Category: Politics

A Wild and Dangerous 2024 Experiment

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“We are in this to win it,” No Labels’ chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, told me one morning earlier this month. Clancy and 16 other representatives of the beleaguered centrist group were staring at me through their respective Zoom boxes during a private briefing, electoral maps and polling data at the ready, all in defense of their quest to alter the course of the 2024 presidential campaign. He continued: “And that’s a function not only of having a ticket eventually that can accumulate electoral votes—” That’s when Nancy Jacobson, the group’s…

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How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

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Not too long ago, Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. The post–Trump era had supposedly begun. Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech. Today, thanks…

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The GOP Has Crossed an Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy

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The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point. Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every Republican presidency from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush. But…

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Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land

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Ten years ago, I stood in the back of a large room at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump ramble. The celebrity billionaire had been loitering on the fringes of American politics for a few years, but this was my first time seeing him give a proper speech. At least, that’s what I thought he was supposed to be doing. Speaking at the Politics & Eggs forum is a rite of passage for presidential aspirants, and Trump at the time was going through his quadrennial ritual of…

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Biden’s Hidden Economic Success

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President Joe Biden’s economic agenda is achieving one of his principal goals: channeling more private investment into small communities that have been losing ground for years. That’s the conclusion of a new study released today, which found that economically strained counties are receiving an elevated share of the private investment in new manufacturing plants tied to three major bills that Biden passed early in his presidency. “After decades of economic divergence, strategic sector investment patterns are including more places that have historically been left out of economic growth,” concludes the…

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The Validation Brigade Salutes Trump

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Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, officially endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection two Saturdays ago. The news landed as an afterthought, which is probably how she intended it. “Today at the @WVGOP Winter Meeting Lunch, I announced my support for President Donald Trump,” Capito wrote on X, as if she were making a dutiful entry in a diary. Republicans have reached the point in their primary season, even earlier than expected, when the party’s putative…

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