David A. Graham

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Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.
The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure.

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No sooner had the Supreme Court issued its opinion in a big campaign-finance case yesterday than my inbox began filling up with nongovernmental organizations and Democratic leaders decrying the ruling.
In the case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v.

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Back in 2016, before he converted to the MAGA cause, J. D. Vance was deeply wary of Donald Trump. He wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.

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Last July, a group of activists staged what they called a “noise demonstration” at ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility, near Dallas. They shot off fireworks, damaged a surveillance camera, and vandalized government vehicles.

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In an interview with The New York Times early this year, Donald Trump was asked, “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?” “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind.

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President Trump spent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.
Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises.

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Photos of air travel in decades past can cause almost visceral pain for a modern flier. Faded or sepia images show sharply dressed people eating real food in spacious seats.

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No event at the Kennedy Center in recent months has drawn as much anticipation in Washington as the removal of President Trump’s name from the building’s facade.

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For some time, the Biden family standings were clear. Hunter, the ne’er-do-well son, resided in the basement. Joe, occasionally buffoonish but a successful and durable politician, sat in the middle.

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The U.S. Navy was born to fight piracy. After the Revolutionary War, the United States maintained no standing fleet, but attacks by the Barbary pirates—corsairs based in North Africa who preyed on American merchant ships and took sailors ransom—drove Congress to reestablish a navy in the 1790s.

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For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.
“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02.

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No White House is immune to hypocrisy. What makes the Trump administration’s approach to justice so astonishing is not just the depth of the hypocrisy but its brazenness.
Last night, CNN reported that the Department of Justice is pursuing a criminal investigation against E.

In August 1958, Esquire invited 58 jazz musicians to meet on a stoop in Harlem for a photo shoot. The resulting picture, now known as Harlem 1958, became legendary for collecting some of the genre’s greatest talents, stretching from the swing era (Count Basie, Gene Krupa) to the peaks of bebop (Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie).

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Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges.

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Is Donald Trump strong or weak right now?
Usually, telling whether a president is up or down isn’t difficult, but the past few weeks have offered reasons to believe both.

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Local election officials are the lifeblood of American democracy. They, and not the president or Congress, are most important for functional elections, and that’s what made Tina Peters’s crimes especially egregious.
Peters was the county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, during the 2020 election.

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Donald Trump deserves plenty of criticism for his serial dishonesty, but on the rare occasions when he speaks frankly, that causes problems too.
This week, a reporter asked the president whether the deteriorating economic situation has created any urgency for him to reach a peace deal with Iran.

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The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, effectively demolishing a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is a “five-alarm fire,” former Representative G. K. Butterfield Jr. told me this week.

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Donald Trump loves to pit his advisers and staffers against one another—many aspects of Trump’s persona on The Apprentice may have been manufactured, but not this one.

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I have a confession to make: I love listening to bad music.
This realization came to me a few months ago, while I was working on an obituary for the guitarist Steve Cropper and relistened to his 1980 record, Playin’ My Thang. Cropper’s work as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.

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Seven years ago, midway through a multiyear demolition of the Voting Rights Act, John Roberts’s Supreme Court heard a case on a slightly different topic: partisan gerrymandering. Republican legislators from North Carolina had drawn a map of U.S.

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Most wars take a long time to achieve quagmire status, but Donald Trump’s Iran war is precocious. Just 60 days have passed since the president formally notified Congress about the military action there, on March 2. (The first air strikes had begun two days earlier.

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Staying in Donald Trump’s good graces while also protecting your own political future requires supreme political agility, and most people who try end up failing at both. Just ask Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Paul Ryan, and any number of other faded GOP stars—if you can find them.

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Seven years ago, during a marginally more innocent time, the Trump administration announced plans to hold the 2020 G7 summit at Donald Trump’s resort in Doral, Florida.

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Within hours after an attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, President Trump declared that the incident showed the need to build a ballroom at the White House without delay. “We need the ballroom,” he told reporters in a press conference.

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Pity poor Tucker Carlson. Watching Donald Trump’s war in Iran—which Carlson has branded “the single biggest mistake” by a U.S. president in his lifetime—he is ruing his strong support for Trump in the 2024 election.

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When Lori Chavez-DeRemer was nominated, she had a chance to be a pathbreaking secretary of labor, supposedly tasked with shepherding the Republican Party in a more worker-friendly direction. Instead, she turned out to be a typical Trump Cabinet member: disempowered and disgraced.

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Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down.