Category: Politics

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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‘The Most Entertaining Dead-Cat Bounce in History’

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Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Not very long ago, the harshest thing Nikki Haley would say about Donald Trump was that “chaos follows him”—a sort of benign jab that creatively avoids causation and suggests mere correlation, like noting that scorched trees tend to appear after a forest fire. For most of the Republican-primary campaign to date, Haley adopted a carefully modulated approach toward the former president, and reserved most of her barbs for her other primary rivals. Her motto seemed to be “Speak…

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Can Biden Win a Primary He Ignored?

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As he stood on a frigid New Hampshire street corner on Saturday morning, Jim Demers was trying to persuade me that the fate of the republic hinges on today’s presidential primary—specifically, whether more people write “Joe Biden” on their ballot than fill in the bubble next to the names of his Democratic challengers. “This is an election like we’ve never seen before. This is one where democracy is on the ballot,” Demers, a lobbyist and former state representative, told me. “This is bigger than New Hampshire. This is about the…

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Elise Stefanik’s Trump Audition

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Elise Stefanik and I had been speaking for only about a minute when she offered this stark self-assessment: “I have been an exceptional member of Congress.” Her confidence reminded me of the many immodest pronouncements of Donald Trump (“I would give myself an A+”), and that’s probably not an accident. Stefanik has been everywhere lately, amassing fans among Trump’s base at a crucial moment—both for the GOP and for her future. Stefanik spent October presiding over the leaderless House GOP’s search for a new speaker—a post that Stefanik, the chair…

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