Yesterday, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.
The context for the interview is important. Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024 GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump.
People across an angry and divided nation were given a magical, unifying moment on Sunday. We needed it.
The singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, 59, returned to the Grammy Awards 35 years after she won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Her working-class ballad “Fast Car” was nominated for both Record and Song of the Year. At the Grammys in 1989, Chapman performed her song solo, playing her acoustic guitar.
You knew it was coming.
As soon as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley emerged as the main threat to Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination, it became inevitable that she would be targeted by him. Any front-runner would do the same thing. But Trump did it with his typical touch.
The significance of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation last night was signaled in the opening sentence: “We’re facing an inflection point in history.”What followed was a speech that may well define Biden’s presidency.The proximate cause for the speech was Biden’s desire to urge Americans to stand with Israel in its war against Hamas and Ukraine in its war against Russia.
“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
With those words, uttered in the well of the House on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker came to an inglorious end. McCarthy is the first speaker in history to be removed by his own party; eight Republicans voted to dethrone him, along with all 208 Democrats who were present and voting.
Updated at 7:45 p.m. ET on August 1, 2023Earlier today, Donald Trump was indicted for a third time, on the charge that he attempted to subvert the 2020 presidential election. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, accuses Trump of a conspiracy to defraud the United States by “using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit”; a conspiracy to “corruptly obstruct and impede” an official proceeding of the U.S.
In his speech last night to his supporters at Mar-a-Lago, made several hours after he was arraigned in Manhattan on 34 felony counts, Donald Trump took aim at Juan Merchan, the judge in the case.“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family, whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign, and a lot of it,” Trump said.
We can’t seem to escape his dark shadow.Donald Trump has added another shameful chapter in the life of this nation. On Thursday he became the first ex-president to be indicted, by a New York grand jury investigating alleged hush-money payments to a porn star.The wisdom of the indictment depends in large part on the facts of the case, which right now we know very little about.
It’s begun to dawn on Republicans that they face a potentially catastrophic political problem: Donald Trump may lose the GOP presidential primary and, out of spite, wreck Republican prospects in 2024.That unsettling realization broke through with the release of a Bulwark poll earlier this week.
The seven public hearings by the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have made the task of dot connecting easy: America’s 45th president oversaw and directed a multipart plan to violently overturn the 2020 election. Texts and testimonies of those in Donald Trump’s inner orbit have shattered every excuse that the former president’s supporters had publicly broadcast since that awful, searing day.
Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearings—hearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that “Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, “Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.
Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearings—hearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that “Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, “Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.
Joe Biden, who ran for president promising to restore trust in American democracy, recently undermined it. It’s not what he was elected to do, and he needs to repair the damage.During his marathon press conference last week, Biden was asked whether the failure of voting-rights legislation in Congress would render this year’s elections illegitimate.
Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.There’s a case to be made that he’s worth ignoring, except for this: Don Jr.
Earlier this week, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, the host of the top-rated news show on cable, rose in defense of the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.“Jones is often mocked for his flamboyance,” Carlson said, “but the truth is he has been a far better guide to reality in recent years—in other words, a far better journalist—than, say, NBC News national-security correspondent Ken Dilanian or Margaret Brennan of CBS.
On a Sunday in late February 2007, Philip Yancey was driving on a remote highway near Alamosa, Colorado. As he came around an icy curve, his Ford Explorer began to fishtail; the tire slipped off the asphalt and the Explorer tumbled down a hillside. The windows were blown out; skis, boots, luggage, and a laptop computer were strewn over the snow.Yancey suffered minor cuts and bruises on his face and limbs and a persistent nosebleed, but he also felt an intense pain in his neck.
Something happened last Saturday that was significant because it was unprecedented: Donald Trump spoke at a rally in the heart of Trump country—Cullman, Alabama, which gave the incumbent president more than 88 percent of the vote in 2020—and he was booed. The jeers were scattered but noticeable, enough so that Trump responded to them.Trump had encouraged those in the audience to get vaccinated. “I believe totally in your freedoms. I do.
“I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation,” Joe Biden said in 1975. “There’s a point where you are incapable of meeting moral obligations that exist worldwide.” At the time, he was arguing against U.S. aid to Cambodia.
“This is an earthquake,” a prominent Christian writer told me.The publication of an extraordinary February 24, 2020, letter by Russell Moore, one of the most influential and respected evangelicals in America (and a friend), has shaken the Christian world.When the letter was written, Moore was the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
The hope of many conservative critics of Donald Trump was that soon after his defeat, and especially in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, the Republican Party would snap back into its former shape. The Trump presidency would end up being no more than an ugly parenthesis. The GOP would distance itself from Trump and Trumpism, and become a normal party once again.But that dream soon died.
adam Kinzinger is a liberated individual—liberated from his party leadership, liberated from the fear of being beaten in a primary, liberated to speak his mind. The 43-year-old representative was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In the original Star Trek series, there was an episode in which M-5, a revolutionary computer created by Dr. Richard Daystrom, is designed to handle all ship functions without human assistance.It’s thought to be an impressive achievement—until M-5 takes total control over the USS Enterprise and begins to attack other Federation ships. Captain Kirk tells Daystrom to disengage the M-5 unit, but it proves to be impossible.
Those hoping for a quick snapback to sanity for the Republican Party once Donald Trump is no longer president should temper those hopes. The latest piece of evidence to suggest the enduring power of Trumpian unreality is yesterday’s announcement by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri that he will object next week when Congress convenes to certify the Electoral College vote.
Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.
“We are entering into an epistemological crisis,” Barack Obama recently told my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg.The crisis didn’t begin with the Trump presidency, but it rapidly accelerated over the course of its term—and the situation has, if anything, grown worse in the aftermath of the presidential election.According to one poll, 70 percent of Republicans say they don’t believe that the 2020 election was free and fair.
Lorenzo Meloni / MagnumIn the aftermath of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump, who has inflicted so much gratuitous harm on the United States—including making unfounded accusations of election fraud and declaring himself the victor, a malicious lie that is undermining the integrity of American democracy—there is an understandable temptation among those on the winning side to seek revenge and settle scores with Trump and Trumpworld.
“Truth will come to light,” Launcelot Gobbo tells his father in The Merchant of Venice. “At the length truth will out.”For Donald Trump, this past week is when, for all except his most beguiled and gullible supporters, the truth willed itself out. At the start of the week, the ground on which the president’s most fanatical followers stood started to crumble; by the end of the week, it had completely collapsed.
“I’m used to bullies.”That’s a line Joe Biden has used several times during his run against Donald Trump, and he said it again recently in talking about the first presidential debate.“I hope I don’t take the bait, because he’s going to say awful things about me, my family, et cetera,” Biden said at a virtual fundraiser.
Fifty-two years ago last Saturday, Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after being declared the winner of the California presidential primary. He was 42 years old.I was too young to remember his death, but over the years I have become something of a Bobby Kennedy devotee. That might seem strange coming from a lifelong conservative who served in three Republican administrations.