[ Posted Tuesday, July 11th, 2017 – 17:13 UTC ]
Donald Trump's story, up until now, has been that "there was no collusion with Russia" during his campaign. That is now -- as the Nixon White House used to say -- no longer an operative statement. The best they can now claim is that while such collusion was attempted, it ultimately wasn't successful. That's pretty weak, though, and with the shifting nature of the story even that may soon become impossible to claim. We'll have to wait and see where the next smoking gun points, before we find out what Trump's next party line will be.
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[ Posted Thursday, June 15th, 2017 – 16:42 UTC ]
With a near-unanimous vote, the Senate just issued a rather strong rebuke to President Donald Trump, telling him that they simply do not trust him to handle sanctions against Russia. If the bill clears the House with a similar overwhelming majority, then Congress will assume control over America's foreign policy towards Russia and leave both the president and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with a very limited ability to change the situation. That's a pretty stunning rebuke to a sitting president. Especially by a Congress controlled by his own party.
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[ Posted Friday, June 9th, 2017 – 17:20 UTC ]
President Donald Trump and former F.B.I. chief James Comey engaged this week in an extended game of "Liar, liar!" Or, more properly: "Liar!" "No, you're a liar!" Yes, it was "Super Bowl" week in Washington, folks!
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[ Posted Thursday, June 8th, 2017 – 18:01 UTC ]
On a day chock full of breaking news from Washington, it's rather extraordinary that one of the biggest stories was about something which didn't happen. Not unlike Sherlock Holmes noting the significance of the dog which did not bark in the night, one of the most astonishing things about this morning's congressional testimony by fired F.B.I. director James Comey was that President Donald Trump did not angrily tweet about it while it was happening. Yes, this is precisely where we now find ourselves as a nation -- it's a big story that the president didn't fly off the handle publicly, in reaction to seeing something he didn't like, on television.
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017 – 16:40 UTC ]
To really be true to today's subject, I should have come up with a headline more along the lines of: "Donald Trump Takes America Back To 1890s!" That's a tad sensationalistic, but we do seem to be right in the middle of a good old-fashioned newspaper war. In the past month alone, I have lost count of the times that major scoops about the extent of the Trump administration's misdeeds have appeared in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Even without counting them, the score seems pretty close to tied, although the Post may have a slight edge at the current moment.
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[ Posted Monday, May 22nd, 2017 – 16:41 UTC ]
President Donald Trump has only just begun his first road trip outside the United States, and he's already "exhausted," according to one of his own advisors. This may or may not be true, since anything either Trump or any of his spokespeople say at this point has to be taken with a grain of salt -- especially considering the "exhausted" comment was given as an excuse for a Trump gaffe (more on that in a bit). But this week's calendar for Trump seems to have been constructed on the theme of: "Any Trump campaign promises left unbroken? Well, let's see how many we can break in a single week!"
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[ Posted Friday, May 19th, 2017 – 17:44 UTC ]
We'd like to begin today by apologizing for not including whatever scandal broke while we were writing this column. It takes us hours to write these, and while we're typing we're not reading news headlines. So this weekly wrapup will doubtlessly not mention whatever scandal broke in the past few hours, and for this we apologize. We would direct you to the final talking point today to cover this lapse (from which we also borrowed our subtitle today, because Daniel Drezner's article is such a hilarious piece of satire).
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[ Posted Friday, May 12th, 2017 – 16:49 UTC ]
This week will go down in American political history as the week people stopped comparing Donald Trump to Andrew Jackson, and instead began comparing Trump to a different Oval Office predecessor, Richard Nixon. If we had a dollar for every time the word "Nixonian" was written or uttered onscreen this week, we could retire tomorrow.
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[ Posted Wednesday, May 10th, 2017 – 16:36 UTC ]
Donald Trump hasn't even been in office for four whole months, and already he's being compared to Richard Nixon. That is both stunning as well as somewhat expected, really. Just on personality alone, Trump seems the most Nixonian figure to occupy the Oval Office since Tricky Dick himself roamed the hallways. Sooner or later, Trump's penchant for vengeance against his perceived enemies was going to cause some problems. It's now obvious that "sooner" won out over "later."
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[ Posted Tuesday, April 25th, 2017 – 16:35 UTC ]
Democrats are at a similar point now to where Republicans found themselves four years ago, but so far there has been no Democratic post-mortem. The GOP document appeared in March of 2013, but we're almost into May and no such Democratic self-examination has taken place. Partly this is because the Democratic National Committee changed hands in the meantime, but Tom Perez has been on the job for a few months now, so perhaps it's time to attempt an analysis of how the party needs to improve?
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