This week has been the tale of two Trumps. In dueling speeches Monday and Tuesday, we saw two sides of President Donald Trump. On Monday night, we saw a subdued, serious, very conventional president speaking from a TelePrompTer, announcing...
When news broke this afternoon that White House Senior Advisor Stephen Bannon had resigned, traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange erupted in cheers. The chaos inside the White House revealed so vividly in President Trump's...
This week, we've been thinking a great deal about our current national moment. And the vitality, especially in times like these, of the institutions of our Republic, and the good men and women that lead them. One of those...
Yesterday, we learned that a grand jury has been empaneled to investigate allegations related to a sitting President; someone within the U.S. government leaked highly sensitive transcripts of a President's phone calls with foreign leaders -- in an apparent...
The Presidency is shrinking. It's unmistakable. While the current occupant of the Oval Office, Donald J. Trump, dominates the news, it is often for reasons other than the great policy questions of the day. Congress stripped the President of...
White House Communications Director Anthony "The Mooch!" Scaramucci lasted all of ten thrilling days. In an ironic turn, it was Scaramucci's victory in forcing the resignation of White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus that ultimately undid him. After...
Let's all take a deep breath before we go blaming Democrats and the media for this morning's shooting. The radicalization of politics as blood sport has happened on all sides. Judging from his Facebook page the shooter, James Hodgkins,...
Two major characteristics separate President Trump from other men to hold the office: He has no political experience, and he heavily relies on family members and a few long-time trusted advisers. One of the people the president leans on...
Version 2.0 of the American Health Care Act likely will not even come to a vote in the Senate, at least not in its present form. The reasons have as much to do with politics as they do with a...
Autopsy, a noun: a postmortem examination to discover the cause of death or the extent of disease. After President Trump and Speaker Ryan declared the American Health Care Act dead, it is time to conduct an autopsy on it....
President Donald Trump sounded weary when he stepped in front of the press to announce that the GOP's Obamacare repeal had failed to rally enough votes to clear the House Friday. It was the President's first real lesson in...
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow promised, with much fanfare, a scintillating scoop on Tuesday night -- President Donald Trump's much talked about tax returns. What she revealed was a letdown - two pages of Trump's 2005 returns that told us little...
On Friday night, the Justice Department asked 46 U.S. Attorneys appointed by President Obama to step down. That should come as no surprise. Every President in recent memory has done the same thing.
In their first two years in office:
President...
Repealing Obamacare is hard. President Obama's health care overhaul, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act, is a tangled web of interrelated mandates, regulations and taxes. Tinkering with any one of them can have a domino effect with unpredictable consequences....
Increasingly political awards show speeches could benefit from a little understanding. Here's the speech we wish we'd hear at the Oscars tonight. We're not holding our breath.
"Like many of you, I am unhappy with last year's election results and concerned...
For the classes I teach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business I make my students write policy memos to a friend or family member as if that person was a Member of Congress. I have done the same here. These...
Many Americans who pay any attention to politics have probably wondered, "What the heck is a gaggle?" since White House Spokesman Sean Spicer on Friday deliberately excluded several news organizations from a pen-and-pad briefing that abruptly took the place...
Among the most striking developments of 2016 was the extent to which politics came to be defined less by which policies we advocate, but which facts we believe. Political discourse has increasingly run aground over disagreements about what is...
When President Donald Trump took to Twitter to declare the media the "enemy of the American people" on Friday, the whole of elite opinion gasped in horror. Coming on the heels of an angry press conference less notable for news than...
Earlier this week, as the outrage over "silencing" Sen. Elizabeth Warren was hitting fever pitch, Senator Marco Rubio took to the Senate floor to give an impassioned defense of respectful political discourse.
Rubio's speech largely went unnoticed. That's too bad. What he had to say was important,...
The partisan outrage mill was restocked with fresh grist on Tuesday night when Senators invoked a century-old rule to rebuke Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for remarks disparaging another Senator. For most people, it likely appeared to be politics as usual....
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made his satirical debut on Saturday Night Live this weekend. President Lyndon B. Johnson might have some advice.
"IT IS PART OF THE PRICE OF LEADERSHIP OF THIS GREAT AND FREE NATION, TO BE THE...
In 1964, Clarence Brandenburg, a KKK leader from Ohio, invited local media reporters to cover a rally where a handful of his supporters were in the audience. While Brandenburg himself was unarmed, several of his supporters in the audience...
The first two weeks of the Trump Presidency have been a wild ride. The breakneck pace of executive orders, battles with the media and generally doing exactly as he said he was going to do has delighted Trump's supporters even as it alarms official Washington and...
Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, President Donald Trump's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court has been well-received -- certainly among Republicans -- and among at least a few Democrats as well. Despite combative early pledges to fight his nomination, Democrats may...
