President Trump regularly brags about the phenomenal economic growth achieved during his presidency. Many economic commentators and political pundits have fallen for his assertion and have repeated it. In fact, economic growth in 2018 was 2.9 percent, only a little more than the 2.2 percent average over the previous decade. And much of the additional […]

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Last week, 59 gravesites at the Hebrew Cemetery in Fall River, Massachusetts were desecrated with anti-Semitic symbols and inscriptions that included swastikas, “Heil Hitler” and “this is MAGA country.” This harrowing incident was only the most recent example of numerous acts of hatred committed in this country over the past two years. In the wake […]

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On the eve of Trump’s first meeting with Kim Jong-un in May 2018, the nuclear policy veteran Robert Alvarez wrote with skepticism in The Spectator about the prospects for meaningful achievements from the summit process. A former senior policy advisor to the Secretary of the Energy Department who led DOE teams to secure weapons material […]

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World War I, the so-called “war to end all wars,” concluded in November 1918. The crucial question of the day changed abruptly—from how to wage war to how to make peace. Could the Allied powers prevent another war on the European continent? How would individual nations rebuild their economies? And who was going to pay […]

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To many people, Trump seems impossibly new and unique, unpredictable and outrageous, and his followers inexplicably oblivious to his dishonesty, irrationality, and incompetence. To scholars of rhetoric, it’s “Oh, yeah, this again.” Rhetoric—what Aristotle called “the art of finding the available means of persuasion”—is an old and universal art. As soon as we communicate with […]

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