Patrick Lawrence: Trump vs. the Deep State
This is the first of two commentaries examining what the writer reads as President Trump’s unfolding offensive against the institutions and agencies comprising the deep state — or, if you prefer, the administrative state or the permanent state or the invisible government….
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Musk & the Myth of USAID
Among the agency’s missions, the one to promote democracy has made it a very sad story. What hath the MAGA movement wrought? I doubt the archest of Donald Trump’s arch-enemies ever imagined that in his second term he would take things…
Patrick Lawrence: Trump’s Failures, America’s Failures
Well, we now have a president who says what he means, and this is an advance beyond the four years Americans spent listening to a lifelong, compulsive liar who more than occasionally said the opposite of what he meant. It…
Patrick Lawrence: The Nihilism of Antony Blinken
Readers write from time to time thanking me for keeping up with The New York Times so they don’t have to do so themselves. I understand the thought, and they are most welcome in all cases. But we have now…
Patrick Lawrence: Our World of Wars, Our War of Worlds
It is some years now since a lot of people began imagining the specter of World War III in the near or middle distance. This kind of thinking has been especially common since the U.S., with determination and purpose, provoked…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Blinded to Syria
I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend. I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Biden Family of Liars
Given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings, it follows that his intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself. This is the sixth in Consortium News’s series on the extensive criminal allegations leveled at…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s ‘Samson Option’
It wasn’t hard to foresee that those planning and executing U.S. foreign policy, lacking all imagination and anything remotely resembling courage, would prove incapable of an orderly transition to a multipolar world order. It has been clear since the terror…
Patrick Lawrence: The Sound of Enforced Silence
Is there some connection, — not quite official but it may as well be— between censorship and presidential politics? I pose the question as a survivor of the Russiagate years, when illiberal liberals started talking about “free-speech absolutists,” and when…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump 2.0 Crosses the Atlantic
Whatever the future may hold — and seldom does it present such promise and peril as now — Trump and his national-security team set a lot of wheels in motion last week. Eight years ago, at precisely this moment in…