Donald Trump is "America" in the most pejorative sense. "Make America Great Again" is a bitter, depressed motto that worked beautifully as the perfect slogan for a country that pushes other nations around, then plays innocent when the result is anger or even...
How can you tell that Donald Trump is just another war president? Because in spite of the administrative chaos, the executive branch with its ever-shifting staff, and the half-conspiracies that surround him, the meat of the matter is the question, which near-war...
United States foreign policy involves miserable choices. Were George W. Bush’s two boots on the ground wars worse than Barack Obama’s dabbling in six different countries with war robots, and his precedent-setting assassinations of American citizens? Was FDR worse than...
The enemy of my enemy is my friend is a Cold War-like mentality that the United States has operated under for decades and decades. Perhaps it’s natural, human, tribalism to do this. Or at the very least, it’s coldly pragmatic. If your enemy is the Godless Soviet...
A February NBC news poll reveals some dramatic diversity within the minds of Donald Trump’s America. The topics covered are varied, and include Americans’ current feelings about Russia, and their worries over a future major war (56 percent are very or somewhat...
Maybe Donald Trump is a different kind of politician. Maybe he will keep his promises. Unfortunately, since January 20, Trump has pursued a nasty collection of priorities. Any hope that the political newbie would be dazed and timid in his first 100 days went out the...
President Donald Trump has been busy during his first week. The speed of his executive orders, and the confidence with which he has signed plans to build a wall, and to replace ObamaCare with... something else has been shocking, considering how shellshocked he looked...
I was desperately hoping to be wrong last week. I was delighted and surprised that I was indeed mistaken about President Obama being unlikely to pardon army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. My cynicism in the previous column was a challenge to the president, almost an...
This column will soon be out of date. There are only a few days of Barack Obama's presidential pardon powers left. He will either offer clemency to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, thereby ending her sentence three decades sooner than officially mandated, or he will...
It’s still impossible to know what president-elect Donald Trump will do. His statements over the past 18 months, and before, have often contradicted each other on issues as varied as foreign policy and transgender people using the bathroom of their choice. On one...
