All posts tagged: Donald Trump
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
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The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed. “A small group of people, inside and outside this
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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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It’s an odd feeling when you find yourself effectively living on an island unconnected to people with whom you were once politically close. But it’s a feeling with which I’ve become very familiar. Recent encounters with old political allies and friends have left me not just with a feeling of isolation but a sense that
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Republican lawmakers have seen the Trump disaster coming for a while now. They simply have no clue what to do about it. A couple of months ago — before we learned that Donald Trump Jr. wanted to spend quality time with people he believed represented the Russian government, before the president publicly humiliated his attorney
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One of the essential, if often unstated, job requirements of an American president is to provide stability, order and predictability in a world that tends toward chaos, disarray and entropy. When our political leaders ignore this — and certainly when they delight in disruption — the consequences can be severe. Stability is easy to take
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President Trump’s firing of James Comey, the 7th director of the F.B.I., was an abuse of power. Republicans — Republican lawmakers and especially the congressional leadership — need to say so. But that is hardly enough. Words must be followed by actions. At a minimum, Republicans must insist on a congressional select committee or independent
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After a series of meetings and phone calls with high-ranking officials this month, a Republican who deals regularly with the Trump administration confided in me about his frustration. “The dysfunction in this White House just knows no bounds,” he said. Of the many things people worried about before President Trump took office, it turned out
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