President Trump’s State of the Union pledge to “extend an open hand” to both parties in pursuit of an ambitious policy agenda quickly came up against the reality of a largely gridlocked Congress and a Republican Party gripped by fear of a brutal midterm election cycle. Republican senators and House members headed out of town…
Does President Trump represent the new normal in American politics? As the world’s oligarchy gathered last week in Davos, Switzerland, to worry about the troubles of the middle class, the real question on every plutocrat’s mind was whether the populist upheaval that delivered the presidency to the intemperate mogul might mercifully be over. If it…
More than a million followers have disappeared from the accounts of dozens of prominent Twitter users in recent days as the company faces growing criticism over the proliferation of fake accounts and scrutiny from federal and state inquiries into the shadowy firms that sell fake followers. The people losing followers include an array of entertainers,…
Aboard Air Force One on a flight home from Europe last July, President Trump and his advisers raced to cobble together a news release about a mysterious meeting at Trump Tower the previous summer between Russians and top Trump campaign officials. Rather than acknowledge the meeting’s intended purpose — to obtain political dirt about Hillary…
The White House has pulled back from nominating a respected foreign policy expert to be the U.S. ambassador to South Korea after he expressed concerns over policy decisions related to North Korea, according to a report Tuesday in The Washington Post. The Trump administration was widely expected to nominate Victor Cha, a former adviser to…
The FBI has “grave concerns” about a secretive Republican-authored memo that members of Congress have been using to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian interference with the 2016 election. In an extraordinary public statement on Wednesday, the bureau said the classified four-page memo authored by Republican members of the…
Women’s health clinics from Iowa to Kenya have been forced to close their doors. International nonprofits have lost the ability to provide birth control, HIV testing and fistula surgeries in the poorest communities around the world. Half a million U.S. teenagers no longer have access to sex education programs. In a single year, President Donald…
A clearly fed up Joe Scarborough addressed the decision to release the Nunes memo in an explosive “Morning Joe” segment aired by MSNBC Tuesday morning, severely reprimanding Devin Nunes and Speaker Paul Ryan. Scarborough called the vote to release the memo part of a “cynical game” that was targeting law enforcement agencies for an imminent…
During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Donald Trump spent several minutes speaking about two men who suffered horrifically in North Korea. Trump told the well-known, tragic story of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student arrested in January 2016 in North Korea for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. Not long after…
No State of the Union response speech has ever been a truly great speech, but Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA) delivered what’s probably the best entry in the genre that I’ve ever heard Tuesday night. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what I liked best about it until I read an anonymous Republican snarking…