Donald trrump

Wednesday

Peter Wood

What the Singer Sewing Machine teaches us about student loan repayment

The Singer Sewing Machine Company is credited – that’s the right word – with popularizing the idea of the installment plan. Starting in 1856, a customer could buy a sewing machine for a very modest down payment and a rather lengthy commitment to further payments. Isaac Singer copied the idea from a piano company, but he turned it into a model of aggressive marketing to the average household. His “dollar down, dollar a week” slogan launched the era of consumer credit on a mass scale, and helped to marry mass production of durable goods to middle-class household economy. The idea spread quickly. By early in the 20th century, people could buy “washing machines, refrigerators, phonographs and radios” on the installment plan. The idea faced some resistance too.

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Neal Pollack

NPR begs for its professional life

As the Trump administration continues its systematic effort to dismantle and humiliate every institution of liberal America, National Public Radio has issued its man-the-torpedoes command. In the equivalent of a red alert going off on the bridge in Star Trek, according to a New York Times report, NPR has ordered its local affiliates to contact their congressional representatives and beg for their professional lives. “Recission,” or revoking of already-allocated funding, is coming soon. “Engage your board members,” the memo goes, “Community Advisory Board, station volunteers, major supporters, community partners, business leaders, and emergency officials who work with your station and ask them to communicate to Congress your opposition to recission.

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Daniel Foganholi

Let students and professors carry guns to class

Last week, I walked across Florida State University’s campus in Tallahassee, watching students laugh, read and relax in the sun. Today, that same lawn is a crime scene – the latest gun-free zone targeted by a coward intent on terrorizing innocent lives. The son of a sheriff's deputy shot two dead and injured six others in a campus rampage. Last year, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed me to the Florida Board of Education, where I serve the 3 million students who attend our K-12 schools and state colleges. It’s time to get real: gun-free zones do not protect our students – they turn them into defenseless, easy targets. At FSU, the shooter used his mother’s legally-owned service weapon. No law could have stopped him.

Tuesday

Aidan McLaughlin

Will AOC be the next leader of the Democrats?

What are we to make of an America in which David Brooks, the mild-mannered moderate of the New York Times opinion pages, calls for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to fight back against the tyranny of President Donald Trump? It’s one in which the traditional thinking about how the Democratic party can wield power has been crushed to dust. It’s one in which voters, disillusioned by repeat defeats to Trump, have felt their hopelessness turn to rage. Moderates, such as Kamala Harris, are not channeling that fury.

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Jennifer Sey

Sports are defying Trump’s trans ban

I was present when President Trump signed the executive order to protect women’s sports. But I knew the fight wasn’t over. In fact, it seems to be getting even uglier.  The American “progressive” faction is digging its heels in to allow men to keep stealing women’s trophies and opportunities – turning hard-won female spaces into political battlegrounds.   This Monday, for the first time, a man ran in the Boston Marathon in the women’s category – and a female athlete who disagreed with his inclusion was sent violent threats, highlighting the farcical state of American athletics.  The rule change means that now it is possible for a man to win the men’s category, the non-binary category and the women’s category.

Saturday

John Mac Ghlionn

Is Kanye West more powerful than Donald Trump?

There are powerful men, and then there is Kanye West. Or Ye, as he now calls himself. While the world spends its energy analyzing the muscle of nation-states, few seem willing to grapple with a far more disturbing, modern form of power: cultural invincibility. In that particular department, Kanye West is in a class of his own.How, I ask, are we to define power in the 21st century? Is it the ability of world leaders like Donald Trump to impose tariffs, pass legislation, launch missiles, control borders? Or the ability to say the unspeakable, do the unacceptable, and still survive – but thrive? If the latter, then it’s time we admit something uncomfortable: Kanye West may be the most untouchable man on the planet.Let me be very clear. This is not a celebration; it’s a diagnosis.

Friday

Ben Domenech

Democrats are doing themselves no favors on El Salvador

The political battle over the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he is imprisoned based on a belief that he is a member of MS-13, has taken over the conversation in Washington for weeks. Several Democratic members of the House and Senate have already announced plans to follow Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland on trips to El Salvador – where he met with Garcia. I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return. pic.twitter.com/U9y2gZpxCb — Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 18, 2025 Whether they'll follow through, given President Nayib Bukele's trolling, is another matter.

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

How much hope did Trump offer Meloni?

In early March Donald Trump said Elon Musk was doing “an amazing job.” Last week he said Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was doing an “excellent job.” On Thursday it was the turn of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni during her meeting at the White House. Trump declared that she was “doing a fantastic job.”  What Trump found so fantastic was never specified, but he tossed a variety of bouquets in Meloni’s direction. Not least was his vow that “there will be a trade deal, 100 percent” with the European Union. It was qualified, however, by Trump’s claim that he’s in no rush to strike a deal with Ursula “the West no longer exists as we knew it no longer exists” von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

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Freddy Gray

What’s going on in the Pentagon?

In the past two days, three senior Defense Department officials have been suspended and one has resigned. Their departures are apparently connected to an internal investigation into "recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information." On Tuesday, Dan Caldwell, who has been working closely with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Darin Selnick, the Defense Department’s deputy chief of staff, were escorted from their office by guards. Then, yesterday, Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was ousted, too. John Ullyot, a top Pentagon spokesman, also announced he was resigning.All four men are military veterans.

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David Sypher Jr.

Joe Biden recalls ‘colored kids’ to be hero of their struggle

In his first public remarks since leaving office, Joe Biden recalled – without a hint of self-awareness – the moment from his childhood he first saw “colored kids” on a bus going by.” It was, in his telling, a pivotal experience, one that sparked his youthful sense of outrage growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.Let’s stop right there.At best, the speech – billed as his first major intervention since Donald Trump took office – reveals how deeply stuck in the past Biden’s racial worldview really is. At worst, it’s an embarrassing reminder that the Democratic Party continues to view black voters, especially black men, not as equals or thinkers, but as props in white liberal moral storytelling.As a black conservative, I've heard this record before.

colored kids
Ross Clark

China bans Boeing in targeted trade war shot

“If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going,” goes the old adage, championing the supposed superiority of the company’s planes on safety issues. If you are traveling in China in future that probably means that you won’t be going very far at all. The US aviation giant is emerging as one of the biggest losers of Donald Trump’s trade war. China has not merely applied punitive tariffs on the company’s planes; it has banned imports altogether. Even existing orders of planes appear to be affected by the ban. What’s more, the ban applies to Boeing itself rather than to general imports of US aircraft – it is personal. Boeing, already reeling from the crash of two 737 MAXs in Indonesia in 2018 and Egypt in 2019, lost $11.

Wednesday

Neal Pollack

Could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes? 

Another Tax Day has come and gone. Here I sit, all broken-hearted. The tax-industrial complex has once again swallowed up thousands of dollars that used to be mine. But this year, I found myself legitimately wondering: could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes?  One of the major pillars of President Trump’s economic platform is the abolition of income tax for all Americans who make less than $150,000 a year. This sounds like a fantasy, an empty chicken-in-every-pot promise, like a student council candidate winking after saying, “If you elect me, I’ll make sure we have soda in the drinking fountains.” But if Trump 2.0 has shown anything this year, it’s a willingness to set into motion seemingly impossible plans.

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Ben Domenech

It’s no mystery how Democrats plan to attack Republicans

It's no mystery how Democrats plan to attack Republicans over the coming year and a half: tie them to Elon Musk like a billionaire-sized string of dynamite. They're doing it already, and intend to ramp it up to 11. Yet Republicans don't seem to have an answer for how to deal with it – and saying "Musk isn't on the ballot, I am" isn't an answer.There was a significant portion of time where Republicans struggled to figure out how to defend Donald Trump, but they've solved that problem. Trump's poll numbers and popularity are now solid as a mountain – people love him or they hate him, and moving those numbers is very difficult, especially when there are dedicated well-funded ad campaigns promoting what he's doing on a daily basis.

James T. Fishback

Trump should have the power to fire the Fed chair

The Chair of the Federal Reserve is arguably the most powerful economic official in the United States. He’s also the least accountable. He sets borrowing costs for households and businesses, opens lending windows to banks deemed “too big to fail,” and decides when to tame or ignite inflationary forces. Unlike the Treasury Secretary or even the President himself, he answers to no one. That may soon change. In Trump v. Wilcox, the Supreme Court is weighing whether the President should be allowed to remove the head of an independent agency.

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Ben Clerkin

Is Trump killing the American dream for mom-and-pops? 

He’s survived an assassination, bounced back from bankruptcy and – so far, at least – avoided all attempts to jail him. But Donald Trump’s most audacious feat is yet before him: to persuade Americans to pay more for their goods as their beloved businesses struggle – and then be grateful to him at the polls.  While tariffs threaten to raise prices across the board for consumers, small businesses with lower margins than their larger competitors are struggling. “Whether or not you support tariffs, or whether or not you think certain offices should be cut, I think overall, any kind of economic turbulence is uniquely burdensome for small businesses,” says Molly Day, the National Small Business Association’s vice president of public affairs.

Tuesday

Raheem Kassam

The reformed Kennedy Center’s beautiful frenzy

As I write, I sit swimming in turbulence somewhere over Virginia, on the same jet as US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – heading to Panama City in an effort to restore the country’s critical canal to US control.But Saturday was a very different scene. A far more comfortable experience, too. In Box 3 at the Kennedy Center for the Arts, for the National Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mozart and Mendelssohn.I hadn’t been to the Kennedy Center in a while (i.e., we are so back). Now run by Trump loyalist Ric Grenell, proudly displayed on the concessions counters are signs that read: “STANDARD STRAWS NOW AVAILABLE!”That means no more paper.

kennedy center
Paul du Quenoy

Bernie Sanders at Coachella shows time is not on the Democrats’ side

As the Church of England faces an exodus of parishioners, some of its more inventive clerics have rushed to embrace EDM as a new medium to draw young people back to their faith. “Our 90s-themed silent disco will be appropriate to and respectful of the cathedral,” curiously insisted the Very Reverend David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, to much derision over that sacred space’s conversion into a party zone for 3,000 revelers in 2024.

Monday

Roger Kimball

What the left calls ‘chaos,’ the rest of us call ‘winning’

They never learn, the libs. Back in 2016, they provided hours of entertainment assuring themselves that Donald Trump would “never be president” (“take it to the bank,” said Nancy Pelosi, who in another galaxy, long, long ago was speaker of the House). Patriotic citizens, eager to instruct the public about the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, stitched together many joyful compilations of Hollywood celebrities, ditto-head news readers and Democratic politicians intoning that party line.  Then, after the impossible mutated into the inevitable and Trump was elected, the narrative shifted to “the walls are closing in on Donald Trump.” If it wasn’t Russia, Russia, Russia it was Stormy Daniels, putatively shady business deals or putative efforts at insurrection.

Saturday

Neal Pollack

First came the dire wolf – the wooly mammoth is next

With all the insane news this week surrounding President Trump’s tariff and trade drama, only one non-political story was significant enough to break through the news cycle: a Texas-based company called Colossal Biosciences has bred three dire wolves and is currently keeping them in a secret 2,000-acre natural habitat somewhere in the United States. That’s right: dire wolves. An extinct species. A beast so mythical that we only really know of it from Game of Thrones. In fact, as we learned in an interview with a comic book magazine, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has even visited the dire wolf reserve. There is a non-AI-generated photo of him online cradling a dire wolf pup and weeping tears of joy.  Immediately, skepticism blew up online.

Thursday

Kate Andrews

The art of the pivot

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” President Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social account yesterday morning. With trillions of dollars wiped off stock market value since his tariff announcements last week, this appeared to be an attempt to manufacture a silver lining. It also happened to be a literal statement. Within a few hours, the stock market was surging as Trump announced a 90-day pause on the higher “reciprocal” tariffs for most countries, while hiking the tariff on Chinese goods to 125 percent. Was this careless? Intentional? Insider trading? According to the White House, it had been the strategy all along. The President told reporters it had been “the biggest day in financial history.” Speaking to his aides beforehand, Trump noted the market was rallying.

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