Category: Politics

In Trump Immigration Cases, It’s One Thing in Public, Another in Court

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During his testimony on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took a swipe at Senator Chris Van Hollen, falsely accusing him of having had “a margarita” with Kilmar Abrego Garcia—one of the Maryland Democrat’s constituents, who was mistakenly sent to an El Salvador megaprison more than two months ago and who remains there despite the Supreme Court ordering the Trump administration to facilitate his release. “That guy is a human trafficker, and that guy is a gangbanger … and the evidence is going to be clear,”…

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The Big, Beautiful Republican Shrug

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When Democrats reshaped the American health-insurance system in 2010, Republicans accused them of all manner of legislative foul play: Middle-of-the-night votes. Backroom deals. An enormous, partisan bill jammed through Congress before anyone could find out what was in it. “Have you read the bill? Hell no you haven’t!” an indignant then-House Minority Leader John Boehner thundered on the House floor. The GOP’s claims were exaggerated. But as Republicans rushed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the House this week, they committed just about every procedural misdeed they had ascribed…

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What RFK Jr. Doesn’t Understand About Autism

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Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET on May 22, 2025 Expressing concern can sometimes be a delicate endeavor. One can intend to be empathetic, but the target of concern hears only condescension and pity. So it is with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently talked about how much autistic children suffer. These poor kids, he said at an April 16 press conference, would never “pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll…

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Return of the Shaman

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Manvir Singh’s new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical interventions and against-the-odds healings are the stuff of classic shamanic practice. And we meet the money managers and “hedge wizards” who traffic quasi-shamanically with the capricious spirits of the global market. It’s a panoramic survey:…

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The ‘Amateur Diplomat’

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Steve Witkoff emptied his backpack on the conference table in his second-floor office, in the West Wing. He wanted to show me a pager given to him by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials of the Mossad. The pager commemorates the intricate operation in which Israel detonated handheld devices used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group, killing or maiming thousands of its operatives. Witkoff located the gadget amid a tangle of electronics he uses to communicate abroad in his role as America’s shadow secretary of state. The…

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Just Don’t Call Her Unqualified

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Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for staffing his administration with unqualified partisan hacks recruited from Fox News. This is not quite fair. Yesterday, Trump named Jeanine Pirro as the new interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro is a partisan hack recruited from Fox News, but she’s a qualified one. Millions of Americans know Pirro as a prolific conservative-television pundit, most recently as a member of Fox News’s afternoon talk show, The Five. Even compared with other right-wing TV personalities, Pirro’s record of unwavering Trump support, including at his…

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