Section: New Republic (USA)
Trump’s Legal Immunity Has a Countdown Clock
This week’s most intriguing news about President Donald Trump didn’t come from the House’s impeachment inquiry. It came from a ProPublica report on unusual discrepancies in the Trump Organization’s finances. Those revelations, in turn, show why the 2020 election—as well as the prospect of impeachment—are such a threat to...
The Moderates Fight Back
One of the hardest things for a presidential candidate is to put on a smiling public face for the TV cameras after spending three hours on a debate stage inwardly seething over missed opportunities and mangled lines. It is one reason why many candidates never appear in the Spin Room after a debate and why others march through the entire ordeal...
Why the Pundits Got Impeachment Wrong
For much of this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used Abraham Lincoln as a human shield. Pressed by the media on calls to impeach President Trump, she regularly quoted Lincoln, who said three years before becoming president: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”It was a...
The Night of the Mad Moderates
It’s getting more difficult by the day to remember the vigor with which former Vice President Joe Biden jumped into the presidential race earlier this year. One of the important documents of that moment in the spring was a piece in Politico Magazine by Bill Scher titled ”Did The Left Misread the 2020 Democratic Primary?” To a not...
The Law That Could Take Down Rudy Giuliani
A little over a year ago, a grip of Democratic senators penned a letter to the Department of Justice with a simple request: review whether or not Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal Nosferatu-cum-lawyer, was in compliance with the DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The eighty-year-old statute, long dormant and nearly...
The Democrats Don’t Have a Frontrunner
Before the final game of the 1944 World Series, a veteran sportswriter looked at the two bedraggled teams gathered at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. During the last year of World War II, with their star players in Europe or the Pacific, both teams were filled with aged has-beens and younger 4-Fs. Assessing their odds, the baseball writer...
Joe Biden Is Right About The New York Times
Early Thursday, the Biden campaign sent a letter to The New York Times criticizing the paper for its coverage of President Trump’s allegations about Hunter Biden. The letter spotlighted recent reporting from the paper’s own Ken Vogel, as well as an op-ed on Hunter Biden from Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart contributor best known for his...
An All-American Campaign Finance Scandal
There is nothing particularly special about Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were indicted by federal prosecutors on Thursday for violating campaign-finance laws. The two Ukrainian-born Florida businessmen have not achieved anything of note in business, culture, or politics. Both men, nevertheless, have finagled their way into the upper levels of...
The White House Knows It’s Losing on Impeachment
President Donald Trump’s biggest problem in the impeachment battle is that the facts aren’t on his side. The White House’s own memo shows him pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden on flimsy corruption allegations. If that wasn’t enough, Trump publicly urged both Ukraine and China to...
Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing
Joe Biden is in trouble. It’s not his actual campaign that’s in truly dire straits. Although Elizabeth Warren has risen steadily, troubling donors already troubled by Biden’s age, he’s still first or second in most polls and shows few signs of tumbling too far from the top of the field. He could do without the attention...
