Politics

I don’t generally point out qualifications for writers, but it’s relevant in this case.

Cracks in the solid wall of Republican lawmaker support for Trump’s plans to derail future elections are appearing more and more these days. Evidence of that is seen in a standoff now between the president and a split Senate Republican majority that could well may doom the so-called “SAVE Act,” the GOP’s monstrous voter repression bill.

Last week, progressives received more good news in their quest to retake the Senate. Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper and insurgent Texas state Senator James Talarico soared through their respective primaries. To the extent that betting markets’ predictions mean anything, they now place the odds of Democrats flipping the upper chamber closer than ever to even money.

The president’s popularity is floundering, Americans’ paychecks are under perpetual strain, and the United States is waging a pointless, unpopular war in the Middle East. Republicans are betting that some virulent Islamophobia can revive the enthusiasm of a weary base. The 2000s never ended, they just got way more online.

America has already won the war it isn’t fighting, which is why it must continue bombing Iran until the Islamic Republic accepts “unconditional surrender,” defined by the White House as a set of conditions that it will decide without Tehran’s input.

When Donald Trump, our mad king, declared that “we are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” because “ownership” is “psychologically important for me,” the reaction was immediate and predictable.

Before dawn on February 28, the United States and Israel launched what Donald Trump hailed as “major combat operations in Iran” but was, in fact, an undeclared, unauthorized, and unconstitutional regime-change war. As the bombs rained down on at least 14 cities, the death toll included Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and at least 165 people—most of them young girls—at a primary school. The president said the mission was “eliminating imminent threats.” In reality, it killed children, provoked counterstrikes across the Middle East, and threatened the region with another of the “forever wars” that Trump once campaigned against.

The Trump administration is currently trapped between the specter of a global economic recession and a naval catastrophe.

The war always comes home, and the effects of Donald Trump’s campaign against Iran are already being felt by Americans in the form of skyrocketing gas prices, which could lead to inflation and pile more economic pressure on everyday Americans. While the nation is quite literally paying the price for the president’s war, he would like everyone to please stop complaining.

Say what you will about cops — even the federal ones — but they have nothing on the people charged with guarding people who have been detained or imprisoned. The cruelty of cops is slightly tempered by the fact that anyone with a cell phone, dash cam, or doorbell surveillance device might catch them in the act. It’s not much a deterrent (and it’s a far better deterrent than police body cameras, ironically enough) but it’s better than the absolute nothing that’s in place in detainment centers, jails, and prisons.

Donald Trump’s war against Iran is already turning out to be a military, diplomatic, environmental, and humanitarian disaster. But none of this seems to matter to the president, who has been remarkably complacent and dishonest about the crisis he has caused. Last Sunday, in a video about the death of US soldiers, Trump said, “And sadly, there will likely be more [deaths] before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.” Asked if Iran could possibly retaliate with attacks on US soil, Trump said, “I guess.” He added, “Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.” When asked about the bombing of a primary school in Minab that killed at least 165 people, mostly children, Trump simply lied, saying, “That was done by Iran.” In fact, all available evidence overwhelmingly points to US guilt in the atrocity.

When companies sued to block Trump’s IEEPA tariffs last year, one of the key arguments they made was obvious: if these tariffs turn out to be illegal, we’ll never get our money back. We need an injunction now. The government had an equally confident response: relax, if the tariffs are struck down, we’ll just issue refunds. No big deal. No injunction needed.

Vacationers have long known that Miami group chats can be a force for evil. Friendship-ruining, relationship-destroying, and, in the case of the Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party, a national scandal.

A Texas GOP candidate has drawn scrutiny after video surfaced of him happily boasting about having a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Donald Trump has often praised William McKinley, a White House predecessor who shared the current president’s love of tariffs and territorial expansion. A pious man, McKinley claimed he had divine sanction for the 1898 US annexation of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War. According to McKinley’s account, he was tormented by what to do with the former Spanish colonies when he “went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” Then he was struck by a divine insight: that the United States had a mission to “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

The American concept of “regime change,” which didn’t enter the popular lexicon until the end of the 20th century, was actually born in Iran. In 1951, at the dawn of the Cold War, Mohammad Mosaddegh, an intellectual and raging anti-imperialist, became prime minister and immediately set about nationalizing the Iranian oil industry. Harry Truman, on his way out of the White House, recoiled at British entreaties to help overthrow a duly-elected foreign leader; Dwight Eisenhower had no such misgivings. His brand-new CIA — under the leadership of Allen Dulles, brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — staged what looked to the world like a popular rebellion, toppling Mosaddegh in 1953 and restoring the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.

In the wake of Trump’s surprise attack on Iran, I spoke with a young man who cast his ballot for the president in 2024. He was generally pleased with Trump’s second term agenda, and had been drawn to the president over social issues and his promise to cut wasteful spending. But he, like his fellow members of his university’s Turning Point USA chapter, was struggling to make sense of the current moment. Trump campaigned as an outsider who’d rattle the system, a dealmaker who would keep America out of futile wars. Like many of the young men who bought this pitch, he’s starting to have doubts.

When Rebecca McFaul woke up in her small farmhouse in Logan, Utah, on a cold January day, she felt the same way she’d been feeling for months: “A certain kind of terror and horror at it all.” Most of her family lives in Minnesota, and for weeks, she’d watched from afar as families were taken by agents, activists were shot and tear gas hung in the air.

Senator Richard Blumenthal said he would open a perjury investigation into the ousted homeland security secretary Kristi Noem after alleging she lied to Congress about the hidden influence her senior adviser Corey Lewandowski had over the agency’s contracts.

Nearly two decades after his second tour, Nathan Wendland is still troubled by his experiences in Iraq.

This gets dark, just as a fair warning. This is our government doing this to its own residents. I am less than thrilled.

On Tuesday, Texas held its Democratic and Republican primaries ahead of the upcoming November midterms. Democratic voters chose between Jasmine Crockett, the anti-Trump firebrand congresswoman, and James Talarico, the populist state representative, in an election that attracted national attention. Crockett conceded the race and endorsed Talarico on Wednesday, but only after claiming late on election night that she wasn’t ready to concede because of a voting issue in Dallas.

Dr. Casey Means’ Good Energy Living newsletter, which she launched in January 2024, has promoted concepts that we can surely all agree on: “We are one with nature.” “Inner peace for 2025.” “We cannot go on poisoning the earth without destroying our own health.” “We are not being protected from toxic food.”

When Steven Gray’s family first received their monthly EBT allowance, the trips to Costco were “life-saving.” Gray said that when he was growing up in South Brooklyn and struggling with food insecurity, running out of funds often meant scrambling to make money with their siblings to help their parents afford groceries. Later, as a financially independent undergraduate student, Gray applied for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program themselves. After being accepted, they were finally able to fill their own refrigerator. “SNAP is not only just food being put on the table,” said Gray, now a student at Columbia Law School. “It’s stability for the future.”

In 2017, I published a book called, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. For the next year, I lived mostly in transit around the world — 50 cities, dozens of stages, endless conversations about how the tech empires had bent our culture out of shape, numbed public life, and hollowed out the foundations of democracy.

Texas has now been home to the most expensive general election Senate campaigns in history. Spending in 2018’s contest between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz was just over $100 million; Cruz’s battle with Colin Allred in 2024 topped $160 million. And now, it’s seen the most expensive Senate primary election in history, as the combined spending on advertising along among the major candidates this year soared to $125 million—and it’s not even over.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had her ass handed to her during a congressional hearing on Tuesday — and not just by Democrats. In a shift from their usual coddling of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members, some Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee laid into Noem, grilling her on her leadership at the agency amid growing public disapproval of the administration’s increasingly violent anti-immigration crackdown.

A curious thing happened the day after Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack Iran: None of the administration’s most senior officials appeared on any Sunday talk shows to defend the joint offensive with Israel, or make the case for why Americans should support the campaign. It was especially surprising given how much Trump — who campaigned against “endless” wars — seemed to be struggling to justify the extraordinary decision to authorize dozens of airstrikes across Iran, including the one that wiped out the country’s longtime leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Please send help. It hurts so bad,” Regina Santos-Aviles told a police dispatcher the night she set herself on fire. Standing in her backyard on September 13, 2025, Santos-Aviles had doused herself in gasoline then used a lighter to ignite the flames, according to a fire department report. The 35-year-old mom was airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio, where she was pronounced dead.

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Protestors stood in the snow outside the offices of Ohio’s utility regulator in January to say they were fed up with rising electricity rates.

With a roar of rockets and bombs, a gasp of international outcry and the death of Iran’s supreme leader, President Donald Trump’s legacy became clearer than ever.

It was another date which will live in infamy. But whereas President Franklin Roosevelt declared war in sombre tones to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump did it his way.

TEL AVIV — The U.S. and Israel have launched strikes against Iran with the goal of toppling the regime, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS had erroneously shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people with the Department of Homeland Security as part of the agencies’ controversial agreement to share information on immigrants for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the U.S.

We wrote recently about the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was not accused of any crime. She was not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her that much while they were busy carting away basically everything she uses to do her job.

As energy prices for US households soar nationwide, Democratic and progressive lawmakers are calling on the energy department to stop increasing exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

He said it was going to be long. He wasn’t lying.

As Trump entered the chamber, Green held up a sign reading “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES!” and remained standing as Trump began his speech.

“When will we see justice?” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) demanded on the House floor Tuesday in a sharp rebuke of the U.S. Department of Justice over its handling of the government’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians—and Texas politicians in particular—have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You’ve heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can’t handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and the real threat to America is that professors might have opinions that lean left.

When I arrived at the food distribution center on a weekday afternoon, the line looked like it was a hundred people long. It brought to mind a photo of a bread line from the Great Depression era.

Apparently, it’s only OK when Trump and his Epstein friends do it.

I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.

You wouldn’t be alone if you feel that the US more closely resembles North Korea these days – with giant images of the dear leader scowling down on the citizenry, and his name inscribed everywhere from public buildings to street signs, transportation hubs and self-aggrandizing monuments.

I think someone needed his diaper changed, if only for this one line:

God, booking a flight is going to be really tedious by the time all airports are named after this asshole. I’d prefer the outcome where all restaurants are Taco Bell.

The New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security has sent Google, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and other media corporations subpoenas for the names on accounts that criticize ICE enforcement. The department wants to identify Americans who oppose what it’s doing.

The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the Guardian.

Donald Trump has been a major supporter of the coal industry since he entered American politics and donned a hard hat at his “Trump Digs Coal” rally in 2016. It’s been part of his attempt to build an image as a populist, and he’s repeatedly said he’s going to revive the industry and bring back coal jobs. It was apparently with this goal in mind that the president last week ordered the Pentagon to purchase coal energy.

Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego’s eastern outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and joining the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official in the region’s local government. “I’ve been a Republican for 50 years,” he said, in the statement explaining his action. “I just can’t stand what the Republican Party has become. I’m formally renouncing the Republican Party.”

A lone blanket belonging to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly led to a poor U.S. Coast Guard pilot being fired, then soon rehired, after it was forgotten on a plane.

The latest tranche of Epstein files released by the Justice Department has sent shockwaves through the international community. Foreign governments, royal families, businesses, universities, and cultural institutions are investigating those with ties to the notorious sex criminal, and powerful figures around the world have been forced to step down from influential positions amid revelations that they were a part of his network. The United States, however, doesn’t seem to care so much.

Now in his fourth decade of spreading the word across most of the world’s continents about “Housing First”, an approach to helping homeless people that has convinced governments and non-profits alike to see housing as a human right, Sam Tsemberis experienced a first.

Parents who owe a significant amount of child support soon could lose their ability to travel internationally as the Trump administration expands and steps up enforcement of a 30-year-old law that allows the federal government to revoke American passports until payments are made, three U.S. officials told The Associated Press.

In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.

Today, Equifax extracts over $800 million worth of contracts from the federal government and state governments each year. Much of that total is for access to its Workforce Solutions product, the Work Number, which provides data on workers’ income and employment. The Work Number’s basic business model is to purchase exclusive rights to worker data from employers and payroll providers (often without a worker’s knowledge) and then sell that data to banks, creditors, and governments for a profit.

Finding Balance Between Rights, Responsibility, and Well-Being

I have seriously considered writing one of these to have in the can, ready to publish. This is a gut punch. (Still, I finally got sick of three errors in the hed and circled back to fix them. And dear god, cadence. You wanted contractions in the first two opportunities, but not in the fourth where one was used.)

For years, we’ve been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration’s supposed “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically it. The Supreme Court looked at it and said there was no standing because there was no evidence of coercion (and even suggested that the plaintiffs had fabricated some of the facts, unsupported by reality).

Days before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an investment firm controlled by a senior member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly signed a deal to pay $500m to buy almost half of a cryptocurrency startup founded by the Trump family. Under any other president, such an arrangement, which was revealed this past weekend by the Wall Street Journal, would cause a political earthquake in Washington. There would be demands for an investigation by Congress, televised hearings and months of damage control.

At this difficult moment in American history, it’s imperative that we have the courage to be honest with ourselves.

They had come to say a prayer for the father, the son and the holy ghost.

For the past week, I’ve been unable to retrieve the copies of The Washington Post that usually get delivered to my home, since the brutal weather in the DC area has turned my front yard into an unfordable moat of frozen snow. This now seems a richly prophetic turn of events, since my hometown newspaper is being eviscerated under the disastrous ownership of centibillionaire monopolist and MAGA flunky Jeff Bezos.

The Department of Justice’s seizure of Fulton County, Georgia, 2020 voting records remains a chilling, bewildering exercise in using federal agencies to try to validate Donald Trump’s false claim that he won reelection that year, carrying Georgia though even state GOP officials certified that he lost the state by more than 11,000 votes. Trump followed up the FBI raid by insisting, during a podcast interview with former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, that “Republicans” should “take over” voting procedures in 15 states. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 states. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Any attempt to “nationalize” voting processes would be unconstitutional; it’s clearly the purview of the states. But note that Trump specifically said one party, his own, should take over. That’s just about as fascist as he’s ever sounded.

Voting rights and pro-democracy advocates are in a precarious position. If they speak loudly and frankly about Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s plans to suppress, manipulate, or outright “steal” the upcoming midterm election, they risk depressing the very people who must be counted on to show up and vote. They risk making people feel like their votes will not matter because “the fix is already in.” They get called a “doomer” by Pollyanna Democrats on social media, and “hysterical” by Republicans. And since the single best solution to the threat of voter suppression is overwhelming turnout, depression and doom, even in the name of truth, ends up helping Trump’s forces.

During the last period of his time as president, while the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn’t hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn’t even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?