Between the collapse of George W. Bush's presidency and the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a more ideological institution than the Democratic Party.

President Trump deserves credit for ordering the operation that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It was a high-risk mission that required U.S. forces to fly hundreds of miles into al-Qaida- controlled territory to storm a heavily armed terrorist compound.

A decade ago, it was conventional wisdom that the world would soon start running low on oil and that the United States would henceforth be at the mercy of the inexorable trend.

Well, people engaged in impartial investigations aimed at finding the truth don't violate every precedent and standard of due process set during previous presidential impeachments.

It's Washington's new favorite Latin phrase: quid pro quo.

With three polls showing her in the lead, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, may soon eclipse former vice president Joe Biden as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The ridiculous number of candidates on the Democratic stage Tuesday night created a fundamentally misleading aural and visual impression.

"I have seen the future, and it works," the left-wing journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared, after observing Bolshevik Russia in its infancy.

The time is the early 1980s. The place is the South China Sea. A sailor aboard the U.S.S. Midway, an aircraft carrier, spots a leaky boat jammed with people fleeing tyranny in Indochina. As he helps bring the desperate refugees to safety, one of them calls out: "Hello, American sailor — Hello, Freedom Man."

President Trump has defended his shameful abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, declaring that "I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars" that have left America "bogged down, watching over a quagmire." Listening to the president, Americans might think that we still have large numbers of U.S. troops fighting on fronts across the Middle East. We do not.

Former vice president Joe Biden has said that in holding up vital military assistance to Ukraine, President Trump "used the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation, a partner that is still under direct assault from Russia ... to subvert the rule of law in the express hope of extracting a political favor."

An imagined conversation between Flyover Man and Urban Guy.

In 2001, Gordon Chang, an American lawyer who had spent many years in Hong Kong and Shanghai, published a book forebodingly titled "The Coming Collapse of China." At the time, the thesis seemed improbable, if not preposterous.

President Trump's critics are now complaining that he asked the Australian prime minister to cooperate with the Justice Department's investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe and that Attorney General William Barr has traveled overseas to ask foreign intelligence officials to cooperate with that investigation.

Let's be clear: President Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not "beautiful" or "perfect." Far from it.

Remember when Democrats insisted that President Trump was "working on behalf of the Russians," only to have special counsel Robert Mueller declare he "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"?

We don't yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine's president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do.

WASHINGTON — A Columbia Journalism Review poll released this year found that half of all Americans have "hardly any confidence at all" in the media, which beat out even Congress as the institution for which the public has the lowest confidence.

Here's some advice for the media covering President Trump: If you don't want to be accused of reporting fake news, don't report fake news.

Imagine if, back in 2011, President Barack Obama had not only withdrawn all U.S. forces from Iraq, facilitating the rise of the Islamic State, but also invited Islamic State leaders to Camp David to sign an agreement cementing his withdrawal plan.

Everything old is new again - even fantasy book controversies.

Russian human-rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko once explained to me how Vladimir Putin's machinery of repression works.

In 2017, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-New York, accused President Trump of showing "a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn't always bend to his wishes" after Trump criticized a federal judge who ruled against his administration.