Does Obama have the right in these waning days to govern like there’s no tomorrow (because, of course, there isn’t)? While I don’t always agree with Obama or his party, I happen to think he’s right about the seriousness of Russian hacking and the cost of Israeli intransigence in the Middle East.
In which the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future teach the president-elect a thing or two.
Donald Trump said a lot of things about a lot of people on his journey to the White House. He mocked a war hero for getting captured. He accused a rival’s dad of consorting with President Kennedy’s killer. He likened another opponent — soon to be a member of his Cabinet — to a child molester.
Newt Gingrich speaks to the media after a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York on Nov. 21. “I have a job,” Newt Gingrich told me this week, when I asked him if there was a job he might accept in the new administration. Yes, he would have accepted the vice presidency
To the list of historic firsts that Donald Trump seems to rack up daily, we can now add this: He is the first candidate in the annals of American politics to allege massive fraud in an election he actually won. Trump took to Twitter last weekend to declare that he would have won not just the presidency
I’ve written a lot of pretty rough things about Donald Trump over the last 18 months. I’ve called him an entertainer and an emotional extremist, a guy with a black hole at his center. I’ve likened him to P.T. Barnum and a dime-store psychic.
The last time Democrats awoke to find themselves completely marginalized, the year was 2004, and George W. Bush had just been reelected, along with pretty much every other Republican in creation.
Last May, after Donald Trump at last secured the Republican nomination for president, I wrote about what I thought was Trump’s best scenario for victory, and I compared the coming campaign to a movie theater. The answer, it turns out, is enough to make Trump the 45th president of the United States —
We’ve finally arrived at sweeps week in the televised event posing as our presidential election. And if American viewers can’t quite bring themselves to click away from Donald Trump’s vulgar and monotonous reality show, it’s probably because they’ve had all they can take of the cloying, predictable soap
Which leads me to the latest innovation in campaign propaganda: Trump Tower TV, which launched this week on Facebook. Think of it as an unreality show, airing inside an actual reality show, which is airing under the guise of an actual presidential campaign. It’s like one of those Russian nesting dolls
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump greets his wife, Melania, his son Eric and his daughter Ivanka after the third and final 2016 presidential debate at UNLV in Las Vegas on Wednesday night. For 16 months, Donald Trump’s accidental campaign was the hottest thing on TV. After weeks of ugly
In 1972, a group of burglars working for the Republican Party broke into Democratic headquarters in the dead of night, searching for documents that might influence that year’s presidential election. Reporters from the Washington Post spent years unraveling the scandal, until at last it brought down
From the media’s triumphant glee over Donald Trump’s leaked tax returns, which turned up in the New York Times last weekend, you’d think we’d just exposed him as a tool of Russian oligarchs bent on infiltrating American politics. It’s not clear that voters really care whether Trump has paid any taxes
Clinton had proved herself again to be the diligent studier who pretends to be amused when you know she isn’t. According to all the TV analysis, which now eerily resembles an NFL playoff postgame show, Donald had self-destructed, Hillary had humiliated him, and the dynamic of the race had suddenly shifted
Whether from incompetence or instability, Donald Trump has made himself not the default alternative to a deeply distrusted candidate, but the dominant and more divisive figure of the two.
Donald Trump decided this week to roll out an ambitious and expensive plan to help working parents raise their kids, which was remarkable for several reasons. The first is that Trump seemed to have come up with the entire thing on impulse, as if, having spent many months repulsing American parents with
Hillary Clinton has a cough. Clinton’s cough, first reported by NBC, led to a spate of media stories, most of which slyly purported to be about the media coverage of the cough, although they managed to leave open the possibility that Clinton, who turns 69 next month, was like one of those bygone Soviet
By taking a look at Hillary Clinton’s plan to fix the deteriorating foundation of our economy, you can discern a lot about what she’s getting right in this campaign, and what she isn’t. It’s been a momentous week in politics, what with a former congressman sending more lewd pictures of himself, and
It brings me no pleasure to report that Trump has achieved his ultimate goal in life (and of his campaign), which is to become the most unavoidable human on the planet. If last year gave us the Summer of Trump, then this is the Summer of Trump’s Unwinding.
Below is an excerpt from “Rock Bottom: A Brief History of the 2016 Presidential Campaign,” published by Yahoo University Press in 2022. President Obama himself rebuked Republican leaders who sought to distance themselves from Trump’s rhetoric while continuing to support his candidacy. “There has to
A few years back, during a visit to the Kennedy Library in Boston, I bought a terrific children’s book called “So You Want to Be President?,” which contains all kinds of fun historical facts. My daughter is 8 now, and she is obsessed with Hillary Clinton.