Bipartisanship is dead. But job-killing trade agreements like NAFTA were promoted by politicians of both major parties alike — until Donald Trump. "Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization, moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. Globalization has made the financial elite, who donate to politicians, very, very... Read More

Unemployment is low — lower than at any time since the Vietnam War. Real wages are increasing. Inflation, voters' top concern for the last several years, is slowing. Democrats are confident enough about how things are going that "Bidenomics" is at the center of their case for another four years in the White House. Yet... Read More

The laws of political physics, it seemed, had been reversed. The president had been exposed as a pathological liar and a serial cheater. The butt of relentless jokes on television comedy shows and online, his reputation and legacy in tatters, he endured the ultimate opprobrium a federal official can face under the American constitutional system,... Read More

Many medical experts and journalists believe that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about vaccines. They say that Kennedy, a candidate for the 2024 Democratic nomination for president, wrongly says that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and incorrectly validates assertions that childhood vaccinations can cause autism. Many people, all of whom are pro-Biden Democrats, say that... Read More

"We believe that the damage done to the ocean in the last 20 years is somewhere between 30 per cent and 50 per cent, which is a frightening figure. And this damage carries on at very high speed — to the Indian Ocean, to the Red Sea, to the Mediterranean, to the Atlantic. ... Everywhere... Read More

The idea that third parties are spoilers is a baseless conspiracy theory on par with the Loch Ness monster, the man on the grassy knoll, and Pizzagate. But what if you're worried, like many Democrats, that voting for a third party like the Greens' Cornel West or, if they ever get their act together, someone... Read More

Each time Donald Trump has been indicted, his poll numbers went up — among Republican voters who closed ranks around him in response to what they decried as politically motivated "lawfare." Now he enjoys a commanding lead for the GOP nomination. Of course, it's one thing to win the nomination of your party, an exercise... Read More

Within the Democratic Party, a quirky single issue has become the focus of opposition to primary challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: his reputation as an anti-vaxxer. For the purpose of this discussion, let's set aside the question of whether or not the criticism is accurate. RFK Jr. denies being against vaccinations in general, says he... Read More

Many things that everyone knows are not true. Sometimes, quite rarely, one of those widely believed falsehoods not only turns out not to be true but obscures the fact that the exact opposite is true. Most people believe that small political parties siphon off votes from one of the two major parties. Mainstream media repeatedly... Read More

President Joe Biden recently told a group of children that he has "six grandchildren. And I'm crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke." Sounds sweet. It's not. People who read and watch Republican-leaning news outlets have long known that the president has a seventh grandchild, the product of... Read More

Winning, as your parents probably told you if they were decent people, isn't everything. It's OK to lose or fail, as long as you clearly did your best. President Joe Biden doesn't understand this truth. He's trying to attract votes from working-class people next year by marketing himself as some sort of Bernie Sanders-style warrior... Read More

Denial is neither a river in Egypt nor just a psychological defense mechanism identified by Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter. It's the guiding principle of President Joe Biden's reelection campaign. Polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans, including most Democrats, don't want Biden to run again because they think he's too old. This... Read More

"Trump always gets all the coverage," an adviser to one of Trump's opponents tells Politico. "This is what it's like to run against Trump." Poor babies! If only Trump's rivals could do something to get attention. Trump gets more media attention because he's unpredictable and therefore interesting. "Listen, because you never knew what he would... Read More

The problem is not that the electorate is polarized, siloed into self-reinforcing media echo chambers and mutually contemptuous — that's the cause. The problem is that neither the partisans of the left nor those of the right can imagine themselves, for even a second, on the other side of the ideological divide. This phenomenon is... Read More

"Government," observed the 14th-century Arab political theorist Ibn Khaldoun, "is an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself." Draconian prison sentences handed down to those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot highlight this truism. Though he didn't enter the Capitol that day, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, 57, received... Read More

Hello. I'm Ron DeSantis and I approve of the following message. As you may have heard, I'm running for president of the United States. You could only have heard it because I announced it on an audio-only platform called Twitter Spaces, which my friend Elon Musk assured my staff is futuristic and will therefore appeal... Read More

Visitors to Bath, England, learn that the town's namesake first-century spa deteriorated following the collapse of Roman authority in the fifth century. Unmaintained, the reservoir silted up and blocked the drainage system, burying the facility and surrounding buildings under yards of mud. Tutored by the Romans, the local English initially knew how to keep the... Read More

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll places the president's approval rating at a record low, 36%. In the modern era, no president has been reelected with numbers like these. Fifty-eight percent of Democrats want their party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden in 2024. Of Democrats. If the election were held today, Donald Trump... Read More

A country that loudly and repeatedly expresses what it purports to be its principles, yet cavalierly ignores them on a whim, rightly earns the contempt of its own citizens and those of other nations, especially when the hypocritical government of that nation criticizes others for failing to adhere to their pompously proclaimed rules-based international order.... Read More

Coupled with leaks from inside his campaign, President Joe Biden's announcement video indicates the general tenor and strategy of his upcoming reelection bid. Biden's messaging is especially notable for what it's missing. Absent from the voiceovers and images is a reference to the COVID-19 crisis. Biden was arguably elected in the first place in large... Read More

"Am I real?" "Do I exist?" "Do you see the real me?" Humans have always asked themselves these existential questions. These days, Marianne Williamson and Robert F Kennedy Jr. have more reason to wonder about their corporeal status than most. Earlier this week, because I felt that I deserved to suffer, I tuned into a... Read More

In the United States, no man is above the law, not even the president — if his name is Donald J. Trump. A decade before 1884, when he was elected to his first term, Grover Cleveland fathered a child with Maria Halpin, a widow. Thing is, she testified under oath that Cleveland had raped her.... Read More

Is a system working as well as possible? Inertia lulls people into believing that legacy products are great — even that they're perfect — without objectively considering whether it's really true. The QWERTY computer keyboard works, but the 1936 Dvorak version is superior. Skim milk makes you fatter. The U.S. may still be a shining... Read More

"When you surround an army," Sun Tzu counseled in "The Art of War," "leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard." Partisans on both sides of America's everything-looks-like-a-hammer politics have forgotten this basic tenet of strategy — and are likely to pay for it. Donald Trump announced that he expects to... Read More