All posts in: Senior Fellows
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. As if that were not enough, we also learned
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“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
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In 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
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If Donald Trump loses his re-election bid, there will be a lot of ruin to sort through. But his most damaging and enduring legacy may well turn out to be the promiscuous use of conspiracy theories that have defined both the man and his presidency. The president’s cruelest policies, like intentionally separating children from their parents at
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In the entire history of American presidential campaigns, there may never have been a wider gap in empathy than between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And it has rarely mattered more. Empathy is the quality of putting yourself in the place of another, understanding how they are experiencing the world, identifying with their feelings, and being
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In public, Donald Trump has spoken in glowing terms about his evangelical supporters, calling them “warriors on the frontiers defending American freedom,” people who are “incredible” and “faithful,” a bulwark against assorted moral evils. But behind the scenes, as The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins recently reported, “many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism
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“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
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“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
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Since the earliest days of the American republic, political leaders have been concerned about the threat posed by large deficits and mounting federal debt. In a 1790 letter to Henry Lee, James Madison wrote that “as far as this object will permit I go on the principle that a Public Debt is a Public curse
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To understand the corruption, chaos, and general insanity that is continuing to engulf the Trump campaign and much of the Republican Party right now, it helps to understand the predicate embraced by many Trump supporters: If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies. During last week’s Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker insisted
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