Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Trump only harms himself by floating the idea of a third term

Donald Trump this weekend floated the idea of running for a third term. Unless he’s doing it in 1940 when Franklin D. Roosevelt did, it’s unconstitutional. I don’t mean unconstitutional for Judge Boasberg or Judge Chutkin or some zealot in robes in San Francisco or Seattle. I mean unconstitutional in capital letters for any judge, including a 9-0 vote on the Supreme Court. The legal background here is straightforward. When FDR ran for a third term in 1940 and for a fourth in 1944, there was no legal or constitutional prohibition against doing so. There was simply a well-established norm, begun when George Washington returned to Mount Vernon after two terms. That norm was respected by every subsequent president. Until FDR.

Trump’s choice on a replacement UN ambassador is complex

Maybe the surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump yanked Elise Stefanik’s nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations. It’s that he hasn’t pulled America out of the organization. But perhaps that outcome is in the offing as Trump ponders whether he should select anyone to succeed her abortive nomination. Trump decided to leave Stefanik in Congress because of the slender Republican majority in the House – 218-213, plus four vacancies. “I have asked Elise, as one of my biggest Allies, to remain in Congress to help me deliver Historic Tax Cuts, GREAT Jobs, Record Economic Growth, a Secure Border, Energy Dominance, Peace Through Strength, and much more, so we can MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

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What went wrong for MAGA in Pennsylvania

What’s changed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania? The Republican-leaning district in a purple state has been turned on its head by a surprise win for the Democratic party: for the first time since the late 1970s, a local Democratic mayor, James Malone, will take up a place in the State Senate, after a special election was held on Wednesday this week.  This is not just an overturn of decades’ worth of party consensus. It seems to be a monumental shift away from the consensus in Lancaster just four months ago, when Donald Trump won the district by 15 points. It was only a one-point drop from his 16-point margin in 2020, when he won the county and lost the state.

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A miracle DC plane crash didn’t happen sooner, Senate hears

The first Senate hearing on the mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in January, which resulted in the loss of 67 lives, was held today. The conclusion: it was a miracle it didn’t happen sooner. Senator Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas and chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, reported that between October 21 and December 24, there were more than 1,500 “close-proximity” events between helicopters and commercial airplanes. It was just a matter of time before something terrible happened.

PBS and NPR should never have received public funding

Congress has been mulling the future of publicly-funded television and radio. Here’s a spoiler alert: that funding is toast. There is no way a Republican-controlled House and Senate will keep pouring money into networks they believe hate them. They know that hatred is warmly reciprocated. The debate about partisan bias at PBS and NPR is important – the bias itself is obvious – but that’s not the most important point. What matters most is that democratic governments have no business funding or controlling news channels directed at their own citizens. Those channels should be privately owned and operated. Every single one.

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Which member of the ‘Houthi PC small group’ chat are you?

Most people use groupchats to share memes, organize brunch or gossip. The Trump administration plans air strikes. After Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently included in the "Houthi PC small group" Signal chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, administration officials were eager to stress that no classified information was included in the unofficial chat. As a result, Goldberg published screenshots of the full conversation this morning. The messages offer a glimpse into not just the views of various cabinet members on foreign affairs; they reveal the texting styles of some of the most consequential government officials in the world. Some are relatable. "Having read thru the full Houthi PC small group logs, I've come to the sad realization that I'm the J.D.

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Of course Jasmine Crockett should run for president

The leadership of the Democratic Party is as open as it has been in generations, with Nancy Pelosi occupying emerita status, Chuck Schumer under fire from half his party – and their most prominent governors hamstrung by problems at home or the fact they’d much rather be podcasting. The field is effectively cleared for an upstart to emerge based on sheer communications talent and the ability to take advantage of a power vacuum as an avatar of leftward frustration. And if that’s the direction Democrats decide to go in 2028, there’s no one who occupies that role right now more impressively than the constantly viral phenomenon that is the congresswoman from Dallas, Texas – Jasmine Crockett.

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We don’t live in an age of reason

When Tucker Carlson claimed to have been “physically mauled” by a demon in his sleep late last year, it was something of a bellwether: a sign that America’s cultural Right, now in the ascendancy, has persuaded itself to take a symbolic stand against the Enlightenment and the scientific worldview. Looking back on the 2010s and early 2020s, much of the American right now sees an era of secular hubris. The problems of the previous 15 years were put down to a naive faith in human reason; which was then confronted by dark and atavistic forces it couldn’t assimilate. The result had been all sorts of premodern terrors come again: plague, war, popular mania, social order overthrown.  The answer would have to be some sort of return of the spiritual.

Mike Waltz claims he has ‘never met’ Atlantic editor

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz spoke to the press this afternoon for the first time since the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg described how Waltz had inadvertently added him to a Signal groupchat in which air strikes on Yemen were planned. Waltz claimed that he'd “never met, don’t know, never communicated with” Goldberg. The only problem: Goldberg says in his report that the pair has met before. So who's lying? The Atlantic reported Monday how Goldberg was granted access to “precise information about weapons packages, targets and timing” from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, two hours before the US attack on Yemen targets on March 15. “There are a lot of lessons,” Waltz told the press while meeting with President Donald Trump and US ambassadors.

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The Goldberg groupchat ‘glitch’ is a crisis of competence

To be fair, Donald Trump’s team did promise to have the most transparent administration ever – a line I was planning to deploy on Fox News, but Peter Doocy beat me to it. Newly elected Senator Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican, was blunter: “Well, somebody fucked up.” It was only a matter of time before this White House, moving as fast as they have been, would make a glaring mistake. They had been relatively fortunate to this point, considering the sheer amount they’ve taken on in the early days of this administration, to have the screw-ups largely at a remove from the West Wing.

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The real problem with the Trump portrait

When Winston Churchill saw the portrait commissioned by parliament for his 80th birthday, he called it “filthy and malignant” and said it made him look “half-witted.” The picture, painted by Graham Sutherland, was soon whisked off to Chartwell, Churchill’s estate in Kent. It moldered there unseen for some years before Churchill’s private secretary ferried it to a secluded cottage and burnt the wretched object. Clemmie, Churchill’s long-suffering wife, approved of the conflagration. A similar fate could fall upon Sarah Boardman’s portrait of Donald Trump, which has been hanging in the Colorado Capitol for the last six years. Trump hates that picture, calling it “purposefully distorted” and taking to Truth Social to vent his spleen.

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Why Harry and Meghan should leave America

Imagine Prince Harry and Meghan Markle perched in their Montecito mansion, glowering at Donald Trump’s brazen, rebooted America. They’re not fleeing yet, but as progressive celebrities ditch Hollywood’s hills – Rosie O’Donnell settling in Ireland, Ellen DeGeneres nesting in Britain – might the Sussexes trail behind? We Yanks would rejoice. The spotlight sharpened last week when Harry’s US visa records hit the headlines on March 18, courtesy of a laudable Heritage Foundation lawsuit. The group probed whether Harry glossed over the drug escapades he bragged about in his memoir Spare – cocaine, cannabis, psychedelics – to clinch his visa.

Ex-Media Matters influencer runs for Congress

Ex-Media Matters influencer Kat Abughazaleh announced a run for the US Congress today, telling Democrats, “It’s time to drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine.” Abughazaleh is fed up with the Democrats “cowering to Trump,” and says the party should be “standing up to authoritarians, not shrinking away when the fight gets tough.” So she decided to run herself. I'm Kat Abughazaleh and I'm running for Congress. pic.twitter.com/tEtaNcc5xL — Kat Abughazaleh (@abughazalehkat) March 24, 2025 The young graduate of George Washington University is bidding for the House seat of the 9th district of Illinois, where she will be facing off against 80-year-old incumbent Jan Schakowsky, who has now served the Prairie State for more years than Abughazaleh has been alive.

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Is Trump’s tariff zeal beginning to wane?

The President can’t stop talking about his favorite word – tariffs – although this week his comments are having a new effect. Rather than plummeting, the stock market is showing signs of life – climbing by more than 1 percent – on the news that Donald Trump’s plans for “reciprocal” tariff seemed to have been scaled back significantly.  For weeks the President has been suggesting that come April 2, trade retribution would really kick in: any country that has an “unfair” trading partnership with the United States (Trump was even thinking of extending this to taxes like VAT) would see an equal import tariff imposed on the country.

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Is the Trump Slump over?

Tariffs would destroy supply chains and drive up inflation. Elon Musk’s savage cuts would bring the government machine grinding to a halt. And chaotic policy making would drive investors out of the United States. As the Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq all fell sharply over the last month, there were plenty of factors driving the “Trump Slump,” as it became known on Wall Street. But hold on. Sure, equities have corrected. But right now it looks as if the rout is already over, and the markets have steadied again.  Last week, US stocks finished in positive territory for the first time in a month, chalking up modest gains over five trading days. On Monday, they carried on climbing, with the Dow up by more than 500 points, and the Nasdaq by more than 300.

Does Tim Walz think we still want to hear from him?

If you thought an embarrassing loss in November would result in Tim Walz taking a hint, you thought wrong. The Democratic party is seeing its popularity continue to decline, even from that low point. A recent NBC poll showed the party’s favorability rating hitting a low not seen since 1990. Yet Walz seems hell bent on sticking around. This leads those of us who just suffered through his three month stint as a vice presidential candidate to ask: are the Dems really doing this again? Despite the lack of demand, Walz is riding a non-existent wave of momentum and making headlines as he goes. While appearing on the This Is Gavin Newsom podcast, Walz and Newsom tried to unpack why the Democrat party is losing support from men.

We are living through the Second American Revolution

On March 23, 1775, a month before the first shots would ring out at Lexington and Concord, Patrick Henry entered Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia to deliver a bold conviction. “The war is actually begun,” he said, “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Henry’s rallying cry remains one of the most iconic speeches in American history and is one of my personal favorites. Indeed, multiple times since we moved to northern Virginia in 2021, my family and I have made the drive south to see Henry’s speech reenacted. The message remains as compelling as ever, and this year, on its 250th anniversary, I believe it is especially relevant to our current political moment. We are facing a struggle for ordered liberty.

The JFK files will infuriate conspiracy theorists

When Donald Trump ordered the declassification of thousands of secret government documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it seemed like it would be a red-letter day for America’s conspiracy theorists. The reality has been quite different. The JFK files — along with other documents about the killings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., which were released on Tuesday — have turned out to be a major disappointment. Around 2,000 documents were included in the release from the US National Archives and Records Administration. But despite Trump’s insistence that the files should not be redacted, many still have blacked-out passages. Others are so faded or poorly photocopied that they are illegible.

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Did Joe Biden’s presidency really happen?

Trees fall in forests, and forgotten statesmen make speeches. Last Saturday, Joe Biden gave his first post-presidential speech to something called National High School Model United Nations, which seems to be a conference for people who maybe don’t exist and nobody outside the room noticed. The event was, according to Philip Wegmann at RealClearPolitics, closed to the press, with no recording of Biden’s remarks made. It’s spooky. The 46th presidency only ended eight weeks ago and already Biden is a ghost. Donald Trump constantly evokes his name – the worst president ever, a catastrophe for this country etc. etc. – and yet the man himself has evanesced.