J. D. Vance Stopped Talking About Eggs

We used to hear a lot about eggs from J. D. Vance. On the campaign trail, he talked about them constantly: how his kids were nuts for them, and how, thanks to the failed policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, omelets were ruined for everyone. “My kids eat a lotta eggs!” he said in Traverse City, Michigan. And in Monroeville, Pennsylvania: “A lotta eggs in my family!” Although other elements of the speech changed here and there, eggs—and their rising price—were always front and center. “The 7-year-old, he’s got…

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The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up

The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by. Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class…

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The Great Resegregation

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer. In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end…

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A Trump Cabinet Pick Gets a Rare GOP Grilling

Republican senators have confirmed a onetime Bernie Sanders supporter to lead the nation’s intelligence community and a member of America’s most famous Democratic family as its health secretary. This morning, however, they saved some of their sharpest questions for a Cabinet nominee who, until last month, served alongside them as a GOP member of Congress. President Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary, former Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, knew she’d face a skeptical Republican audience during her Senate confirmation hearing. Last year, she supported a major pro-union bill known as…

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Growing Up Murdoch

Updated at 11:35 a.m. ET on February 15, 2025. James Murdoch was seated at a conference table in a Manhattan law office in March 2024 when he realized he was witnessing the final dissolution of his family. Three months earlier, his father, Rupert, had told James and his sisters that he was rewriting the family trust to grant his elder son, Lachlan, full control of the Murdoch empire after his death, rather than splitting it equally among his four oldest children. The amendment was part of a secret plan that…

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Trump Says the Corrupt Part Out Loud

Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump. Consider the Trump administration’s actions yesterday alone: The president officially pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who served eight years in prison…

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