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Trump Time Capsule Redux: Vichy Senate Edition
Back during the 2016 campaign, I put out 152 installments of the Trump Time Capsule series, chronicling what was known about this man at just time the Republican party was deciding to accept (and then...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 54 Days to Go: ‘Making Me Look Bad’
As I write, the national news is dominated by the arrival of Hurricane Florence, and the political news has emphasized Donald Trump’s reaction to this event and last year’s Hurricane Maria. Other...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 52 Days to Go: Rush to Judgment on Kavanaugh
The most cynical decision George H. W. Bush made as president was to nominate Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.The choice was cynical because of Thomas’s race. In 1991 Bush had a vacancy to fill...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 51 Days to Go: Manafort
Two days ago, Paul Manafort made his plea-bargain deal with Robert Mueller’s federal investigators. As part of the terms, he says he will cooperate fully and truthfully with the federal team—knowing...
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Midterm Time Capsule: Good for Jeff Flake
According to the Washington Post just now, Senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, who is a Republican and a member of the Judiciary Committee, has said that a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 50 Days to Go: The Kavanaugh Watch
At the moment, in mid-September—with no way of knowing how the mid-term elections will go, or what legal entanglements lie ahead for Donald Trump—we do have one possible gauge of how far the politics...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 49 Days to Go: Intel Dump, Refugee Cap
Because these details tend to get lost in the froth, let’s pause to note two extraordinary steps Donald Trump took in the past 24 hours.One of them is literally unprecedented; the other is a sharp...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 48 Days to Go: Children, the Future, Cancer, Due Process
Here are some items from the news that barely break the consciousness-barrier, amid the Kavanaugh confirmation fight and other chaos, but that I expect will be considered significant in the history of...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 47 Days to Go: Derangement Comes to the Kavanaugh Fight
Way back in Trump Time Capsule #4, when Donald Trump was about to clinch the Republican presidential nomination, I mentioned Trump’s long-standing weakness for conspiracy theories. These ranged from...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 46 Days to Go: Backtracking, Plowing Ahead
Last night around 1 a.m., I mentioned that a fevered and insanely conspiratorial tweetstorm then online was almost certain to disappear. It was filed by Ed Whelan, a friend of Brett Kavanaugh’s and a...
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Welcome West Fallows
For my wife, Deb, and me in recent years, a big theme has been the renewal of America at the local level. Here’s the latest proof:It comes with the arrival late Friday night of young West Fallows,...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 42 Days to Go: Fox News and The New Yorker
I have been off line, traveling for actual reporting, over the weekend, and re-appear to find… argh!!! There is no possible way to keep up. So as a brief time-capsule register of where things stand,...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 41 Days to Go: Laughter at the UN
American presidents usually address the United Nations General Assembly in the fall—as you can see here, and as Donald Trump did on Tuesday. Sometimes they also do so in the spring*, or on other...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 37 Days to Go: What Trump and Kavanaugh Have in Common
Brett Kavanaugh’s suitability to serve as a Supreme Court justice differs from Donald Trump’s suitability to serve as a president in some obvious ways.Kavanaugh has long previous legal experience,...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 35 Days to Go: ‘Outright Fraud’
The huge New York Timesreport today by David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner, five weeks before the midterm elections of 2018, is a counterpart to the Access Hollywood tape that came out four...
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Midterm Time Capsule, 31 Days to Go: Kavanaugh Will Change the Court
Brett Kavanaugh’s impending arrival on the Supreme Court is like Donald Trump’s attainment of the presidency, in this important way:By the rules of politics that prevailed until 2016, neither of them...
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Was Gary Hart Set Up?
Illustration by Paul Spella; Paul Liebhardt / Corbis; 'National Enquirer' / Getty; Associated PressIn the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political...
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‘Was Gary Hart Set Up?’: Readers Respond
The new issue of the magazine (subscribe!) has an article by me on a tantalizing “what if?” question involving the course of modern history. The article is called “Was Gary Hart Set Up?”, and its point...
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A Voting-Rights Showdown in Dodge City
One of this cycle’s most closely contested, and highly important, elections is in Kansas. There the Republican Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, is in a surprisingly tight race for governor—against the...
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The Worst of Our Country—And the Best
Every society contains its monsters: people damaged or disturbed enough, or misdirected enough, to inflict cruelty on others. A central purpose of society—its families, its schools, its civic and faith...
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