There was a time, not that long ago really, when Donald J. Trump said he cared about the sanctity of classified information. That, of course, was when his opponent was accused of jeopardizing it and it was a useful political weapon for Mr. Trump. Throughout 2016, he castigated Hillary Clinton for using a private email […]
Read More
It’s been feeling a bit like 2016 lately. Back then, the opposition to Donald J. Trump was badly divided. The party couldn’t coalesce behind one candidate, allowing Mr. Trump to win the Republican primary with well under half of the vote. With Mike Pence and Chris Christie bringing the field up to 10 candidates this […]
Read More
Chris Christie is embarking on a mission that even some of his fiercest allies must squint to see ending in the White House. But Mr. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who is now 60 and more than five years removed from holding elected office, has been undeterred, talking up an undertaking that he […]
Read More
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a California lawyer may trademark the phrase “Trump too small,” a reference to a taunt from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Rubio said Donald J. Trump had “small hands,” adding: “And you know what they say about guys with […]
Read More
Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. A recent CNN poll shows that 20 percent of Democrats favor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for the party’s nomination, 8 percent want Marianne Williamson and another 8 percent want someone else. That’s 36 percent saying they aren’t thrilled with the presumptive nominee. Do you think this is some kind of polling […]
Read More
Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors — […]
Read More
In the prelude to last weekend’s coronation of King Charles III, Helen Lewis visited and considered royals less fussed over. “One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts,” she observed. “It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe […]
Read More
It’s been 52 years since Congress passed, and the country ratified, a constitutional amendment — the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in the wake of the Vietnam War and the broader disruption of the 1960s (the 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992, was passed in 1789). It’s been 64 years since Congress […]
Read More
Watching the nascent Republican primary race, I have a sickening sense of déjà vu. As much as I abhor Donald Trump’s opponents, I’m desperate for one of them to prevail. Trump might be easier for Joe Biden to beat, but anyone who gets the Republican nomination has a chance of being elected, and the possibility […]
Read More
Not long after misinformation plagued the 2016 election, journalists and content moderators scrambled to turn Americans away from untrustworthy websites before the 2020 vote. A new study suggests that, to some extent, their efforts succeeded. When Americans went to the polls in 2020, a far smaller portion had visited websites containing false and misleading narratives […]
Read More
The looming debt ceiling vote is the perfect hook. The increase in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-largest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration. Long before Covid, Republicans in Congress were told by the Trump White House to spend more — and that spending contributed […]
Read More
Finally, here we are: Donald Trump’s first indictment. The 34 felony counts unsealed at his arraignment this week focus on the falsification of business records in the first degree, a low-level felony charge. This indictment may not prove to be the rock-solid legal case one might hope it to be. It neither addresses the gravest […]
Read More
That appeared to prompt Justice Merchan, who spoke calmly and soberly, to respond that he had no immediate intention of placing a “gag order” on Mr. Trump, counter to concerns expressed recently by the former president’s legal team. Prosecutors have not requested a gag order. THE COURT: Certainly, the court would not impose a gag […]
Read More
In an ordinary presidential-primary season, the indictment of a front-runner over hush money paid to a porn star would, at the least, be an opening for rivals to attack. But a day after the arraignment of former President Donald J. Trump on 34 felony counts, one thing was clear: This will not be an ordinary […]
Read More
And the 34 felony charges, to which Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty, turned out to be more significant and more sweeping than previously suspected. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, described a broad conspiracy, with Mr. Trump at the center, to falsify business records for the purpose of unlawfully influencing the 2016 presidential election. The […]
Read More
According to the indictment, the business record falsifications were done “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” Though no other crime is charged, the statement of facts accompanying the indictment accuses Trump of violating election laws. It’s the connection to another crime that turns falsifying […]
Read More
Donald J. Trump, who has weathered two impeachment trials, a special counsel inquiry and decades of investigations, was accused by Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday of orchestrating a hush-money scheme to pave his path to the presidency and then covering it up from the White House. Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty in the case, which has […]
Read More
Federal and state campaign laws require payments made in connection with elections to be reported, and if they are made by third parties coordinating with the candidate, such as Mr. Trump’s former fixer Michael D. Cohen, they are subject to certain limits. Mr. Cohen paid $130,000, well beyond the legal federal limit, in the days […]
Read More
If Donald J. Trump seems a little on edge lately, so does the city where he made his name. The former president, after largely eluding legal accountability of any kind for decades, has now been indicted by a grand jury in a case brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. So far Mr. Trump […]
Read More
Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I have a clear memory of Democrats defending Bill Clinton tooth and nail for lying under oath in the Paula Jones case, about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. At the time, they said it was “just about sex” and that Clinton lied to protect his family and marriage. Morally speaking, is […]
Read More
Even some people eager to see Donald Trump held accountable for his depthless corruption have been uneasy about his indictment in New York. “A charge like this — a porn star payoff seven years ago, somehow tied to the election, but not really — it doesn’t seem like the right way to go,” said Van […]
Read More
A former American president has been indicted. A Manhattan grand jury voted yesterday to indict Donald Trump. The case relates to his involvement in paying hush money to a porn star to bury a sex scandal in the final days of his 2016 presidential campaign. There is still a lot we don’t know, including the […]
Read More
Donald J. Trump was indicted in Manhattan on Thursday, becoming the first American president, current or former, to be charged with a crime. His indictment was handed up by a grand jury which has been hearing evidence about Mr. Trump for months. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the charges, is focused on the […]
Read More
I recently contacted Laura Niemi, a professor of psychology at Cornell, posing a series of questions that included these two: If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary […]
Read More
GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — Chris Christie wants a New Hampshire do-over. That was the overriding message on Monday night during a visit that Mr. Christie, a 2016 presidential candidate, made to the state, a testing-the-2024-waters trip in which he sharply criticized Donald J. Trump and waxed nostalgic for his own short-lived primary campaign seven years ago. […]
Read More
The most telling exchange in Donald Trump’s Waco, Texas, rally on Saturday didn’t come from Trump himself. It came at the beginning, when the aging rock star Ted Nugent was warming up the crowd. “I want my money back,” he yelled. “I didn’t authorize any money to Ukraine, to some homosexual weirdo.” Moments later, speaking […]
Read More
Secretive talks in the waning days of a campaign. Furtive phone calls. Ardent public denials. American history is full of October surprises — late revelations, sometimes engineered by an opponent, that shock the trajectory of a presidential election and that candidates dread. In 1880, a forged letter ostensibly written by James A. Garfield claimed he […]
Read More
One thing we can be sure of: If this Stormy Daniels thing hurts Donald Trump politically, it will be for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with sex. Nobody cares whether or not the two of them once had an, um, intimate assignation. Although I do enjoy recalling that Daniels has referred to it as […]
Read More
When Michael D. Cohen stood before a federal judge to ask for leniency he attributed much of his behavior to the influence of one man: Donald J. Trump. “Time and time again,” Mr. Cohen told the judge at his sentencing in late 2018, “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.” […]
Read More
The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.” Strongly related is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at […]
Read More
At the time, it all was more tawdry than momentous. A reality star invited a porn actress half his age to a hotel room after a round in a celebrity golf tournament. She arrived in a spangly gold dress and strappy heels. He promised to put her on television and then, she says, they slept […]
Read More