Republicans

The ‘Never Trump’ Construct

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review   The president’s fiercest critics still do not grasp that Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the GOP’s internal strife. For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican party over Donald Trump, 90 percent of Republicans ended up voting for him.   Bitterness Over […]

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The Method to Trump’s ‘Madness’

By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness The Democratic Party, as it did after Hubert Humphrey’s close loss in 1968, seems still to be misdiagnosing its 2016 defeat. Democrats see too little identity politics rather than too much as their trouble, and thus are redoubling on what has been slowly shrinking the party into coastal enclaves.

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review   Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. What’s new is in-fighting among the elites.   The Left-Wing Trump Haters About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental.   The hard-leftist

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The Anti-Trump Bourbons: Learning and Forgetting Nothing in Time for 2020

By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness Just seven months into Donald Trump’s administration we are already bombarded with political angling and speculations about the 2020 presidential race. No one knows in the next three years what can happen to a volatile Trump presidency or his psychotic enemies, but for now such pronouncements of doom seem

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Is There Still a Conservative Foreign Policy?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Trump did not create the divide in the GOP policy world — he exposed it. The Trump victory and the Republican establishment’s mostly negative reaction to it have in matters of foreign policy called into question who is conservative, who not — and whether the old ideological rubrics

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The Problem of Competitive Victimhood

by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Divisive identity politics are fading in favor of a shared American identity. The startling 2016 presidential election weakened the notion of tribal identity rather than a shared American identity. And it may have begun a return to the old idea of unhyphenated Americans. Many working-class voters left the Democratic

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Trump — And the Use and Abuse of Madness

By Victor Davis Hanson National Review Fiery and unpredictable rhetoric can be a powerful strategic tool, but only if it’s not habitual. Occasionally insanity, real or feigned, has its political advantages —largely because of its ancillary traits of unpredictability and an aura of immunity from appeals to reason, sobriety, and moderation. Rogues often try to

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Republicans and the Lost Art of Deterrence

By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness In a perfect and disinterested world, when Washington, D.C. is deluged in scandal, a nonpartisan investigator or prosecutor should survey the contemporary rotten landscape. He would then distinguish the likely guilty from the probably falsely accused—regardless of the political consequences at stake. In the real cosmos of Washington, however,

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Trump’s Circular Firing Squad

By Victor Davis Hanson National Review Trump and his critics are attacking each other, failing to focus on the only story that counts: the welfare of the United States. The American political system has never quite seen anything like the current opposition to President Trump and his unusual reaction to it. We are no longer

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