Category: Politics

Will Elise Stefanik Get the Last Laugh?

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The low point of Elise Stefanik’s career arrived late last month in the form of a phone call from the White House. Just days before the Senate planned to confirm her as the next ambassador to the United Nations, President Donald Trump was on the other line asking her to withdraw. By way of consolation, the president assured Stefanik that he’d make it up to her: “You’re going to get a much bigger…

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Trump Has Already Botched His Own Bad Tariff Plan

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Donald Trump had a plan. It was not a good plan, or even a plausible one. But it was, at least, a coherent plan: By imposing large trade barriers on the entire world, he would create an incentive for American business to manufacture and grow all the goods the country previously imported. Whatever chance this plan had to succeed is already over. The key to making it work was to convince businesses that the new arrangement is durable. Nobody is going to invest in building new factories in the United…

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Why Trump Says He’s ‘Not Joking’ About a Third Term

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Donald Trump’s interest in seeking an unconstitutional third term as president, like many of his most dangerous or illegal ideas, began as a joke. Trump would muse on the stump that he deserved an extra term because he was robbed of his first (by Robert Mueller’s investigation) or his second (by imagined vote fraud in 2020) without quite clarifying his intent. But in an interview with NBC News this weekend, and then in remarks on Air Force One, Trump said he was completely serious about at least exploring the notion.…

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Why Trump Won’t ‘Produce a Scalp’ After the Signal Debacle

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In the telling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he was only executing his duties when he shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen in an unclassified group chat on the Signal messaging app. “My job,” he told reporters during a swing through Hawaii, “is to provide updates in real time.” The implication: Nothing to see here. The reaction inside the Pentagon to Hegseth’s communications—disclosed this week by The Atlantic after the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to the chat—told a different story, as security specialists raced…

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America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

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On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author’s flight. The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. He completed his manuscript two years later at the University of Chicago (where I…

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Stephen Miller Has a Plan

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During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker. LOL Stephen, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry. No one is laughing now. Miller, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security adviser and deputy chief of staff, has returned to the White House stronger and more determined than ever to silence the derision…

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