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Trump's Depressingly Normal Speech About Afghanistan
On Monday evening, Donald Trump gave a speech about Afghanistan that we might have heard from any mainstream politician over the past 15 years.In some realms, the idea of a “normal” presentation by...
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The Republican Party Is Enabling an Increasingly Dangerous Demagogue
Last night I was in circumstances where I could hear only a few excerpts from Donald Trump’s inflammatory speech in Phoenix. The parts I heard were remarkable enough.They included Trump’s wink-wink...
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Donald Trump's Telling Change to the Oval Office
Here’s a little quiz. Take a look at the picture of the photo above, which shows the newly redecorated Oval Office that is occupied by Donald Trump. What’s unusual in this scene?As a helpful hint,...
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Why the Arpaio Pardon Matters
Presidents issue pardons for a wide variety of reasons. The highest-profile pardon cases, though not the most numerous, are political:The first President Bush pardoned several officials who took part...
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Trump’s Oval Office: ‘But What About the Chairs?’
On Friday—a few hours before Donald Trump pardoned ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio, and before Hurricane Harvey made its devastating landfall on the Texas coast—I posted an item about Donald Trump’s newly...
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Xavier Becerra on the California ‘Resistance’
Last month, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I emceed an hour-long discussion with Xavier Becerra, the new Attorney General of California, on how the nation’s most populous state planned to deal with a...
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Remembering Kukula Kapoor Glastris
Many people who knew or worked with Kukula Glastris described her as “the kindest” or “the most generous” person they had known. It’s a big world, and titles like that can be contested. But I’ve never...
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Why the Republican Party Will Come to Regret Rolling Back DACA
I’ve followed the politics and reality of immigration for a long time. In the mid-1980s, I traveled around the country for several months on a big reporting project for TheAtlantic about that era’s new...
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Why Hillary Clinton's Book Is Actually Worth Reading
Most books by politicians are bad. They’re bad because they are cautious, or pious, or boring, or some even-worse combination of all three.They’re cautious because over the years politicians learn they...
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The Early Decision Racket, Redux
To take your mind off politics, at least politics of the national-election variety, let’s take a look back on some of the oddities of the American college-admissions process, for which millions of...
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The New Series on the Vietnam War, and the Mysteries of Historical Resonance
The Ken Burns / Lynn Novick 18-hour series on The Vietnam War began its run on PBS on Sunday night and continues through this week and next. I felt about as familiar with that era as I could...
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The Theory and Practice of Civic Engagement, by Eric Liu
Eric Liu (Citizen University)If you happen to be in Redlands, California, on Thursday evening, September 21, I suggest you go by the headquarters of the tech company Esri to hear a talk by my friend...
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Trump's Shocking Recklessness
During last year’s presidential campaign, I conducted a running feature called the “Trump Time Capsule.” Its purpose was to chronicle the things Donald Trump said or did that were entirely outside the...
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Readers on Trump, Kaepernick, and the NFL
Over the weekend I wrote about Donald Trump’s attacks on protesting NFL players, at a raucous rally in Alabama, and his tweeted threats that if North Korean officials didn’t change their tune, “they...
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Why The New York Times Should Grapple With Its Coverage of Hillary's Emails
This week Jill Abramson, the estimable former executive editor of The New York Times, whom I’ve always admired and never criticized, contended that I had been “stoking” the idea that the NYT had a...
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Two Additions to the Political Reading List: Unbelievable and Thanks, Obama
The relationship between the drama of a presidential campaign, and the literature and reportage that come from it, is shaky at best.By acclamation the best modern campaign-trail book, What It Takesby...
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From Donald Trump, a New Low
Donald Trump, who is at one of his golf courses, early this morning.The purpose of my 152-installment Trump Time Capsule series during the 2016 campaign was to record, in real time, things Donald Trump...
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Two Dark American Truths From Las Vegas
Beyond the scores of people who have been killed and the hundreds who have been wounded in Las Vegas today, thousands of other people, though not visibly or directly injured, have had their lives...
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Mass Shootings in the United States: 'This Is Who We Are'
In a recent article for The Atlantic, writer James Fallows argues that no other society has allowed gun massacres to keep happening. For example, in the wake of a mass shooting in Australia in 1996,...
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It’s What Bob Corker Does Next That Counts
Senator Bob Corker, a Republican of Tennessee, deserves credit for saying in public this evening to The New York Times what most prominent Republicans have known and many have said (in careful privacy)...
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