“There is no sense of deference in the administration to what is scientific fact and evidence-based policies,” Koh stressed. “The president has repeatedly criticized the CDC and the FDA. We’re in the worst public health crisis in our country in a century. At a time like this, you need to turn to the top health […]
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For four years, Donald Trump’s tax returns have been the white whale of political journalists and the most sought-after material of any presidency this side of Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes. Naturally, when The New York Times obtained and published the trove, it was an epochal moment for the media and a major headache for Trump […]
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Everybody knows Donald Trump is an opportunistic, lying asshole. Hell, that was his defenders’ main point this weekend, when they tried vainly to save the president from Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 3 article in The Atlantic, in which multiple former U.S. officials and senior military officers revealed—anonymously—that Trump in private is the same as Trump in […]
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Hours after the body of Donald Trump supporter Aaron Danielson began growing cold on the streets of Portland, the latest casualty in the ongoing domestic unrest of the Trump era, frothing far-right backers immediately jumped to a single conclusion. Unlike all of the other deaths of the Trump era—of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville at the […]
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As pernicious as anti-Americanism was to the Legion, however, the group didn’t shy from adopting very particular foreign tactics to meet it. “[T]he American Legion stands ready to protect our country’s institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy!” National Commander Alvin Owsley told an interviewer in 1923, adding: The […]
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Shortly after this, Trump met with six Americans who have been returned from overseas captivity, introducing them as “hostages” and congratulating himself (as well as Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) for freeing his hapless countrymen. This, of course, is the sine qua non of the Trump promise to Americans: Let me do anything I want […]
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It is by now almost a formality: In the Middle East, nothing either good or bad can transpire without Washington pointing to Tehran’s alleged hegemonic designs as the force behind it. So it was with the so-called peace deal announced last week between Israel and the United Arab Emirates; two countries who were never at […]
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American exceptionalism comes in varieties. On the one hand, there is the view, present across the political spectrum, that our institutions will endure—as Moyn and David Priestley put it in the New York Times in 2017, “there is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to […]
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But even with the power and lawbreaking gusto of the Trump family behind it, the GOP finds it exceedingly difficult to game this system entirely, in part because their recent rule has been so dishonest, so onerous, and so frankly homicidal that it’s historically unpopular—and this is maximally visible with the voting public. “To deter […]
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Into this maelstrom of racial animus and nihilism strides Kushner, a bloodless man possessed of a singular genius for locating new petards with which he can hoist himself. Last Thursday, Kanye got on Colorado’s ballot; within 48 hours, he’d gotten a private audience in the state with the permanently wincing White House senior adviser, who […]
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Belarus remains in a holding pattern. The prevailing social contract, in which Lukashenko retains power in return for economic and socio-political stability, is clearly fractured, perhaps beyond repair. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Lukashenko might cede ground, as we saw in Armenia in 2018, allowing a new generation to rise. He could attempt to […]
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Elizondo left the Pentagon in October 2017, he said, over the military’s secrecy and inertia. During his tenure, one senior Defense Intelligence Agency official in particular expressed discomfort with investigation of UFOs because the official, a staunch Christian, felt the evidence suggested UFO’s were demonic. Crazy as it may sound, Elizondo’s stories certainly gave the DIA […]
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Neither the State Department, nor the White House, responded to requests for comment, but this concession was brokered at the State Department’s highest levels, a government source with knowledge of the deal told The New Republic. Pompeo appeared to acknowledge this while speaking to a Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, during a Senate hearing on July […]
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Two months later, as school reopenings loom, Donald Trump’s all-out “war” against Covid-19 has been—like all other American “wars” since 1942—an unevenly waged failure. We lead the world not only in defense spending but also in Covid-19 cases and deaths. Throughout the United States, people—usually the president’s people—continue to reject social distancing and mask wearing, […]
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Tracing the Kurdish fuel deals leads to a Virginia-based logistics company, DGCI. For at least half a decade, DGCI has been the Pentagon’s go-to fuel provider in Kurdistan and has been dogged by questions about its connections to Kurdish politicians. The DOD attempted to award fuel contracts to two other companies, but the Kurds prevented […]
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The chaotic and conflict-ridden Middle East is a scene of American failure. In recent decades, the United States has lavished more resources and attention there than on any other region. It has incurred more American military deaths in Iraq than in any other war since the Vietnam War. The current state of the region, and […]
Read MoreThe VA hasn’t released comprehensive statistics into this behavior, but a survey released this spring showed that 54 percent of psychologists in training at a West Coast VA facility reported experiencing racism on the job. Similar allegations of discriminatory personnel practices have popped up at other facilities, as have racist online posts by employees and […]
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But on Monday, Florida’s Republican leadership pivoted into coronavirus-era big government by, well, controlling kids. Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran—handpicked for the job by DeSantis after serving as the Republican speaker of the statehouse—ordered “All school boards and charter school governing boards” to “open brick and mortar schools in August at least five days per week […]
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China now plays host to the world’s largest forced incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority anywhere since the Second World War. With upwards of nearly two million Uighurs now forced into scattered gulags across the region, their captivity marks the largest imprisonment—based not on crimes, but on ethnicity and religion alone—since the Holocaust. And as The […]
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