Author: W. James Antle III

President Donald Trump was already in the midst of a moment like when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers as a deadly aviation disaster struck. Except Trump was trying to remind federal employees who is the boss much more broadly than Reagan was as he stared down an illegal strike. “We have informed the…

What’s old is new again. President Donald Trump has returned to the White House, and his new administration is already acting with a vigor that eluded former President Joe Biden for most of his forgettable term. Not since Grover Cleveland, in a dramatically different political and media environment than that which prevails today, have we…

Former Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton sat politely as President Donald Trump excoriated their failures and what he described as the “betrayals” of the political class in his second inaugural address. “We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to…

When President Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for the White House for the third time, he told the crowd in Milwaukee, “I’m not supposed to be here.” It was a line he repeated often in the weeks following the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, which happened just days before the GOP convention.…

It is fitting that President Joe Biden will be bookended throughout history by President-elect Donald Trump, his predecessor and successor. Even the four years Biden was in office were largely defined by Trump. Biden opened his farewell address Wednesday night ensuring that his deputies, not Trump’s, received credit for the ceasefire and hostage deal in…

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office for a second time, the mood is distinctly different than in 2017. Democrats are moving out of Resistance mode ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration despite, or perhaps because, fascism and Hitler were such a big part of their closing argument in last year’s presidential campaign. The hair-on-fire approach…

When House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was reelected, some conservatives said they only voted for him because President-elect Donald Trump asked them to. Johnson has been a pragmatic House speaker who has often worked with Democrats, but Trump in a second term may show his pragmatic side too, if the Art of the Deal author…

What a difference President-elect Donald Trump makes. Congressional conservatives don’t have fewer reservations about House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) than they did when he was first elected. If anything, they have more. But the handful of conservative dissidents still had no realistic path to the speakership themselves. They had no viable alternative, which is how…

When Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, it was inevitable that President Joe Biden would regret his decision to step down from the top of the Democratic ticket. Biden associates now say that the outgoing president regrets dropping out of the race and believes he could have beaten President-elect Donald Trump. Unless…

Former President Jimmy Carter, a onetime naval officer and peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States after promising citizens he would never lie to them, has died at the age of 100. Carter’s death marked the end of the longest life of any former U.S. president. George H.W. Bush, who previously…