Jonah Goldberg

On everything from legislative strategy to energy policies to Cabinet appointments, Trump has left his own party faithful scrambling to explain and defend his actions beyond blind cult-of-personality loyalty.

The bedrock assumptions about how politics “works” and the rules for what a politician can or can’t do, no longer seem operative.

The best defense — really the only defense — of Trump’s rhetoric is that it’s a negotiating tactic: Start with an outlandish ask, and then find a compromise that would have been impossible without it.

The biggest difference between these two concepts is the most important one: The swamp exists; the deep state doesn’t.

The most interesting political takeaway from the drama is that the Republican Party now has two masters with different goals.

None of this is to suggest that presidents and their economic policies don’t matter. It’s just that they don’t matter as much as presidents and their partisans claim they do.

The single most abused, misused and misunderstood word in American politics is “unity.”

Amid the short-lived debate over private-sector “greed” occasioned by Harris’ proposal, we heard almost nothing about the avarice of the public sector.

Simply put, Biden’s luck has run out. But he could still put an end to his opponent’s improbable run of luck.

There’s bad news and good news for those who want to see Joe Biden win in 2024 (or who really just want to see Donald Trump lose).

Saying you’ll be a dictator for any amount of time is no laughing matter, particularly for a former president who likes to test-drive real desires by pretending he’s joking.

Politicians play on nostalgia because it is one of the most powerful human emotions.

McCarthy was never a policy wonk or doctrinaire conservative, he’s a dealmaker and glad-hander, which is why most handicappers expect he’ll figure out how to horse-trade his way into the speakership. The only question is what he’ll trade for that precious gavel.

Rarely has so much passion and studied seriousness been devoted to the trivial issue of a congressional criminal referral.

The “gun lobby” is the tail, not the dog.