Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: USA Today
by Dace Potas

“Democrats have a nasty habit of criticizing President Donald Trump for the wrong reasons. They latch onto the most visceral thing he has done lately and let it crowd out more legitimate criticisms. The latest example is the renovation of the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool. Crews painted the bottom a deep blue, which Trump claimed would improve reflectivity – and by most accounts, it has. His opponents say otherwise. California Gov. Gavin Newsom insisted the project was a mess, the Democratic Party maintained it was ineffective, and the media sought out historians who spoke against the project. Trump is often difficult to attack precisely because there is so much noise. Democrats reach for the most trivial targets, and in doing so, the more important points can get lost. They should spend less time on the nonsense and more on what actually matters.” (06/15/26)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/06/15/trump-paint-lincoln-memorial-white-house-ballroom-criticism/90506951007/

Source: Law & Liberty
by Daniel L Dreisbach

“On June 12, 1776, Virginia’s Fifth Revolutionary Convention unanimously passed the Virginia Declaration of Rights. A trenchant, post-colonial statement affirming humankind’s inherent rights, limited government, and republican principles, the Declaration is arguably the nation’s most imitated founding document and a pillar of American founding principles. George Mason, the Declaration’s principal draftsman, boasted that it was the first of its kind on the American continent. It distilled the great principles of liberty and constitutionalism that revolutionary Americans believed were derived from England’s ancient constitution, common law, and natural rights theory.” (06/15/26)

https://lawliberty.org/the-virginia-declaration-of-rights-at-250/

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Joseph Solis-Mullen

“Perhaps fearful of abandonment, or of being treated as a mere ‘bargaining chip’ in negotiations with Beijing, Taiwan has worked diligently to ingratiate itself with President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Just last month, Taipei hired Checkmate Government Relations, a firm whose founder, Ches McDowell, enjoys close ties to Donald Trump Jr. and access to the president himself. The six-month contract is worth roughly $300,000. The move follows Taiwan’s 2025 decision to retain Ballard Partners, another well-connected Washington firm led by prominent Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard. Yet Taiwan’s influence operation is hardly confined to one party.” (06/15/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/taiwan-trump/

Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman

“Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.” (06/15/26)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/meet-the-new-bosses-worse-than-the

Source: Libertarian Institute
by José Niño

“When a resurfaced clip of Joe Biden’s 1989 speech went viral in December 2025, it created an awkward moment for Democrats attacking President Donald Trump’s military campaign against alleged drug boats. In that speech, delivered as the official Democratic Party response to President George H.W. Bush’s address on the crack cocaine epidemic, then-Senator Biden declared with unmistakable clarity what he wanted the United States to do. … That 1989 rhetoric now reads like a blueprint for exactly what the Trump administration has done since September 2025, when U.S. forces began destroying vessels that the Pentagon claims are operated by cartel-linked organizations—starting in the Caribbean off Venezuela and expanding to the eastern Pacific in October.” (06/15/26)

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-bipartisan-roots-of-trumps-war-in-latin-america/