It’s no wonder that Trump's Attorney General William Barr has a poorly disguised contempt for his critics, many of whom are so inflamed by their opposition to Trump that they’ve lost any sense of standards. In a peppery speech to a Federalist Society conference last year that is now one of the counts against him, Barr rightly warned that “it is the Left that is engaged in a systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” At the end of the day, they really don’t want Trump to have an attorney general, but that’s not going to happen. If they force Barr out — or more likely, Trump’s continued tweeting pushes him over the edge — they’ll miss him when he’s gone.

The Philippine Islands are among the largest recipients of foreign aid in East Asia, and we’ve provided $1.3 billion in military assistance over the last two decades. But money shouldn’t be the largest consideration here. Trump has been given a historic opportunity to reshape American and Asian policy along the lines he ran on in 2016. He should tell Duterte that we accept his decision and that we, too, are giving notice of our decision to let the 1951 treaty lapse. And following expiration of that treaty, the U.S. will be absolved of any legal obligation to come to the defense of the Philippines. Time for Manila to take charge of its own defense. Trump should not miss this opportunity.

The role that Buttigieg served in South Bend was a good one, which anyone should be proud to fill, but it is simply fantasy to suggest that the skill set he learned there prepared him for the White House. Sen. Amy Klobuchar had a point when she said that no woman with qualifications as thin as Buttigieg's would be standing on the presidential debate stage. The amazing thing, however, is that even a man with such thin qualifications would be suffered to stand there. America has elected inexperienced presidents before. When the former mayor claims that his service in South Bend has prepared him for the presidency, one can only wonder whether he's been spending too much time at the Linebacker.

Never-Trump men and women agree with a media that has been proven wrong over and over again, but there is no room for self-awareness. The two-or-so weeks of journalistic self-reflection that followed the 2016 election gave way to race-baiting, conspiracies, and inquisitions. A promised focus on the heartland and The New York Times’s apology to its readership gave way to The 1619 Project. In what industry would this hubris survive except for media? Even in politics, a business filled with corrupt liars not even trying to deliver, its practitioners are held to task by elections. Not here. The club marches on, complete with back-handed back-slaps to the boys who carry its water.

That people like Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, et al. are touring the nation publicly abusing the president in order to capture the Democratic nomination is proof that Trump is not a tyrant. In a genuine dictatorship, there would be no alternative party from which to challenge him. He has the power to obliterate entire cities, yet the worst any of these people can expect from our Oval Office “autocrat” is a snarky tweet. If the Democrats want to win, they will have to stop running against an absurd caricature and try to learn what the president knows that they have missed. The voters will be happy to tell them if they will just shut the hell up and listen.

Professors Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens conducted a new study of the political affiliation of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states. For party registration, they found a Democratic to Republican (D:R) ratio of 8.5:1, which varied by rank of institution and region. For donations to political candidates (using the Federal Election Commission database), they found a D:R ratio of 95:1, with only 22 Republican donors, compared with 2,081 Democratic donors.The true tragedy is that so many Americans are blind to the fact that today's colleges and universities pose a threat on several fronts to the well-being of our nation.

Let Barr do his thing. Let Durham do his. I’m not going to Lucy and the football myself into believing that either one is definitely going to serve up the justice upon the Deep State derps that is the minimal requirement for beginning to rebuild the trust in federal law enforcement these hacks flushed away, but who knows? They might do something. In the meantime, we simply need to treat federal law enforcement as what it is: deeply corrupt and utterly untrustworthy. The other thing is that the president needs to pardon Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and the others caught up in the scummy attempt to criminalize dissent. And he should commute Paul Manafort’s sentence to time served.