Commentary: Trump Makes History by Winning Both Iowa and New Hampshire Primaries

Trump NH

Former President Donald Trump easily won the New Hampshire primary against rival former South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley with a record number of votes for the contest, 166,000 and counting with 92 percent of precincts reporting, and the third highest percentage total, 54.6 percent, for a Republican in a competitive primary after Richard Nixon’s 78 percent in 1968 and Dwight Eisenhower’s 56 percent in 1952.

The margin, Trump’s 54.6 percent to Haley’s 43.3 percent, was an 11-point rout leaving little doubt about Trump’s dominant position in the race, continuing to display all the elements of the incumbency advantage even though he is not in the White House.

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Ramaswamy Lays Out Recalibrated America First Foreign Policy Vision: ‘We Will be Uncle Sucker No More’

As he takes heat for proposing that the United States roll back aid to Israel in pursuit of stronger regional relationships for the key American ally, GOP top tier presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants a new approach to U.S. relations with friends and foes alike.

And he’s harkening back to the founders’ vision of avoiding “entangling alliances” to get there. 

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Commentary: ‘Nixonian’ Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

The 1968 presidential election was my first. I voted for the erstwhile Republican, Richard M. Nixon. And because I wrote a college paper about my decision at the time, causing complete consternation for that professor, I still have a clear idea of why I did it. The choice was between Nixon and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. The other candidate on the ballot, George C. Wallace, was a populist with proven racist views and unpalatable.

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Commentary: America Gone Mad

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

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Commentary: Democrats Repeat the Mistakes of 2016

Donald Trump waving

As we get to the midpoint between the last presidential election and next year’s midterms, all political sides are expending extraordinary effort to ignore the 900-pound gorilla in the formerly smoke-filled room of American politics. This, of course, is Donald Trump.

The Democrats are still outwardly pretending Trump has gone and that his support has evaporated. They also pretend they can hobble him with vexatious litigation and, if necessary, destroy him again by raising the Trump-hate media smear campaign back to ear-splitting levels.

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Commentary: History of Presidents Day

“This is Washington’s Birthday,” sings Fred Astaire in the movie classic Holiday Inn, “And I can’t tell a lie.” Americans of a certain age no doubt can remember when the day we now know as Presidents Day was called Washington’s Birthday, invariably celebrated on February 22.  George Washington was officially born on February 11, 1731 according to the old Julian calendar; February 22, 1732 according to the Gregorian calendar now in use.  In the early days of our nation Washington was universally revered for his role in the Revolution and the founding of the Republic; unofficial celebrations to mark his birthday were held throughout the nineteenth century.

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Commentary: The Silent Majority Will Support Trump Like It Did Nixon in 1972

“THE SILENT MAJORITY IS STRONGER THAN EVER!!!”

That was President Donald Trump’s analysis on Twitter of the current political climate in the U.S., likening it to the late 1960s and early 1970s — with radical antiwar and race riots — that helped propel Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968 and later helped engineer his 49-state sweep in his 1972 reelection bid.

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Commentary: The Poison Legacy of ‘Low-Bar’ Impeachment

Since the embarrassing impeachment and failed conviction of President Andrew Johnson in 1868, Americans more or less had avoided that ultimate constitutional method of removing a chief executive from power. The Johnson impeachment had been so steeped in personal hatred, political rivalry, and post-war agendas that the failure by one vote in the Senate to remove the impeached Johnson more or less discredited the process for a century.

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Commentary: Mueller’s Report Is a Rerun from the Nixon Era

by Ken Masugi   The best book on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report—and one that few people have actually seen—came out in January. In fact, the most relevant chapter was published originally in 1992, in an academic journal, and that article was based on a conference paper delivered in 1984. The book is John Marini’s Unmasking the Administrative State, which I helped to compile. The chapter to which I refer is “Politics, Rhetoric, and Legitimacy: The Role of Bureaucracy in the Watergate Affair.” Marini updated the original article with a short afterword reflecting on President Trump’s struggle with the bureaucracy—which, as it happens, does not mention Mueller’s efforts or anything about Russian collusion or the other subjects of the report. Yet Marini’s work will remain for some time the best source for understanding the report’s significance. He makes clear the mere appointment of the special counsel meant that the bureaucracy had won and that Trump’s presidency would be crippled not merely for the tenure of the counsel but even for its duration. With that appointment, the greatest promise of Trump’s presidency was over immediately after it got started, with more allegations to come. Marini observes that all political scandals are…

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Commentary: Democrats in 2020 Are Unelectable Nonentities

by Conrad Black   It is uproariously entertaining to see the scurryings of the innumerable host of Democratic presidential candidates in what is already more of a lottery than a quest for the nomination of a great party to the world’s greatest office. The Gadarene stampede to (and over) the edge of the abyss of all who advocate open borders, 70 percent income taxes, the green terror, socialized medicine, legalized infanticide, reparations to native and African-Americans, packing the Supreme Court, and vacation of the Electoral College, has finally elicited, in a Churchillian expression, a tiny mouse of dissent. The charge to oblivion reminds me of 1972. I had the privilege of knowing Richard Nixon in his last five years of his life and he described to me the reaction he and his wife had to the Democratic opposition of that year. Senator George McGovern (D-S.D.) was nominated on a platform that included a general income tax increase, the transportation by school buses of millions of children all around every metropolitan area to distant neighborhoods in search of “racially balanced” schools, and a capitulation to North Vietnam that was, as even the New York Times acknowledged, more humiliating to the United…

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