Two years down and two to go. Like him or loathe him, Donald Trump is the force of nature his supporters hoped he would be and his detractors feared he would be. There’s no reason to think he will change his ways of getting things done leading up to the 2020 presidential election. If the voters could get his solid results without the nonstop drama, Donald Trump would be a shoo-in for a second term.
Ours is the era of the Twitter celebrity. Gun control activist David Hogg, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and of course President Trump owe their celebrity to Twitter, giving most of them (the president excepted) celebrity and fame just for being famous. None would have ascended to such fame but for the social networking platform. Twitter is said to be losing money — gobs of it, in fact — but it’s a kingmaker. Or at least a prince-and princess-maker.
Donald Trump isn't the first man to point out that life in the Middle East is built largely on a mirage of fantasy and resentment. But he is the first man in a long time to do something about it. Moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is simply a long-overdue recognition of the reality that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and the Jews aren't going anywhere.
In the end, the resistance didn't work. Despite much hemming and hawing, the nomination of Gina Haspel to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency passed the Senate this week. The vote was 54 to 45, with six Democrats supporting her. Two of those Democrats are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Their support sealed the success of the nomination earlier in the week.
The blue wave that Democrats are counting on to win the day in November, and the Congress with it, just can't seem to break out of the swamp. This week's party primaries were counted on to produce candidates moderate enough, or at least sane enough, to restore credibility to Democratic prospects. It didn't happen quite that way.
It's rare for the list of everyday annoyances to get shorter, not longer. But shrink the list did when the high price of oil crashed a decade or so ago, leaving Americans with a happy jingle in their pockets. Now several factors are converging to drive up the price of oil again, and motorists are feeling familiar pain in the wallet. Dread may return with every fill-up. The difference this time, though, is that the United States has new oil reserves in the Earth's fractures beneath North Dakota, and now maybe Saudi Arabia wants to be a pal.
The world did not end when President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate scheme, nor did the heavens fall when he insisted that the United States deserves a fair shake in the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement.
Diplomats should not be confused with donkeys, but the carrot and the stick are useful tools to encourage both diplomat and donkey to do the right thing. Though a novice, President Trump has aggressively wielded these implements to deal with rogue regimes in Iran and North Korea. The sight of three Americans freed from North Korean prison returning to American soil is evidence that change, limited but real, is at hand.
There was no end of gnashing of teeth and furrowing of brow when President Trump declared in December that he would honor a campaign promise, routinely made and routinely broken by several of his predecessors, to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the actual capital of Israel.
The Boy Scouts of America have been taught for more than a century to "Be Prepared." But the Scouts have never been prepared for this. Facing a long, steady decline in membership, since the men in charge opened the ranks to a variety of LGBTQ applicants, the organization is doubling down on what they did wrong. They're taking the Boy out of Boy Scouts.
Donald Trump diplomacy, which so offends delicate sensibilities in the United States and in the ministries of the West, nevertheless continues to pay rewards. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo comes home from North Korea on Thursday with three political prisoners released as a propaganda sweetener in advance of the president's talks with Kim Jong-un about suspending his nuclear weapons program.
Once more, President Trump has done what he said he would do if elected president. Barack Obama's "very bad deal" with Iran is history. Let the hand-wringing begin.
Composing a laundry list of achievements is a big job for any former president of the United States, but few of Barack Obama's predecessors had Donald Trump at work erasing their footprints. Thanks to the Donald's relentless counter agenda, the legacy that the Democratic star plans to earn cash and credit for in his coming memoir will be little more than a memory by the time his book reaches the printer.
Every zookeeper knows it's important to keep the animals fed on an orderly schedule. It's dangerous to keep the critters waiting for their grub. They want fresh meat, and want it served on time.
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been more about rewarding a certain kind of Scandinavian liberalism than celebrating actual, identifiable achievement. So it's highly unlikely that the five Norwegians, appointed by the Norwegian parliament, who bestow the prize would give one to President Donald Trump — even were he to abolish all weapons, end all conflicts, and "stop the rise of the oceans." It's highly unlikely the president will call Air Force One from the hangar for a trip to Stockholm.
Fans of the welfare state mostly the nave waiting for the streetcar to Utopia have dreamed for years of a "universal basic income" for everybody, paid by governments to layabouts and unemployables. The doughty Finns tried it, and to their surprise and disappointment it didn't accomplish anything beyond an expensive lesson in how human nature invariably works. Now they have discontinued their 16-month-old experiment in giving a no-strings-attached "universal basic income" to certain unemployed Finns.
The hardest thing a politician or office-holder can do when his mouth gets him in trouble is to shut up and hope someone else will change the subject.
Genetic science has dramatically expanded the methods of bringing criminals to justice, but not every measurement is meant for prying eyes, and the dive into the gene pool can turn the lights on the good, the bad, the ugly and everyone in between. But there are costs.
Sometimes "the filthy rich" among us do great and good things with their money. More than a few American towns and cities have libraries today because Andrew Carnegie, a steel baron of an earlier age, dedicated his wealth to getting them started. Many of Henry Ford's millions were dedicated to improving education, though some of those millions wound up in dubious places. Rockefeller millions and Walton millions have done much to enrich schools, museums and art galleries.
When Donald Trump sits down with Kim Jong-un sometime this spring he will do so against the backdrop of Kim's surprising love-in with President Moon Jae-in last week at Panmunjom, when the two leaders hugged, held hands and all but planted kisses on each other to make up for decades of mutual hostility on the Korean peninsula.
Never throw anything away. You never know what might return to high fashion.
Human events sometimes seem to spill across the globe without rhyme or reason, but occasionally events converge in harmonic fashion, revealing a stunning opportunity.
