Author: Mona Charen

My old friends Dennis Prager, Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh, among many others, seem to have made a transition. It’s not enough to vote for Trump. No, even reluctant supporters must now talk themselves into believing that conservative “principles” require a vote for Trump. Like John C. Calhoun, who discovered that slavery was not only not wrong, […]

In “Fiddler on the Roof,” the milkman Tevye imagines what life could be like in “If I Were a Rich Man.” Among the shrewder lyrics is the insight that “the most important men in town will come to fawn on me” and pose questions that would “cross a rabbi’s eyes.” Why? Because “when you’re rich, […]

Terry McAuliffe is a Hillary Clinton pal. He fronted $1.3 million for her house in Chappaqua, New York. We should all have such friends. Thanks to the Republicans who shut down the government in 2013, McAuliffe is now the governor of Virginia, a swing state, and thus in a position to help Clinton get another […]

In the nanosecond between Donald Trump’s foot-in-mouth moments this week, just before he made headlines by announcing changes in the topless blender that is his senior staff, he gave what many consider to be the finest speech of the campaign. CBS’ Major Garrett tweeted “Having been listening since august 2015, objectively best drafted & best […]

We know that America is feeling like a cancer patient at the moment. Doctors explain that there are only two options: amputate a limb or go through chemotherapy, which might save the limb, but also might kill us. We shuffle around in a daze, scarcely believing that there are no good exits from this house […]

About 14 months ago, American politics began to resemble a B-level Washington, D.C. novel. A former secretary of state was revealed to have endangered U.S. secrets and possibly sold aspects of U.S. foreign policy to the highest bidder. Will she face indictment? No. But the FBI director acknowledges that the only way she could possibly […]

Where does a true patriot turn in the 2016 presidential election? The Democratic Party’s national convention is attempting to lay claim to the patriot mantle. Yet the party is not quite there. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was heckled with chants of “no more war.” The Code Pink wing lost the nomination this year, but […]

Ted Cruz’s electrifying performance at the 2016 Republican National Convention will be long remembered, and deservedly so. At a critical moment, when the party of Lincoln had uncomfortably but nonetheless thoroughly embraced a lifelong Democrat/reality star/violence-abettor — and when few leading Republicans had demonstrated the courage to oppose him — Cruz did. Politicians live for […]

In the aftermath of the violence of the past two weeks, I was genuinely rooting for President Obama to achieve the eloquence for which he has such an unearned reputation. If ever there were a moment that called for largeness of spirit, the racially motivated assassination of five officers following the disturbing and highly questionable […]

The Islamic State, you have to acknowledge, is on quite a roll. Over the July 4 weekend, the FBI arrested a northern Virginia neighbor of mine, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh. He was apparently plotting a Fort Hood style attack and told an FBI informant: “I just want to live a good Muslim life and die as […]

“Why do people hate Hillary Clinton so much?” a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Company asked me this week. I responded that the pitiless rancor of American politics today is out of all proportion to our real challenges — but it’s worth recalling how Hillary Clinton earned her miserable reputation. It was the flagrant and […]

We’ve heard a great deal this campaign year about the plight of the working class. The left tells a story about the middle class being destroyed by predatory millionaires and billionaires who are soaking up 99 percent of the “income gains” (as if national income were one giant Big Gulp and the 1 percent managed […]

Whole doctoral dissertations could be devoted to the question of what makes President Obama angry and what does not. His Tuesday broadside against Donald Trump stood in marked contrast to Sunday’s somewhat-cold response to the Orlando massacre. This is a pattern. Mr. Obama did not name Trump, referring to him only as a “politician who […]

The phone has been ringing off the hook at Judge Aaron Persky’s chambers at the Santa Clara County court for the past several days. “Tell your judge he can go to hell, and I hope his kids get raped and he rots in hell,” said one caller. The judge and members of his family have […]

A gorilla has taken control of your TV set. What an apt metaphor for the past year. In fact, of course, I refer to the actual gorilla that was (if you take the word of some of the more unhinged commenters on social media) “assassinated” by zoo officials in Cincinnati. I nearly wrote “who,” but […]

As someone who believes that excessive partisanship and Balkanization is poisoning our politics, I have tried to view Hillary Clinton as something other than the ghoul she is portrayed as in conservative circles. No accusation against her is considered too outlandish to gain assent in some precincts of the right: Vince Foster was murdered. Clinton […]

Washington state’s Republican Party just defied the stampede toward “unity.” Meeting over the weekend, they awarded 40 of the state’s 41 delegates to Ted Cruz. Washington’s Republicans have refused to be sheep. The past few days have featured hectoring demands of Never Trump people to “get over it.” These have come not just from the […]

EgyptAir Flight 804 — carrying 66 people, including three children — departed from Paris on Wednesday night. Just before it was scheduled to land in Cairo, it appears to have made a 360-degree turn before plunging 9,000 feet and disappearing from radar. Was it terrorism? Donald Trump leaped onto Twitter at 6:27 a.m. to suggest […]

Let’s call this the most unsurprising headline of the year so far: “Marriage Increases the Odds of Surviving Cancer, Studies Find.” Next thing you know they’ll be discovering that salt makes you thirsty. I’m not actually belittling the science, more the opposite. Even the most cursory glance at social science data accumulated over the past, […]

The greatest failures of the past generation concern men, women and sex — and there could not be two more awful representatives of what has gone wrong than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton delights in presenting herself as a feminist icon — but she is weighed down by the weaknesses of feminism and […]

A longtime Republican conservative emailed me after Donald Trump’s Tuesday night romp through the “Acela corridor.” “Is the GOP now the anti-trade, anti-immigrant party?” I don’t think so, but take no comfort in the reason: Republicans haven’t signed on to protectionism and nativism (or at least, only a minority has), but they seem to have […]

If it concerns sex in any way, you can be sure that our culture will fixate on it and manage to defy common sense with hyperventilating indignation. Same-sex marriage roiled the waters for decades, but now that the Supreme Court has big-footed that question, culture warriors are prowling for new realms of transgression to embrace. […]

Does this sound familiar? “They wanted something new, something fresh, and they found in this man a radical discourse. He said he would get rid forever of the old elites.” Or this: “He ran as the outsider, the non-politician in a country which had come to distrust politicians. The media loved him, and he loved […]

When a Republican has been in the presidency for eight years, as George W. Bush was, Democrats run against the Republicans. When a Democrat has been in office for eight years, as Barack Obama will soon have been, Republicans run against Republicans. This is a year in which the multiple failures of the Obama years […]

In a year of floors falling away under one’s feet (such as the assumption that nearly all Americans demand a minimal level of civility in public life), the Corey Lewandowski story represents one more gob smack. That Donald Trump stands by the belligerent Lewandowski tells us more of what we already knew about Trump, and […]

Is there any way for Ted Cruz or John Kasich to wrest the Republican nomination from Donald Trump? With every tick of the clock, it looks less likely. The chances differ for the two candidates. Kasich needs a miracle. Cruz may possibly succeed with a new emphasis. Kasich’s claim boils down to this: He’s a […]