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Trump's Reassuring Hurricane Response

August 30, 2017  •  The Wall Street Journal

President Trump visited Texas Tuesday to assess the damage from Hurricane Harvey and show concern for its victims. So far, his administration is largely getting praise for effective handling of the crisis. Washington's disaster authorities appear to be in sync with the state on roles and responsibilities; the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its leader, Brock Long, deployed resources as Harvey approached; and the government response as a whole appears well coordinated.

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Judaism Can Help Those Whose Electronic Yearnings Get the Better of Them

August 22, 2017  •  Mosaic

Jeffrey Bloom begins his fine essay with a discussion of a form of addiction that has lately been the subject of widespread worry: the addiction of many Americans, and especially many younger Americans, to their "screens." As a behavioral addiction, in contrast to the much more serious plague of chemical addiction to drugs, it is also easier to ridicule or dismiss. But Bloom devotes some enlightening paragraphs to a recent book detailing its gravely debilitating effects on the lives of those caught in its snare and, alarmingly, to the ways in which (in his words) "the feedback mechanisms of social media" and video games "are engineered [my emphasis] to erode self-control"—in other words, the ways in which whole industries implicitly collude in the creation of more addicts.

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Why the White House Needs Another Bannon

August 21, 2017  •  Politico

Steve Bannon was a unique administration figure in many ways, but in another, he was part of a long White House tradition.

For the past four decades, Republicans have viewed themselves as the party of ideas—and a crucial part of that self-perception has been having a person inside the White House to serve as a conduit to conservative thinkers. Ever since Richard Nixon, Republican presidents have installed a kind of resident intellectual who can help shape the president's vision, articulate that vision to conservative thinkers, and—importantly—warn the president of discontent from his key supporters in that conservative idea world.

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How Republicans can fix Obamacare now

August 1, 2017  •  The Washington Post

The failure of Senate Republicans to pass even their "skinny" repeal bill is a serious disappointment to critics of the Affordable Care Act. Despite campaign rhetoric suggesting otherwise, "repeal and replace" of the ACA is something Republicans are apparently unable and likely unwilling to do. The only silver lining for conservatives is that the failure has demonstrated what the political market will bear when it comes to changes to the law.

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It's Summer, Time to Catch Up on Your Reading

July 31, 2017  •  National Review Online

Looking for stories of strong presidential leadership, I recently read two worthy books on Dwight Eisenhower: David A. Nichols's Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower's Secret Campaign against Joseph McCarthy and Michael Doran's Ike's Gamble: America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East. Nichols looks at how Eisenhower worked behind the scenes to marginalize Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, even going to great lengths to avoid saying McCarthy's name. When it came to emasculating McCarthy, though, Ike wanted it to happen in as public a way as possible. Both Ike and Senate Democratic leader Lyndon Johnson pushed to have the Army–McCarthy hearings televised, understanding, as Nichols understatedly puts it, that "television was not kind to McCarthy." Indeed, it was not.

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Books by Tevi Troy