Conrad Black
Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.
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From my most recent NRO article, about recent comments by George W. Bush and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the need for Trump: “The incumbent is not without his limitations, but a few words from George W. and Justice Ginsburg remind ... -
The Prosecution Is Weakening
From my most recent NRO article, about the state of the Trump–Russia investigation: “The smear campaign over the disembodied fiction of Trump–Kremlin collusion to rig the 2016 presidential election becomes ever more threadbare.” Whether you agree or disagree, your ... -
Trump and the State of the Union
A week in England has enabled me to see more clearly the absurdity of the depths and length that the political scandal-mongering in the United States has achieved. Most of the British media are anti-American anyway, and, like most of ... -
The Exhausted Racism Charge
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump and the current immigration controversy: “The Democratic charge — that Trump is a racist — is nonsense and the campaign attempt to portray the president as hostile to anyone not of white pigmentation, ... -
Michael Wolff and the Death Rattle of Trumpophobia
From my most recent NRO article, about Michael Wolff’s notorious new book: “It is so overtly and egregiously false, so completely worthless as an account of what is happening in the White House, the respectable elements of Trumpophobia are ... -
Trump’s Whirlwind Year
From my most recent NRO article, about how the president fared in 2017: “Donald Trump was a joke until nominated, unelectable until elected, incompetent until he succeeded on most fronts, and about to be impeached until he debunked the collusion nonsense; ... -
The Media, Trump, and Nixon
From my most recent NRO article, about the media’s treatment of Trump: “Specialists in aberrant mass psychology will one day derive great interest and perhaps generate much enlightenment on what it is that has possessed a wide swath of ... -
The Newest Round of Anti-Trumpism
From my most recent NRO article, about the Flynn indictment and the current state of the Mueller investigation: “To anyone with legal insight, the Flynn indictment was the barefaced admission by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that, after nine months in ... -
The Current Panic
From my most recent NRO article, about the sexual-harassment controversy: “Obviously, issues of the sexual harassment of women, especially juveniles and particularly if any aggressive physical contact is involved, are a subject that will not, and should not, suddenly vanish. ... -
Hillary’s Version
From my most recent NRO article, about Hillary Clinton’s book: “It was generally panned when it came out a couple of months ago for blaming everyone but herself for her defeat. I have never been a Clinton-basher and I ... -
The Moore Case
From my most recent NRO article, about the Roy Moore allegations: “I don’t like Roy Moore as a candidate, but I don’t like premeditated political character assassinations either, and in a parallel of the fact that impositions on ... -
Ring Down the Curtain on This Fiasco
From my most recent NRO article, about Mueller’s investigation: “The Trump-haters who control the media are asking the nation and the world to believe that the continuation in office of the constitutionally chosen president of the United States depends ... -
After the Manafort Indictment
From my most recent NRO article, about Mueller’s first indictments, and what happens next: “Mueller must soon acknowledge that he has no evidence of Trump-Kremlin collusion and move on with his mandate to investigate the Russian attempt to influence ... -
Trump: Travails and Opportunities
From my most recent NRO article, about the current state of play in U.S. politics: “The country is finally beginning to look seriously at what the Clinton Foundation, former president Clinton, and then–Secretary of State Clinton did in ... -
The Never Trumpers’ New Strategy
From my most recent NRO article, about the latest anti-Trump strategy: “Recourse to the 25th Amendment would not remove Trump: It would be like the madness of King George III, and he would be writing Congress every month demanding to ... -
The Steele Dossier Is Still Absurd
From my most recent NRO article, about the continuing allegations that Trump colluded with Russia: “What is happening now is a disgraceful charade: Burr and Warner are waiting for the author of the fable of the Muscovite Golden Shower to ... -
Las Vegas, the NFL, and Jimmy Kimmel
From my most recent NRO article, about the recent shooting and much more: “The only gun-control measures that would reduce the possibility of a Las Vegas horror are a good deal more stringent than any that more than 10 percent of ... -
Germany’s Moment
From my most recent NRO article, about Germany in the aftermath of its recent election: “Europe and the world are waiting for the sensible and benign Germany that has led Europe to economic success, under the American umbrella and then ... -
Trump’s Bold Defense of America
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump’s U.N. speech: “There is no reason for Trump to certify Iranian compliance with Obama’s shameful nuclear green-light agreement with Iran.” Whether you agree or disagree, your comments are, ... -
Trump and the ‘Pivot’ to Democrats
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump and the congressional parties: “McConnell and Ryan don’t hold the balance of power between the administration and the Democrats, and it isn’t a matter of a durable and late ‘... -
Mockery of Trump Will Diminish
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump and his foes in Washington, D.C., and the media: The hysterical assault by the media and Democrats is starting to crumble and fall apart. Like shrieking babies who eventually become ... -
As the Mockery Dwindles
The moment I have been awaiting with trembling and prayerful anticipation since the week of President Trump’s inauguration is dawning: The hysterical assault by the media and Democrats is starting to crumble and fall apart. Like shrieking babies who ... -
Reviling Trump
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump and Charlottesville: “There was absolutely nothing wrong with the president’s clear denunciation of the violent factions on both sides.” Whether you agree or disagree, your comments are, as always, most ... -
The Media ‘In Crowd’
From my most recent NRO article, about the Left in the entertainment industry: “None of these people have any more right to be taken seriously when they inflict their sophomoric views of public policy and world affairs on their tens ... -
Choose Sides in This Civil War
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump and his opponents: “This is a civil war and the apostate conservatives should realize that, if Trump loses, they don’t get a new Reaganism in the Republican party and renewed ... -
White House Shakeup
The shakeup in the White House affords even some in the serried ranks of anti-Trump commentators the opportunity to take a somewhat more benign perspective. What the veteran and always fair and perceptive Brit Hume of Fox News calls “the ... -
Trump Is Winning More Than Ever
Catching up on American affairs after nearly three weeks overseas has been a challenging cultural experience. In Europe, including the United Kingdom, coverage of American political affairs lurches between belligerent ignorance and Late Communist International malice, and Fox News is ... -
Trump and His Enemies
A change of pace and tone by the president is the best way to end the war of attrition that has overtaken and partly anesthetized the entire process of government in Washington. The bombastic Trump personality and his frequently changing ... -
Trump: Off to a Good Start
It is often hard to discern, but, despite an unprecedented amount of friction and the continued implacable hostility of the discredited post-Reagan political establishment, Donald Trump is continuing to gain ground in his holy crusade against them. He mousetrapped himself ... -
Election Day Jitters Worldwide
The world is afflicted by an international crisis of ineffectual government, even in most of the principal democracies. The three principal Western continental European countries are close to election day, and none of them can be called today a stable ... -
A Grand New Foreign Policy
Though it is hard to believe some days, the political atmosphere in Washington is slowly settling down. The Democrats drone tiresomely on, battering the piñata that there is no evidence that President Obama tapped candidate Trump’s telephones, and ... -
The More Trump Wins, the Angrier They Get
The frenzy of the Never Trump movement becomes more demented every week. This last weekend, former national-intelligence director James Clapper (no friend of Donald Trump) said that there had been no evidence of any collusion between Trump people and any ... -
Trump and the ‘Enemy of the People’
What is utterly astonishing about the fierce contest between the national media and President Trump is that the media do not realize how despised they are by most Americans, and how richly, as a group (which contains many individual exceptions), ... -
Trump: Winning More Than Ever
Appearances are deceiving, and President Trump, although the launch of the 90-day travel ban was botched, cannot lose on the issue. His opponents, in the U.S. and the world, have absurdly overreacted; an arriving onlooker would imagine that the ... -
Donald Trump and His Opponents
It was a brilliant inauguration, and the continued scrapping and strafing between the administration and the bedraggled, sodden mass of the media continues the execution of a new demarcation of power in the federal government that will prove benign. This ... -
Bogus Vietnam Charges against Nixon
Like Japanese veterans of World War II stumbling, emaciated, out of the jungles of Guam and the Philippines many years after the end of the war, near-terminal victims of Watergate fever still wander dazedly into the media with some new ... -
Historic Opportunity for Trump
The year ends amid the most astonishing display of sour grapes, mass embarrassment, and unspontaneous amnesia in living memory of U.S. presidential elections. The national media, sleepwalking toward the inauguration they did everything possible to prevent, having denied at ... -
In Europe, the Moderate Right Is Winning
As Donald Trump steadily gains in public approval — by his intelligent appointments of well-qualified women and non-Caucasian people to key positions — and debunks the entire Clinton-Obama campaign against him of “racist” and “sexist” defamation, recollection of that spurious campaign evaporates. ... -
The Obama ‘Legacy’
As there is an incessant crescendo, still gaining in volume each week, about President Obama’s “legacy,” I thought it appropriate to try to identify this legacy, which his supporters believe history will honor. I have written here and elsewhere ... -
Trump Can Fix It
It is hard to believe that this clangorous campaign of defamations is in its last week. Of course, in the first year of Donald Trump’s largely self-financed campaign, which broke all records for the sale of silly T-shirts, hats, ... -
The Bonfire of the Hypocrisies
American presidential politics are now in uncharted and turbulent waters. The key to Donald Trump’s success in the primaries and in thrashing the mainstream Republican party, which sank without a ripple apart from the hundreds of millions of dollars ... -
A Tactical Victory for Clinton — Trump’s Was Strategic
The Great Debate was, as all America except CNN knows, an anticlimax. No commentator’s view is worth more than the opinion of anyone else who listened to the debate, but I think it was a tactical marginal victory for ... -
Trump Is Winning
As I suggested when I gave readers a rest from me five weeks ago, the Republican convention successfully celebrated the complete rejection of the post-Reagan Republican party: The Bushes, McCain, and Romney weren’t present or mentioned, or much missed. ... -
Trump Seizes the Day
The last of the endless refuges of the Never Trump brigades were vacated as the once unthinkable Trump campaign departed Cleveland victorious. All the claims that there would be an anti-Trump coup attempt by procedural experts at the convention, or ... -
Erdogan’s Turkey: An Opportunity for the West
I will maintain, until next week when the Republican convention will be over, my self-imposed gag on substantive comments about the presidential race. But I would like to make an interim comment on the media. Peggy Noonan is correct, as ... -
Britain’s Post-Brexit Turmoil
It must be the balmy summer weather that makes me wonder if most people except me are losing their minds, and if our leaders, the beneficiaries and personification of the great democratic systems for which previous generations proverbially fought and ... -
The Conservatives, and the U.K., after Brexit
Though there have been no significant differences between the U.S and the U.K. for more than 150 years, and the two countries have been splendid allies in stirring times, there remains a combination of British envy and distaste for ... -
Brexit Will Be Okay
There remain a few things to write about the British vote to leave the European Union. The current hysteria is the usual mindless idiocy of financial specialists who don’t know anything about politics or strategic issues, especially when they ... -
Trump Tells the Truth on Islamist Terror
It is with extreme reluctance that I endorse anything uttered by the television pontificator Bill Maher. He is in every aspect slovenly, and in all matters affects a world-weary, comedic-nihilist fatigue with the entire human cavalcade. But miracles do occur, ... -
Trump Answers the Call for Change
The Orlando tragedy, following on the controversy over Donald Trump’s accusation of bias against a judge of Latin American descent in the Trump University case, which itself followed right on the heels of a big week of primary wins ...
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A Cure for Trump-Skepticism
A couple of utterances of prominent American public figures recently have reminded us of why the country voted for a complete change in 2016. Former president George W. Bush, speaking in Dubai, violated the custom, until now scrupulously upheld, of a ... -
The Prosecution Is Weakening
Donald Trump’s critics never imagined that more than a year into his presidency, his approval rating would be rising and just under 50 percent, the economy would be cranking up to a 4 percent growth rate, North Korea would have quieted ... -
Trump and the State of the Union
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump after his strong State of the Union address: “The Democrats, having set out to impeach Donald Trump and having almost destroyed the Clintons instead, must be almost ready for a modicum ... -
The Exhausted Racism Charge
The first opportunity for a successful end of the Second Civil War, between President Trump and the incumbent political class, has been squandered by the Democrats. Nothing could be done until Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan ... -
Michael Wolff and the Death Rattle of Trumpophobia
Having encountered Michael Wolff and having had an acidulous public exchange with him, I attest that he is an utterly odious man. He can’t write properly, has no professional integrity, and is a sociophobic mud-slinger and myth-maker. His entry ... -
Trump’s Whirlwind Year
Those who are still predicting that Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office are now like exotic and endangered creatures. It is like an absurdly slow dance, in which the steps are so infrequent and tentative that it ... -
Media’s Unhinged Attacks on Trump Recall the Treatment of Nixon
In this season of frenzied liberal assault on the incumbent president and the almost uniform view of the long-standing bipartisan political elite of the United States that President Trump is a maniac, any falsehood about him or act of obstruction ... -
The Newest Round of Anti-Trumpism
It is hard to believe that Trumpophobic idiocy can plumb depths more profound than it has reached in the last few days. Just as the Russian-collusion argument, which was never supported by anything except Hillary Clinton’s sulky evasions of ... -
The Current Panic
The practice of instant, fierce, and quickly passing controversy seemed to come upon this country, not altogether coincidentally, with the rise of Donald Trump. The Billy Bush tape was clearly timed and aimed to destroy his candidacy, and in the ... -
Hillary’s Version
The American political community has not taken adequate notice of Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened (the title is not posed as a question). It was generally panned when it came out a couple of months ago for blaming everyone ... -
The Rush to Judgment in the Moore Case
It is hard not to look upon the Roy Moore imbroglio as another well-timed hit-job from a familiar and well-practiced source — the same people who thought they had destroyed the Trump campaign by releasing the Billy Bush tape from eleven ... -
Ring Down the Curtain on This Fiasco
I have scoured the American and some international media in vain to find any recognition of what a Gordian knot of absurdity the investigative pretzel of official Washington has become. No one seems to have noticed that the Democrats are ... -
After the Manafort Indictment
The pretense of the Democrats to derive some pleasure from the Manafort and Gates indictments and the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos is one of the more challenging attempts at moralistic theatrics Senator Chuck Schumer has attempted in the last ... -
Trump: Travails and Opportunities
The pattern of the Trump administration continues to evolve, despite many perturbations, toward a more conventional relationship with the media and the country. I was taken gently to task last week by my colleague Jonah Goldberg for applying “Never Trumper” ... -
The Never Trumpers’ New Strategy
The Never Trumpers seem to have retreated, more or less in unison, to the last trench before they throw down their arms and run backwards for their lives: They are now invoking the 25th Amendment. This indicates that they realize ... -
The Steele Dossier Is Still Absurd
It is with great reluctance that I must take issue with my very esteemed friend Andy McCarthy, in this case with his treatment of the Steele Dossier, which makes a lot of sensational allegations against President Trump of compromising past ... -
Las Vegas, the NFL, and Jimmy Kimmel
American political discourse is becoming more fruitless all the time. The terrible tragedy in Las Vegas has led to amplified calls for gun control, although no version of gun control that anyone is advocating would have prevented that tragedy. The ... -
Germany’s Moment
After the recent German election, that country may be a step closer to assuming its full status as the greatest power in Europe, and the greatest in the world after the United States and China. It has long been a ... -
Trump’s Bold Defense of America
It is becoming difficult to believe that the ever-more-silly entertainment world, an echo chamber of escalating primal imbecilic utterances in a hall of mirrors, festers in the same country that, as its president correctly told the United Nations on Tuesday ... -
Trump and the ‘Pivot’ to Democrats
As usual with President Trump’s more imaginative moves, the arrangement with the Democratic congressional leaders to defer the debt-ceiling issue for three months and pass hurricane relief at once was a more important step than it appears. The key ... -
Trump Will Prevail
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump and his foes in Washington, D.C.: Ryan and McConnell have misled the country about their ability or intention to pass bills. If they don’t become more purposeful, the Republicans ... -
Trump Will Prevail
From my most recent NRO article, about President Trump and his foes in Washington, D.C.: “Ryan and McConnell have misled the country about their ability or intention to pass bills. If they don’t become more purposeful, the Republicans ... -
Reviling Trump
The whole world is astounded and distressed at the incivility of American public discourse. Not since Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused President Dwight Eisenhower, former president Harry Truman, and the late president Franklin D. Roosevelt of being Communist sympathizers, and ... -
The Media ‘In Crowd’
Watching Everything Is Copy, Jacob Bernstein’s documentary life of his mother, Nora Ephron, the other night gave me a much clearer picture than I had had of the force, attractiveness, and danger of that talented cultural, media, and entertainment ... -
Choose Sides in This Civil War
The battle lines have been so sharply drawn, in what is now a bloodless civil war for direction of U.S. public policy, that the two sides cannot really communicate with each other. There is a commendable candor in Kellyanne ... -
The Decline and Fall of The Economist
For decades, The Economist steadily built up its sales in the United States as it found a market that was constantly growing in wealth and numbers and that could not be reached by the banalities of Time and Newsweek. Henry ... -
Trump Turns the Corner
The president’s tour in the Middle East and Europe is going extremely well, to the point where there is almost complete silence from the Democrats. The Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget are rolling out a budget ... -
The Murdoch Effect
Rupert Murdoch has been a controversial figure in the media of Australia, then the Western world, and more recently the whole world, for a total of nearly 65 years. He inherited control of his father’s newspaper group at the age ... -
Trump’s Syria Strike and the Washington Spring
Perhaps it is a function of spring, and of the irrepressible perseverance of hope, which even motionless in the heart of darkness cannot be extinguished, that I cautiously predict the beginnings of a return to functioning government in Washington. The ... -
Coming Back from the Health-Care Debacle
The health-care-reform fiasco illustrates perfectly why the United States has been an ineffectual, gridlocked failure at legislative self-government for over 20 years. It is not only not a system with two parties ready to govern; it is not a system with ... -
The Russia Insinuation Collapses
The ignominious collapse of the Democratic claims and insinuations that Donald Trump was improperly connected to the Russian government has de-escalated the Democrats’ campaign against the president — from a frenzied assault seeking impeachment and removal for a cause to be ... -
Trump: Overpromising on Drugs
Even five weeks after the inauguration, the president is still, as he demonstrated at CPAC, speaking in absolute terms of reducing crime and shutting down the sale and use of narcotics. Electorates make allowance for the exaggerated claims of politicians ... -
How Trump Can Succeed
The preliminaries of the Trump presidency are ending, and difficult though it is to appreciate, the atmosphere is lightening somewhat. It is a little early to opine on the Trump foreign policy, but his first three visits from other government ... -
Trump: The First Ten Days
The instant crisis over the 90-day ban of some categories of foreigners from the United States is a sideshow and will pass quickly. But, like the treatment of the Mexican-wall issue, it has had some ham-handed aspects. It will not ... -
Donald Trump vs. the Media
The CNN hype of the farrago of scatological nonsense about the president-elect and the Russian government ends the pre-inaugural interlude on an all-time triumph of media unprofessionalism, malice, and outright idiocy, by the most bigoted of all large American news ... -
Obama’s Failed Presidency
Like most people, I had hoped for the customary settling down after the very tumultuous and nasty election. We have been denied that, not by the candidates, who have been dignified, but by the outgoing administration. I have written here ... -
Lights Out for the Old Order
This is the ninth time I have witnessed, usually from afar but not this time, a party transition in the administration of the United States government. British prime minister Harold Macmillan famously described the process in 1960–61 as like the takeover ... -
Trump: Ready to Lead in First Hundred Days
The post-electoral media buzz over the president-elect is surrealistic, in that it seems to reflect the almost universal inability of the U.S. national media to grasp the fact that no one is listening to them and no one cares ... -
Trump Victory Exposes Media Bias
There is little more to be said about the election result. Though my preference was known to readers and has been favored by the voters, I am disconcerted by the divisions that have arisen among former allies, especially between thoughtful ... -
Trump vs. Clinton: A Fight about Character
As I am about to depart on an overseas trip and will miss at least one week in this space, I offer a brief forward look on the home stretch of the election campaign. The Democrats have absolutely no plausible ... -
Trump Still Has a Great Opportunity
It is already a platitude that Donald Trump had a bad week. The stridently partisan national (and international) media have translated Mrs. Clinton’s unimpressive and fairly narrow victory in the first debate into a terrible “drubbing” (the word is ... -
Deplorable Elites
While I have consistently dissented in this column and elsewhere from extreme versions of the anti-Trump barrage across the American and international media, he was not my first choice for the Republican nomination, and I have tried not to close ... -
Trump Seizes the Day
From my most recent NRO article, about Trump’s win in Cleveland: “Not only did Trump sweep his opponents in decisive fashion, coming from nowhere and financing his own campaign; not only did the Republican primary vote increase in four ... -
Erdogan’s Turkey: An Opportunity for the West
From my most recent NRO article, about the attempted coup in Turkey: “Despite his untrustworthiness and inconsistencies, it should be possible for the West to deal with Erdogan now that he has quarreled with everyone else. It should be possible ... -
Britain’s Post-Brexit Turmoil
From my most recent NRO article, about Britain’s Brexit aftermath: “We will know on Wednesday whether Mrs. May has got a government that adequately represents the popular majority, or just a patch-up regime stretched by Scotch tape and rubber ... -
The Conservatives, and the U.K., after Brexit
From my most recent NRO article, about Britain’s Brexit aftermath: “The vitriol being hurled about in London is, as usual with the British, very fluent and often entertaining. Americans can keep it in mind for the next time British ... -
Brexit Will Be Okay
From my most recent NRO article, about the aftermath of Britain’s vote: “Now Britain is back to the starting gate, but its position is enviable: Europe will make some concessions to keep Britain, as the EU’s largest customer, ... -
Trump Tells the Truth on Islamist Terror
From my most recent NRO article, about the political aftermath of Orlando: “In responding to the Orlando tragedy, Trump, though the polls do not yet show it, clearly did much better than Clinton or Obama. The president took his usual ... -
Trump Answers the Call for Change
From my most recent NRO article, about another tumultuous week in the campaign: “The Republican leadership learned the hard way that they were standing on a bridge that had no connection to the rudder or propeller of their ship. The ... -
Trump and Hillary: Not That Bad
From my most recent NRO article, on the WSJ and the campaign: “As someone who hopes for much better government than the last two administrations and the latter Clinton term provided, I hope that Trump and his Republican opponents can ...