Jonah Goldberg stories, Page 15
Jonah Goldberg: Cancel the primaries
The Democratic primary campaign started in January, but it already feels as if it began in the late Jurassic period, and the first votes are still three months away. Primaries are a lot like Christmas: The shopping season begins way before, and things rarely live up to expectations. (I mean...
Jonah Goldberg: Apology is Trump’s best option for avoiding impeachment
In l’affaire Ukraine, the president is guilty as charged. And the best strategy for him to avoid impeachment by the House and perhaps even removal by the Senate is to admit it, apologize and let voters make their own judgment. It’s also the best way to fend off a disaster...
Jonah Goldberg: Missing-server conspiracy theories convenient smokescreen
The impeachment drama is already a three-ring circus, with a full complement of clowns to the left and the right. I want to focus on one detail that hasn’t gotten enough attention: the “missing” DNC server that President Trump believes might be in Ukraine. If you’ve paid any attention to...
Jonah Goldberg: For Trump, alliances are strictly business
“Integrity lowers the price of capital.” An extremely successful investor once told me that. The context at the time was Donald Trump’s impending takeover of the GOP. This person meant it as an investment rule, an insight into Trump and a life lesson. The investment part is easy. Say you...
Jonah Goldberg: In betrayal of Kurds, Trump was winging it — again
In one sense, the Syria debacle is a singular moment in the Trump presidency, and arguably in American history. I can’t think of another momentous decision by a commander-in-chief that was instantly recognizable as a disaster for which the president was entirely to blame. Even if you think the Iraq...
Jonah Goldberg: Senate GOP’s no-win scenario
In response to news reports Oct. 6 that at least one additional administration whistleblower has come forward to say what he or she knows about President Trump’s Ukrainian schemes, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted, “I’ve seen this movie before — with Brett Kavanaugh. More and more doesn’t mean better...
Jonah Goldberg: Trump’s effort to damage Biden could backfire
Is President Trump going to get Joe Biden elected? Opinions vary widely on how to characterize Trump’s now-infamous conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The president believes it was “perfect” and “beautiful.” In the middle are those who think it was bad and improper or perhaps impeachable but not necessarily...
Jonah Goldberg: Little doubt he did it, but should Trump be impeached?
Here’s a take no one will like: I’m confident he did it. I’m confident it’s impeachable. I’m just not so sure he should be impeached for it. Let’s start at the top. It’s obvious to me that President Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to launch a probe of former Vice...
Jonah Goldberg: What do progressives have against vaporous substances?
In the classic 1979 comedy “The Jerk,” Steve Martin plays a very dumb guy who often misses the point. In one scene, while he’s working as a gas station attendant, an assassin tries to kill him with a high-powered rifle. When the bullets start whizzing past his head and popping...
Jonah Goldberg: Does Team Trump think we’re idiots?
What offends me most about the whistleblower-Ukraine-Biden story isn’t the obvious corruption of it all. It’s the way members of Team Trump assume we’re all idiots who won’t notice they’ve abruptly shifted their narrative. At first, it seemed like a familiar scenario of allegations met with denials. The Washington Post...
Jonah Goldberg: Candidates & constitutional boundaries
It’s exhausting being both a conservative and a critic of President Trump. When I aim my pen at the White House, many of my comrades on the right go nuts. And readers who love it when I go after Trump turn into a cage full of poo- flinging monkeys when I...
Jonah Goldberg: White liberals have moved to left of black voters
“No Democrat is going to win the nomination for president of the United States without African-American support. Nor should they,” Kate Bedingfield, Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Bedingfield was pushing back on a single bad poll for Biden (from Monmouth University) that had the media and...
Jonah Goldberg: A theory on Trump’s GOP approval rating
Early one recent morning, Donald Trump tweeted: “94% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, a record. Thank you!” Where the president got this specific number remains a mystery. Recent polls by YouGov put his GOP approval roughly 10 points lower, and Gallup, which has tracked Trump’s popularity since he took...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s best bet is front-porch campaign
Here’s an idea: Joe Biden should run a front-porch campaign. Front-porch campaigns were once a common feature of American presidential politics, though the term wasn’t always applied to the practice. The most famous front-porch campaigns were in the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in William McKinley’s successful bid in 1896. While...
Jonah Goldberg: Maybe liberty isn’t a lost cause in China
Here’s a crazy idea: Maybe the forces of liberty will win. Sadly, few people are rooting for liberty these days, and even among those who are, there’s a dismaying amount of pessimism about its prospects. Consider China. There’s a new bipartisan consensus these days: The “elites” made a “bad bet”...
Jonah Goldberg: Epstein’s death reflects new age of conspiracy theories
Anyone who’s watched a courtroom TV drama has heard the phrase “Hard cases make bad law.” It’s a legal maxim that says really extreme — i.e., rare or weird — cases are not only hard to generalize from, they’re also a bad foundation for new legislation or policy. This also...
Jonah Goldberg: Neither left nor right has proper remedy for America’s illness
America is sick. Just about everybody recognizes it, and we didn’t need two more mass shootings to convince anybody of anything. Most Americans think the country is on the wrong track, despite a roaring economy. You can blame Donald Trump, but Americans have been unsatisfied with the country’s direction for...
Jonah Goldberg: Unity can be worse than partisanship
I want to put in a good word for partisanship. This might sound strange to some readers. I’ve written a lot about our problem with tribalism, including hyper-partisanship and political polarization. It was a major theme of my cheerily titled book “Suicide of the West.” So I’m happy to concede...
Jonah Goldberg: Paul Ryan once again being cast as pariah
Paul Ryan is getting the hate treatment — again. The former GOP House speaker and 2012 vice presidential candidate is a unifying figure these days. Liberals have long despised him — unfairly in my mind. Anti-Trump conservatives are infuriated by his “surrender to Trumpism,” in the words of Charlie Sykes,...
Jonah Goldberg: Political leanings can’t be reduced to genetic programming
Increasingly, the intellectual consensus seems to be that our political leanings are hardwired in our genes. There is some excellent research behind this thinking, and I’ve come around to believing that DNA plays a bigger role in our political worldviews than many on the right or left are willing to...
Jonah Goldberg: Nike fans flames of culture war
Nike is doing it wrong. I don’t mean the shoemaking, though that thing with Zion Williamson was pretty bad, I have to say. No, Nike is doing it wrong because it managed to do something that all the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters and other denizens of the lowest coprophagic phylum of...
Jonah Goldberg: The conservative divide
The idea holding together the conservative movement since the 1960s was called “fusionism.” The concept, which always worked better as an organizing principle than a philosophical one, was that freedom and virtue were inextricably linked. Virtue not freely chosen wasn’t virtuous. Or as Frank Meyer, the foremost architect of fusionism,...
Jonah Goldberg: Does reality change ideas, or vice versa?
The intellectual right is in the middle of a huge brouhaha, as some prominent right-wing commentators celebrate what they believe is the end of the “conservative consensus” around classical liberalism — free markets, limited government, the sovereignty of the individual and even in some cases free expression. Fox News’ Tucker...
Jonah Goldberg: Trump’s poor approval ratings have little to do with Mueller investigation
“Without the ILLEGAL Witch Hunt, my poll numbers, especially because of our historically ‘great’ economy, would be at 65%,” President Trump tweeted last month. In all likelihood, the president believes what he wrote. It’s a strongly held sentiment among many of Trump’s ardent supporters that if he hadn’t been stabbed...
Jonah Goldberg: Abortion debate leaves no room between extremes
“Democrats are aggressively pushing late-term abortion, allowing children to be ripped from their mother’s womb right up until the moment of birth,” President Trump said at a Florida rally earlier this month. “The baby is born and you wrap the baby beautifully and you talk to the mother about the...
