Commentary by Michael Barone

Most Recent Releases

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
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                            July 4, 2025What the 12-Day War Hath Wrought By Michael Barone
Not many people today remember the exhilaration so many Americans felt after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967. The liberal folks around me at work and law school then had been frustrated and puzzled at the lack of progress being made in Vietnam by the 448,000 U.S. troops stationed there, and the sudden and astonishing success of the Israel Defense Forces, symbolized by the eye-patched Gen. Moshe Dayan, was a refreshing contrast. No talk then of Israelis as colonialist settler oppressors.

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                            June 27, 2025The Barista Proletariat Wins in New York By Michael Barone
Zohran Mamdani's lead in first choices in New York City's ranked-choice mayoral primary, and his inevitable victory when second, third, fourth and fifth choices of trailing candidates are allocated to candidates voters ranked lower, mean that he'll be the Democratic nominee for mayor of the nation's largest city and the likely winner of the general election in November.

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                            June 20, 2025Fast-Changing Events Making, or Remaking, History By Michael Barone
Events are moving fast. Seven days ago, as I write, Israel had not yet launched its first attacks on targets in Iran. Seven days from now, things may well have changed -- significantly.

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                            June 13, 2025Los Angeles Riots May Encourage Illegal Immigrants to Self-Deport By Michael Barone
"How'm I doin'?" the late New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask constituents on his travels through the city. President Donald Trump, in the opinion of most Americans, is doin' pretty well.

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                            June 6, 2025The New Politics of Metropole vs. Heartland By Michael Barone
You see the same pattern over much of the world. In three consecutive presidential elections in the United States. In the latest polls in Britain, where the 2016 Brexit referendum was the first notable outbreak. In France's most recent national election and in Germany's. In Canada's election last month. And maybe in Poland and South Korea last weekend.

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                            May 30, 2025Trump's Eyes Opened on Putin. Now What Will He Do? By Michael Barone
   "I'm not happy with what Putin is doing. He's killing a lot of people, and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin," said Donald Trump on Truth Social over the holiday weekend.

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                            May 23, 2025The Democrats: Leadership Discredited, Party Off Kilter By Michael Barone
How does a political party with overwhelming advantages, including increasing support from the growing bloc of highly educated and affluent voters, almost monopoly support from the press and broadcast media, and with burgeoning financial and high-tech sectors of the economy, manage to lose just about everything across the board?

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                            May 16, 2025On Education, Mississippi Shows the Way By Michael Barone
Mississippi leads the nation. That's not a typographical error. And it's not just a gotcha phrase, preparing the reader for learning that Mississippi leads the nation on all sorts of negative things.

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                            May 9, 2025European Elites Destroy Democracy in Order to Save It By Michael Barone
If you are a graduate of Yale University, you can vote every spring for a member of the Yale Corporation, which selects the school's president. However, you can only participate if you vote for one of the two candidates nominated by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee, a group of university officials and graduates. There's no way to write in a name or, if you don't favor either candidate, to cast a blank ballot. You must vote for one of the insiders' choices or not vote at all.

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                            May 2, 2025Trump's Push for Equal Rights and Against Quotas By Michael Barone
   "It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals."

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                            April 25, 2025Reality Has a Vote, in Politics as in Entertainment By Michael Barone
Reality has a vote. That is one lesson administered to the body of politics in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump's second administration.

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                            April 18, 2025Why Does Union Membership Keep Declining? By Michael Barone
It hardly qualifies as news anymore, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership declined from 2023 to 2024, going from 10% to 9.9% of wage and salary workers. Some 32% of public employees are union members compared to only 5.9% of private-sector workers, down from 6% in 2023.

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                            April 11, 2025Will Trump's Tariffs Move Us Back to the Constitutional Order? By Michael Barone
   It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries' trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words -- say, "buyer-dominant" countries and "seller-dominant" countries.

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                            April 4, 2025Trump Seems Bent on Political Self-Harm By Michael Barone
        Is President Donald Trump bent on political self-harm? It often seems that way. His overall job approval rating still hovers within a point or two of the 50% popular vote he received last November. But he is losing support on the economy and inflation, the No. 1 issue last year, while his overwhelming success in reducing illegal immigration has reduced the salience of what was the No. 2 issue.

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                            March 28, 2025Abundance Versus 'Everything Bagel' Liberalism By Michael Barone
   "Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city," former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. "No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination."

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                            March 21, 2025Experts Have Only Themselves to Blame for the Distrust of Institutions By Michael Barone
Now they tell us.

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                            March 14, 2025Tariffs Based on Tendentious History Could Be Political Malpractice By Michael Barone
   Will the second Trump administration come undone by an economic policy based on what the British military historian Lawrence Freedman, describing Vladimir Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, calls "tendentious history"?

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                            March 7, 2025A Formidable President Storms Ahead By Michael Barone
Some thoughts spring to mind after President Donald Trump's 100-minute address to Congress.

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                            February 28, 2025Getting to Denmark By Michael Barone
Sooner or later, The New York Times catches on to the news. In the case of immigration policy, the news it has caught up with is that mass immigration, legal and illegal, from less-developed countries is politically toxic.

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                            February 21, 2025The Policies of European Elites End in Tears By Michael Barone
If you follow these things closely, you may have seen a clip of the chairman of the Munich Security Conference breaking down in tears, unable to speak any further while reflecting on Vice President JD Vance's speech there. This breakdown is remarkable because the chairman, Christoph Heusgen, is not a minor apparatchik but a sophisticated and knowledgeable official who was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's national security adviser from 2005 to 2017.