATA[Anyone who has waded through first-year Latin will remember future-less-vivid conditional phrases. Those are the “if he were to, then I would” conditions in which Latin uses the present subjunctive: “If the President were to release the Congressman’s Memo, the Left would go stark raving mad.” Well, he did, and they did, which I guess means we have moved into the indicative. I have some other conditionals that I’d like to present to the President for his consideration—if you have his ear, I’d appreciate it if you would bring them to his attention—but first a few words about The Memo and The Madness. The virtual ink wasn’t dry on the much-anticipated Memo—a four-page summary of “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation” prepared by the GOP majority of the House Intelligence Committee—before a cataract of commentary flooded the airwaves and cyber hustings. Among the best commentary on the Right were “Worse Than Watergate” by Chris Buskirk at American Greatness, “Why Did the Democrats Lie So Baldly About the Memo?” by my PJ colleague Roger L. Simon, “Trump Triumphs with Release of House Intel Memo,” byDavid Goldman (another PJ colleague), and Mark Steyn’s withering  “Uncandid in Camera.” Andrew McCarthy did his usual service of providing a patient and meticulous legal analysis of the memo and what it means for the key players based on what we know so far. The “so far” is important. For these are early days in the memo-publishing biz. The Democrats, claiming that the GOP “cherry picked” and distorted the findings of the Committee’s findings,  are preparing to release their own summary. And Devin Nunes, the GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has described Friday’s memo as merely “phase one.” “We are in the middle of what I call phase two of our investigation,” Nunes said on Fox News, “which involves other departments, specifically the State Department and some of the involvement that they had in [the Trump-Russia investigation].” There has been such a blizzard of accusation and counter-accusation that it is a little difficult to keep clear on what all the sound and fury is about. Taken together, the columns I link to above provide a pretty comprehensive guide for the perplexed. But boiling it all down for prime time I would say the issue is this: did the Obama administration weaponize the police apparatus of the U.S. government (the DOJ and the FBI) in order to spy on its political opponents, aid the campaign of Hillary Clinton, and then, after she lost, sabotage the incoming administration of Donald Trump? Put thus baldly, it sounds like an improbable plot for a political thriller, Shack of Cards, say. This is where the future less vivid comes in. Consider this list of allegations, drawn from his reading of the memo, compiled by Chris Buskirk. “Based on what we know now,” Buskirk wrote, [T]he conspiracy to undermine candidate Trump and later to destroy President Trump may have been limited to the Justice Department and FBI. That would be bad enough—and a serious threat to representative government striking, as it does, at the efficacy of our elections—but it may also have extended to the West Wing where U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, at a minimum, used “national security” as a rationale to insert themselves into the election. If these things were true, what then? While you’re pondering that, consider a few of the specific points that Buskirk raises: 1. The FBI’s case to the FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court was based almost entirely upon a partisan hit-job bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. Christopher Steele, the source of the dossier, had “financial and ideological motivations” to undermine Donald Trump according to the Nunes memo. In fact, the FBI’s file records that Steele told Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr that “he was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” 2. Ohr’s wife was one of just seven employees at Fusion GPS, the firm that was paying Christopher Steele. The personal financial relationship between the Ohrs and the dossier was concealed from the court. 3. The FBI could not corroborate the information in the Steele dossier, calling it only “minimally corroborated” but did not disclose this fact to the FISA Court thus leading it to believe that the information in the dossier was either FBI work-product or that it had been independently corroborated by the FBI. Neither was true. 4.  The FBI did not disclose that the source of the information which formed the basis of their FISA application was a paid political operative of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. 5. The FBI and the Department of Justice intentionally misled the FISA court in their applications to obtain authority to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. They did this not once, but on four separate occasions over the course of a year, including after Donald Trump was in office. The misleading applications were signed off by James Comey (three times), Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rosenstein. If these things were true, what then? Well, if you are James Comey, former director of the FBI, it’s time to play Walt Whitman, become large, and contradict yourself.  Since being fired by Donald Trump last May, Comey has competed with the President in issuing provocative tweets. In response to the Nunes memo, he went full Dada. On the one hand, he tweeted Friday, it was no big deal. “That’s it?” On the other hand, the “Dishonest [how?] and misleading [where?] memo” 1. “wrecked the House intel committee” [really?] 2. “destroyed trust with Intelligence Community” [holy cow!],  3. “damaged relationship with FISA court” [tell us how, Jim], and 4. &#8220;inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen” [exactly what classified info? And, anyway, shouldn’t we mostly be concerned that you were spying on an American citizen to aid a political candidate whom you liked and damage another whom you didn’t?]. Let’s see if we can help poor Jim Comey with the last question in this bizarre tweet: “For what?” he asks. In other words, why did Devin Nunes seek to release the memo and why did the President declassify it so that it could legally be released? (Note this last point: the information in the memo was not classified by definition because the President of the United States, under the power vested in him by the Constitution, declassified it.) How’s this for a first stab at an answer to Comey’s question? Because when you were director of the FBI you oversaw and abetted the illegal spying on American citizens for partisan political reasons, because you misled the FISA Court in applying for the surveillance warrant, and because you were knowingly part of an effort to sabotage first a presidential campaign and then a presidential administration that you did not like. This is leaving aside your possibly felonious actions in leaking classified information yourself. How’s that for  starters? Let’s see if Adam Schiff, or Chuck Schumer, or Nancy Pelosi or their PR flaks at CNN, The Washington Post, and kindred organs of undeplorable enlightenment have any convincing  rejoinders to that description. Jerry Nadler’s pathetic response Saturday shows just how desperate they are. [Update: Andy McCarthy eviscerates Nadler&#8217;s sorry performance here.] In the meantime, consider this: According to the Nunes memo, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCade testified before Congress that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the [FISA Court] without the Steele dossier information.” But these spooks are thorough. They didn’t rest when they got a pack of unverified gossip from a declared Trump-hater who scraped together what even Comey described as  his “salacious and unverified” skein of innuendo from various unnamed Russian sources, all paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign (funneled through two levels of intermediary institutions, a law firm and Fusion GPS). No, these G-Men are serious. They confirmed information. How? By referring to a Yahoo News story (don’t laugh) whose author, Michael Isikoff, confirmed that the only source for his article was (wait for it) Christopher Steele! Yep. As Mark Steyn put it, “the Government got its surveillance warrant by arguing that its fake-news dossier from Christopher Steele had been independently corroborated by a fake-news story from Christopher Steele. Either,” Steyn concludes, “the FBI is exceedingly stupid, which would be disturbing, given their lavish budget. Or the same tight group of FBI/DoJ officials knew very well what they were doing in presenting such drivel to the FISA court.” Which is it? While you are waiting, let me move on to my promised scraps of advice for the President. If it were the case, as has been alleged, that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein threatened to subpoena texts and messages from Devin Nunes and other Congressional members of the intelligence committee because he was “tired of dealing with the committee,” then the President should fire Rosenstein. “I didn’t want to do it,” he could say, “but my administration respects the process of Congressional oversight.” If it were the case that Congressional Democrats refuse to come to a deal about DACA with the President, then the President, starting March 5 when the current legislation expires, should start deporting illegal immigrants. 1000 on the 5th, 1000 on the 6th, 1000 on the 7th, and so on. “I didn’t want to do it,” he could say, “but my administration stands for enforcing the law, and so they have to go.” If it were to happen that the Democrats refuse to do their job and vote on a budget, then the President should once again let the government shut down and hang responsibility for the resulting pain around the neck of Chuck Schumer and his enablers. “I didn’t want to do it,” he might say, “but my administration upholds the law. I had to do it.” I am sure other scraps of advice will occur to me in due course. But that’s a bit to be getting on with. Besides, Memo-Madness promises to grip the country like no scandal since Watergate. Doubtless there are twists and turns yet to be revealed, but from what we know so far I’d say that the primary “Russian collusion” to be revealed by Mr. Mueller’s probe will turn out to be between the Hillary Clinton campaign and, via that energetic fantasist Christopher Steele, unnamed Russians. I also suspect that the effort of the FBI, goaded by the Obama administration and Hillary’s satellites, to rig the election and then, when that didn’t work, to delegitimize the duly elected President of the United States will emerge as the biggest political scandal in our nation’s history. Let’s see if I am right.]]>Sun, 04 Feb 2018 13:40:39 -0500<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2018/02/04/thoughts-future-less-vivid-scraps-advice-president-trump-n118784<![CDATA[It was the best of years, it was the worst of years.]]>Mon, 25 Dec 2017 22:44:58 -0500<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2017/12/25/tale-two-years-n118780<![CDATA[]]>Thu, 16 Nov 2017 08:32:48 -0500<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2017/11/16/a-good-thing-not-a-bad-thing-n118776<![CDATA[The policy take-away from President Trump’s remarks last night at the Heritage Foundation centered around tax cuts. The president likes ‘em, and if he has his way (and on this issue, I think he will), we will see a sharp cut to the corporate tax rate (from 35 percent to 20 percent), a simplification and reduction of the individual tax rate, and a big expansion of the individual exemption (to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for married couples filing jointly).]]>Wed, 18 Oct 2017 07:35:20 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2017/10/18/donald-trump-american-patriot-stamp-ronald-reagan-n118773<![CDATA[In Federalist 10, James Madison observes:]]>Thu, 03 Aug 2017 07:32:39 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]><![CDATA[Donald Trump]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2017/08/03/could-donald-trump-do-anything-to-win-the-nevertrumpers-n118769<![CDATA[Apart, that is, from exploiting its special privileges in order to enrich the members of that most exculsive club.]]>Sun, 23 Jul 2017 07:49:44 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]><![CDATA[Congress]]><![CDATA[Donald Trump]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2017/07/23/mommy-what-does-does-congress-actually-do-n118766