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Last week, at an event in West Virginia, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fat-shamed the state’s governor, Patrick Morrisey. “The first time I saw him, I said you look like you ate Governor Morrisey,” Kennedy told a laughing crowd. Morrisey has apparently invited Kennedy to be his personal trainer.

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In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy.

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei.

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“We’re going to start being smart, and we’re going to start being very wealthy again,” President Donald Trump announced today as he laid out a plan that risks derailing America’s economy.

The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.

Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is finally getting his wish of sucker punching the federal health agencies. This week, Kennedy began the process of firing some 10,000 employees working under the Health and Human Services umbrella. Even before he took office, Kennedy warned health officials that they should pack their bags, and on Tuesday, he defended the cuts: “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” Kennedy posted on X.

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.
But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success.