Category: Politics

Bad News for Trump’s Legislative Agenda

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The success of President-Elect Donald Trump’s legislative agenda will depend on whether Republicans can close ranks in Congress. They nearly failed on their very first vote. Mike Johnson won reelection as House speaker by the narrowest of margins this afternoon, and only after two Republican holdouts changed their votes at the last minute. Johnson won on the first ballot with exactly the 218 votes he needed to secure the required majority. The effort he expended to keep the speaker’s gavel portends a tough slog for Trump, who endorsed Johnson’s bid.…

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The President Trump Is Pushing Aside

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Only one historic site bears the name of America’s 22nd and 24th president—and it’s no Monticello. The Grover Cleveland Presidential Library and Museum occupies a one-story building in Caldwell, New Jersey, behind the house where its namesake spent the first few years of his life. The museum is the size of a small living room. A Dunkin’ sits across the street. The site befits Cleveland’s legacy. He was a large man but not larger than life; his two terms in the White House were most remarkable for the four years…

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Jimmy Carter Was America’s Most Effective Former President

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His four years in office were fraught, bedeviled from the start by double-digit inflation and a post-Vietnam-and-Watergate bad mood. His fractious staff was dominated by the inexperienced “Georgia Mafia” from his home state. His micromanagement of the White House tennis court drew widespread derision, and his toothy, smiling campaign promise that he would “never lie” to the country somehow curdled into disappointment and defeat after one rocky term. Yet James Earl Carter Jr., who died today at his home in Plains, Georgia, surely has a fair claim to being the…

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Not the Life Matt Gaetz Was Planning On

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The normal rules of public disgrace may no longer apply to Donald Trump. But at least some expectation of good behavior remains, it seems, for a politician in Trump’s orbit. After a multiyear investigation, the House Ethics Committee reported today that former Representative Matt Gaetz paid “tens of thousands of dollars” to various women, including one 17-year-old girl, “for sex and/or drugs” on at least 20 occasions. Many such allegations had been reported before but specific details are always more shocking to the senses, and the report was heavy on…

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The Potential Backlash to Trump Unbound

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Donald Trump will return to office facing far fewer constraints than when he entered the White House in 2017. The political, legal, institutional, and civic forces that restrained and often frustrated Trump during his first term have all palpably weakened. That will be a mixed blessing for him and for the Republican Party. There’s less chance that forces inside or outside his administration will thwart Trump’s marquee campaign proposals, such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, big tariffs on imports, and sweeping rollbacks of climate and other environmental regulations. But…

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The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. I. Supply and Demand Here, in the third decade of the 21st century, the most sought-after ammunition in the U.S. arsenal reaches the vital stage of its manufacture—the process tended by a young woman on a metal platform on the second story of an old factory in rural Iowa, leaning over a giant kettle where tan flakes of trinitrotoluene, better known as the explosive TNT, are stirred slowly into a brown slurry. She…

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