Commentary
On October 7, 2025, after years of dueling keyboards with Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, I finally designated her as my nemesis as a conservative political commentator, tired of her disdain for President Trump.
It was her November knee jerk reaction to Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth to be his defense secretary, writing that Hegseth didn’t possess the seriousness of General George Marshall. She followed with an October 2, 2025, op-ed citing Hegseth as “embarrassing.”
But in this past weekend edition of the Journal, Noonan surprised me with a turnabout from her usual criticism of our president.
Seemingly admitting her negative view of Trump, she opened her column with “Give it to him. Give him your applause. Sometimes pessimism reaches a point of moral error. Sometimes hope is the only realistic approach.
“So give it to President Trump, whose White House has produced the first progress in the Middle East since the grave crisis of Oct. 7 began.
Recognizing that it could all fall apart, that joy may be premature, she wrote, “I’ll take my joy premature, bartender,” adding that “if it turns out progress was illusory, we will at least have reacquainted ourselves with what optimism in the Middle East feels like.”
I was stunned when I read, “I want to pay tribute to the wonderful creative insanity Donald Trump can display on the international front,” and again with her response to a foreign affairs friend, who said to her, “Do you believe the idiocy of this guy?” referring to Trump’s plan for restoring Gaza as the Riviera of the Middle East.
“I kind of liked it,” she said,” I think I love it,” having earlier noting, “I like the Barnum & Bailey aspect of the Trump administration.”
I’ll assume that Noonan was serious in these comments, but I doubt this brevity on Trump’s Middle East success portends a change in her opinion of him.
From the Biden Misfits
Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to spin the Trump-brokered ceasefire as “building on” what Biden supposedly achieved. “It’s almost comical,” writes Matt Margolis in PJ Media, “the guy who spent his tenure presiding over one foreign policy humiliation after another now wants credit for the stability emerging under Trump.”
Then there was the embarrassing remark made by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, who in a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine summed up his view of the state of the Middle East writing, “The region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
Five days later, October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists carried out a vicious attack on Israeli men, women and children attending a concert, killing 1,400 and taking hundreds hostage
Of course, there’s former defense secretary Robert Gates’ quote: “I think he (Biden) has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
And there’s this
Recalling former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s May 29, 2017, statement, “There is no chance President Donald Trump will secure a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. One can see that Trump doesn’t give up easily.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
