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Famed American artist Jon McNaughton has released a stirring new painting of President Donald Trump, standing in front of the White House, along with the “forgotten men and women,” he says, who elected the nation's 45th president. McNaughton, renowned for his patriotic and faith-based paintings, said in a video accompanying the painting's release he initially wondered if he was going too far: “When I decided to paint this picture, I wondered if this was taking it too far. But sometimes you have to speak forcefully like the brush strokes of my painting. Of the snake at Trump's feet, McNaughton explains:...

It’s time to listen to the “forgotten” people worrying about jobs, food, medicine and other basic needs instead of focusing on political skirmishes, Glenn Beck said on Friday’s “The Glenn Beck Radio Program.” He played a heartbreaking clip of a Maryland caller talking to a D.C. radio show about his circumstances of losing his job, being unable to find work, not having money for medicine and rapidly running out of funds. “I consider myself one of the forgotten men and women,” the caller said, tears choking his voice. “We need tax cuts. … We need jobs.” “This is why we’re...

Dr. Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to President Trump and former national security editor for Breitbart News, joined SiriusXM host Lee Stranahan for Breitbart News Daily.Gorka agreed that attacks on Trump administration officials like himself are actually attacks on his “audience.” “It has to have that broader connection. Why? Because what I’ve seen in the last three-and-a-half weeks of us being in office is all we have is a majority of the media reporting reflects one thing, Lee: they cannot believe, refuse to believe, what happened on November the 8th. The American people spoke. The ‘forgotten man’ was given a voice....

The Forgotten Man is back with a vengeance. Since Amity Shlaes revived the phrase in the title of her best-selling history of the Great Depression, “the Forgotten Man” has come to stand in for the losers in the left’s identity politics. Thus, the 21st-century Forgotten Man has a conventional-sounding name, is heterosexual, never went to graduate school, and does not know where the 202 area code is. (It’s Washington, D.C.) The Forgotten Man has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. President Donald Trump name-checked this retro superhero in his Nov. 9 victory speech and his...

The Democrats have a lot of fence-mending to do with a once-key constituency of their political coalition---the Forgotten Man---blue-collar voters who get up and go to work every day, obey the law, pay their taxes, and don't think responsibility is a four-letter word. The Forgotten Man has consistently been given the backhand by the party whose elites cynically and mockingly refer to them as "flyover country." It is The Forgotten Man who just handed the keys to the White House to a political neophyte who gave voice to their frustrations and connected with them as no one has since Franklin...

I don't think the Democrats are going to like it.

In front of the White House a man is sitting on a park bench in the throes of depression. He is surrounded by 43 presidents. In the forefront, purposefully ignoring the depressed man is President Obama, whose right foot is stepping on the Constitution. James Madison is next to Obama, pleading with him to stop. This tableau is called “The Forgotten Man”, a painting by Jon McNaughton, an artist who is known for his politically-charged work. The painting, which uses objects such as discarded dollar bills as symbols and scraps of paper with individual constitutional amendments scrawled onto them, has...

Now that we are at Labor Day — meaning the start of the year of presidential campaigning — let us review the five big errors that made the Great Depression. These were spelled out three years ago in a column by our Amity Shlaes. It was issued in the Washington Post under the headline “Five Ways to Wreck a Recovery.” Her lessons are drawn from her seminal history of the catastrophe of the 1930s, “The Forgotten Man.” Her list remains, in our view, one of the most prescient op-ed pieces to herald President Obama’s accession. The tragedy of Mr. Obama’s...

How would the Founding Fathers and the Presidents of the past react to Barak Obama’s trampling of the Constitution? What would their faces express and their body language tell you? Artist Jon McNaughton shows you: VideoDid you notice the expressions of progressive President’s that came before Obama, clapping and smiling?

Democrats’ sympathy for the unemployed doesn’t extend to the people who might hire them, or give their employers loans. The 19th-century academic William Graham Sumner had a famous formulation for the hidden costs of feel-good economic legislation. Persons A and B, he wrote, usually get together to decide what C will be compelled to do to alleviate problem X. “What I want to do,” Sumner wrote, “is to look up C. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who is never thought of. He works, he votes, generally he prays...

In the 1930s, the Schechter brothers ran a chicken business in Brooklyn. The name Schechter is derived from the Yiddish word for "butcher," and this is what the brothers did: they slaughtered chickens and sold them to shops. The brothers seemed to be typical immigrants, at once struggling and succeeding. But in 1934, they became famous thanks to Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. Only months after Franklin Roosevelt had signed a code regulating the chicken business, the brothers were accused of violating it. Prosecutors said they had sold an unfit chicken, one with an egg lodged inside it, and...

There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight. But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night. Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession. “There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide...

There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight. But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night. Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession. “There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide...

For five years, classical liberal columnist and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Amity Shlaes delved deeply into the history of the Great Depression. She had been an op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal, a WSJ columnist reuniting Germany, and a columnist for the Financial Times. She wrote two books, on German national identity and on America’s tax policy, critiqued from the right. Both sold well, but neither one foreshadowed the success she’d have with her research on the New Deal. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, published in 2007, has become one of the most...

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a true liberal--a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so." Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something...

In his 1932 campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt had talked about helping someone he called “the forgotten man.” He was thinking of the poorest man, or as he put it—invoking the time of the pharaohs—“the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The phrase came from an essay (and later a book) written decades before, called The Forgotten Man. Written by a famous Yale professor named William Graham Sumner, this essay defined “the forgotten man” differently. Sumner employed an algebra to explain what he meant: A and B want to help X, he wrote. This is the charitable impulse. The...

June 20, 2008, 0:00 p.m. What’s the Frequency?New Deal narcissism and what FDR wrought. An NRO Q&A The New Deal celebrates its 75th anniversary this week. National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez checked in with New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, to mark the occasion. Kathryn Jean Lopez: How are you celebrating the New Deal’s 75th? Amity Shlaes: I’m participating in the Roosevelt Reading Festival at Hyde Park Saturday! One of the people I will see there is Nick Taylor, author of his own book, American Made,...

The historical model that the Democrats are choosing to hold up as they ponder our financial crisis isn't Harry Truman's Fair Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It is Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. At least three economic reforms under discussion now were also central in the New Deal package. Trouble is, these reforms didn't necessarily work well when they were first tried - and some failed outright. Consider, for starters, a stimulus package. President-elect Obama has said that "the one thing I can say with certainty is that we are going to need a stimulus package passed either before...

Alter's readers would never suspect that [FDR] scores as badly if not worse on the typical kinds of charges hurled against George W. Bush and his administration: militarism, ideological cabals, secrecy, lies and lying-us-into-war, unscrupulous punishment of political enemies, disrespect for the Constitution and our political traditions, run-amok Wilsonianism, special favors for Big Business, and, most of all, incompetence. As historian William Leuchtenburg documented in his essay "The New Deal as Moral Analogue to War," Roosevelt's presidency was drenched in martial metaphors and militaristic appeals to loyalty and unity long before World War II. The New Deal's Public Works Administration...

"Americans just now need what Amity Shlaes has brilliantly supplied, a fresh appraisal of what the New Deal did and did not accomplish...." -George F. Will, Columnist