Donald Trump Has Lost His Ability to Short-Circuit the News
Twelve days ago, The New York Times published a story based on documents that reporters had wanted to see for years: Donald Trump’s tax returns. The story revealed that the president was deeply in...
View ArticleThe White House Coronavirus Outbreak Won’t Stop the Barrett Confirmation
Two weeks ago, the White House held an event with more than 200 attendees where President Donald Trump formally announced his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Since then, the...
View ArticleThe Social Dilemma and the Rise of the Clickbait Documentary
The Social Dilemma, director Jeff Orlowski’s buzzworthy Netflix documentary about Big Tech, starts casually, with the interviewees settling down in their chairs, taking their last sips of coffee, and...
View ArticleA Petulant Trump Squanders His Best Chance for a Breakthrough
On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, the king of real estate bankruptcy, declared political bankruptcy. Trailing Joe Biden by double-digit margins in recent national polls, the Covid-stricken president...
View ArticleWhy Are Democrats So Afraid to Say Fracking Is Bad?
If you’re freaked out about the climate crisis, it might be nice to live in Mike Pence’s imaginary world. There, the Paris Climate Agreement is a muscular international treaty capable of shaping trade...
View ArticleNorth Carolina’s Labyrinthine Voting Nightmare
Guilford County, the third most populous in North Carolina, is currently facing something of an electoral crisis. Earlier this month, data provided by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of...
View ArticleNo, Regeneron Did Not Cure Donald Trump of Covid-19
On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump tweeted a nearly five-minute video in which he directly attributed his progress recovering from Covid-19 to a monoclonal antibodies treatment from Regeneron, a...
View ArticleThe Sweet Fantasy of the Female Pop Star
The first time Mariah Carey sang on television in her whistle register—the very tippy-top of the human vocal range, higher than a falsetto—was during a performance of “America the Beautiful” at Game...
View ArticleA Thrilling Week Inside Trump’s Flailing Masculinity Death Cult
It’s been a week since we learned that the president and first lady both tested positive for Covid-19, right after appearing at a series of possible superspreader events, including the largely...
View ArticleThe Anti-Social Novelist
A man writes a book. It is, he feels, “a kind of outpouring,” written from the same impulse “that makes him sing or try to go to bed with all beautiful ladies.” But then the critics blame the book for...
View ArticleDonald Trump Will Kill Us All
Donald Trump has, for most of the pandemic, merely abetted the spread of the coronavirus—through what has alternately been called “misinformation,” incompetence, and “stupidity.” His indoor rally in...
View ArticleThe Pandemic Has Been Great for the Health Insurance Industry
Much attention has rightly been paid to the millions of people whose loss of employment this year also meant a loss of health insurance, a terrible thing to happen at any time but especially during a...
View ArticleJoe Biden Doesn’t Have to Answer Your Court-Packing Question
This has probably been Joe Biden’s best week since Super Tuesday. Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is imploding, Biden’s lead is expanding (by 10.2 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll of...
View ArticleThe Martyrdom of Donald Trump
The president is a sick man. On its face, Trump’s appalling handling of his coronavirus diagnosis doesn’t seem to tell us much more than we already knew about him. His inability to admit to any fault...
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The Great GOP Dystopian Experiment Is Working Exactly as Planned in Florida
BESIDE A TRUMP-FLAGGED BOAT AT A DOCK IN FORT LAUDERDALE—It looms ever closer, like a poorly conceived sequel to a decades-old movie even most of its fans would like to forget. There’s a mostly new...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Leonard Leo
Leonard Leo is on the brink of achieving the goal he has been working toward for decades: a lasting conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. Almost comically shadowy and conspiratorial, he can,...
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Trumpism Ate Martha McSally’s Brain
The most prominent statue outside the Capitol building in Phoenix represents an icon who touches a nerve deep in the cultural consciousness of Arizona: a fighter pilot. Frank Luke Jr., a local boy...
View ArticleThe Amy Coney Barrett Hearings Are a Gut Check for Democrats
Washington hardly needed another spectacle to go along with the ongoing election season and the last fortnight of daily news about Covid-19 infiltrating President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Monday...
View ArticleHow the Media Can Mount a War Against Voter Suppression
I get excited, a tiny blast of dopamine goes off in my head anytime a cable news host says, “New swing-state poll numbers coming up after the break.” Admittedly, the effect is enhanced when the numbers...
View ArticleThe All-American Mind of a Militia Member
On June 25, a man named Adam Fox, upset that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer had shuttered gyms across the state as part of a pandemic lockdown order, started a livestream on a private Facebook...
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