Author: Patrick J. Buchanan

Donald Trump turned in perhaps the most effective performance in the history of presidential debates on Sunday night. As the day began, he had been denounced by his wife, Mike Pence, and his own staff for a tape of crude and lewd remarks in a decade-old “locker room” conversation on a bus with Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood.” Tasting blood, the media were in a feeding frenzy. Trump is dropping out! Pence is bolting the ticket! Republican elites are about to disown and abandon the Republican nominee! Sometime this weekend, Trump made a decision: If he is going down to … Continue reading →

The post The Donald Lives! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Denouncing Russian air strikes on Aleppo as “barbaric,” Mike Pence declared in Tuesday’s debate: “The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength. … The United States of America should be prepared to use military force, to strike military targets of Bashar Assad regime.” John McCain went further: “The U.S. … must issue an ultimatum to Mr. Assad — stop flying or lose your aircraft … If Russia continues its indiscriminate bombing, we should make clear that we will take steps to hold its aircraft at greater risk.” Yet one gets the impression this is bluster and bluff. … Continue reading →

The post Stop the Killing, Stop the Carnage, Stop the War appeared first on LewRockwell.

In taking that $915 million loss in 1995, and carrying it forward to shelter future income, Donald Trump did nothing wrong. By both his family and his business, he did everything right. In a famous 1947 dissent, Judge Learned Hand wrote: “[T]here is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. … Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.” … Continue reading →

The post Aborting the Trump Revolution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Celebrating the racial diversity of the Charlotte protesters last week, William Barber II, chairman of the North Carolina NAACP, proudly proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.” Well, if Barber is right, so, too, was John Adams, who warned us that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Consider what the protesters, who, exults Barber, “show us a way forward to peace and justice,” accomplished. In the first two nights of rioting, the mob injured a dozen cops, beat white people, smashed and looted stores, … Continue reading →

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On one of my first trips to New Hampshire in 1991, to challenge President George H. W. Bush, I ran into Sen. Eugene McCarthy. He was returning to the scene of his ’68 triumph when he had inflicted the first crippling wound on Lyndon Johnson. “Pat, you don’t have to win up here, you know,” he assured me. “All you have to do is beat the point spread.” “Beat the point spread” is a good description of what Donald Trump has to do in Monday night’s debate. With only a year in national politics, he does not have to show … Continue reading →

The post How Trump Wins the Debate appeared first on LewRockwell.

Alerting the press that he would deal with the birther issue at the opening of his new hotel, the Donald, after treating them to an hour of tributes to himself from Medal of Honor recipients, delivered. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. … President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.” The press went orbital. “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent” howled the headline over the lead story in The New York Times. Its editorial called Donald Trump a “reckless, cynical bully” spreading political poison in an … Continue reading →

The post The Death Struggle appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since Donald Trump said that if Vladimir Putin praises him, he would return the compliment, Republican outrage has not abated. Arriving on Capitol Hill to repair ties between Trump and party elites, Gov. Mike Pence was taken straight to the woodshed. John McCain told Pence that Putin was a “thug and a butcher,” and Trump’s embrace of him intolerable. Said Lindsey Graham: “Vladimir Putin is a thug, a dictator…who has his opposition killed in the streets,” and Trump’s views bring to mind Munich. Putin is an “authoritarian thug,” added “Little Marco” Rubio. What causes the Republican Party to lose it … Continue reading →

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Speaking to 1,000 of the overprivileged at an LGBT fundraiser, where the chairs ponied up $250,000 each and Barbra Streisand sang, Hillary Clinton gave New York’s social liberals what they came to hear. “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” smirked Clinton to cheers and laughter. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” They are “irredeemable,” but they are “not America.” This was no verbal slip. Clinton had invited the press in to cover the LGBT gala at Cipriani Wall Street where the cheap seats went for $1,200. And … Continue reading →

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Were the election held today, Hillary Clinton would probably win a clear majority of the Electoral College. Her problem: The election is two months off. Sixty days out, one senses she has lost momentum — the “Big Mo” of which George H. W. Bush boasted following his Iowa triumph in 1980 — and her campaign is in a rut, furiously spinning its wheels. The commander in a chief forum Wednesday night should have been a showcase for the ex-secretary of state’s superior knowledge and experience. Instead, Clinton looked like a witness before a grand jury, forced to explain her past … Continue reading →

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In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly of Alton, Illinois, mother of six, wrote and published a slim volume entitled “A Choice Not an Echo.” Backing the candidacy of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the book was a polemic against the stranglehold the eastern liberal establishment had held on the Republican nomination for decades. “A Choice” sold 3 million copies. Schlafly went on to lead the campaign to derail the Equal Rights Amendment, which, with 35 states having ratified, was just three states short of being added to our Constitution. Pro-ERA forces never added another state. Phyllis, who, at 20 was testing weapons at a … Continue reading →

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In accepting the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto to fly to Mexico City, the Donald was taking a major risk. Yet it was a bold and decisive move, and it paid off in what was the best day of Donald Trump’s campaign. Standing beside Nieto, graciously complimenting him and speaking warmly of Mexico and its people, Trump looked like a president. And the Mexican president treated him like one, even as Trump restated the basic elements of his immigration policy, including the border wall. The gnashing of teeth up at The New York Times testifies to Trump’s triumph: “Mr. … Continue reading →

The post Did Trump Just Win the Election? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. For consider what the Associated Press reported this week: The surest way for a person with private interests to get a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, or a phone call returned by her, it seems, was to dump a bundle of cash into the Clinton Foundation. Of 154 outsiders whom Clinton phoned or met within her first two years at State, 85 had made contributions to the Clinton Foundation, … Continue reading →

The post Lots of Smoke Here, Hillary appeared first on LewRockwell.

Issue one! To understand John McLaughlin, it was helpful to have been a 13-year-old entering an all-boys Jesuit school in the 1950s. For when John yelled “Wronnng” at me from his center chair of “The McLaughlin Group,” it hit with the same familiar finality I had heard, many times, from Jesuits at the front of the class at Gonzaga. In that era, John was himself a Jesuit teacher at Fairfield Prep, where the black cape he wore and his authoritarian aspect had earned him from his students the nickname — Father God. In 1970, Fr. John heard another calling, and, … Continue reading →

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“I did it my way,” crooned Sinatra. Donald Trump is echoing Ol’ Blue Eyes with the latest additions to his staff. Should he lose, he prefers to go down to defeat as Donald Trump, and not as some synthetic creation of campaign consultants. “I am who I am,” Trump told a Wisconsin TV station, “It’s me. I don’t want to change. … I don’t want to pivot. … If you start pivoting, you are not being honest with people.” The remarks recall the San Francisco Cow Palace where an astonished Republican, on hearing the candidate speak out in favor of … Continue reading →

The post It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year 2016, the national debt is projected to reach $19.3 trillion. With spending on the four biggest budget items – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense – rising, and GDP growing at 1 percent, future deficits will exceed this year’s projected $600 billion. National bankruptcy, then, is among the existential threats to the republic, the prospect that we will find ourselves in the not-too-distant future in the same boat with Greece, Puerto Rico, and Illinois. Yet, we drift toward the falls, with the issue not debated. Ernest Hemingway reminded us of how nations … Continue reading →

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