What you should know about being LGBT and Muslim, from a leading LGBT Muslim group

Why it makes perfect sense that Chris Murphy is leading a gun-control filibuster

.@ChrisMurphyCT “I’m prepared to stand on this floor…for frankly as long as I can…” #GunViolence #enoughhttps://t.co/hOp3Vfdx1i — CSPAN (@cspan) June 15, 2016 After the Orlando mass shooting, Democrats in Congress are pulling out all the stops to try to force Republicans to pass a new gun-control law. For a few years now, the most prominent […]

Is Donald Trump suggesting that Barack Obama committed treason?

A marvel of the modern era is that, with so much information at our fingertips, it is trivial to weave a conspiracy theory out of next to nothing. It also allows for those so inclined to retroactively cobble together justifications for arguments that are otherwise shaky. Donald Trump is so inclined. In the wake of […]

The problem with the way we talk — and write — about Muslims and terrorism

Today, most people are at least aware that certain things one can say will be understood as a stereotype. On the list: He’s “smart”/”articulate”/”clean”/”well-read” or “well-traveled” for a black man. She’s pretty, for someone with such dark skin/curly or kinky hair/African features/Asiatic eyes. He’s very masculine, for a gay man. She’s very open-minded for a […]

Donald Trump just totally wasted a critical six weeks of the general election campaign

Donald Trump effectively secured the Republican presidential nomination on May 3. That was 43 days ago. Today, Trump is no closer to uniting the Republican Party or pivoting to the general election than he was six weeks ago. And that is, at a minimum, a massive waste of a critical time period and, at worst, […]

Stephen Colbert’s brutal takedown of Donald Trump includes a swastika
Stephen Colbert thinks Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory response to the Orlando terrorist attacks was “grandstanding” and in poor taste. He made as much clear during an interview with Bill O’Reilly on Monday. But he’s not done pressing the point. On Tuesday’s show, Colbert went after Trump — hard. He started on a serious note. “This whole speech, […]

Harry Reid’s great night in Nevada

No, he’s not on the ballot, and he probably won’t ever be again. But perhaps more than anyone, retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is celebrating the results of Tuesday’s primaries in his home state. After all, all of his handpicked candidates won their races. These weren’t just any old congressional primaries: Reid […]

The 2016 map of battleground states now includes Utah. Will wonders never cease?

In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won the state of Utah by 48 points. In 2016, Utah is now on The Fix’s list of competitive states amid polling that suggests that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are running close to even there. We are moving Utah from the solidly Republican category to the leaning […]

Negative views of Donald Trump just hit a new campaign high: 7 in 10 Americans

In the latest sign Americans are dreading their general election options — and particularly one of them — negative views of Donald Trump have surged to their highest level of the 2016 campaign, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Trump’s unfavorable rating, in fact, far surpasses Hillary Clinton’s even as the presumptive Democratic nominee receives […]

Bernie Sanders’s Democratic Party reforms focus on things that would’ve helped Bernie Sanders win

During a brief statement in Washington on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders outlined four proposals to reform the Democratic Party. Those proposals are as follows, given in the order Sanders presented them. Get new leadership at the Democratic National Committee. Approve “the most progressive platform ever passed” at the Democratic convention in July. Enact “real electoral reform” […]

Why one gun control advocate thinks the Orlando shooting might actually change things

The dynamic of the gun control debate has been static for years.  A mass shooting occurs. Talk begins that perhaps this is the moment some elements of gun control could pass Congress. As the days pass from the tragedy, political will rapidly ebbs and, almost always, nothing happens. But, according to Jim Kessler, a longtime gun […]

Donald Trump is unusually old for a possible president, but not for an American

Tuesday is Donald Trump’s 70th birthday. Happy birthday to Donald Trump. (Sorry we can’t spend it with you.) Trump is one of only a handful of major-party presidential candidates to be a septuagenarian, a list that also includes John McCain in 2008 and Ronald Reagan during his 1984 reelection. But either way,  we’re going to […]

A new poll shows Clinton up 12 on Trump — because it comes at a great time for Clinton

Hillary Clinton gets 49 percent of the support in a new Bloomberg poll — in a three-way contest that includes Libertarian Gary Johnson. In recent surveys, she’d generally held small leads over Donald Trump, with that lead dropping once Johnson was in the mix. But in this poll, conducted by Selzer & Co., Clinton not […]

How committed is Donald Trump to his Muslim immigration ban? Depends on the day.
Over the course of his campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly made bold, and sometimes surprisingly divisive, policy proposals. It’s part of his pitch to voters: “We can’t worry about being politically correct.” And during the Republican primary season, when there is a premium on appealing to conservative voters, it was a tactic that clearly set him apart […]

Paul Ryan endorsed Donald Trump 12 days ago. He hasn’t agreed with him since.
Paul Ryan endorsed Donald Trump exactly 12 days ago. At the time, Ryan said he was backing Trump even though he and the presumptive Republican nominee didn’t agree on everything. That is turning out to be the understatement of the election. Ryan has repeatedly contradicted Trump over the intervening two weeks, desperately trying to preserve […]

Will Donald Trump’s renewed rhetoric on Muslims help or hurt in November?

The day after Americans learned that 49 people had been gunned down in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Donald Trump converted a planned speech criticizing Hillary Clinton into one criticizing terrorists specifically and Muslims more broadly. He expanded his proposals to limit entry to and surveil Muslims living in and arriving at the United States, offering […]

Hate crime? Terrorism? Mass shooting? How the increasingly blurred lines lead to a blurry response.

In the days after Dylann Roof entered a historic black Charleston church and shot and killed nine people came the realization that we had just seen a combination of two terrible American phenomena — a mass shooting and a race-related hate crime. But it took several days for that reality to set in. First, a series […]

Why President Obama is so angry about Donald Trump’s ‘radical Islam’ attack

A visibly irritated President Obama slammed Donald Trump and the broader Republican Party on Tuesday for their criticism of his unwillingness to say that the United States is at war with radical Islam, casting it as a cheap political stunt unworthy of the country. “What exactly would using this label accomplish,” Obama asked angrily. “What […]

How many terrorists has President Obama actually ‘taken out’? Probably more than 30,000.

Update: On Tuesday, President Obama sharply dismissed Donald Trump’s critiques of the fight against terror in a brief statement. “If there is anyone out there who thinks we are confused about who our enemies are,” Obama said, “that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who we have taken off the battlefield.” […]

This Harvard study is a powerful indictment of the media’s role in Donald Trump’s rise

I’ve written repeatedly — and self-righteously — about my belief that ascribing the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican primary race to media complicity is ridiculous. And I believed every word. But, a new study by Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University casts serious doubts on my position as it documents […]

Anderson Cooper just absolutely grilled Florida’s GOP attorney general over LGBT rights
VIDEO of @AndersonCooper grilling @PamBondi. “Do you really think you’re a champion of the gay community?” https://t.co/DOFTxJOPuh — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 14, 2016 CNN’s Anderson Cooper went after Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) hard in a one-on-one interview Tuesday, calling into question her status as a champion for LGBT Floridians given her work […]

Is Hillary Clinton the ‘most experienced’ presidential candidate in history?

During his video endorsing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, President Obama made a claim that’s become common in recent months. “Look, I know how hard this job can be. That’s why I know Hillary will be so good at it,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think that there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this […]

How Donald Trump mastered the art of political innuendo and rumor-mongering

Jenna Johnson, who covers Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for The Post, wrote a very important piece Monday that details how the presumptive Republican nominee moves rumor and innuendo into the public consciousness without ever having to directly answer for it. Trump’s strategy comes down to three simple words: “People are saying.” As in: “There are […]

Stephen Colbert gets Bill O’Reilly to agree that Donald Trump is using a terrorist attack as a ‘political tool’
When Stephen Colbert and Bill O’Reilly — a.k.a. “Papa Bear” — get together, the result is almost always interesting and sometimes even surprising. Colbert seems to have a fixation on finding areas where the two of them agree — perhaps because his former Comedy Central character was kind of a mocking parody of O’Reilly and his brand of […]

Donald Trump’s terrorism speech revealed the key flaw in his Muslim ban proposal

Donald Trump, still getting used to using a teleprompter, stumbled a bit from his prepared remarks during the speech on terrorism he gave in New Hampshire on Monday. Referring to the man who murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, he intended to say that, “[T]he killer, whose name I will not use, […]

Donald Trump just barred Washington Post reporters from campaign events. That should bother everyone.

Donald Trump announced via Facebook on Monday afternoon that he has decided to ban The Washington Post from covering his presidential campaign. Trump expanded on that in a statement released Monday night. Here it is, in full: The Washington Post unfortunately covers Mr. Trump very inaccurately. Today’s headline, “Donald Trump Suggests President Obama Was Involved […]

Remembering Tim Russert, 8 years later

Tim Russert, a giant figure in news and politics, died on this day eight years ago.  I wrote the piece below in 2013 — commemorating the five-year anniversary of his death.  I still believe every word of it so I decided to publish what I wrote back then word for word. One small addition: I […]

Here’s when Americans lost confidence in the presidency, Congress and the banks

If there’s any small consolation to working for The Washington Post on a day when Gallup revealed that only 1 in 5 Americans have confidence in the institution of newspapers, it’s this: At least we’re not falling off a cliff. Chris Cillizza looked at the overall trend of institutional confidence earlier today. Among all of the […]

After Orlando shooting, Donald Trump defiantly doubles down on, well, everything
Donald Trump delivered a speech on national security following a terrorist attack that led to the deaths of 49 people in an Orlando nightclub over the weekend. The complete transcript is posted below, with my annotations. To see an annotation, click or tap the highlighted part of the transcript; if you would like to leave […]

Donald Trump’s appeal, explained in 1 very simple chart

The most common (only?) question I get when people find out I am a political reporter goes something like this: How did Donald Trump do it? By “it,” people mean — as you undoubtedly have guessed — presumably winning the Republican presidential nomination and, according to most national polling, running nearly even with Democrat Hillary Clinton […]

Toughness vs. tenure: Americans see Clinton and Trump as equals on fighting terrorism

Hillary Clinton was a member of the Senate for eight years, serving on the Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities. She served as secretary of state for another four years — a tenure she’d like to summarize by pointing to that famous photo of her in the White House Situation Room on the […]

This new Utah poll is amazingly bad for Donald Trump

No state voted more heavily for the GOP presidential nominee in 2012 than Utah. And in 2008, it was the third-most Republican state in the union. A new poll shows that Donald Trump is tied with Hillary Clinton in Utah. We’re not quite saying, of course, that Utah is a tossup or that Trump is in real […]

One reason Donald Trump likes to do interviews via phone: He can’t be interrupted

Two interviews on Monday morning make clear one key reason why Donald Trump prefers a phone interview to an on-camera one. It’s obvious that part of Trump’s reliance on phoning in to interviews is convenience: no need to go anywhere and it allows him to stack interviews up one after the next. But there’s another […]

How the Orlando shootings expose (again) the impossible smallness of our politics

In her first speech following the largest mass shooting in American history, Hillary Clinton called on Americans to remember the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a guide for how the country should respond to the tragedy in Orlando. “We had each others’ back,” Clinton recalled. “There was a Republican president, […]

The problem with banning guns for people on the no-fly list

Update, June 13: During a speech on Monday, Hillary Clinton reiterated her suggestion that people included on the government’s no-fly list should not be allowed to buy firearms. This article originally ran in December, when the idea of barring gun sales to people on the no-fly list was first proposed. I made a joke on […]

3 things Congress could do in response to the massacre in Orlando

While Democrats have largely been emphasizing the need for gun control and protections for the LGBT community in the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, Republicans have almost universally been emphasizing something else: fighting terrorism. “We have to destroy the Islamic State,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) said Monday on CNN when asked what can be done to […]

Hillary Clinton says she’ll talk about ‘radical Islamism.’ Here’s why President Obama still won’t.

With another mass shooting involving a man who reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS, the “radical Islam” debate has been stoked again. Over the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized President Obama for not saying “radical Islam” in the aftermath of the attack in Orlando on Sunday. Meanwhile, in something of a break with […]

Donald Trump suggests maybe Obama doesn’t really *want* to stop terrorism (wink wink)
Donald Trump’s reaction to terrorist attacks has fallen into a predictable pattern: Blame President Obama’s policies and Obama personally, hint at bigger attacks to come and take credit for having predicted the inevitable. All of those have been in effect over the last 24 hours, after a gunman reportedly claiming sympathy for the Islamic State murdered 49 […]

Marco Rubio sure sounds like he might be prepared to run for reelection, after all

.@marcorubio, deeply impacted by shooting, tells me he has to rethink all his plans, talk with his family, consider his service… — Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) June 13, 2016 Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sounds a lot like a guy prepared to make a sharp reversal and seek reelection to the Senate after repeatedly saying no. No, […]

What if Donald Trump is exactly what people want after the Orlando shooting?

After I wrote a piece Sunday on the lack of empathy showed by Donald Trump in the wake of the Orlando shootings — and why that was a bad thing for his chances of winning this fall — I heard from a lot of smart people who vehemently disagreed with that analysis. “I actually think […]

A somber John Oliver: Orlando gunman attacked the ‘ultimate symbol of what is truly wonderful about America’
Trying to make jokes during a scheduled TV comedy show in the hours after a tragedy is never easy. And by virtue of his time slot on Sunday nights, John Oliver was among the first to have to strike that delicate balance. So he began his show Sunday on a somber note, stating that the […]

A reminder: The NRA’s influence isn’t really about its campaign contributions

Update: After the deadliest mass shooting in American history early Sunday morning in Orlando, Volsky’s tweetstorm is drawing attention again. With the debate over guns already picking up, we are re-upping this piece from December about how the NRA’s influence isn’t really about campaign contributions. Following the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, ThinkProgress’s […]

All the ways President Obama has responded to mass shootings, in 1 timeline

This story was originally posted on June 18, 2015. It was updated Sunday, in the wake of the deadliest shooting in American history at Pulse nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning. Since President Obama took office in 2009, there have been dozens of mass shooting incidents across the United States. In some, the president has taken […]

After Orlando, the right points to radical Islam, while the left points to guns, hate

It is not impossible to discuss radical Islam, terrorism, threats to the LGBT community and gun violence at the same time. So let’s do it. — Rep. Ted Deutch (@RepTedDeutch) June 12, 2016 What happened in Orlando early Sunday morning, which already ranks as the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, quickly raised big political questions about terrorism, guns […]

Radical Islam accounts for few recent mass shootings — but also some of the deadliest

As is usually the case, it took very little time for people to start assigning motivation to the shooter who killed 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. That the apparent suspect was the U.S.-born son of Afghan immigrants prompted some suspicion that his motivation was radical Islamic beliefs. That his father told a […]

Orlando shooting exposes Donald Trump’s biggest weakness: A total lack of empathy

A man who reportedly pledged his loyalty to the Islamic State murdered 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Saturday night, making it the single most deadly mass shooting incident in American history. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, tweeted his reaction on Sunday afternoon: Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical […]