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 ...

For many years, I was skeptical about accusations of racism in the criminal justice system. Yes, I knew that blacks comprised only about 12% of the population yet represented 33% of the prison population. But those data alone did not prove that police are racists or that courts are tougher on ...

“I wish I knew how it would feel to be free” — Nina Simone, 1967 Here’s a knock-knock joke: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Aunt Jemima.” “Aunt Jemima who?” “Ain’t yo’ mama on the pancake box?” OK, so you’re not laughing. But that joke killed in ...

Dear Dwight Howard: So I hear you’re not sure you want to come back and play basketball. Your team (also my team), the Los Angeles Lakers, was considered a championship contender before the season was abruptly halted by the coronavirus pandemic. Now comes word the NBA plans to resume a ...

This column is presented as a public service. A few days ago, Greg Glassman, the founder and CEO of CrossFit, set off an uproar by belittling the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. In a Zoom call with gym owners, he bristled at the idea of memorializing a man whose ...

We thought it was a fixed feature of our new era. We thought that objective reality didn’t matter anymore, if it even existed at all. We thought we were so entrapped by our information silos that nothing could penetrate. “LOL. Nothing matters” ran the Twitter meme. What we’ve learned ...

For two weeks now, outrage has convulsed America: pundits, preachers, protesters and at least one “severely conservative” GOP senator all raising their voices to condemn police brutality. Yet, here’s the startling truth: No one has made a stronger case against the police than the ...