Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune and a foreign affairs writer for Newsweek.
During his first run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders won big in New Hampshire. Claiming 60 per cent of the vote, Sanders trounced establishment favourite (and eventual nominee) Hillary Clinton by 22 points. Bernie’s Granite State victory last night wasn’t as large, but it was a victory nonetheless. By
President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address began with a snub to Speaker Nancy Pelosi as she extended her hand across the dais for the customary greeting. It ended with a visibly annoyed Pelosi ripping the copy of her speech and slamming it down on the table. And those were the boring parts of
Voters in Iowa lined up in high-school gymnasiums across the state last night to prepare for a long few hours of caucusing. But nobody predicted the process would stretch late into the night without a single vote having been certified by the Iowa Democratic party. By midnight, the rival campaigns were flummoxed, unable to officially
Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign looked listless back in October. Sure, the Vermont senator and 2016 Democratic party runner-up still had his most fervent supporters coming to his rallies and listening to him rail about millionaires, billionaires and greedy health insurance companies. But the polls suggested the wind was hitting his face; one survey put Sanders in a
As a general rule, neoconservatives and hawkish Republican foreign policy officials don’t respect President Donald Trump’s capacities as commander-in-chief. They view him as impulsive, unwise, short-sighted, and buffoonish—the kind of guy who doesn’t do his homework, spends more time on Twitter than reading briefing books and would rather pull up America’s drawbridge than act as
The official impeachment debate on the floor of the House of Representatives began with a solemn call from Speaker Nancy Pelosi: ‘We gather today under the dome of this temple of democracy to exercise one of the most solemn powers that this body can take: The impeachment of the President of the United States’. The
After 17 witnesses, weeks of closed-door depositions and public hearings and a lot of heated back-and-forth between the parties, it has all come down to this: the unveiling of the formal articles of impeachment. Early on Tuesday morning, the six Democratic chairs who have been investigating President Trump on everything from obstruction of justice to violations
Kamala Harris began her campaign with an impressive display of political might: a gigantic late-January rally in her hometown of Oakland, California, where 22,000 people turned up for her first major speech as a presidential candidate. “We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation,” the senator from California bellowed into the
Donald Trump was given a hard deadline from judiciary committee chairman Jerrold Nadler: if you want to defend yourself against impeachment, you must do so by 6 December. It didn’t take Trump long to respond: over my dead body. But while Trump’s bravado is not a surprise, his impeachment strategy is not without its risks. White
London plays host to another Nato summit tomorrow, which can only mean one thing: expect plenty of handshakes, laboured smiles for the cameras and joint communiques about solidarity, unity and the importance of Western values. Underneath the facade, however, lies a club riven by disputes over policy and personality. Nato may be celebrating its 70th
If all it took to become president of the United States was massive spending on television and digital advertisements, Mike Bloomberg would win the 2020 presidential election in a landslide. As the eighth wealthiest person on the planet with a net worth of over £41bn ($53bn), Bloomberg has a practically unlimited war chest at his disposal.
If there was one person who could directly tie president Donald Trump to the alleged quid pro-quo with the Ukrainians, it was Gordon Sondland. The multimillionaire hotel executive-turned-ambassador had a regular channel of communication with Trump and was a central driver of Washington’s Ukraine policy. As Rep. Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s most committed defenders, said,
It didn’t take long after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of an impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump for the top Republican in the Senate to rally his troops. In mid-October, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell schooled his fellow GOP lawmakers on the mechanics of an impeachment process and the Senate’s role as juror and decisionmaker. A tutorial
The first public hearing into President Donald Trump’s impeachment began with a bang. And it proceeded throughout the afternoon into a constellation of two completely different realities. By the time the hours-long testimony was over, you might find yourself having trouble separating truth from conjecture. Bill Taylor, the interim US ambassador to Ukraine and the
If President Donald Trump hoped the release of a memo detailing his July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was going to exculpate him from questions about misconduct in office, his hopes were dashed the moment the public read the transcript. Suspicions of Trump trading £323m ($400m) in military aid to Ukraine in return
Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be a liberal from San Francisco, California and a diehard political opponent of President Donald Trump, but she is also an institutionalist at heart. Having gone through the saga of former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s, she has never been a fan of using the procedure to push
Saudis woke up last Saturday to find the crown jewel of their oil industry in smoke. The attack on the al-Abqaiq oil processing facility, allegedly conducted by cruise missiles and launched from a staging area inside Iran, resulted in the sharpest single-day increase in crude prices since the 1991 Gulf War. Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation,
Italian politics is like a game of musical chairs. One government resigns or collapses, another takes its place, until that government is either rendered irrelevant a year later or voted out during the next election. Italy has had 68 governments in the last 74 years and 10 prime ministers in the last 20. Italians will
It was Labor Day in the United States yesterday, which can only mean one thing—now that the barbecues and swimming at the beach are over, Americans will be tuning in to the 2020 Democratic presidential primary a lot more often. The candidates are entering a fall campaign season that could prove pivotal for their operations,
From the moment Donald Trump stepped onto the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States, there have been people in the Republican party who have sought to bring him down. During the 2016 GOP primary, Republican national security officials wrote scathing and embarrassing open letters against him.
