All posts tagged "Bill Kristol"

Political analysts warned that Republicans have a plan to move Todd Blanche through his upcoming confirmation hearing untouched.

During an interview on Morning Shots, conservative analyst Bill Kristol and journalist Ben Parker broke down the mechanics of the two-day Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which will decide whether to advance Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's nomination for the permanent role of Trump's attorney general.

Despite the time senators will have to confront Blanche on a slew of topics, including the Department of Justice's anti-weaponization fund and the Epstein files, Parker and Kristol predicted that Republicans will try to limit the amount of time that goes toward hitting Blanche with tough questions....

President Donald Trump has signaled he is likely to retreat from the ongoing Iran war, a former White House insider said on Tuesday.

Bill Kristol, conservative analyst and editor-at-large for The Bulwark, shared what he thinks Trump and his administration will do next as the war now reaches the fifth week.

"Where he’s heading is toward the exits," Kristol wrote. ...

The Bulwark's Bill Kristol wrote Thursday that House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans were complicit in an "Orwellian" cover-up to protect powerful people involved in the Epstein scandal.

Kristol quoted Johnson telling CNN's Jake Tapper, "I want everything to come out about the Epstein evils. . . . I’m pushing aggressively for the full release of everything that is possible, and, by the way, so is the president. We’re using every mechanism within our power to do that, and to do it as quickly as possible."

And yet, Kristol wrote, Johnson "panicked" and "recessed the House in order to avoid a floor vote on a resolution calling for the release of the files."...

In a new article for The Bulwark, conservative writer William Kristol hypothesized how Donald Trump's late attorney and fixer, Roy Cohn, has guided the president from beyond the grave and helped him tally a spate of achievements in the White House.

Of the "big, beautiful bill" that finally landed on his desk after months of posturing, Kristol imagined Trump thinking, "The key is the $170 billion for the internal police. I saw early on—maybe it was the ghost of Roy Cohn whispering in my ear—that 'mass deportation' was the path to seizing and consolidating power."

The hypothetical Trump continued, "So, yeah, the mass deportations have started, and they’re not going to stop. We do that for the next few years, keep the issue front and center—and meanwhile get ICE built up, and get people used to using the military at home. 'Boiling the frog slowly'—that’s another great expression Roy loved to use. I guess he invented it."...

If "Democracy dies in darkness," as The Washington Post declares, so, too, does authoritarianism, according to conservative columnist Bill Kristol in The Bulwark.

In his latest column, Kristol cited House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) justification for why President Donald Trump can't possibly be accused of "wrongdoing": "The reason that many people refer to the Bidens as the ‘Biden crime family’ is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains, in the back rooms. They were trying to conceal it. . . Whatever President Trump is doing is out in the open. They’re not trying to conceal anything. . . . President Trump has had nothing to hide. He’s very up front about it," Johnson said.

Kristol called this defense "an admission" of Trump's "open corruption and lawlessness," but argued that it's "far more dangerous" than the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans of, say, Richard Nixon....

The Bulwark's Bill Kristol argued in a new piece Wednesday that it made perfect sense for Donald Trump to spend his first international trip of his second term in Saudi Arabia because he admires the kingdom's iron fist of repression so very much.

Kristol wrote that Trump appearing among the "autocrats and plutocrats and kleptocrats" hosted by His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was exactly the image Trump wanted circulated around the world: American strongman holds court with a despot in one of the world's "most unfree" nations.

“I like him a lot. I like him too much,” the president said of his "friend" MBS, despite Saudi Arabia's proven ties to 9/11 and the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The U.S. has “no stronger partner," Trump said of the kingdom before shoring up at least $600 billion in Saudi investment pledges....