Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Is Trump exiling his problem women?

Maybe the best really was yet to come: Kimberly Guilfoyle has landed the break-up gift of a lifetime, finding herself appointed Donald Trump's ambassador to Greece the same day news broke of her split from his son Donald Jr. "For many years, Kimberly has been a close friend and ally," President-elect Trump wrote in a statement Tuesday evening. "Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States, and safeguard its interests abroad." "I am so proud of Kimberly," echoed Don Jr. on X. "She loves America and she always has wanted to serve the country as an ambassador. She will be an amazing leader for America First.

kimberly guilfoyle women

Joe Biden and the art of quiet quitting

President Joe Biden still has forty-two days left in office, but rather than go out in a blaze of glory, he appears to be embracing the “quiet quitting” craze so popular with younger generations, in which employees “continue to put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs, but don’t go the extra mile for their employer.” President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, is giving an early Christmas present to the 77,289,122 people who voted for him by overshadowing the current commander-in-chief on the international stage. As Israeli paratroopers deploy to Syria and the Russia-Ukraine war rages on, it’s Trump who is wearing the pants in the on behalf of the US overseas.

daniel penny

The Daniel Penny verdict is a hopeful sign that sanity can rule in our cities again

It was a gray May afternoon in New York City when a thirty-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely — who had dozens of encounters with law enforcement, suffered from schizophrenia and other mental health issues and was under the influence of synthetic drugs — boarded the F train and began ranting and raving at the straphangers on board. He said he was ready to die, that someone would die today, screaming that he didn’t mind going to jail or getting life in prison. Scared passengers backed away, with one young mother barricading her five-year-old behind a stroller. Witnesses attest to what happened next: a young man headed to the gym, an ex-Marine named Daniel Penny, did what others wouldn’t be brave enough to do in this situation.

Time is running out for TikTok

TikTok’s days may be numbered in America after all. Following a presidential campaign in which both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promoted themselves heavily on the platform, despite bipartisan national security concerns over its ownership’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party, a federal appeals court today ruled that the app must break ties with the Beijing-based ByteDance within a few weeks or be banned in the United States.Until the decision, everything was looking up for TikTok. Trump trounced Harris on the platform, and his campaign and top surrogates were active all over the popular social media app.

Trump is already driving the left crazy

A phenomenon that will likely be with us throughout the second term of Donald Trump as president is a dynamic of left-right crazy that will foment anxiety and desperation with ludicrous speed. Here’s the way the ouroboros tangles: a right-wing voice indicates that Trump is about to do something crazy in a positive sense. A left-wing voice responds with anxious fear that this crazy step is about to be taken in a negative sense. Then this crazy thing doesn’t happen, but there’s an explanation — the right-wing seizing upon the idea that a crazy good thing was undermined by various forces, while the left wing is sure their online pushback was key to stopping the crazy bad thing from happening.

How Democrats are responding to Trump deportations

As President-elect Donald Trump charts plans to carry out mass deportations of illegal aliens, Democrats across the country are deciding whether or not they want to cooperate with the effort. Trump and his border czar, former acting ICE director Tom Homan, are reportedly mapping out a sophisticated operation that would include assistance from local and state law enforcement, ICE agents and potentially the National Guard and other military assets to identify and remove people who are in the country illegally, which number in the tens of millions. The wrench comes in with the local and state part of the equation; will Democratic officials order their law enforcement officers to stand down?

Joe Biden breaks his promise and pardons Hunter

President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, sparing him ahead of sentencing for felony tax and gun crimes. The ne’er-do-well was potentially facing years of jail time after pleading guilty to nine federal tax charges and getting convicted of three felony gun offenses. “Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” Biden said in a statement released Sunday night. He also alleged that the judicial process had been tainted by politics and was worried that investigations and prosecutions against his son would continue after his presidency.

biden hunter

The Hunter Biden pardon has silver linings

“My word as a Biden.” Remember that? It was something that Joe Biden was in the habit of saying whenever he was about to utter something untrue. A couple of years ago when the Great Unraveling was beginning to be obvious to everyone, Biden deposited the phrase right before saying that he was “never more optimistic” about the prospects for the country. This prompted one social media wit to respond: “The border is open, real wages are down, energy costs are outrageously high, the Taliban controls Afghanistan, and the cartels are making billions smuggling fentanyl. There is reason to be ‘optimistic’ though — we have a [House GOP] majority who is working to hold Biden accountable.

hunter
hunter biden pardon

Hunter’s pardon is the legacy of Joe Biden’s weakness

So Joe Biden decided to go out by doing the thing. And why not? For all the people who praised him for being noble and restrained, for insisting that no one is above the law and the court process must play out, what did they really do for him in the end? Plunge the knife blade under his shoulder blades with slightly less force than Nancy Pelosi? A betrayal is still a betrayal, regardless of the motives — and there are consequences for that; in this case, the consequences stand to Hunter Biden's benefit. He is pardoned, with a vengeance. Karine Jean-Pierre insisted it would never happen. Jen Psaki praised the president to high heaven, as a mark of his high character.

Trump’s tariff threat

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat of 25 percent, across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada has already shocked the system. The US dollar rose against its neighbors’ currencies, as stocks dropped and rose.Floating an additional tariff on China is one thing, but adding America’s two neighbors makes the move especially ambitious. If implemented, the US would effectively levy tariffs against its top three trading partners, which together make up around 40 to 50 percent of total trade between America and the world. That’s revolutionary.One thing that’s for certain is that tariffs would hurt the countries they target more than they hurt the US. More than 75 percent of Mexican and Canadian exports are to the Land of the Free.

Jack Smith’s crusade ends with a whimper

What a waste. As Special Counsel Jack Smith had his 2020 election charges against President-elect Trump dismissed by Justice Tanya Chutkan, any amusement derived from the fact Smith and his merry band of anti-Trumpers just spent two years spinning their wheels is belied by the damage caused by his travesty. It is not only the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars squandered. It is not only thousands of misused hours of investigators and prosecutors who should have been pursuing violent crimes, drug and human trafficking and terrorism cases. It is not only countless time spent clogging the dockets of courts in Florida and Washington, DC, which should have been used for legitimate cases.

jack smith

Trump’s popular transition

President-elect Donald Trump is assembling his presidential cabinet in record time, leaving those outside of his orbit scrambling to keep up with the abundance of names flooding their inboxes. In just the past few days, Trump announced Russ Vought will return to the helm of the Office of Management and Budget, president of the America First Policy Institute Brooke Rollins will serve as secretary of the Department of Agriculture, billionaire hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent will lead the Department of the Treasury — plus a smattering of other department heads and health-related appointees.Even if the rapid pace — particularly when compared to the 2016 transition — might be giving some whiplash, the American people are so far on board with the president-elect’s picks.

How DOGE is planning to cut down the feds

President-elect Donald Trump’s appointees for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are planning to crack down on employees who work from home — those who are left, anyway, after the duo’s round of “large-scale firings.”In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out “the DOGE plan to reform government,” in which they purport to “reverse a decades-long executive power grab” while “following the Supreme Court’s guidance.

appointments

What Trump’s appointments tell us

Donald Trump may have a four-year term, but he has far less time to make a real difference. In practice, he may have a year or perhaps eighteen months before the midterm election looms and Congress slows to a crawl. If Trump wants to be a transformational president — and he clearly does — then he will have to move fast. That’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s beginning with a series of rapid-fire appointments, most of which require approval from the new, Republican-majority Senate. (His White House aides, such as national security advisor, do not require Senate approval.) What message is Trump sending with his appointments so far? First, he demands loyalty — to him and to the agenda he articulated clearly on the campaign trail.

The realignment election

We’re sitting at the airport bar in Lansing, Michigan when we notice a MAGA hat next to the cash register. “What’s that?” my husband asks the black bartender. The bartender curls up the corners of his mouth and says, “I’m a Trump supporter.” He tells us that he was raised to be a Democrat by his grandmother and his mother but found himself disillusioned with the Obama administration and the bailouts of Wall Street and the auto industry. “They got their annual bonuses and their stock buybacks. What did we get? We got the bill. That was my breaking point.” “I got tired of hearing the same shit every four years,” he asserted. “Now I wear my hat out and people look at me like, ‘a black Trump supporter?

election

How the lawfare campaign against Trump backfired

The effort to bankrupt, disgrace and banish Donald J. Trump to a jail cell in Riker’s Island has instead helped pave his road right back to the Oval Office. The unprecedented abuse of the American legal system fueled plenty of cable news coverage, but it also alienated the electorate. As with President Joe Biden’s mental decline, voters trusted their own eyes over the tale being told on their screens and delivered a decisive verdict against an eight-year politically-motivated lawfare campaign — exit polls showed that Trump voters were more likely to say democracy was under threat.

Trump

The two final battles of the culture war

On issue after issue, conservatives — and Republicans — have lost the “culture wars.” Not just lost but lost decisively and permanently. The victories are so secure on most issues that conservatives have abandoned the fight. At times, the result has been a more tolerant public consensus, for example regarding gay rights and marriage. There are two notable exceptions, however, where the cultural battles remain white-hot: abortion and transgender rights. Both issues motivated voters in 2024. On abortion, voters have been mobilized by controversial Supreme Court decisions. The fight began in earnest in 1973, when Roe v. Wade effectively legalized abortion throughout the country and throughout the nine months of pregnancy.

culture

Panicking over the planet and population is pointless

One sign of moral panic is that when the facts change, the fears remain the same. In the 1970s, the Washington Post, TIME and Newsweek stoked fears of “a new ice age.” As soon as scientists updated their models to show a trend in the other direction, “global warming” became as threatening as global cooling. And when winters stubbornly kept happening and the direst predictions of new-age prophets like Al Gore failed to come to pass, the whole thing was rebranded as “climate change.” Whatever the label, and whatever the underlying phenomenon was thought to be, the moral implication remained the same — human beings were ruining the earth and must curtail their comforts to save the planet. Bad weather used to be God’s punishment for human sinfulness.

panic

Laken Riley’s killer sentenced

Jose Ibarra, the “sick, twisted and evil coward” who was accused of murdering Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, was convicted on all counts and sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole, with an additional twenty-seven years tacked on.“She fought for her life in dignity, and to save herself from being brutally raped,” Riley’s mother said. Ibarra, who is reported to be a member of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang, “showed no regard for Laken and human life. We’re asking the same be done to him.”Riley’s high-profile murder inspired the Laken Riley Act, a bipartisan measure that “directly addresses one of the federal policy issues related to Laken Riley’s murder,” according to Congressman Mike Collins’s office.

cabinet

Trump 47 is transforming what a cabinet means

The reaction in most elected Republican circles to the naming of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees for the most prominent positions in his administration has ranged from the exuberant, to the somewhat skeptical, to the truly head-scratching, to, in one obvious case, outright disgust. But what’s emerging now is a clearer picture of what Trump 47 has as an idea of his cabinet — and it’s far more consistent, and potentially transformative, than some observers currently seem to appreciate. Cabinets and top officials are most often drawn from a pool of experienced politicians with lengthy résumés, earned from decades of service in varied capacities and concentration in their particular area.