Politics Archives

Thursday

May 1, 2025

Is America in the grip of Empty Shelves panic?

The morning of President Trump’s 100th day in office brought fresh tariff melodrama with the coffee, eggs and toast, as a report emerged suggesting Amazon was considering listing the exact cost of a US tariff surcharge next to all goods purchased on the site. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately snarled from the podium that this was a “hostile and political act,” though it was really neither hostile nor political. Regardless, Amazon immediately rolled it back, claiming the story had been misreported by Punchbowl News. “The team that runs our ultra low-cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” a spokesman said.

Kate Andrews

Kamala Harris is back

Addressing a ballroom filled with Democratic supporters and donors in San Francisco last night, Kamala Harris asked a favor from her audience. “Please allow me, friends, to digress for a moment,” she asked with a slightly mischievous grin. Hallelujah. Here we go: OK, it’s kinda dark in here, but I’m gonna ask for a show of hands. Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago, the one of the elephants at the San Diego zoo during the earthquake? Google it if you haven’t seen it. So that scene [has] been on my mind. Everyone’s asking "what’ve you been thinking about these days"... here those elephants were, and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle, and stood next to each other, to protect the most vulnerable. Think about it.

Wednesday

April 30, 2025

Ben Domenech

Whitmer’s smart play for Trump’s voters

“I’m that same woman from Michigan,” Governor Gretchen Whitmer told Fox 2 Detroit Tuesday night, when asked about her changing relationship with President Donald Trump. Yet for progressive Democratic voters, Whitmer’s willingness to appear – reluctantly in the Oval Office three weeks ago, less so Tuesday at the Air National Guard Base at Selfridge, where Trump invited her to speak at the lectern prominently bearing the seal of the President – is viewed as anathema. Who’s right in this moment? Will Whitmer’s multiple appearances and plaudits for Trump become something she intensely regrets when the Democratic party’s presidential primaries begin apace? Or is the True Gretch author sly as a fox?

Debbi Hixon

Arm school guards – not children – to honor my husband

Last week, I watched the heartbreaking news out of Florida State University – another campus turned into a crime scene, another community shattered by gun violence. As someone who lost her husband in a school shooting, I can tell you: these moments are never just headlines, they are wounds that never fully heal. Chris Hixon, my husband, was murdered on February 14, 2018, during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. He was an athletic director, a Navy veteran and, above all, a protector. When the shooting began, he did not hesitate. He ran toward the danger to save students. He was shot and killed while doing everything right. Chris was trained to use a weapon. He served our country with honor.

Ben Domenech

Josh Hawley talks Trump’s first 100 days: pro-life ‘needs to be a priority’

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has been one of Donald Trump’s fiercest allies on Capitol Hill. But since his easy re-election last November, he’s also been someone within the Republican party who demanded public commitments from Trump’s nominees on several issues of importance to him – areas of concern that include the influence of big tech, the encroaching role of China and a promise on the part of nominees with little or no record on the abortion issue to support pro-life policies. Senator Hawley spoke to me on the 100th day of Trump’s second presidency about what he’s seeing on tariffs, foreign policy and China.

Teresa Mull

MAHA must harness the power of Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow may be set to pass her celebrity-everyone-loves-to-hate crown to another out-of-touch elitist. The Goop founder and queen of outrageous “wellness” hacks has announced – gasp! – that she’s begun eating like the rest of us. Paltrow has followed a Paleo diet for years – meaning she cut out virtually all culinary joy for the sake of eating like a cavewoman, though I assume she did more gathering than hunting. Yet on her Goop podcast last week, Paltrow announced, “I’m a little sick of it if I’m honest. I’m getting back into eating some sourdough bread and some cheese. There, I said it. A little pasta. After being strict with it for so long.” Paltrow’s foray into normal-people food is serendipitous; or perhaps it’s ingenious timing.

Ross Clark

Was ‘Liberation Day’ just shock therapy?

With Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announcing that a trade deal between the US and India could be imminent, it once again raises the possibility that Trump’s intended outcome is not the imposition of high, permanent tariffs – but that the measures announced on “Liberation Day” were really just shock therapy aimed at the ultimate liberalization of trade. It is significant that India was one of the countries which were originally put down for some of the higher tariffs: 26 percent was going to be the blanket rate on imports from India. South Korea, another country with which trade deal negotiations seem to be in an advanced state, was going to be subject to 25 percent tariffs.

David Sypher Jr.

But, Michelle: Barack deported more immigrants than Trump

Michelle Obama says Donald Trump’s immigration policies “keep her up at night.” But if immigration enforcement is a moral crisis, why wasn’t she losing sleep when her own husband deported more immigrants than any president in American history? Instead of helping the Democrats, this kind of out-of-touch moral posturing only highlights the party’s elite detachment from reality – and it’s costing them working-class voters who live with the consequences of the failed policies they are still defending.Michelle Obama may lie awake thinking about immigration enforcement. Many of us stay up worrying about what happens when our neighborhoods, wages and public schools are strained by policies designed to win applause, not provide order.

Tuesday

April 29, 2025

Roger Kimball

Pay no heed to the misleading Trump approval ratings

When it comes to Donald Trump and his achievements during his first 100 days, who are you going to believe, the New York Times or your lyin’ eyes? By “the New York Times,” incidentally, I do not mean just that one woke media outlet masquerading as a source of news. No, I take the Times as a metonym for the entire propaganda industrial complex, the giant dispenser of politically correct nostrums and seismically sensitive Keeper of the Narrative. Thus it is that the Times is a reliable dispenser not of that sort of information we denominate “news” – that is, what is actually happening and who is involved in making it happen.

James Johnson

The polls are wrong (again) on Trump

“Trump has lowest 100-day approval rating in 80 years,” screamed ABC News at the start of this week. The ABC News/Washington Post poll, conducted by Ipsos to mark Trump’s 100th day in office, was one of a handful that have shown Trump’s approval rating dipping below 40 percent for the first time. There is just one problem: the pollsters who are showing the worst numbers for Trump are the ones who got the election most wrong. Take the ABC/WaPo/Ipsos poll, that showed Trump on 39 percent approval. In their final poll of the 2024 cycle, they found a three-point lead for Kamala Harris. Ipsos’s other poll for Reuters had a two-point advantage for Harris nationally. Trump ended up winning the popular vote by one and a half points.

Emily Smith

Being Mr. Meghan Markle is no honeymoon

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are finally enjoying their “honeymoon period.” Or they are according to the Duchess of Sussex, who made the statement on a fawning podcast as part of a brand building media blitz – and who certainly seems to be enjoying herself.But has she asked her husband if he’s reveling in their belated honeymoon quite as much as she is? Once the spare to the throne, his presence as her forlorn shadow at events to honor her now appears largely surplus to requirements even to Meghan. “That man loves me so much,” she gushed on Montecito neighbor Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast on Monday. She likened their relationship to a video game where you "slay the dragon, save the princess.

Ben Domenech

A mammoth 100 days of Trump’s America First foreign policy

One hundred days into the second Donald Trump presidency, his presence in the Oval Office represents the largest sea change in US foreign relations since the end of the Cold War. Within the space of fewer than four months, Trump has forced Ukraine to deal with reality, by delivering hard truths about what ending the war will require. He has deployed J.D. Vance to shock the international system, with tough messages to our allies in Europe and Asia. Trump’s declaration of a litany of cartels as foreign terror organizations has kicked off a redirection of our relationship with Mexico, Panama and the Western hemisphere. His close relationship with Israel, a clear break with Joe Biden’s approach, has shifted expectations for the Middle East.

Urs Gehriger

How Liberation Day rocked Switzerland

When President Donald Trump gathered the world’s media to the White House Rose Garden to unveil America’s “Liberation Day,” Swiss viewers were cautious but optimistic. Administration insiders had assured us that we had nothing to fear. During Trump’s first term in office, Switzerland had been the port in the storm of European opinion. As outsiders to the European Union, we were able to forge our own relationship with the American superpower. Our small alpine nation, with its population of 9 million, rose from the eighth largest foreign direct investor in the United States to the sixth. Swiss companies, like Nestle, Stadler and Novartis, ramped up their American operations, generating profits and jobs for both countries.

Daniel McCarthy

Trump is a Large Hadron Collider

By conventional measures President Trump’s first 100 days back in office have not been a success. He hasn’t (at time of writing) restored peace for Europe’s frontier with Russia or tamed inflation in America’s supermarkets. Instead, he’s given the stock market a shock the likes of which it hasn’t felt in decades and blown up some apartment buildings in Yemen. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken apart entire federal agencies, but the very small-government conservatives and libertarians who might be expected to be enthusiastic about this are instead signaling that they were pretty comfortable with the way Washington was – or at least that they don’t want those ways changed unless they’re done by the most proper possible playbook.

Travis Aaroe

Who cares about globalization?

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” was the culmination of a 30-year insurgency against the global economic system. It was the most fiscally significant event since lockdown. By the fiat of the President, tens of trillions of dollars were on the move; stock markets trembled; and the US-China relationship – the material basis of globalization – seemed at risk of permanently freezing over. Yet just under a week later, tariffs were to be displaced in the news cycle by the case of a deported "Maryland man," Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and his possible gang affiliations. Only one of these events would prompt five Democratic lawmakers to drop everything for an urgent trip abroad.

Monday

April 28, 2025

Neal Pollack

The Trump White House is government by meme

On Monday morning, the nation awoke to learn that 100 "Wanted"-style posters now line the driveway to the White House, featuring faces of people the Trump administration has deported and the crimes they’d committed. A perpetual shriek, warning about the rise of fascism, arose from the online cosmos, as people began posting, again, “This is how it starts.” I saw more than one person compare the display to a medieval king posting heads on spikes around a moat, or Nazi propaganda magazine spreads about dangerous “Juden.” Perhaps. Or maybe it was just oppositional troll-bait. This is how the Trump White House operates. It’s government by meme, and it can be very effective.

Ben Domenech

Could abortion pills be the sleeper issue for the midterms?

The politics of the abortion issue in the post-Dobbs environment has been dramatically altered, both by the introduction of state-level restrictions in Republican states and by pressure campaigns in Democrat-dominated states to increase the subsidization and solidification of existing lax abortion policies. But the most significant development in the abortion space in recent years wasn’t a decision that came from the Supreme Court, but from the Biden administration – first temporarily (with Covid as the justification) and then permanently granting the ability to dispense abortion-inducing pills via telehealth, without the previously required visit to a doctor.

Stephen L. Miller

The media must admit to covering up Biden’s decline

When it comes to the many forthcoming books about President Joe Biden’s decline, only one question matters: what role did the national news media play in assisting his White House in the cover-up? It’s a question that, if early snippets and sample releases are anything to go by, will remain largely ignored by the authors and their colleagues in media. A number of reporters are releasing volumes about Biden’s conspicuous cognitive decline, that many of them supposedly only became aware of on the debate stage last June. Many of these journalists actively worked to smear anyone who had noticed the former president’s state of mind, including right-leaning commentators and Republicans, as far back as 2021.

David Sypher Jr.

No, Joy Reid: Rome didn’t fall due to a lack of ‘diversity’

Former MSNBC host Joy Reid recently delivered a peculiar history lesson to her social media audience. In her mind a reproach to Donald Trump, Reid warned that the Roman Empire “died because it wasn’t diverse enough,” implying that sticking with “just white folks” leads to inevitable civilizational decline. If history were written by cable news soundbites, we might soon learn that Napoleon lost Waterloo because he lacked a DEI department.In reality, Rome didn’t fall because of a lack of diversity. Nor is Europe today crumbling because of too many white people. Societies fail for many reasons, but skin color has never been one of them.

Sunday

April 27, 2025

Neal Pollack

The Trump White House is The Real Housewives of Pennsylvania Avenue

In the latest episode of “As the Trump Turns,” Elon Musk and Secretary Treasury Scott Bessent, two incredibly powerful billionaires, got into a White House screaming match over who gets to be the acting commissioner of the IRS. According to Axios, Bessent accused Musk of going behind his back to get Trump to appoint Musk’s favored candidate. Musk “clapped back,” calling Bessent a “Soros agent,” and accusing him of running a “failed hedge fund.” “Fuck you!” Bessent screamed. “Say it louder!” shouted Musk. There were no reports of anyone ripping down drapes or tossing a champagne glass in anyone else’s face. But this is how Donald Trump runs his White House.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House on February 26, 2025 in Washington, DC (Getty Images)