"A sham case, and everyone knows it." So writes the iconoclastic Matt Taibbi, once counted as a left-wing writer, and he's not the only one from outside MAGA precincts who has been appalled by the Manhattan district attorney's case that produced a guilty verdict against former President Donald Trump.
For three and a half years, the Biden White House has seemed remarkably leakproof. Even amid popular backlash to administration policies -- the spending splurge in 2021 that was followed by sharp inflation in 2022 and 2023, the changes in enforcement of immigration laws that have produced numbers of incoming illegal immigrants unmatched even in border boom periods in the 1980s and '90s, and the endorsement of policies allowing biological men to compete in women's sports -- top officials have stuck to talking points and avoided finger-pointing.
If you want to explain to a puzzled, left-leaning writer like The Atlantic's Annie Lowrey why most voters this year rate the economy during former President Donald Trump's term more favorably than the economy during President Joe Biden's, you might start with a pair of simple charts.
Will the world be better off with fewer people? For years that has been a hypothetical question posed to suggest an affirmative answer. Fewer people, it was claimed, would mean less depredation of natural resources, less urban overcrowding, more room for other species to stretch their (actual or metaphorical) legs. Mankind was a parasite, a blight, and overpopulation a disease. Fewer people would mean a better Earth.
The violent campus takeover by protesters -- some of them students, many not -- has had the unintended effect of discrediting the premise underlying the protest. That premise is that the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed, and that the oppressors are always evil and their victims already virtuous.
As the philosopher and baseball player Yogi Berra once (supposedly) said, it's deja vu all over again. Student protesters are occupying campuses of famed universities across the country. In New York, Columbia University protesters occupied administrative offices in Hamilton Hall and were cleared out by police, exactly 56 years to the day after student protesters occupied and were thrown out of that building in 1968.
Was the passage by the House last Saturday and the Senate on Tuesday of the foreign aid package with money for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan a turning point in American foreign policy?
Why was America in the Revolutionary War era, with 3 million people, able to generate leaders of the quality of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, while today's America, with 333 million people, generates the likes of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump?
When are we going to trust our fellow Americans again? When are we going to allow qualified individuals with responsibility to make decisions without consulting detailed rulebooks and formal procedures?
What were they thinking? Did President Joe Biden and the folks who put together his immigration policy imagine the voting public would celebrate policies that resulted in a record-high number of migration encounters -- more than three-quarters of a million -- in the usually low-immigration months of October, November and December 2023?
How are America's leaders measuring up against the standards set by the Constitution and the examples of the Founding Fathers? It's a question I've been asking as I seek refuge from contemporary politics in reading and occasionally writing, in my 2023 book "Mental Maps of the Founders," about the early years of the republic.
Donald Trump's anodyne if overexcited comment that the U.S. auto industry would face a "bloodbath" if he's not elected and doesn't impose 50% or 100% tariffs on cars produced predictable results.
Last week's Super Tuesday results ensured the renominations of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, barring some unanticipated adverse health events. So, who's going to win in November?
The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.
Herewith some idiosyncratic, perhaps eccentric, observations on the electoral contests so far in this presidential cycle.
1. Turnout is down. In the first five contests -- the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan primaries -- Republican turnout was down from 2016, the most recent cycle with serious contests. That's based on precincts currently reporting and the ace New York Times number crunchers' estimates of as-yet-uncounted votes.
What's been missing these past couple of months from the coverage of and debate over the failed immigration bill? Some important basic facts and lots of historical context.
What does America's overclass think of the rest of us? The short answer is "not much." They think ordinary people's splurging on natural resources is destroying the planet and needs to be cut back forcefully. And that the government needs to stamp down on ordinary people enjoying luxuries that, in their view, should be reserved for the top elites.
What happens when a political party becomes demotic? Before answering the question, note that the word in question is not demonic, from the Greek word daimon, meaning a deity (remember that the Greek gods were notoriously jealous and greedy), but demotic, from the Greek word demos, meaning the people -- the same root as democratic.
The last six or seven months have been a couple of tough seasons for public policies based on lies. Two examples come to mind.
What went wrong with Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign? You can list many arguable mistakes, as you can with any campaign, and you can add, as some reporters have, that the candidate was not likable or good at retail campaigning -- which mostly reflected reporters' personal dislike of DeSantis or resentment at his refusal to schmooze what he considered unfriendly press.
