Politics Archives

Wednesday

September 3, 2025

Cynthia Nixon and the battle for Broadway

When Representative Jerry Nadler announced his retirement this week, Democrats in New York instantly began preparing for a political drama worthy of its stage. Nadler’s district – the 12th, which covers the Upper West and Upper East Sides, Midtown, Times Square and the United Nations – is the geographic heart of Manhattan. It’s also one of the safest Democratic seats in the country. Whoever wins the primary will not only control a powerful perch in Congress, but also inherit a stage in the very center of America’s media capital.That’s the problem. In New York’s 12th, politics isn’t about solving problems. It’s about performance.For decades, Nadler played the part of Manhattan’s liberal lion.

Cockburn

Trump brothers go mining

After a day where the very alive President Trump bombed a Venezuelan drugs boat, moved Space Force headquarters out of Colorado because that state has mail-in voting, declared he was sending federal troops into Chicago and claimed that AI generated a video of someone throwing a plastic bag of construction debris out of the window of the White House, it became clear that the real action was going on outside the White House walls, with Trump’s very rich sons. As Cockburn reported yesterday in The Spectator, the Trump Brothers, Don Jr, Eric, and the true genius behind the operations, Barron, had somehow amassed $5 billion in paper wealth thanks to savvy investments, based in no way on shady insider information, in WLFI, the family’s nascent cryptocurrency venture.

Nigel Jones

Trump’s strike on the Venezuelan ‘narco terrorists’

President Trump has authorized what he called a "kinetic strike" from a US warship that destroyed a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela bound for the US, killing 11 so called "narco terrorists" aboard. The action by a US naval task force in international waters in the southern Caribbean is the first since the President threatened armed intervention against narcotics smuggling by Venezuela’s drugs cartels in January. Trump said that the attack was aimed at members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua drugs cartel which the US branded a terrorist organization in February, and which it claims is controlled by Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime. The US Department of Justice has called Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro "the world’s No.

Tuesday

September 2, 2025

Cockburn

For Trump and Ilhan, Washington pays

How does Ilhan Omar make her money? How does the Trump family make its money? Is money real? What is reality? These are the questions Cockburn is asking himself after this weekend’s financial news. First, let’s fly over Minnesota. Founding “Squad” member Omar, the Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday, is currently worth more than $30 million, despite telling the press earlier this year that it’s “categorically false” that she’s a millionaire. If by false, you mean “true,” then yes. The Free Beacon obtained Omar’s latest financial disclosure, which indicated that she and her husband, shifty “former political consultant” Tim Mynett, are worth somewhere between $6 million and $30 million – a wide range.

David Sypher Jr.

Ilhan Omar’s $30 million disclosure exposes left’s hypocrisy

Rep. Ilhan Omar once dismissed suggestions she was a millionaire as “ridiculous.” That was only a few months ago. Now, according to her latest congressional financial disclosure, Omar and her husband report assets valued between $6 million and $30 million. That’s not just millionaire territory – it’s potentially the top one percent. The jump is staggering. Businesses tied to Omar’s husband, including a California winery and a venture capital firm, went from reporting thousands in value one year to millions the next. Rose Lake Capital, his firm, is now valued at up to $25 million. For a couple that not long ago claimed to be weighed down by student loans, it’s an astonishing turn of fortune. But the real story here isn’t Omar’s wealth.

Peter Wood

The dangerous rise of ‘Chinese Bezique’

In one of Joseph Conrad's early stories he mentions an old seaman who delighted in a card game he called "Chinese Bezique." Captain Lingard considered the game as "a remarkable product of Chinese genius – a race for which he had an unaccountable liking and admiration." This passage somehow popped into mind as I read the New York Times expose, "How China Influences Elections in America's Biggest City." The article has nothing to do with card games – or Borneo, where Conrad's novel is set-but it exemplifies the same odd combination of admiration and disdain. The four authors of the Times' article are clearly impressed with the elaborate efforts of the Chinese consulate in New York City to recruit the City's Chinese social clubs into instruments of Beijing's foreign policy.

Alessandro Arduino

Ukraine’s own Wagner Group

As peace in Ukraine seems still far and the conflict is witnessing a new escalation of violence, a new breed of private military companies is already emerging, ready for a post-conflict Ukraine. Rooted in a draft legislation “On International Defense Companies” proposed on April 2024, the Ukrainian government aims to channel combat-seasoned veterans into regulated, transparent security firms rather than leave them adrift or, worse, turn them into mercenaries for hire in distant conflicts from the Sahel to the DRC.

Monday

September 1, 2025

Neal Pollack

Wishing Trump dead only makes him stronger

Maybe you heard that Donald Trump died over the weekend. First, the internet began to buzz over some bruising on the President’s hand during an executive-order signing ceremony. Then people started noticing that no one saw Trump on Friday, and that he didn’t have any events scheduled over the weekend. J.D. Vance gave an interview with USA Today in which he said, “if, God forbid, there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on-the-job training than what I've gotten over the last 200 days.” Trump has become so ubiquitous in our lives that there was only one conclusion to reach from his temporary semi-absence: He is dead. A TikTok video making that claim got 600,000 likes. There were tens of thousands of Twitter posts on the topic, almost trying to will it into reality.

Sunday

August 31, 2025

Neeraja Deshpande

Boomer hate has gone too far

Charles Murray, whose work on race and IQ has made him something of a darling of the online right, found himself out of favor with his fan base when he posted on X that a young married couple – each making $15 an hour and working 48-hour weeks – can afford a baby and a place to live. The reaction was furious. “Charles Murray is a good man,” wrote Zarathustra, a popular dissident right-wing poster. “Sadly, however, he’s also a Boomer. Which by necessity, means his bumper sticker talking points on political economy are comically out of touch garbage, and read like a moldy Reagan Youth pamphlet from 1982.” Murray’s post broke X containment and made it to the subreddit r/BoomersBeingFools.

Ani Chkhikvadze

Europe is a paper tiger

“The purpose of NATO,” Lord Hastings Ismay, the alliance’s first secretary general, once quipped, was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” That formula defined Europe’s security for decades, and it worked because US power anchored the alliance. But as President Donald Trump’s administration demands its European allies carry their share of the burden, shows little appetite for sending troops to Europe and worries more about the Southeast Asian theater, Europeans are being forced to confront their lack of political will for their own security, underinvestment in defense and dwindling public appetite to fight for their country.

Nigel Jones

Mexico seethes over cartels, ‘gringos’ and migrants

Mexico has been rocked by massive popular protests as the Hispanic world’s largest nation seethes with a fizzing cocktail of grievances ranging from the fate of 130,000 people who have ‘disappeared’ in the country’s drug wars, to discontent over the ‘gentrification’ of Mexico City in a bid to attract tourists. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets of the country’s major cities on Saturday, many carrying portraits of loved ones who have vanished since 2007 when the then President Felipe Calderon launched a "war on drugs" to combat the narcotics cartels who increasingly dominated the nation of 130 million people.

Saturday

August 30, 2025

John Hasson

The students bullied into being woke

If, as Shakespeare observed, “all the world is a stage, and all its men and women merely players,” no place is that truer than the modern American university. In the first study of its kind, 88 percent of Northwestern and University of Michigan students admitted they “have pretended to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically.” While the phenomenon of college students pretending to be more liberal than they actually are to make life easier for them as they attend these hotbeds of radicalism is not surprising, the true scale of it is. But how have we got here? If you’re looking for a single explanation, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The modern college environment is a perfect storm of several factors working together.

Chad Hagan

Stop the Medicaid ambulance grift

With Congress back in their districts for the August recess, GOP members will undoubtedly be bragging to their base about the Medicaid abuses they stopped by passing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. These reforms include enrollment reductions and new work requirements for enrollees. However, many Members are hoping that no one calls them out for failing to address an intergovernmental transfer grift. This little-known accounting trick has turned this basic entitlement program into a bloated scam that enriches public agencies while squeezing out private providers. In theory, many of the services Medicaid covers, such as emergency ambulance rides, officially known as Ground Emergency Medical Transport (GEMT), should be straightforward.

Friday

August 29, 2025

Mike Coté

US ‘covert ops’ in Greenland

A crack has developed in the NATO alliance, but surprisingly it has nothing to do with Ukraine. On Wednesday, the Danish foreign minister summoned the American envoy to answer for allegations that US citizens were carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland. According to reports, the men were seeking to incept a Greenlandic liberation movement meant to “pave the way for a US takeover” of the world’s largest island. They compiled lists of potential secessionist recruits who would support becoming part of the United States, going so far as to cultivate contacts during repeat visits to Greenland. Research was also done into those on the island who may fervently oppose such an alteration of the status quo, a far less routine action.

Isaac Schorr

Is RFK Jr. Trump’s Achilles’ heel?

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s quest to prove himself President Donald Trump’s most destructive Cabinet member continues apace. On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly announced that “Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” She had been nominated to the key post in March, and actually served in it for less than a month. Shortly after that, Monarez’s lawyers issued a fiery statement asserting that she had neither been fired, nor resigned, and was being targeted by Kennedy for refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives,” and help him weaponize “public health for political gain.

Jason Russell

Kamala doesn’t deserve Secret Service detail

I served nearly a decade on Secret Service protective details. That included guarding the lives of President Bush and Obama as well as former presidents Clinton, Ford and Carter. From that vantage point, President Trump’s decision to end protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris is notable but not shocking. It returns her status to what the law sets as the default and reflects how the protective mission is managed in practice. Federal law provides former vice presidents with Secret Service protection for six months after they leave office. After that window, the Secretary of Homeland Security can authorize temporary protection if conditions warrant it. That is the baseline professionals in the field plan around.

Katherine Dee

Robin Westman and the unstoppable tide of ‘slop violence’

On Wednesday, doing my laundry, I decided to turn on the TV for the first time in decades. Breaking news: a school shooting in Minnesota. It’s been years since a story like this made me cry. How could you cry at every mention of gun violence when you live in a place like the Midwest? I have been aware of gun violence in schools since I was a child myself. I remember first hearing about a school shooting when I was six years old. A little boy had shot his sister. I cried and cried and cried – I cried for the child that died, and I cried for the child who’d killed her. It remains one of my most traumatizing memories. The last shooting that made me cry was Sandy Hook. I was at dinner when a friend showed me Adam Lanza’s photo on his phone. Twenty first-graders dead.

Juan P. Villasmil and Rob Gioia

Trump’s big Bolivia opportunity

After nearly two decades of reign over Bolivia, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party was banished at the ballot box on August 17. Its fall is a dramatic political realignment to the right for Bolivians, and a rare opportunity for the United States to reform relations with a geopolitically critical nation. As one expert, Leonardo Coutinho, told us, “The Trump administration can not only contribute to the restoration of democracy but also play a central role in dismantling a fully functioning narco-state.” Despite its 25 percent inflation rate and a 93 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, Bolivia is rich in natural resources, boasting some of the world’s largest lithium reserves, making it an attractive target for both American and Chinese grand strategies.

Jenna Stocker

How Democrats failed Minneapolis

What happens after an unspeakable tragedy? One that comes on an idyllic late August day in Minneapolis that signaled the end of a barefoot summer and the beginning of back-to-school activities, reacquainting with friends, and easing back into a school schedule? For two families, it is the end of any normal life they had known. For countless other families whose children attended Annunciation Catholic School in a peaceful, leafy-treed neighborhood of the city, it marks a new life of contradiction: of being blessed that they are reunited with their loved ones and overwhelming grief at an inhuman, violent targeting of innocent life at its most sacred – within the walls of a church while at prayer.

Thursday

August 28, 2025

David Sypher Jr.

Muriel Bowser’s praise for Donald Trump

Mayor Muriel Bowser has found herself in the middle of a political tightrope – and it’s one that many Democrats may soon have to walk. In response to rising crime and public unease, the Washington, DC Mayor acknowledged something few in her party dare to admit: that Donald Trump’s federal “surge” of law enforcement officers actually made the city safer.“This federal surge has had a significant impact on crime in Washington, DC, and we greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said at a press conference yesterday.That single sentence captures the dilemma of the modern Democratic party.