Peter Wehner

In the first months of Donald Trump’s first term, as one moral outrage followed another, I often found myself repeating, in conversation, a seven-word phrase: Where there’s no bottom, there’s no bottom. However bad things got, they were bound to get worse. That applied above all to Trump, but also to his party, which was fusing with him.
We’ve since seen endless examples of what “no bottom” looks like. The latest is an ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio.

Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. Vendors sold Fauci votive candles and bobbleheads.

“A war. A man. A trick. A trick to break the walls of Troy. And burn it—screaming—to the ground.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in the great hall of Ithaca, with a bard singing a hymn about the cunning of Odysseus, the hero of the tale, to the men who have overrun his house—courting his wife, menacing his son—while he is absent. A feast has been turned into a desecration.
The law these men broke was the most sacred in the ancient world: “xenia,” the law of hospitality.

The actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife, the producer and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, were found stabbed to death in their home on Sunday. Yesterday, their son Nick, who has spoken about his bouts of drug addiction and homelessness, was arrested on suspicion of murder. With that news, a terrible event became doubly tragic.
Reiner was beloved by almost everyone who knew him. On social media, friends described him as generous, kind, funny, and a caring soul.

On Friday night at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, fans witnessed perhaps the greatest game by a player in the history of baseball, and one of the handful of greatest individual performances in any sport ever. But Shohei Ohtani’s performance shouldn’t be of interest just to sports fans. His triumph offers all of us a ray of hope at a troubled time.
Ohtani, the most talented baseball player in history, put on a show for the ages.

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The contrast could hardly have been greater.
During a memorial service for Charlie Kirk, held in a stadium filled with nearly 100,000 people, Erika Kirk, the wife of the slain right-wing activist, expressed both her profound love for her husband and the profound grief brought on by his death. It was the speech of a woman deeply influenced by her Christian faith.

Not too long ago, many Republicans proudly referred to themselves as “constitutional conservatives.” They believed in the rule of law; in limiting the power of government, especially the federal government; in protecting individual liberty; and in checks and balances and the separation of powers.

Just after noon next Monday, Donald Trump will take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, despite having, four years before, “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”
That is the conclusion of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s effort to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election.

This article was updated on December 31 at 6:15pm.
The cast of Saturday Night Live has said lots of things over the course of the show’s 50-year history that have drawn wild cheers from its audience. But two Saturdays ago may have been the first time the person drawing shrieks of delight had been arrested for a cold-blooded assassination.
The spontaneous ovation was for Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged in the December 4 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.
Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, has described himself as a “devout Christian.

Kamala Harris has had as good a three-week stretch as any presidential candidate in modern American history.
When Joe Biden dropped out on July 21, less than a month after his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump, the Democratic Party was on course to be defeated in a landslide.

Yesterday, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.
The context for the interview is important. Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024 GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump.

People across an angry and divided nation were given a magical, unifying moment on Sunday. We needed it.
The singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, 59, returned to the Grammy Awards 35 years after she won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Her working-class ballad “Fast Car” was nominated for both Record and Song of the Year. At the Grammys in 1989, Chapman performed her song solo, playing her acoustic guitar.

You knew it was coming.
As soon as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley emerged as the main threat to Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination, it became inevitable that she would be targeted by him. Any front-runner would do the same thing. But Trump did it with his typical touch.

The significance of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation last night was signaled in the opening sentence: “We’re facing an inflection point in history.”What followed was a speech that may well define Biden’s presidency.The proximate cause for the speech was Biden’s desire to urge Americans to stand with Israel in its war against Hamas and Ukraine in its war against Russia.

“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
With those words, uttered in the well of the House on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker came to an inglorious end. McCarthy is the first speaker in history to be removed by his own party; eight Republicans voted to dethrone him, along with all 208 Democrats who were present and voting.

Updated at 7:45 p.m. ET on August 1, 2023Earlier today, Donald Trump was indicted for a third time, on the charge that he attempted to subvert the 2020 presidential election. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, accuses Trump of a conspiracy to defraud the United States by “using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit”; a conspiracy to “corruptly obstruct and impede” an official proceeding of the U.S.

In his speech last night to his supporters at Mar-a-Lago, made several hours after he was arraigned in Manhattan on 34 felony counts, Donald Trump took aim at Juan Merchan, the judge in the case.“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family, whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign, and a lot of it,” Trump said.

We can’t seem to escape his dark shadow.Donald Trump has added another shameful chapter in the life of this nation. On Thursday he became the first ex-president to be indicted, by a New York grand jury investigating alleged hush-money payments to a porn star.The wisdom of the indictment depends in large part on the facts of the case, which right now we know very little about.

It’s begun to dawn on Republicans that they face a potentially catastrophic political problem: Donald Trump may lose the GOP presidential primary and, out of spite, wreck Republican prospects in 2024.That unsettling realization broke through with the release of a Bulwark poll earlier this week.

The seven public hearings by the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have made the task of dot connecting easy: America’s 45th president oversaw and directed a multipart plan to violently overturn the 2020 election. Texts and testimonies of those in Donald Trump’s inner orbit have shattered every excuse that the former president’s supporters had publicly broadcast since that awful, searing day.

Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearings—hearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that “Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, “Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.

Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearings—hearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that “Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, “Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.

Joe Biden, who ran for president promising to restore trust in American democracy, recently undermined it. It’s not what he was elected to do, and he needs to repair the damage.During his marathon press conference last week, Biden was asked whether the failure of voting-rights legislation in Congress would render this year’s elections illegitimate.

Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.There’s a case to be made that he’s worth ignoring, except for this: Don Jr.

Earlier this week, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, the host of the top-rated news show on cable, rose in defense of the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.“Jones is often mocked for his flamboyance,” Carlson said, “but the truth is he has been a far better guide to reality in recent years—in other words, a far better journalist—than, say, NBC News national-security correspondent Ken Dilanian or Margaret Brennan of CBS.

On a Sunday in late February 2007, Philip Yancey was driving on a remote highway near Alamosa, Colorado. As he came around an icy curve, his Ford Explorer began to fishtail; the tire slipped off the asphalt and the Explorer tumbled down a hillside. The windows were blown out; skis, boots, luggage, and a laptop computer were strewn over the snow.Yancey suffered minor cuts and bruises on his face and limbs and a persistent nosebleed, but he also felt an intense pain in his neck.

Something happened last Saturday that was significant because it was unprecedented: Donald Trump spoke at a rally in the heart of Trump country—Cullman, Alabama, which gave the incumbent president more than 88 percent of the vote in 2020—and he was booed. The jeers were scattered but noticeable, enough so that Trump responded to them.Trump had encouraged those in the audience to get vaccinated. “I believe totally in your freedoms. I do.

“I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation,” Joe Biden said in 1975. “There’s a point where you are incapable of meeting moral obligations that exist worldwide.” At the time, he was arguing against U.S. aid to Cambodia.

“This is an earthquake,” a prominent Christian writer told me.The publication of an extraordinary February 24, 2020, letter by Russell Moore, one of the most influential and respected evangelicals in America (and a friend), has shaken the Christian world.When the letter was written, Moore was the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.