Pat Buchanan: Is a New GOP Being Born?

By Patrick Buchanan

The first four Republican contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — produced record turnouts.

While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out the throngs.

The crowds that continue to come out for his appearances and the vast audiences he has attracted to GOP debates testify to his drawing power.

Moreover, Trump has now been endorsed by Gov. Chris Christie, ex-chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of the most respected conservatives on Capitol Hill.

Pat Buchanan: The Donald’s Odds Against Hillary

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race – which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries – what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court?

If Republicans can unite, not bad, not bad at all.

Undeniably, Democrats open with a strong hand.

There is that famed “blue wall,” those 18 states and D.C. with a combined 242 electoral votes, just 28 shy of victory, that have gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1988.

Pat Buchanan: How Republics Perish

By Patrick J. Buchanan

If you believed America's longest war, in Afghanistan, was coming to an end, be advised: It is not.

Departing U.S. commander Gen. John Campbell says there will need to be U.S. boots on the ground "for years to come." Making good on President Obama's commitment to remove all U.S. forces by next January, said Campbell, "would put the whole mission at risk."

"Afghanistan has not achieved an enduring level of security and stability that justifies a reduction of our support. ... 2016 could be no better and possibly worse than 2015."

Translation: A U.S. withdrawal would risk a Taliban takeover with Kabul becoming the new Saigon and our Afghan friends massacred.

Pat Buchanan: The Remainderman

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Donald Trump won more votes in the Iowa caucuses than any Republican candidate in history.

Impressive, except Ted Cruz set the new all-time record.

And Marco Rubio exceeded all expectations by taking 23 percent.

Cruz won Tea Party types, Evangelicals, and the hard right.

Trump won the populists and nationalists who want the borders secure, no amnesty, and no more trade deals that enable rival powers like China to disembowel American industries.

Pat Buchanan: The Rejection Election

By Patrick J. Buchanan

With the Iowa caucuses a week away, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, who leads in all the polls, is Donald Trump.

The consensus candidate of the Democratic Party elite, Hillary Clinton, has been thrown onto the defensive by a Socialist from Vermont who seems to want to burn down Wall Street.

Not so long ago, Clinton was pulling down $225,000 a speech from Goldman Sachs. Today, she sounds like William Jennings Bryan.

Taken together, the candidacies of Trump, Sanders, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz represent a rejection of the establishment. And, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other Republican campaigns are now channeling Trump’s.

Pat Buchanan: Is the Spectre of Trump Haunting Davos?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The lights are burning late in Davos tonight.

At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.”

Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in the third parties arising across Europe, and in the U.S. primaries.

Pat Buchanan Says Donald Trump is the Future of the Republican Party

As I've watched and listened to Donald Trump's campaign pitch over the past few months, I am regularly reminded of the Republican presidential primary campaigns that Pat Buchanan ran in the 1990s. Buchanan ran as a "pitchfork populist" in those elections, an outsider fed up with the way both parties did their business in Washington. He also championed slowing immigration into the United States and voiced skepticism about international trade deals. Sound familiar? I reached out to Buchanan to talk about Trump's similarities and differences with him and the broader state of the Republican Party. Our conversation, conducted via email and edited only for grammar, is below.

FIX: Is Donald Trump the logical heir, issues-wise and tonally, to your presidential campaigns? Why or why not?

Buchanan: Trump is sui generis, unlike any candidate of recent times. And his success is attributable not only to his stance on issues, but to his persona, his defiance of political correctness, his relish of political combat with all comers, his "damn the torpedos" charging in frontally where others refuse to tread, as in that full retaliatory response to Hillary Clinton’s stab at him for having a “penchant for sexism.” Trump shut her down. These clashes have elated a party base that is sick unto death of politicians who never fight.

On building a fence to secure the border with Mexico, an end to trade deals like NAFTA, GATT, and [most favored nation status] for China, and staying out of unwise and unnecessary wars, these are the issues I ran on in 1992 and 1996 in the Republican primaries and as Reform Party candidate in 2000.

What Trump has today is conclusive evidence to prove that what some of us warned about in the 1990s has come to pass. From 2000 to 2010, the U.S. lost 55,000 factories and 6 million manufacturing jobs.

What Trump has in hand now to prosecute his case against the Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats is hard proof these trade deals have de-industrialized America. If the GOP wants to know why it lost the Reagan Democrats, it is because the GOP exported their jobs to Mexico and China. The returns are in. And testifying to that truth is not only Trump’s attacks on those trade deals but the lack of a vigorous defense of them by Clinton Democrats or the GOP establishment. Who today celebrates NAFTA, as John McCain went to Canada to do in 2008?

FIX: What’s different about today’s political environment from the ones you ran for president in? Are people angrier now? 

Buchanan: When I campaigned in North Carolina in 1992, I recall a fellow coming up to me at the airport, saying, “What are you doing in North Carolina, Pat? This is the State of Satisfaction.” Undeniably, there was a true depression in New Hampshire in 1992, and a real sense on the part of conservatives that President Bush had abandoned us and the Reagan legacy and Reagan agenda to cut deals with Congress to raise taxes, spend more on “kinder, gentler” programs, impose quotas, and declare America’s goal to become the creator of a “New World Order.”

What’s different today is that the returns are in, the results are known. Everyone sees clearly now the de-industrialization of America, the cost in blood and treasure from decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the pervasive presence of illegal immigrants. What I saw at the San Diego border 25 years ago, everyone sees now on cable TV. And not just a few communities but almost every community is experiencing the social impact.

The anger and alienation that were building then have reached critical mass now, when you see Bernie Sanders running neck and neck with Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire and Trump and Ted Cruz with a majority of Republican voters. Not to put too fine a point on it, the revolution is at hand.

Read more at The Washington Post >>

Pat Buchanan: Islam and the West: An Irreconcilable Conflict?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here … and … around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.'”

So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate.

Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald Trump, but by Harvard’s famed Samuel Huntington. His “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” has been described by Zbigniew Brzezinski as providing “quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.”

Pat Buchanan: America First — or World War III

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“If you’re in favor of World War III, you have your candidate.”

So said Rand Paul, looking directly at Gov. Chris Christie, who had just responded to a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer as to whether he would shoot down a Russian plane that violated his no-fly zone in Syria.

“Not only would I be prepared to do it, I would do it,” blurted Christie: “I would talk to Vladimir Putin … I’d say to him, ‘Listen, Mr. President, there’s a no-fly zone in Syria; you fly in, it applies to you.’

Pat Buchanan: Will Elites Blow Up the GOP?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Buchanan, if you ever hear of a group getting together to stop X, be sure to put your money on X.”

So, Richard Nixon told me half a century ago, after he had been badly burned in just such a futile and failed enterprise.

It was the Cleveland Governors Conference of 1964.

Sen. Barry Goldwater had just defeated Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in the final and decisive winner-take-all primary in California.

Pat Buchanan: An Establishment Unhinged

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions.

As all the old hate words — xenophobe, racist, bigot — have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to Hitler and Mussolini.

The establishment seemed to have become unhinged.

Pat Buchanan: Why Liberal Media Hate Trump

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In the feudal era there were the “three estates” — the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution.

But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”

Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill — of the Press … of the fourth estate. … There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her courtiers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets.”

The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.

Pat Buchanan: Are Trump and Putin Right?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Monday, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosted a spirited discussion with Donald Trump on whether he was right in asserting that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the towers came down on 9/11.

About Muslim celebrations in Berlin, however, there appears to be no doubt. In my chapter “Eurabia,” in “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” [2006] is this quote from The New York Times Magazine, exactly 10 years ago.

Pat Buchanan: Will Europe Man Up?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

If the purpose of terrorism is to terrify, the Islamic State had an extraordinary week. Brussels, capital of the EU and command post of mighty NATO, is still in panic and lockdown.

“In Brussels, fear of attack lingers” was Monday’s headline over The Washington Post’s top story, which read:

“Not since Boston came to a near-standstill after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 has the life of a major Western city been brought to a halt this way by the fear of terrorism.”

Pat Buchanan: The End of Obamaworld

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential.

Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason.

He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into the heart of the West, and has egg all over his face. More critically, the liberal world order he has been preaching and predicting is receding before our eyes.

Pat Buchanan: Is Putin Our Ally in Syria?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Among the presidential candidates of the Republican Party and their foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill the cry is almost universal:

Barack Obama has no strategy for winning the war on ISIS.

This criticism, however, sounds strange coming from a party that controls Congress but has yet to devise its own strategy, or even to authorize the use of U.S. military force in Syria.

Congress has punted. And compared to the cacophony from Republican ranks, Barack Obama sounds like Prince Bismarck.

Pat Buchanan: Can Europe Survive This Invasion?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“A modern day mass migration is taking place … that could change the face of Europe’s civilization,” warned Hungarian President Viktor Orban.

“If that happens, that is irreversible. … There is no way back from a multicultural Europe,” said Orban. “If we make a mistake now, it will be forever.”

Orban acted on his beliefs. He erected a 110-mile fence on the Serb border, redirecting hundreds of thousands of migrants away from Hungary to Croatia, thence to Austria and Germany.

Pat Buchanan: The Coming Age of Austerity

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Are the good times really over for good?” asked Merle Haggard in his 1982 lament.

Then, the good times weren’t over. In fact, they were coming back, with the Reagan recovery, the renewal of the American spirit and the end of a Cold War that had consumed so much of our lives.

Yet whoever wins today, it is hard to be sanguine about the future.

The demographic and economic realities do not permit it.

Pat Buchanan: Is the Pope Toying with Heresy?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Are Catholic truths immutable? Or can they change with the changing times?

This is the deeper question behind the issues that convulsed the three-week synod on the family of the 250 Catholic bishops in Rome that ended Saturday.

A year ago, German Cardinal Walter Kasper called on the church to change — to welcome homosexual couples, and to permit cohabiting and divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

Retorted traditionalists: This is heresy.

Had the pope followed his friend Cardinal Kasper and ordered Catholic teaching and diocesan practice changed, he could have provoked a schism inside the Church.

Pat Buchanan: America in Search of a Cause?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“If the Cold War is over, what’s the point of being an American?” said Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of the John Updike novels.

A haunting remark, since, for 40 years, America was largely united on the proposition that our survival depended upon our victory over communism in the Cold War.

We had a cause then. By and large, we stood together through the crises in the first decades of that Cold War — the Berlin blockade, Stalin’s atom bomb and the fall of China to Mao, the Korean War, the Hungarian revolution, the Cuban missile crisis, and on into Vietnam.