Free Republic

I offered to help prep Chris Christie for the debate with Donald Trump. Christie helped prep Trump in 2016, saying he played Hillary Clinton very aggressively so that Trump would think the real thing was “a cakewalk.” And now, sitting at a table in the Times cafeteria with the former New Jersey governor, I figured I could play Trump. We have both known the blackguard for decades. And let’s be honest. We want Christie on that wall. After years of watching Republicans cower before Trump, it’s bracing to see the disgraced former president finally meet his mean match. Even my...

I miss torturing Liz Cheney. But it must be said that the petite blonde from Wyoming suddenly seems like a Valkyrie amid halflings. She is willing to sacrifice her leadership post – and risk her political career – to continue calling out Donald Trump’s Big Lie. She has decided that if the price of her job is being as unctuous to Trump as Kevin McCarthy is, it isn’t worth it, because McCarthy is totally disgracing himself. It has been a dizzying fall for the scion of one of the most powerful political families in the land, a conservative chip off...

Donald Trump was right. Germs are scary. For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germophobe had a big hospital-strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt. He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldn’t eat afterward. Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis...

When it comes to presidential obstruction, at least Watergate started with a crime. A stupid crime, but a crime. After 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, $30 million spent, endless jaw-jaw on cable and countless whiny Trump tweets, we have come down to one fundamental truth. And it’s the same truth that has been terrorising us all along: Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity. The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id. President Trump obstructed on nearly every...

Melania has learned a few things from the master. The first lady will never be as brilliant at trolling as her husband. He is an idiot-savant who plays in the roiling ocean of Twitter as naturally as a blubbery-necked sea lion. Only Donald Trump, a Rat Pack relic who spurred the reckoning with his transgressions toward women, could send out a tweet taking credit for the women’s march. But the Slovenian Sphinx has her moments. It started when she seemed to sartorially upbraid Trump for his Billy Bush vulgarities by wearing a pussy-bow blouse to the St. Louis debate. Then,...

Donald Trump was promising to destroy a vile criminal cartel. Unfortunately, not his own. But one could be forgiven for mistaking the vicious tactics of the MS-13 gang, as described by the president in a Long Island speech on Friday, with those of the Trump White House. “They don’t like shooting people because it’s too quick, it’s too fast,” Trump said, adding: “They like to knife them and cut them, and let them die slowly because that way, it’s more painful, and they enjoy watching that much more. These are animals.” The president could have been describing his own sadistic...

Dear Donald, We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt. You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician? Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician. After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator. I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning. And you,...

WASHINGTON — Now, stacked on the Trump tower of petrifying things we have to worry about — war with Iran, war with China, war with Mexico, war with Islam, war with koala bears — there is yet another looming disaster. The East Wing is perilously behind in planning for the Easter Egg Roll. Is the White House dropping the ball — or rather, the ovoid? As our omnipresent new president hijacked our reality, the first lady vanished, sparking headlines for nary a glimpse in D.C. since the inaugural. Just as there is a gush of leaks from the resistance in...

President Donald J. Trump will walk into the Oval Office and be stunned. First, it will be a shock to work in an office decorated with images of men other than himself. Second, he is bound to be suffused with awe as he looks around at the Remington bronze bronco, the Rockwell “Statue of Liberty,” the portraits of Washington and Lincoln, the Swedish ivy on the mantel that has eavesdropped — and leavesdropped — on so much history. The new president will suddenly realize that Joe Biden is right. He needs to grow up. Chuck Schumer is right. He has...

Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine. The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships. The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The...

I sat watching in astonishment. The one who couldn’t bear to show up to concede was not, as expected, Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton... When the Apocalypse came at midnight and the TV analysts — even on Fox — were scrambling to reverse their analyses and justify their bad polling data; and the stock exchanges had to temporarily halt the futures market because it was falling too fast, and the world was spinning off its axis, I called my conservative brother to see what the heck was going on. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “As flawed a candidate as...

His life took off, he said, when he fell in love with “that girl.” He told a familiar love story, recounted in his memoir, about springtime at Yale Law School in 1971 and a “magnetic” girl with thick blond hair and big glasses and no makeup and a long, white flowery skirt. He said when he first saw her in a political and civil rights class that he wanted to tap her on the shoulder but he knew if he did, he would be starting something beyond his control. With a sky-blue tie and silvery hair and an easy smile,...

HILLARY CLINTON first grabbed the national spotlight 47 years ago as an idealistic young feminist, chiding the paternalistic establishment in her Wellesley commencement speech. So it’s passing strange to watch her here, getting rebuffed by young women who believe that she lacks idealism, that she overplays her feminist hand and that she is the paternalistic establishment. Bernie Sanders may be a dead ringer for Larry David, but Hillary is running the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” campaign. She can’t fire up young voters by dwelling on what can’t be done in Washington and by explaining that she’s more prose than poetry.

<p>Sarah Palin during an audience question-and-answer session at the "Saturday Night Live" 40th-anniversary special last week.</p> <p>Sarah Palin in 2016?</p> <p>Even she thinks that’s a joke.</p> <p>The former vice-presidential candidate made her final transition to pure celebrity and political punch line on Sunday night, when Lorne Michaels’s “Saturday Night Live” celebrated its 40th birthday with a comic extravaganza that became NBC Entertainment’s top-rated show in more than a decade.</p>

THIS was a bomb that had been ticking for a while. NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography. They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division. But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and “there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,” as one NBC News reporter put it.

When Roger Goodell was growing up here, he had the best possible example of moral leadership. His father, a moderate New York Republican appointed by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to Bobby Kennedy’s Senate seat after the assassination, risked his career to come out against the Vietnam War... The two legacies from his dad, Bryan Curtis wrote in Grantland last year, could well be “a measure of his dad’s idealism, his contrarianism, his stubbornness. And I bet we’d also find a kind of defense mechanism that develops when you see your dad destroyed on a public stage. An instinct that makes you...

The novelty of flying cars never materialized. But flying novels are right around the corner. If you aren’t nervous enough reading about 3-D printers spitting out handguns or Google robots with Android phones, imagine the skies thick with crisscrossing tiny drones.

During the 2012 campaign, the president and his top advisers liked to make the argument that if he was re-elected, the “fever” would break. Washington would no longer be the graveyard of progress, the crypt of consensus. Once dystopian Republicans accepted that Obama was not running again, they would start cooperating with him. .... Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership. He still thinks...

I SAW “Argo” with Jerry Rafshoon, who was a top aide to President Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, when six Americans escaped and were given sanctuary for three months by courageous Canadian diplomats. We were watching a scene where a C.I.A. guy can’t get through to Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, to sign off on plane tickets for the escaping hostages, so he pretends to be calling from the school where Jordan’s kids go. “Hamilton wasn’t married then and didn’t have any kids,” Jerry whispered, inflaming my pet peeve about filmmakers who make up facts in stories about...

On Thursday, Bill Clinton once more telegraphed that he considers Obama a lightweight who should not have bested his wife. Bluntly contradicting the Obama campaign theme that Romney is a heartless corporate raider, Clinton told CNN that the Republican’s record at Bain was “sterling.” Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging. On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year....