My friend David French, one of the most admirable voices in America today, argues that conservatives need not vote against Republican Senate candidates in order to send a message about Trumpism. I disagree. He writes, “A rage, fury, and a ‘burn it all down’ mentality is one of the ...

Capping a week of deserved tributes, the funeral for Rep. John Lewis in Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church brought me back a quarter-century to another funeral for another revered member of Congress, former House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. On a cold January day at St. ...

“Nobody likes me.” — Donald Trump “Truth or Consequences” is the name of a town in New Mexico, and of a game show dating from the 1940s. But it’s also one of the primal laws of existence. Where an important truth is denied, consequences follow. So none of us can be surprised ...

She was a teacher in Michigan. She was in line at a Walmart in rural Ohio. She was at a bar in San Francisco. She was a post office supervisor in Miami. He told her to smile, and she didn’t. He wanted to buy her a drink, and she declined. He didn’t like her driving. He didn’t ...

We are watching a show. It’s important to keep that in mind. It has its villains — Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland and other supporters of the “liberal, radical left” idea that people have the right peaceably to assemble and to petition the government ...

I expected despair. I should have known better. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had just been eviscerated by the Supreme Court. So I called Georgia Rep. John Lewis, for whom passage of the act was the defining event of a heroic life, thinking his discouragement would mirror mine. Lewis ...

If the Trump family had never existed, someone would have invented them. Indeed, they’d have been right at home in some over-the-top TV soap produced by Aaron Spelling. As depicted in “Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary L. Trump’s lacerating new portrait of her uncle Donald and the ...

Dear Karen: I wanted you to know that I got your email. Yours, your husband’s, your brother’s and your best friend’s. All were vexed at my recent evocation of the meme that uses your name as shorthand for a certain type of white woman: rude, entitled and presuming to police ...

Dan Buck is a philosopher friend of mine with a rare gift for explaining the political world. Back when Ronald Reagan was an enormously popular president (carrying 93 out of a possible 100 states in two national campaigns), I marveled at how voters were so unfailingly tolerant, even ...

A few words on the death of Carsyn Leigh Davis. It has become predictable that the political right always knows whom to blame for disaster. After the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Donald Trump blamed video games. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, ...

So now, Karen’s got a gun. To be clear, her name wasn’t actually Karen — it was Jillian Wuestenberg. But Wuestenberg’s behavior — while with her husband, Eric Wuestenberg, she drew a gun on a Black woman and her daughter in a parking lot near Detroit last week after she and the girl ...

Christopher Slutman, 43, had always wanted to be a firefighter. He was that kind of kid, the kind who wants to save people. He was also a Marine Reserves staff sergeant who had served in Iraq. Last year, he was assigned to duty in Afghanistan. On April 8, 2019, just two weeks before he was ...

Even if this ends well, it will not end well. Mind you, if it ends badly — that is to say, if Donald Trump is returned to the White House in November — America’s likely future will be, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short.” But the paradox of our predicament is ...

In providing the crucial fifth vote to strike down a Louisiana law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at hospitals, Chief Justice John Roberts has re-enforced a longstanding theme: there is no guarantee a judge nominated by a Republican president will decide ...

It comes down to a binary choice. Either he is a monster or an ignoramus. Either Donald Trump did nothing when informed that American intelligence believed Russia was paying a bounty to the Taliban for killing American military personnel in Afghanistan, or he had no clue, didn’t even know ...

In the latest of many cynical and highly political moves, the House of Representatives last week passed a measure that would transform the District of Columbia and make it the 51st state. “DC,” as it is often abbreviated by locals, is already a “state.” It is a state of corruption, ...

New York Times/Siena College has Democrat Joe Biden at 50% and Republican President Donald Trump at 36%; CNN has Biden at 54% and Trump 36%; Fox News has Biden at 50% and Trump at 38%. These recent national polls have left Democrats almost giddy with anticipation. But before Democrats put the ...

This is an emergency. Election Day is little more than four months off, voters facing their most important choice since 1860: Donald Trump or America? It’s a decision that will define the future. And millions of us wonder if we’ll get to have our say. Such is the state of things seven ...

Last week, the Supreme Court stopped President Donald Trump from inflicting the devastation that candidate Trump had vowed to inflict on 700,000 young immigrants in this country. This is a temporary reprieve, which makes this another reason why this year’s presidential election is the ...

Meanwhile, back at the pandemic . . . The death toll now stands at 120,000. The United States, with roughly 4% of the world’s population, accounts for about 25% of its COVID-19 deaths. Those states that reopened despite warnings that doing so would cause a spike in coronavirus cases are ...