Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest. He lives in Washington DC
‘We ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about’, Arthur Koestler declared in The God That Failed, the volume of essays by lapsed communists that appeared in 1949, the year that the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb and China went communist. There’s a certain loftiness to Koestler’s statement
Donald Trump made a big deal about his new National Security Strategy (NSS), touting a new era of stalwart vigilance when he delivered a speech earlier this week. His predecessors, he said, had frittered away American dominance. He, and he alone, as Trump likes to say, would restore it. Except, as his national security council spokesman
It’s starting to look as though the historic mission of Donald Trump, who was a registered member of the Democratic party as late as 2009, is to revive American liberalism. On Tuesday night, Trump, who earlier in the day had tweeted ‘Roy Moore will always vote with us’, accomplished his most improbable feat since winning
Here we go again. Donald Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal in October. Now, in another audacious foray into Middle East diplomacy, Trump is waving goodbye to the waiver about moving the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It appears that the former real estate mogul will embark upon one last construction project. If
As I rode the metro to work this morning, an elderly gentleman holding a sign that read, `Manafort-Flynn. Who’s Next?’ boarded my car at the Judiciary Square stop. It’s a question the Trump administration may be pondering as well. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has flipped former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn,
Is the net closing in on Jared Kushner? It is now being reported that Trump’s son-in-law received a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’, which he also reportedly forwarded on. Both Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein are alleging that Kushner did not turn over several important documents to investigators despite numerous
In June, I mooted the possibility that Theresa May might consider emigrating to the United States to join the Trump administration, preferably as chief of staff. I’m sorry to see that she has spurned my request and that the charms of No. 10 Downing Street are proving more alluring than decamping for the White House.
The US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s press conference yesterday was moronic. Earlier this week, NBC News broke the story that Tillerson, exasperated by Donald Trump’s shenanigans, called him a `moron’ during a meeting in July at the Pentagon. It took the intervention of vice-president Mike Pence, in the role of Trump administration life coach, to
Beware the Moore. This is the doctrine that establishment Republicans such as the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who poured in millions of dollars to try and defeat Judge Roy Moore’s bid for the Republican Senate primary nomination in Alabama, were preaching in recent months. For good measure, President Trump also backed the current Senator Luther
If there was any doubt that Bernie Sanders is gearing up for another run for the presidency, his speech today in Fulton, Missouri removed it. Sanders appeared at the very spot where Winston Churchill pronounced in 1946 that Stalin was creating an iron curtain in Europe. Sanders, however, enunciated a more emollient message than the
Donald Trump fully embraced his inner neocon before the United Nations today. He lashed out at North Korea, indicating that he was ready to ‘totally destroy’ it. He upbraided Iran as a corrupt and malignant regime that had taken America and its allies to the cleaners with the nuclear deal—’One of the worst and most
While Donald Trump seeks to cut a deal with the Democrats on immigration, his detractors on the right are starting to resemble the sinister clown Pennywise in the popular new horror movie It, who terrorizes a small town in Maine by living in a sewer and snacking on children. ‘Trump base is blown up, destroyed,
Donald Trump has become the Conor McGregor of American politics. For weeks tensions have been mounting in the capital of the free world as Republicans and Democrats prepared to square off over the debt ceiling and a government shutdown. The climactic showdown was supposed to take place at the White House yesterday. But in the
Steve Bannon is out. H.R McMaster is in. It’s now starting to dawn upon some of Donald Trump’s most ardent admirers that they’ve been had. The main accomplishment of the Trump revolution has not been to forward populism. It has been to devour its own children. Trump entered office declaring that ‘this carnage ends now’. Not
On Sunday morning the White House, in an unsigned statement, came out swinging against ‘nephew-nazi and all extremist groups.’ Leave it to the Trump administration to bungle even the wording of neo-Nazi in its belated attempt to distance itself from the sanguinary events that took place on Saturday in the bucolic town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where
Wednesday marked the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender in a radio address, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. After 1945, Japan developed a pacifist movement and a so-called peace constitution. No country has deployed these
Today is the 72nd anniversary of the America atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a lovely port city that also served as a Japanese naval base during the second world war. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce in a radio address Japan’s surrender, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. The
That was fast. Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House communications director before he could even really begin communicating Donald Trump’s message. He was a kind of Trump mini-me, down to mastering his hand movements. But his wildly objurgatory language over the past week–directed primarily at former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and
Poor Reince Priebus. Or maybe not so poor. A munificent book deal surely looms in which he can chronicle his serial humiliations at the hands of Donald Trump who, as is his wont, made the announcement on Twitter that retired general John Kelly, the director of the Homeland Security, will now become White House chief of
Here we go again. NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump Jnr. somehow forgot to mention that a former Soviet counterintelligence officer was also present at his pow-wow with a Russian lawyer. The man in question, Rinat Akhmetsin, has denied ever being affiliated with Russian spy agencies. But as NBC politely put it, “the presence at the
