New Jersey’s attorney general has stepped into the investigation of President Trump’s $107 million presidential inaugural fund, issuing an administrative subpoena for the fund’s financial records, including any that document fund-raising in the state. The action, taken last week by the state’s consumer protection office, came on the heels of a subpoena issued this month […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump formally declared a national emergency at the border on Friday to access billions of dollars to build a border wall that Congress refused to give him, transforming a highly charged policy dispute into a fundamental confrontation over separation of powers. In a televised announcement in the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump said […]
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Amid the unceasing awfulness of the Trump administration, I’ve lately found comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time,” which has in turn informed my thinking about the almost utopian ambitions of the Green New Deal. Surveying the American presidency, Skowronek sees politics unfolding in cycles. Every so often, insurgent coalitions […]
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You could always slight the very rich by calling them moneybags, robber barons, fat cats or plutocrats. Billionaire was a neutral word, grounded in math: Such a person could spend $10 million a year, for 100 years, before the pile was gone. Then came Howard Schultz, a billionaire times two, insisting that people not use […]
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WASHINGTON — Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, went to bed Wednesday night cautiously optimistic that a shutdown crisis that had stretched back to December had finally ended. Then President Trump awoke in a rage Thursday, feeling cornered into accepting a bipartisan funding deal struck earlier in the week that would deprive him once again […]
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There was a brief period this month when it seemed that the midterm elections, which delivered control of the House to Democrats, might immediately shake up Americans’ income tax bills. That sense of urgency lasted half a day. On Feb. 7, newspapers reported that President Trump had said he was “open” to easing a tax […]
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WASHINGTON — Outraged House Republicans sued President Barack Obama in 2014 for spending billions of federal dollars without congressional approval — and won. Now many House and Senate Republicans could side with President Trump for doing what they saw as a grave abuse of power by Mr. Obama — circumventing an unwilling Congress in a […]
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WASHINGTON — The federal debt ticked past $22 trillion this week, a record that comes despite continued economic growth, but neither political party appears to be making a priority of debt reduction. Larry Kudlow, the director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, said on Thursday that the president was “concerned” about the rise of the […]
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ImageThe White House confirmed that President Trump will declare a national emergency at the southern border.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON — In declaring a national emergency to try to build his long-promised border wall, President Trump will invoke extraordinary and seldom-used authorities to bypass Congress’s constitutionally granted power of the purse. Democrats are fuming, […]
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WASHINGTON — The White House’s announcement Thursday that President Trump would claim emergency powers to build his border wall without congressional approval was a way out of the political crisis he created over shutting down the government. But while the move means the country will avoid another protracted shutdown, legal specialists warned that the long-term […]
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WASHINGTON — Despite telling his doctor that he would like to lose 10 to 15 pounds, President Trump gained weight over the past year and is now officially obese. The president was weighed last week as part of his annual physical, and is now at 243 pounds, according to Dr. Sean Conley, the White House […]
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Congress has long ignored its constitutional war-making responsibilities, evading difficult questions about military engagement and effectively giving presidents a blank check to decide when and how the military should be involved in hostilities. That the House finally took up that duty on Wednesday andvoted to end military support for Saudi Arabia in the catastrophic civil […]
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President Trump is verging on a declaration of national emergency — purely in order to fund his wall. And if he does, the courts may — or may not — reject his gambit. But the fact that he may actually possess the legal authority to require agencies to waste billions of dollars simply to fulfill […]
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U.S. political discussion has been dominated by the issue of Donald Trump’s wall — an issue on which Trump’s irrationality keeps surprising even his critics. So I don’t imagine that many people have heard about Trump’s nomination of David Malpass, currently an under secretary at the Treasury Department, to lead the World Bank. But it’s […]
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In the early months of the Trump administration, with the president no longer running his family business, his eldest sons embarked on a plan to roll out two new hotel lines in dozens of American cities. It reflected the ambitions of “the next generation of the company,” President Trump’s son Eric said at the time. […]
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Updated February 14, 2019: Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, announced that President Trump planned to declare a national emergency so he can bypass Congress and build his long-promised wall along the southwestern border. Read the latest here. WASHINGTON — As the budget standoff between President Trump and congressional Democrats grinds into the third week […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to declare a national emergency so he can bypass Congress and build his long-promised wall along the border even as he signs a spending bill that does not fund it. The move would effectively end a two-month war of attrition between the president and Congress that closed much of the […]
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WASHINGTON — Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director, said in an interview aired on Thursday that top Justice Department officials became so alarmed by President Trump’s decision in May 2017 to fire James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, that they discussed whether to recruit cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove […]
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Welcome to Crossing the Border, a new limited-run weekly newsletter from The New York Times. Like what you see? Send this newsletter to a friend. If someone forwarded it to you, sign up here to have the next issue delivered to your inbox. Crossing the border can be done in a rental car, inching northward […]
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Only a handful of Democrats in Congress (and just one Democrat-adjacent presidential contender) identify as “socialist,” but they appear to be the chief targets of President Trump as he faces a confident Democratic opposition in the House of Representatives. “We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” he said in his […]
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