Category: Politics

The Bizarre Normalcy of Trump 2.0

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A very strange disjuncture has opened up in Washington between the serene mood and the alarming developments that are under way. The surface is calm because the Republican presidential candidate won the election, and Democrats, the only one of the two major parties committed on principle to upholding the legitimacy of election results, conceded defeat and are cooperating in the peaceful transition of power. Whatever energy the chastened Democrats can muster at the moment is aimed inward, at factional struggles over their future direction. Meanwhile, what is actually happening in…

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The ‘Mainstream Media’ Has Already Lost

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. This October, in the closing days of the presidential election, the podcaster Joe Rogan said something extraordinary. He had just hosted Donald Trump for a three-hour conversation in his studio in Austin, Texas, and wanted to make clear that he had discussed a similar arrangement with Kamala Harris’s campaign. “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour,” he…

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A Constitutional Crisis Greater Than Watergate

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Updated at 10:17 a.m. ET on December 1, 2024 For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA. Reagan’s FBI appointee served through the George H. W. Bush…

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Moderation Is Not the Same Thing as Surrender

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Before this month’s elections, when Democratic candidates were being attacked for letting transgender athletes compete in girls’ sports, trans-rights activists and their allies had a confident answer: They had nothing to fear, because anti-trans themes were a consistent loser for Republicans. That position became impossible to maintain after the elections, when detailed research showed that the issue had done tremendous damage to Kamala Harris and other Democrats. In fact, the third-most-common reason swing voters and late deciders in one survey gave for opposing Harris was that she “is focused more…

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What Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Get About Women in Combat

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Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, the former Army National Guard major and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has no clear policy or management experience that qualifies him to run the Pentagon. What he has instead is a reactionary streak—one that’s evident in his view that women should no longer have combat roles in the military. In his recent book The War on Warriors, he implies that women service members who have received military honors for their bravery were decorated because of “an agenda.” These comments reflect a…

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What Going ‘Wild on Health’ Looks Like

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bear-fondling, gravel-voiced Camelot scion, is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where presumably he will “go wild on health,” to quote Trump. His nomination has raised concerns among public-health experts because many of Kennedy’s views on health are, well, wild. To be sure, among Kennedy’s battier ideas are a few reasonable ones, such as reducing obesity and cracking down on direct-to-consumer drug commercials and conflicts of interest among researchers. But these are eclipsed by some troubling ones, such…

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