The Chaos After Trump

What happens to American politics after Donald Trump? Do we snap back to normal or do things spin ever more widely out of control? The best indicator we have so far is the example of Italy since the reign of Silvio Berlusconi. And the main lesson there is that once the norms of acceptable behavior are …

Though George Washington was elected unanimously, he was always a reluctant president. He pursued a second term in 1792 only at the urging of his cabinet, and in 1796, when he insisted it was time to step down, he famously warned that not to do so risked a return to the very tyranny Americans had …

A few months after my father left our family home for good, my mother heard me screaming in the middle of the night. It was the kind of scream that made her grab her rifle in one hand and some ammo in another. It was a spring night and I was sleeping with my window open, which was right above my bed; …

Chaos. That seemed to be the descriptor most tossed around last week to capture the circus around Donald Trump. But I think chaos is the fruit of this poison tree, not the root of it. That is to say that I don’t believe that Trump desires chaos because he feels most at peace when the world around him is …

Two years ago, The Washington Post ran a long piece about West Virginia called, “How the birthplace of the American labor movement just turned on its unions.” It described how, following the Republican takeover of the Legislature in 2014, the state passed a so-called right-to-work law prohibiting …

A new national ad campaign, “Truth About Tech,” is designed to expose the ways that platforms like YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook are harmful to children and to “protect young minds from digital manipulation and exploitation.” Organized by the nonprofits Common Sense and the Center for Humane …

UK: “A man who was convicted of benefits fraud in 2012 asked us to delist nearly 300 articles related to the conviction based on a document he provided suggesting he was later found innocent of the crime. We delisted 293 URLs pursuant to the documentation the requester provided. The requester then …

Our democracy is in serious danger. President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy. That is, either Trump’s real …

I used to have this one-liner: “If you want to emasculate a guy friend, when you’re at a restaurant, ask him everything that he’s going to order, and then when the waitress comes … order for him.” It’s funny because it shouldn’t be that easy to rob a man of his masculinity — but it is. Last week, 17 people, most …

Last week President Trump announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum products, and the response couldn’t have been more negative — critics warned of trade wars, recession, global instability. But the blowback is overblown, and seems to constitute reflexive anti-Trump sentiment rather than careful …