Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device:Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Stitcher Joseph R. Biden Jr. picked Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate, making her the first Black woman and the first Asian-American woman to run for vice president on a major party’s ticket. Alexander Burns, […]
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When I arrived in the United States in 1984, an Indian graduate student wanting to study African-American history, I was an anomaly. Most of my fellow South Asians were in STEM doctoral programs. During the Reagan years, I supported the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and the Democratic Socialists of America in their attempt to […]
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Some of the most important developments in politics do not happen every election cycle, but every ten years, when politicians scrap the old battleground map and struggle to replace it with a new one more favorable to their interests. Steven Hill, a former fellow at New America, described how this works in his still pertinent […]
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MINNEAPOLIS — Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota fended off a well-funded primary challenger on Tuesday, ensuring a clean sweep of re-election fights for the group of first-term Democratic congresswomen of color known as the Squad and sending a message to Washington about the staying power of the party’s new progressive voices. Ms. Omar, who made […]
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Conspiracy theorists won a major victory on Tuesday as a Republican supporter of the convoluted pro-Trump movement QAnon triumphed in her House primary runoff election in Georgia, all but ensuring that she will represent a deep-red district in Congress. The ascension of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who embraces a conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has labeled […]
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WASHINGTON — In naming Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr. made a groundbreaking decision, picking a woman of color to be vice president and, possibly, a successor in the White House someday. Yet in some ways, Mr. Biden made a conventional choice: elevating a senator who brings generational and coastal balance […]
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WASHINGTON — The Senate’s highest-ranking Democrat assailed the Postal Service on Tuesday for what he said was an effort to jack up the cost to states of mail-in voting, a new line of criticism in the escalating dispute over ensuring Americans can vote safely this fall in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Senator Chuck […]
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Already, I am dreaming of the debate. There’s Mike Pence, white of hair as well as cheek, his demeanor more starched than his dress shirt, his smile so tight it’s the twin of a grimace. He represents more than the Trump administration, God help him. He represents an America that’s half memory, half myth. And […]
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LOS ANGELES — At her strongest, Senator Kamala Harris is forceful and pragmatic. She elates crowds in Iowa and South Carolina with her denunciations of President Trump, and spells out her policy agenda — on matters like restricting gun sales, reducing prescription drug prices and giving tax benefits to renters — in precise terms. Then […]
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WASHINGTON — When President Trump announced that he was unilaterally deferring payroll taxes to bring economic relief to struggling Americans, he and his aides thought it would allow them to frame him as pro-worker. But the move comes with political risks. Eliminating the payroll tax could jeopardize the funding stream for Social Security, which is […]
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Imagine a parallel universe in which the sitting president cares about holding a free and democratic election in the midst of a pandemic. Imagine that his administration is staffed with competent, incorruptible officials who devote every waking hour to stopping the virus, saving lives, rebuilding the economy and preserving democracy. Imagine that the Postal Service […]
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Native women were highly visible in early 20th-century suffrage activism. White suffragists, fascinated by Native matriarchal power, invited Native women to speak at conferences, join parades and write for their publications. Native suffragists took advantage of these opportunities to speak about pressing issues in their communities — Native voting, land loss and treaty rights. But […]
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Last week I found myself reading “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” the new book by Stuart Stevens, the longtime Republican operative and chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s losing 2012 campaign for the presidency. Stevens belongs to one of the notable sects in the church of NeverTrump, consisting of […]
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There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it. First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump is considering new immigration rules that would allow border officials to temporarily block an American citizen or legal permanent resident from returning to the United States from abroad if the authorities have reason to believe the person may be infected with the coronavirus. In recent months, Mr. Trump has imposed sweeping […]
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President Trump was abruptly pulled out of the White House briefing room in midsentence during a televised news conference on Monday after what was reported to be a shooting incident not far from the Executive Mansion. A Secret Service agent approached the president as he was discussing the coronavirus and the economy and told him […]
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The White House has pitched its payroll tax holiday as a boon to American workers that would fatten their paychecks and provide a jolt to the economy. But for companies large and small, the presidential intervention poses difficult legal and logistical questions that only add to the uncertainty that executives and workers are contending with […]
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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected in the coming days to lift Obama-era controls on the release of methane, a powerful climate-warming gas that is emitted from leaks and flares in oil and gas wells. The new rule on methane pollution, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, has been expected for months, and will […]
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To the Editor: Re “U.S. Is Alone Among Peers in Failing to Contain Virus” (front page, Aug. 7): David Leonhardt’s comprehensive article is an excellent opening salvo for our understanding of this U.S. failure. However, the problem is deeper than the incompetency, ignorance and recklessness of the Trump administration. The larger problem is the absence […]
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President Trump, in a new court filing seeking to block the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., from obtaining eight years of his tax returns, said on Monday that the efforts amounted to illegal harassment. The argument came in response to a filing last week by Mr. Vance’s office, which said prosecutors had a […]
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Gail Collins: Bret, did you listen to the president’s weekend address? The one he gave to an audience composed of members at his private golf club? The part where he said Democrats don’t love the country? For a long time now I think I’ve gone past the ability to be shocked by his run-of-the-mill rants, […]
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As the coronavirus surged across the Sunbelt, President Trump told a crowd gathered at the White House on July 4 that 99 percent of virus cases are “totally harmless.” The next morning on CNN, the host Dana Bash asked Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and one of the nation’s […]
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WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been critical of Big Tech, admonishing Facebook for mishandling misinformation and saying internet companies should lose a central legal protection. But his campaign has quietly welcomed onto its staff and policy groups people who have worked with or for Silicon Valley giants, raising concerns among the industry’s critics […]
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WASHINGTON — On Thursday, July 30, I fell asleep watching reruns of “Law and Order.” The next morning, I woke up a fugitive. Chinese state television said that the Hong Kong authorities had issued arrest warrants for six activists who promote democracy for that supposedly semi-autonomous region. I was one of the six. The charges? […]
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One of the oddest moments during last month’s tech hearings on Capitol Hill came when a Florida congressman darkly hinted that Google was making it difficult for him to find a website he was looking for, The Gateway Pundit. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, wearing a dark suit and the forced solemnity of an undertaker, […]
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President Trump, in announcing his executive measures on Saturday, said he was bypassing Congress to deliver emergency pandemic aid to needy Americans. But his directives are rife with so much complexity and legal murkiness that they’re unlikely, in most cases, to bring fast relief — if any. Because Congress controls federal spending, at least some […]
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WASHINGTON — Facing sharp criticism, administration officials on Sunday struggled to explain the executive actions President Trump used to circumvent Congress in the absence of an agreement on a coronavirus aid package, even as they defended him and insisted that Americans would receive the relief he promised. The president’s decision on Saturday to sign a […]
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When I first heard the news of the terrible explosion in Beirut, and then the rampant speculation about who might have set it off, my mind drifted back some 40 years to a dinner party I attended at the residence of Malcolm Kerr, then president of the American University of Beirut. During the course of […]
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TEL AVIV — In the pile of old notebooks I saved from when I was covering American politics for an Israeli newspaper (and when reporters still used a pad and pen), I found five mentions of Joe Biden’s Israel story. Most of them are from 2008 — first during the Democratic primary, when Mr. Biden […]
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As Wall Street donors arrived at a fund-raiser for Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant earlier this year, campaign staff members asked if they wanted to sign up for pictures with the candidate. More than a few of the bankers and private-equity investors politely declined, opting to mingle over glasses of wine […]
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WASHINGTON — In February, Democrats began getting anxious about the crucial Senate race in North Carolina. An unknown Republican-affiliated group was suddenly pouring millions of dollars behind the candidacy of Erica Smith, a progressive state senator who they believed had no chance of winning the seat in November. So party leaders began spending millions of […]
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