Jonah Goldberg stories, Page 11

Bad marriages usually lead to ugly divorces, and that’s where the GOP is heading. After Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination in 2016, the word went forth on the right: It’s a binary choice. You’re either for Hillary Clinton or you’re for Trump. I never agreed with this reasoning, but...

At a rally in Wisconsin the day before the election, President Trump was talking about the choice between him and Joe Biden. He started to say, “This isn’t about …” and then stopped himself and said, “Yeah, it is about me.” He was right. The election was about him. Republicans...

The day before Election Day, Reuters ran a story about the personal toll politics has taken on some peoples’ lives. Mayra Gomez told her 21-year-old son she’d be voting for Trump. He essentially disowned his mother in response. Gomez says he told her: “You are no longer my mother.” Gayle...

Whatever is going to happen with the election is going to happen. Most people have made up their minds, and it’s unlikely that any October surprise — or even a November surprise — will change that. The polls have been stable for literally years now, and as of this writing,...

“God bless real Michigan. God bless real America. God bless the greatest president in our lifetime, Donald Trump,” Ted Nugent recently declared at a Michigan rally. It’s ironic that Trump, the first president born and raised in New York City (or any major city) since Teddy Roosevelt, has hitched his...

Much of the mainstream media refuses to cover the substance of the Hunter Biden laptop story. I think this is more defensible than Trumpworld claims. President Trump says journalists who don’t cover it are “criminals,” which is criminally stupid. Still, I think the press shouldn’t be so scared to deal...

The 2016 election lives loudly in everybody right now. On the Trumpian right, “the polls were wrong before” isn’t merely an observation, it’s a catechism. And on the anti-Trumpian left, it’s a constant source of anxiety bordering on panic. It’s making a lot of folks a little crazy. My friend...

Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, is an “originalist.” Given that originalism is a term coined by lawyers, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are many different flavors of originalism. But, as Barrett explained in her confirmation hearings, they all share the basic idea that the meaning of...

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has been tweeting some interesting things. During Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate, Lee declared on Twitter, “We’re not a democracy.” That raised some eyebrows, to say the least. He followed up by tweeting, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the...

A few years before he died, my friend Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist turned Pulitzer-winning political commentator, told me that the quality of health care you receive tends to rise in tandem with your income — up to a point. For some people, the two lines separate when they get so...

What shall we make of the president’s tax situation? If The New York Times’ accounting is correct, Trump has paid little (or nothing) in income taxes for a long time. In both 2016 and 2017, he paid $750 to Uncle Sam. In 10 of the last 15 years, he paid...

Something strange is going on with The New York Times and the 1619 Project. By now you’ve probably heard of the 1619 Project. It began as a special issue of The Times’ Sunday magazine to mark the 400th anniversary of African slaves being brought to the Jamestown colonies. But it’s...

I’ll confess: There was a time when I would have considered the question facing Republicans a no-brainer. Of course they should seize this opportunity to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a conservative. Moving the courts — especially the Supreme Court — rightward has been a conservative lodestar for...

By any conventional or historical measure, the recent breakthrough between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain is a good thing, and the Trump administration deserves its share of praise for it. The refusal of much of the media to take this moment seriously only lends credibility to President...

Let’s squarely face an ugly possibility: President Trump could get elected a second time without winning the popular vote. Indeed, according to most experts, that’s the only way he could be reelected. This would surely prompt another chorus of calls to scrap the Electoral College. I think that would be...

Who is a moderate now? Who’s a centrist? Until recently, the answer to such questions was primarily ideological. Centrists were middle-of-the-roaders who rejected the purity of the ideological left and right. I will confess: I used to have considerable scorn for such people. They often acted as if being in...

As ambivalent as I am about a Donald Trump victory — or, for that matter, a Joe Biden one — there is one scenario I would enjoy: What if Trump was reelected thanks to support from Hispanics? Now, I should say this is only a remote possibility. There’s zero indication...

Vicky Osterweil, the author of “In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action,” is getting her 15 minutes of fame thanks to a segment on NPR in which she said some really mind-bogglingly dumb, indefensibly evil and fascinatingly reactionary things. We’ll come back to her in a moment....

Last month, a mob of white protesters swarmed a white woman eating dinner in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Video of the bullies demanding that patrons raise their fists in solidarity with the movement went viral. Many pro-Trump and right-wing media personalities were quick to insist this verbal...

The party conventions are over — and I don’t just mean the 2020 conventions. In one sense, the conventions have been over for a very long time. They were created primarily to do two things: pick presidential nominees and craft party platforms. A convention hasn’t actually picked a nominee since...

In July 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis enjoyed a 17-point lead against Vice President George H.W. Bush in a Gallup poll. But Bush went on to crush Dukakis, taking 40 states and winning by seven percentage points. He did so by running an aggressive — critics would say demagogic...

In George Bernard Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah,” the serpent says to Eve in the Garden of Eden: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” What’s funny is that a version of this quote is often ascribed to Robert...

The Birtherism 2.0 brouhaha began the way so many do. A Trump sycophant, in this case Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, handed the president a hot-take opinion piece as if it was breaking news. Mere hours later at a press conference, he acted as if that op-ed was a settled...

President Trump’s delay-the-election trial balloon on Twitter last week was resoundingly denounced, and rightly so. Indeed, so thorough was the repudiation, including from top Republicans, that the president backtracked a little. “I don’t want to delay,” Trump explained in a press conference to discuss the pandemic. “I want to have...

On Thursday morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the U.S. GDP had the biggest drop in a single quarter in U.S. history. From April through June, the economy contracted by 9.5 percent, with GDP falling at an annualized rate of 32.9 percent. President Trump, who tweets about many...