Pat Buchanan Columns category, Page 3

Who could have predicted how dreadful a year 2020 would be? By this New Year’s Eve, 19 million to 20 million Americans will have contracted a deadly virus in a pandemic that exploded out of China to carry off 333,000 Americans, one of every 1,000 of us. As 2021 begins,...

If America was a company and not a country, we would have long ago dissolved the corporation, split the blanket and gone our separate ways. What still holds this disputatious and divided people together? Consider. In announcing the $900 billion stimulus bill to deal with the pandemic, House Speaker Nancy...

2020 surely will qualify as an “annus horribilis” in the history of the republic. By New Year’s, one in every 1,000 Americans, 330,000, will be dead from the worst pandemic in 100 years. The U.S. economy will have sustained a blow to rival the worst year of the Great Depression....

The Biden-Harris administration will confront “a pandemic, an economic crisis, calls for racial justice and climate change. The team being assembled will meet these challenges on Day One.” So declares the transition team of Joe Biden, to echo what he’s defined as the lead items on his presidential agenda. The...

In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of State supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist. This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from...

Dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election remains undecided, Joe Biden has begun to name his national security team. Right now, it looks Democratic establishment all the way. Antony Blinken, a longtime foreign policy aide, is Biden’s choice for secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, one of Hillary Clinton’s...

Because of Donald Trump, Vice President Joe Biden thundered during the campaign, the U.S. “is more isolated in the world than we’ve ever been. … America First has made America alone.” Biden promised to repair relations with America’s allies. And he appears to have gone some distance to do so...

“In victory, magnanimity … in defeat, defiance.” That counsel about human conflict comes from Winston Churchill. And President Trump, given all he has endured for five years from those piously pleading now for a “time of healing,” cannot be faulted for his defiant resolve to unearth any and all high...

On the last days of the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump was holding four and five rallies a day in battleground states, drawing thousands upon thousands of loyalists to every one. Waiting for hours, sometimes in the cold, to cheer their champion on, these rallygoers love Trump as few presidents...

In fiscal year 2020, which ended Sept. 30, the U.S. government set some impressive new records. The deficit came in at $3.1 trillion, twice the previous record of $1.4 trillion in 2009, which was set during the Great Recession, and three times the 2019 deficit of about $1 trillion. Federal...

“The Indians are seeing 60,000 Chinese soldiers on their northern border,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo ominously warned Friday. He spelled out what he meant to commentator Larry O’Connor: “The Chinese have now begun to amass huge forces against India in the north. … They absolutely need the United States...

What a difference a week can make. Saturday, Sept. 26, was among the best days of the Trump presidency, or so some of us thought watching the president introduce in the Rose Garden his sterling candidate for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. Ahead was the Tuesday debate,...

By nominating federal judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump kept his word and more than that. Should she be confirmed, he will have made history. Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors — even Ronald Reagan, who filled three...

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are on the cusp of making history. With Trump having named two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, they have an opening to elevate a third justice to fill the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thereby securing...

“There is no … sound reason for the United States to continue sacrificing precious lives and treasure in a conflict not directly connected to our safety or other vital national interests.” So said William Ruger about Afghanistan, our longest war. What makes this statement significant is that President Trump has...

When U.S. cities erupted after the death of George Floyd, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the vanguard of the protests, renaming a section of downtown Black Lives Matter Plaza, and painting the name in letters on the street so huge they could be seen from space. Last Thursday, however,...

In northeast Syria last week, a U.S. military vehicle collided with a Russian armored vehicle, injuring four American soldiers. Both the Americans and Russians blame each other for failing to follow established rules of the road. Had an American been killed, we could have had a crisis on our hands....

As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display. Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced...

If the definition of racism is deliberate discrimination based on race, color or national origin, Yale University appears to be a textbook case of “systemic racism.” And, so, the Department of Justice contends. Last week, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband charged, “Yale discriminates based on race … in its undergraduate...

There is a real possibility that this week Joe Biden will be selecting the 47th president of the United States. For the woman Biden picks — he has promised to exclude from consideration all men, black, brown, white or Asian — has a better chance of succeeding to the presidency...

With the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse under nightly siege from violent radicals, and Portland’s police hard-pressed to protect it, President Trump sent in federal agents to secure the building. The reaction from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “The use of stormtroopers under the guise of law and order...

Is her racial diversity America’s greatest strength? So we are told. Yet even before America becomes a majority-minority nation, 25 years from now, recent changes in the composition of the country are going to impact both parties in 2020. According to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, between 2010 and 2020,...

On July 22, 1988, after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the party nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, enjoyed a 17-point lead over the Republican candidate, Vice President George W. Bush. Five weeks later, on Labor Day, Dukakis was down eight points, the same margin by which he would lose the...

The Seattle Commune is no more. Declared three weeks ago by radical leftists as CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, rechristened CHOP, the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest, the six-block enclave inside Seattle ceased to exist July 1. The cops shut it down. As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as...

Some polls now have Joe Biden running ahead of Donald Trump by 10 points and sweeping the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. This vindicates the strategy Biden’s advisers have adopted: Confine Joe to his basement, no press conferences. Trot him out to recite carefully scripted messages for the...