Tag: former president
The Supreme Court’s Supreme Betrayal
The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.
In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the
In South Carolina Nikki Haley’s Bill Comes Due
The afternoon before Donald Trump’s blowout win in South Carolina’s primary, Shellie Hargenrader and Julianne Poulnot emerged from a rally for the former president bubbling with righteous conviction.
They had spent the previous hour listening to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. regale supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in an office park outside Charleston. The crowd had been energized, frequently calling out in response to his words as if at a church service as Trump Jr. lacerated President Joe Biden,
An Airtight Ruling Against Trump
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On July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering President Richard Nixon to produce the Watergate tapes, the president turned to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, to understand what had just happened. He later recounted the exchange in his memoirs:
“Unanimous?” I guessed.
“Unanimous. There’s no air in it at
Iowa’s Cold Comfort for Ron DeSantis
Even before the caucus began, Matt Wells was working the room. The 43-year-old wore an autographed Ron DeSantis trucker hat as he strolled up and down the aisles of the Washington High School auditorium in rural southeast Iowa, greeting neighbors and passing out DeSantis flyers. When it was time for three-minute speeches, Wells spoke from the podium without notes, his voice quivering with emotion. DeSantis “always backs up his words with action,” he told the crowd. “He will be
Trump’s Lawyer Walked Into a Trap
It was a cold and rainy morning in Washington, D.C., yesterday. Five years ago, Donald Trump said that was enough to deter him from visiting Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, to commemorate the fallen American soldiers—soldiers who died defending the nation whose Constitution he had sought to abrogate but now seeks to invoke. But yesterday, he showed up anyway. Appearing in court was more important to him, because this was about him.
And so at 9:25 a.m., the former president and his
Trump’s Strongest Rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis
The latest GOP presidential debate demonstrated again that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are pursuing utterly inimical strategies for catching the front-runner, Donald Trump.
The debate, on Wednesday evening, also showed why neither approach looks remotely sufficient to dislodge Trump from his commanding position in the race.
DeSantis delivered a stronger overall debate performance than Haley. But the evening mostly displayed the structural limitations of the theory that each campaign is operating under, and the limited progress either candidate has
A Military Loyal to Trump
If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to
Trump Is Becoming Frighteningly Clear About What He Wants
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In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated hatred had led to death on a horrifying scale.
“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”
Ndahiro
Trump Isn’t Merely Unhinged – The Atlantic
With apologies to a certain newspaper’s slogan, many of Donald Trump’s most dangerous statements hide in the plain light of day.
The problem is not that they don’t get reported on—they do—but even so, they are easy to tune out, perhaps because he’s been saying outlandish things for so long that people simply can’t bring themselves to parse the new ones; or perhaps because they’ve become accustomed, or at least numb, to his utterances; or perhaps because they don’t want
Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy
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It wasn’t clear at first why Peter Thiel agreed to talk to me.
He is, famously, no friend of the media. But Thiel—co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, avatar of techno-libertarianism, bogeyman of the left—consented to a series of long interviews at his home and office in Los