Mona Charen

“Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” That acknowledgement from Michael McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was echoed a few days later by Michael Turner, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “To the extent that this propaganda…

During the all-too-brief one-on-one contest between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, there was a good deal of analysis declaring it the last stand of the Reaganite vision for the GOP versus the MAGA takeover. That was the wishiest of wishful thinking — and not just because such large segments of…

President Joe Biden chose to scrap a bit with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at the State of the Union — a choice that should remind us of the old saw, “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” Greene has two modes: heckling and lying. This time, she was doing…

Apparently interpreting the Supreme Court’s decision on the 14th Amendment as a personal vote of confidence, Donald Trump pushed his luck, urging the justices to rule swiftly that he has absolute immunity as well. That is not likely. Most observers thought the court would reject Colorado’s action because permitting it would have invited chaos in…

The Alabama Supreme Court set off political tremors last week with its decision that frozen embryos have the status of “extrauterine children” and thus are covered by a state law that permits parents to seek damages for the wrongful death of a “minor child.” The implication that in vitro fertilization (IVF) cannot be practiced if…

The border bill circus is the latest demonstration of a bedrock reality of today’s Republican Party: It does not exist to achieve political outcomes. Its chief function is fan service. The overriding concern of GOP voters, according to polls and to elected Republicans, is immigration. In the ranty precincts of the right, they believe that…

The title of my 2003 book, “Useful Idiots,” was a reference to a perhaps apocryphal quote sometimes attributed to Lenin to the effect that gullible liberals in the West would prove useful idiots for the Soviet Union. I wrote about Democrats; 21 years later, the epithet belongs wholeheartedly to the GOP. Their choice to support…