Mollie Hemingway Commentary: Taking on the Establishment

Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party.

Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bids for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: A Time of Chaos Upon Chaos Atop Chaos

America will weather its current hysterias.

But the tensions and furor are reminiscent of the last generations of the Roman Republic. In its last century, Romans began to adjudicate politics by obsequious partisan town criers (their version of our media), mass demonstrations, and freelance street gangs. Looters, arsonists, and demonstrators did pretty much as they pleased in the streets of Rome without fear of legal consequences.

In our time, the media has now vanished – kaput, no more, ended.

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Commentary: The Pale Pastel Republicans for Socialism

The man was a walking political disaster.

He was “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.” His positions were “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.” He was horrifyingly “foolhardy,” and a Republican Party in his hands was headed for a certain “crushing defeat … that could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.” The man was putting the GOP in “an impossible situation” because he was a “sure-loser in November” who held “extreme and too simple views.”

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Commentary: #VoteBlueNoMatterWho Is No Match for #NeverSanders

Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue – and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats.

Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions – closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair trade policies, restoring assembly and manufacturing jobs to the hollowed-out interior, avoiding optional wars abroad, and trying to drain the proverbial federal swamp of its careerist bureaucrats and revolving-door apparatchiks.

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Commentary: Just Like 2016, NeverTrump Republicans Would Rather Lose Than Face Another Term with President Trump

Donald Trump’s chances for reelection in November have never been higher. The latest Gallup poll puts his approval rating at 49 percent, other polls have measured even higher, and he just gave the speech of his life in his 2020 State of the Union address. But watch out. Without Republican control of the Senate in 2020, much less recovering control of the House of Representatives, the impact of a second Trump term will be profoundly diminished.

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Former Kasich Strategist Partners with George Conway to Launch Never-Trump Super PAC

An alumnus of former Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s presidential campaign has joined George Conway in launching a new never-Trump super PAC with the explicit purpose of “defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.”

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Commentary: The Heavy Wages of Trump Fixation

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

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Commentary: Anti-Trump Fraternity and NeverTrump Sorority Collude in Impeachment Scam

How stupid does the anti-Trump fraternity think the American people are? By “anti-Trump fraternity” I mean not only the increasingly frantic Democrats who, like Belshazzar at that memorable dinner party many years back, can see the writing ever more clearly on the wall for 2020, but also the NeverTrump sorority who just cannot get over the fact that someone was elected president of the United States without their permission, indeed, over their explicit objections. How dare they!

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Commentary: Trump vs. the ‘Stepford Wife’ Republicans

When the protagonist in Ira Levin’s novel, The Stepford Wives, begins to suspect that other women in her Connecticut town are robots, she surmises:

That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

Which brings to mind the viral video of Mitt Romney reacting to his Twinkie birthday cake. Lack of ample bosom aside, Mitt is a great example of someone playing a housewife unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real. He is a Stepford-Wife Republican.

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Rep Justin Amash, Who Recently Left GOP, Says He’s Not Ruling Out a Presidential Bid

by Chuck Ross   Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who announced July 4 that he is leaving the Republican party, said Sunday that he is not ruling out a run for president. “I still wouldn’t rule anything like that out,” Amash told CNN’s Jake Tapper when asked if he is considering…

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Commentary: Tedious, Entitled, Ignoble and Mad – the Anti-Trump Circus Turns Four Years Old

by Victor Davis Hanson   We are now in the fourth year of an anti-Trump mania, and about reaching the point of caricature. The Left should have learned something after the failed celebrity appeal to undermine the Electoral College, the initial articles of impeachment, the empty invocations of the Logan…

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Britain’s Version of the Never-Trumpers May Bring Down the Government Over Brexit

by Ben Whedon   The British version of the “Never-Trump” movement may force the next prime minister from power in order to prevent a “no-deal Brexit,” if high-ranking Conservative Party members of Parliament follow through on their threats. Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond said in May he “couldn’t support a…

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Commentary: Mainstream Media’s Agitprop Distorts Trump’s Actions to Help Protect Trillions in Crony Globalist Status Quo

by Edward Ring   Competing investigations and alternative analyses offer partisans on both sides ample fodder to feed their biases, but a presumption that guilt can be manufactured if it doesn’t exist is the common thread pushing them. Just as the Soviets knew in Stalinist Russia, if you look at anyone long enough,…

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Trump Hits Back Against GOP Rep Who Took Stance On Impeachment: ‘Justin Is A Loser’

by Evie Fordham   President Donald Trump criticized Republican Michigan Rep. Justin Amash on Twitter after the congressman said Saturday that Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct” related to the Mueller investigation. “Never a fan of Justin Amash, a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas…

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Commentary: #NeverTrump GOP Senators Messing with Donald Trump Jr.

by George Rasley   Just when you thought that #NeverTrump Republicans in the Senate might, just might be ready to “move on” as Majority Leader McConnell put it, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (an alleged Republican) has subpoenaed the President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr to testify on matters related…

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Commentary: Mitt Romney Is a Virtue Signaling Twit

by George Rasley   Leave it to Mitt Romney to be the first Republican (notice we didn’t say conservative) to use the Mueller Report to criticize President Trump. After the redacted report was released Romney issued a statement saying he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and…

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Commentary: The Clarity Accompanying the Democrats’ Takeover of Congress

by Julie Kelly   Months before the midterm elections last fall, several self-described “conservatives” implored Americans to vote for Democrats. Still stung that Republicans ignored their advice to reject Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and unmoved by Trump’s solid record of conservative accomplishments in office, these embittered outcasts claimed that a…

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Commentary: The Rise of the Republican #WalkAways – And Why No One Cares

by Troy Worden   You might have heard about the #WalkAway Movement, in which disaffected Democrats say farewell to their party due to its hard-left turn. But you might not have heard much about an identical movement of disaffected Republicans leaving their party, though it’s not because it isn’t happening.…

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Roger Kimball Commentary: Burying the Dead With Bile-Filled Histrionics

by Roger Kimball   The big news last week revolved around the funerals of a 1960s pop singer and an unreliable Republican senator with a cult following among masochistic conservatives and cynical leftists eager to capitalize on his capacity to spread dissension among his nominal allies. I suppose the exploitation…

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Trump Derangement Syndrome Case #47563: Bill Kristol Considering Run For President In 2020

Bill Kristol, #NeverTrump

by Peter Hasson   Bill Kristol, the former editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard, is considering challenging President Donald Trump in the 2020 Republican primary. Kristol, consistently one of the most vocal anti-Trump Republicans during the 2016 campaign, has been considering a run for months, a source familiar with Kristol’s thinking…

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Commentary: #NeverTrumpers Make It Plain They Enjoy Being Lonely Outside the Party

George Will, Max Boot, Donald Trump

by Jeffery Rendall   Are #NeverTrumpers loners or are they really just lonely? The question came to mind recently as the nebulous allegedly “conservative” anti-Trump group appears to be losing adherents and friends at an alarming rate. It’s not that President Donald Trump has suddenly become so popular that it’s no longer…

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Commentary: The Perfidious Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney & Orrin Hatch

by George Rasley   That didn’t take long. As soon as President Trump endorsed Mitt Romney’s candidacy to succeed Utah’s retiring Senator Orin Hatch and voters in the Beehive State handed the nomination to Romney (even though he actually lost the GOP State Convention vote) Mitt showed his true colors…

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Commentary: Who Better Understands the Concerns and Frustrations of Conservatives, George Will or Donald Trump?

George Will, Donald Trump

by Jeffery Rendall   It should come as no surprise to observers of American politics that nearly two years after Donald Trump was formally nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate – and a year and a half after he assumed the office – his “conservative” #NeverTrump adversaries are still…

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