Impeachment isn’t just a legal remedy. Nor is it a way for opposition parties to negate the results of an election, no matter how clouded by allegations of wrongdoing. It’s a political tool. It’s designed specifically to carry out the public will.
The central question for Democrats in 2020 is whether they can give an acceptable alternative to voters who handed Trump his margin of victory last time. About the only way to ensure his reelection is to enable him to make this about white, male America versus everyone else.
The political media seems deeply invested in the “breakout moment” idea. But you can’t manufacture something like that, and if someone tells you to, you’re getting bad advice. At this early stage of the campaign there are subtler, more attainable ways to have success.
Warren is just doing what a presidential candidate is supposed to do — offer some larger argument for what government ought to look like. What makes her so notable is how little any of the other candidates seem to have thought about this at all.
The debate process assigns absolutely zero value to the thing that ought to matter a lot in a presidential campaign, and especially in this one: actual experience in governing.
We’re the only country that has, from the beginning, defined patriotism as fealty to a series of principles, rather than to a monarch or a common identity. Trump’s attempt to reverse that formulation is stunning.
In a campaign like this one, it’s not the level of broad interest in a candidacy that matters most, but rather the narrow base of unshakable support that can keep it afloat. It’s about staying power, which polls don’t really measure.
There’s a reason we call it a trade war. Wars have casualties. Winning them always comes with a cost, and it’s a cost the citizenry has to be willing to bear.
If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago, when I was chronicling the path of Democratic politics for the New York Times Magazine and for a book, I’d have told you Nancy Pelosi was a true ideologue at heart.
Democrats already know how they feel about Trump. What they want is a nominee who won’t become inexorably swallowed up in Trump’s all-consuming vortex of personal insults and cultural smears.
Of Trump’s advisers, only Stephen Miller has consistently proffered a grander notion of what this presidency might be made to mean — the retrenchment of white culture into nativism and national identity.
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper puts himself forth as a politician who bridges what are supposed to be unbridgeable divides.
Even the country’s best newspapers and websites present almost everything the administration does in dramatic tones beyond all proportion, as if the mere act of Trump trying to govern constituted an existential threat.
The current crop of Democratic candidates seem to think the hallmark of boldness is a willingness to tell reliable primary voters exactly what they’re desperate to hear, in the most dramatic terms possible.
Inside the mind of Beto O’Rourke as he ponders the 2020 presidential race and the right pair of jeans.
Governors just don’t get the kind of respect they once did in presidential politics. And that’s something Democratic voters should probably reconsider.
Unless both houses of Congress are willing to impeach and convict him, don’t bet on President Trump serving anything less than a full term.
Pete Buttigieg would rather talk about his record as the two-term mayor of South Bend, Ind., than about his identity as the first openly gay man to seek the Democratic nomination.
Our developer president could have focused his energy on building airports, high-speed rail lines and high-tech schools. But he can only think of one place to sink a shovel, and that’s turning out to be the sinkhole of his administration.
Howard Schultz is one of very few people on the planet who had the vision to transform the way we live. He saw where the culture was headed and figured out a way to get ahead of it. No one in politics is doing that.
The question facing former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, if he decides to run against Trump, is this: Do you try to take out the incumbent president in the primaries, or do you make an independent bid instead?
President Trump doesn’t think our defense of democratic values really works for America anymore, and in this he has more in common with Vladimir Putin than he does with his own Cabinet or his military.
In Trump’s America, taking personal responsibility for anything you say or do is suddenly out of vogue, no matter which side you’re on or how petty the issue.
Back in 2015, I sat down with President Obama, during a visit to Nike’s Oregon campus, to talk about the huge Asian trade pact he was trying to sell. It was what Obama said that day about Elizabeth Warren, who had become a vocal critic of the trade deal, that landed like a grenade. What crude and awful thing did Obama say?
The contrast to focus on in 2020 isn’t just right versus left. It’s short term versus long term. It’s quarterly returns versus a half century of peril.
“Streaming is beginning to look an awful lot like the old-fashioned analogue TV it was supposed to replace.”
“Streaming isn’t going away … You’re still going to have a lot of choice for a long time.”
“In the future, [streaming] likely will cost more, have a little less library content and cancel more shows more quickly.”
“Streaming is still a game of content … It’s not a matter of who’s spending more, it’s who’s spending smartly.”
“Streamers are retreating from any sort of creative risk in favor of humdrum, lowest-common-denominator shows.”