Politics Archives

Wednesday

March 19, 2025

Trump is working overtime to restore the rule of law

In the matter of Donald Trump v. Leviathan, let me begin by stipulating that Sir Thomas More was right in A Man for All Seasons when he remonstrated with his future son-in-law William Roper. Roper was urging More to arrest the scheming Richard Rich, whose machinations would eventually lead to More’s execution. But, More points out, Rich had broken no law. William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

Ben Domenech

Chuck Schumer imperiled from the left and the donor class

The rapid nature of the turn against Chuck Schumer, ostensibly the most powerful Democrat in Washington as Senate Minority Leader, is a sign of a Democratic Party in utter chaos. Axios reports today that the calls from House Democrats for Schumer to step down from his post have already begun, following on outside progressive groups who deemed him unworthy as a wartime consigliere. The colossal miscalculation of standing up the possibility of fighting only to cave immediately to keep the government from shutting down has consequences. For the aging Senator who has held on so long, his spectacles perched at the edge of his nose, it seems like he is living on borrowed time. Progressives may have a rehab program in mind, but how long can that last?

Teresa Mull

How politics tainted the delayed homecoming of stranded astronauts

The return of two NASA astronauts – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore – back to Earth after equipment malfunctions saw their intended week-long sojourn to space turn into a nine-month stay on the International Space Station, should be cause for national celebration. Alas, politics has tainted the stratosphere, with each side of the aisle playing a part in the blame game for the astounding delay in getting our stranded astronauts back home. Williams and Wilmore will have endured more than just a few missed family events and some extra time spent conducting experiments (they carried out more than 150) aboard the ISS.

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump, Putin and the Concert of Arabia

For Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it’s a case of “Today Ukraine, tomorrow the world.” In their much-hyped phone call this week, the Russian leader didn’t seem to give much away: a step toward a sort-of ceasefire, a prisoner swap, and a few other odds and ends. But Putin knows that Trump wants much more than just an agreement on the Donbas. Settling the most significant conflict in Europe since World War Two is merely a prelude to a much bigger deal in the Holy Land — a truly historic arrangement that could fulfill Trump’s desire to be seen as a legendary peacemaker. That’s why Trump sent Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, to Moscow last week to pre-negotiate with Putin.

Tuesday

March 18, 2025

Bethany Mandel

The New York Times finally comes clean about Covid

In June 2021, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ridiculed people that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak origin for Covid. He quipped: “Oh my God! There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? ‘Oh, I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it.” At the time, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Stewart’s rhetoric “dangerous and short-sighted.” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman fumed that “celebrities” shouldn’t be considered reliable sources of information and Forbes rounded up viewers uncomfortable with Stewart’s words.

Monday

March 17, 2025

Cockburn

French politician calls for return of Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty was given as a gift by France, the United States’s oldest ally, to celebrate our centennial anniversary as an independent state. Now, as the US moves toward its quarter-millennial anniversary, Member of the European Parliament Raphaël Glucksmann is asking for it back. Glucksmann said to supporters he would tell Americans that, “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home.” The statue was originally called La liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty Enlightening the World).

John Steele Gordon

Recession? What recession?

The stock market, traditionally a leading indicator, entered correction territory last week. But does that indicate that a recession is coming? Well, it’s an old saying on Wall Street that the market has predicted ten of the last three recessions. Markets hate uncertainty, and no one knows how President Trump’s efforts to use American tariffs to force our trading partners to lower theirs will turn out. But foreign trade is increasingly important to all countries, so it’s likely that, after some political Sturm und Drang, deals will be struck and international trade will continue the strongly upward path it has been on since the end of World War Two. By definition, a recession is two consecutive quarters of contraction.

Jenna Stocker

The case against admitting Canada to the US

Fans of South Park are familiar with the long-running gag involving the show’s portrayal of Canadians as crudely animated, detail-less animated cutouts, perpetually outraged — almost always an overreaction to something America has done. In a rather hilarious instance of life imitating art, President Donald Trump’s assertion that Canada become the 51st state has enraged the notoriously polite society, and age-old suspicions that America has always been poised to overtake their northern neighbors have resurfaced. I get it. When you have an inferiority complex, you can lose your sense of humor.

Ben Domenech

How Republicans should capitalize on Chuck Schumer’s weakness

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s failed fiscal gambit last week proved as obvious as it was predictable. Yet Schumer's flub has had an outsized impact in prompting open conversation among Democrats about whether they need to move on from the New York Senator. The leftist activist group Indivisible called for Schumer to step down, saying he needs to be replaced with “a Minority Leader who’s up for the fight this moment demands.” Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania went on Bill Maher Friday to criticize Schumer’s misuse of legislative leverage. And prominent party voice MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend announced she was quitting the Democratic Party live on air.

James Snell

Why air strikes on the Houthis will fail

The United States has begun what may well prove to be a long — and likely doomed — campaign of airstrikes against Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, in Yemen. For a year and a half since October 2023, the Houthis have been highly successful in disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, launching missiles and drones at cargo ships, oil tankers, and passenger vessels — hitting some, sinking fewer, and inconveniencing millions. Every conflict the US has engaged in since 2001 has ended before America achieved its objectives. While few ships have been hit, even fewer have been sunk, and fewer still have resulted in casualties, the numbers speak for themselves.

Sunday

March 16, 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump has elevated the Houthis as an opponent

So much for President Donald J. Trump’s serial vows to extricate America from the Middle East’s seemingly endless wars and feuds. His bombing on Saturday of numerous targets in Yemen has further enmeshed it in them. Several weeks of bombing loom as Trump vows to crush the Iranian-backed Houthi militia and warns Tehran that it might be in for similar treatment. His statement was unequivocal: “To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable.” Whether the Iranian mullahs will be impressed by Trump’s fulgurations is an open question.

Saturday

March 15, 2025

Kate Andrews

Will Trump’s spending bill luck run out?

It isn’t just a weekend of warmer weather for the President, who took off for Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening. It is possibly a weekend full of calmer news. The decision from Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer to let the spending bill advance in the Senate allowed the six-month extension to get over the line last night, as the Senate voted 54-46 to see it through. This seemed to give markets a temporary sense of relief as well, as growing expectation that the bill would pass saw stocks rally. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq had their best day gains since Donald Trump took office again, while technology stocks also appeared to make a major comeback by the time markets closed yesterday.

Matthew Foldi

Can Chuck Schumer hang on?

Are the Democrats on the verge of their own Tea Party? This question is dogging the Democratic Party, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer figures out how to handle an increasingly rambunctious base that declared open season on him this week. Months of frustration from the Democrats’ activists has boiled over after Schumer announced that he would vote to move forward with a bipartisan plan to avoid an imminent government shutdown. Schumer’s ultimate vote against passing the bill is of no consolation to Democrats, many of whom reportedly urged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to primary Schumer. The Democrats’ problems stemmed from their underestimation of Speaker Mike Johnson, as Schumer told the Washington Post.

Daryl McCann

Trump’s foreign policy isn’t unprincipled

"He [Donald Trump] sees American leadership as merely a series of real estate transactions." That was the verdict of the Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin following the President’s address to Congress. Trump 2.0 does, admittedly, have the appearance of a political version of The Art of the Deal, in which the Donald is prepared to leverage a bilateral compact with every country in the world — so long as the price is right. There are no friends in The Art of the Deal, no permanent friends anyway, only prospective business associates. Ukraine wants the flow of armaments to resume? Sign over the rights to half your natural resources.

Michael Evans

The problem with putting US nukes in Poland

Nuclear weapons are becoming a major issue for Poland. One way or another, both the Polish president and prime minister want their country to host tactical nuclear weapons as a deterrent against President Putin’s Russia. In the latest — but by no means the first — statement on this issue, President Andrzej Duda revealed that he recently discussed stationing American tactical nuclear weapons in Poland with Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy for Ukraine. In an interview with the Financial Times, Duda said: “I think it’s not only that the time has come, but that it would be safer if those weapons were already here.

Robin Ashenden

Trump’s war on Europe should not surprise anyone

Has there been a more cataclysmic year for US-Europe relations than 2025? It began with J.D. Vance’s “sermon” to EU leaders at the Munich Security Conference last month, in which he berated Western Europe for its policies on immigration and free speech. This year has also seen the growing threat of NATO falling apart after 76 years of peace in Western Europe, with the White House seemingly tilting toward Russia and Trump demanding that alliance members such as Germany, France, and the U.K. dramatically increase their defense spending. This week, as the Trump administration imposes tariffs on Europe and Europe retaliates, there are even signs of a full-scale trade war.

Friday

March 14, 2025

Juan P. Villasmil

Why Greenland’s election might not have been so bad for Trump

“We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America,” President Donald Trump told Greenlanders from a joint session of Congress earlier this month. And determine their future they did, as Greenland voted in a parliamentary election Tuesday. The results might not be as bad for Trump as NBC’s headlines imply. That's the takeaway of Tom Dans, a man Greenlandic media calls Trump’s sande mand — true man — in the island-nation. Dans, who is in Washington, DC after spending weeks traveling across the icy Danish protectorate, previously served in Trump’s first administration’s Arctic Research Commission and the Treasury Department. He currently heads American Daybreak, a nonprofit organization.

Owen Matthews

What Vladimir Putin really wants from Ukraine

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have very different negotiating styles. Trump lines up his offer in advance, browbeating everyone on his side into compliance before slapping his bottom line on the table. Putin, by contrast, is a haggler. He loads his proposals with excess demands that he intends to discard during the negotiation process to get to a final deal. Put simply, what Putin says he wants and what he realistically expects to get are two different things. At first glance, Russia’s initial response to US proposals for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine includes several major deal-breakers that Ukraine could never accept. Most notably, the Kremlin demands international recognition that Ukraine’s Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces are now part of Russia.

Cockburn

Vance booed at Kennedy Center performance

You wouldn’t expect the Kennedy Center to exactly love J.D. Vance. But that doesn’t make the audience’s reaction to him showing up there on Thursday any less extraordinary. Vance went to the Kennedy Center with his wife Usha, to watch a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra, perhaps expecting a genteel evening at one of Washington’s most high-brow venues. Instead, the audience acted like a mob, booing him as he took his seat in a box. Boos for JD Vance as he enters tonight’s concert at the Kennedy Center pic.twitter.com/IWTsJUWjCR— Andrew Roth (@Andrew__Roth) March 13, 2025 The crowd’s performance is perhaps explained by the President’s recent, er, changes to how the Kennedy Center runs.

Paul Wood

Who trusts Saudi Arabia?

Imagine you’re MbS, newly installed as Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian ruler thanks to cunning and ruthlessness. You arrest a few of the most obvious thieves at court and hang them by their thumbs to find out where they hid the loot. You order your henchmen to grab critics of the royal family who fled abroad and bring them home to shut them up. But one of those critics is cut into pieces with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and the Turks go public. No one wants to come to your glitzy investment conference; no one wants their photo taken next to you. It’s a long road back. It takes a lot of oil and a lot of cash. But finally, you host talks between the US and Russia on Ukraine — and now Saudi Arabia is the Norway of the Middle East.