The Republican Freak Show

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party. Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, has described himself as a “devout Christian.” But a recent CNN story reported that several years ago, he was a porn-site user who enjoyed watching transgender pornography (despite a history of an anti-transgender rhetoric), referred to himself as a “Black Nazi,” and supported the return of slavery. According to CNN, commenters on the website discussed whether…

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The Woo-Woo Caucus Meets

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were president, this is the kind of Cabinet he might appoint: Vani Hari, a.k.a. the “Food Babe” influencer; The Biggest Loser’s Jillian Michaels; the conservative psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and his daughter, the raw-meat enthusiast Mikhaila Peterson Fuller; and 18-year-old Grace Price, a self-identified citizen scientist. The former Democrat turned spoiler presidential candidate served as a headliner for a four-hour roundtable presentation yesterday on Capitol Hill. Moderated by Senator Ron Johnson, a hard-right…

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Vivek Ramaswamy Has a Solution for Springfield

It didn’t take long for someone to bring up the cats. Only minutes into Vivek Ramaswamy’s town hall last night in Springfield, Ohio, a man who identified himself as Kevin raised his hand. He felt awful seeing news clips of children in Haiti with “flies in their eyes,” he said. But what about the people here in Ohio? And what about “the motherless kittens in the alleys of Springfield. Where are the mothers?” Kevin was referring, of course, to the pets—the cats and dogs and birds—that some Springfield residents allege…

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Trump and Vance Are Harming the People They Claim to Care About

Springfield, Ohio, is just the sort of beleaguered heartland manufacturing town that Donald Trump and J. D. Vance say the MAGA movement wants to help. Instead, the Republican ticket has chosen to make life miserable for the town and its residents for the sake of political gain. The thing to remember is not just that Trump and Vance are lying about immigrants eating pets in Springfield. It’s that Vance is happy to admit that they’re lying. He’s done that twice, first in an X post last week and then once…

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‘That’s Something That You Won’t Recover From as a Doctor’

Photographs by Bethany Mollenkof This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days,…

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Trump Promises a ‘Bloody Story’

Donald Trump says something crazy or vicious almost every time he speaks. It’s his nature, but it’s also a political strategy. The flow of half-demented, half-depraved talk energizes those who enjoy it—and exhausts those who are horrified by it. The mainstream media cannot report every outrageous remark, or they would do nothing else. Even those shocking comments that do get reported tend to  make just a blip. The next day, if not the next minute, Trump is telling another lie or vilifying another public servant or issuing another threat. Yesterday’s…

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