Tag: President Donald Trump
No One in Kyiv Knows Whether Russia Is Bluffing
Children twirled around a skating rink just outside the president’s office in central Kyiv last week, while tourists took pictures of themselves in front of onion-domed, snow-dusted churches nearby. The stores were full of people shopping for the New Year’s holiday and Orthodox Christmas, just as they always are at this time of year. The airports were crowded.
In other words, nothing unusual was happening in the Ukrainian capital—nothing except for the contingency plans being made for a possible Russian
Will COVID Get Worse This Winter?
The first part of what may be the first epidemiologic text ever written begins like so: “Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year.”
The book is On Airs, Waters, and Places, written by Hippocrates around 400 B.C. Two and a half millennia later, the Northern Hemisphere is staring down its coming season of the year with growing apprehension. America’s grimmest phase of the coronavirus pandemic so
The Conservative Backlash to Progress
Although the United States was born of a revolution, one common view maintains that the Constitution tamed our rebellious impulse and launched a distinctly nonrevolutionary political experiment. But throughout American history, an important strand of conservatism has repeatedly championed rebellions—or what are better understood as counterrevolutions.
They emerge like clockwork: Each time political minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo.
The term counterrevolution is significant not only because conservatives
Facebook Papers: ‘History Will Not Judge Us Kindly’
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Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once.
At 2:10 p.m., a live microphone captured a Senate aide’s panicked warning that “protesters
Arkansas’s COVID-19 Cases Are Undoing Unvaccinated Places
At a county health department near my hometown in rural Arkansas, almost everyone who comes in for a COVID-19 test is congested and short of breath, with a sore throat and muscle aches. They might have the flu, except for the added telltale symptom of this coronavirus: the loss of taste and smell. Many of the patients now are younger than those in previous months; a nurse who works there told me she saw two cases of young children in
Bob Corker on the Future of the Republican Party
Senator Bob Corker had just gotten out of a hot-yoga session with his wife on a Sunday morning in 2017 when his phone started blowing up. President Donald Trump was tweeting about him, falsely claiming that the Tennessee Republican supported the Iran deal (he did not) and that he had begged Trump for a reelection endorsement (Corker says he never did such a thing). “I got to my house, and I was dripping wet, standing in my closet, getting undressed
Opponents of Critical Race Theory Are Arguing With Themselves
The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.
Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who
How Democrats Lost the Courts—And Plan to Win Them Back
Every political coalition likes to talk about how its opponents are more organized, more ruthless, and better funded. As progressives plot their response to Donald Trump’s mostly successful project to remake the federal courts, they are reviewing the times they’ve been outworked, outfought, and outsmarted on judicial nominations. One not-so-familiar name jumps out: Before Merrick Garland’s stint in purgatory, before Brett Kavanaugh’s furious denial of assault allegations, before Amy Coney Barrett’s eleventh-hour confirmation, there was Goodwin Liu.
In 2010, Democrats