Not everyone has the chops to be a leader of nations. Appealing to the better angels of human nature is a lofty approach to leadership, but the unforgiving streets of New York City have taught President Trump another way to get results. After more than a year of watching the president in action, some people still don’t appreciate what a little fear can accomplish. Mr. Trump doesn’t want a trade war — he just wants his trade partners to have dread of one. Dread can change behavior.
The Group of 7 economic summit in Quebec last week was not quite a family feud, but it didn’t bore anyone. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got in a few licks on each other, Mr. Trump’s “bromance” with French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to be on the rocks, and his relations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May, never particularly warm, continued to be strained if not frosty. But Mr. Trump struck up a good relationship with newly installed Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. Their relations showed a little bonhomie rather than bashing.
The Democrats are supposed to be the fighting party, preferring a brawl to a tea party.
Retirement fever is contagious. Orrin Hatch of Utah is the latest to say he's leaving the U.S. Senate, and the Republicans and the nation will miss him on Capitol Hill.
This is the second round of violent protests by Iranians against their government for suppressing their rights and attempts to enjoy those rights. Barack Obama didn't have much sympathy for the protests against the government suppression of voters in a national election in 2009.
In a world without villains, an old year would go out like a lamb, punctuated only by accident and disappointment. As if a solemn warning of a very specific kind, the last day of 2017 ended with violence, grief and alarm in a Denver suburb, where a gunman with motives yet unknown ambushed four police officers, killing one of them.
With few exceptions, diversity of opinion in Hollywood ranges from left all the way to the far left. Public dedication to diversity is an obsession for "progressives," as liberals now call themselves, but the one form of diversity where it actually makes a difference is diversity of thought. But Hollywood can't allow that.
Everyone agrees -- it's the only thing the fractured nation can agree on -- that the year 2017 was a pretty weird year.
Hope springs eternal, especially at the start of a new year when the desire for a better life is matched by vows to eat less, exercise more and avoid one or all of the seven deadly sins.
The Trump administration's decision to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons is a decision fraught with implications that reach far beyond the dispatch of weapons.
Vladimir Putin is running for another six-year term next year and it looks like he's heading for a romp. But he's taking no chances.
Rep. Sheila Jackson apparently got a free upgrade to first class on a recent United Airlines flight ("United apologizes to passenger who says U.S. Rep. got her seat," Web, Dec. 25). To make matters worse, in order to make this happen United bumped a passenger who had already reserved the seat.
United Airlines continues to have a hard time being nice to its passengers.
To suggest that a reckoning is coming, even if it is, is an implied threat. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is not happy again.
You don't take a knife to a gunfight, and like it or not, politics has become something of a gunfight and this gunfight, the closest since the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, is on vivid display in the contest for the seat of the 94th District in the Virginia House of Delegates, where the winner of a tie is to be finally determined by drawing lots, as prescribed by Virginia election law.
Campaigning is always easier than governing. There's unanimity at a campaign rally, but in Congress, not so much. From 2010 onward the Grumpy Old Party won election after election on the promise to pull up Obamacare, root and branch, and start over with health-care reform.
Colin Kaepernick, the onetime San Francisco 49ers quarterback who kept his seat during the playing of the national anthem and made the National Football League infamous, probably thought he was just taking a rest. Now "taking a knee" is the one play that every NFL player can master.
Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is one of the bright lights of the Trump administration. He acted forcefully to get the runaway agency under control and then refocused it on its actual core mission.
Keeping everybody on campus politically correct is not easy, but nobody tries harder than the president, the deans and maybe even the professors and teaching assistants at the University of Minnesota.
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson had a bright idea not long ago. "Let's just meet," he said in a message to North Korea. "We can talk about the weather if you want. We can talk about whether it's going to be a square table or a round table, if that's what you're excited about."
President Trump basked late Wednesday in a rare moment of acknowledged triumph, delivering at last on a legislative promise, "the big, beautiful tax cut" he promised would arrive before Christmas.
The journalist's lot, like the policeman's, is not a happy one. The overpaid prima donnas who posture in front of the cameras are not typical of the reporter or correspondent. The typical reporter is overworked and underpaid, an asset to his (or her) publication, and often considered to be only as good as their last story. They're catching flak for "fake news" — not always without cause — and colleagues nearly everywhere are jailed, or worse, simply for doing their jobs. Civilized nations know better than to allow shooting the messenger.
