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    Evan Thomas

    Evan Thomas

  • I called George Bush a ‘wimp’ on the cover of Newsweek. Why I was wrong.

    In October 1987, when George H.W. Bush announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, Newsweek magazine ran a cover story titled “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’” The article did not quite come out and declare that Bush was a weakling, and it noted that Bush’s own advisers were worried about the “wimp” label. As the 41st president, Bush was anything but a wimp. In 1991, he had the courage to abandon his own “read my lips” vow and instead raise taxes in the cause of restoring fiscal sanity to the federal budget, left badly out of whack by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan.

  • Trump should have picked a true conservative for the Supreme Court

    With the selection of Brett Kavanaugh, conservatives are celebrating President Trump’s move to push the Supreme Court to the right. The model most commonly touted is the late Antonin Scalia, who, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, held down the court’s right flank for nearly two decades before his death in 2016. A better model — a healthier example for preserving a stable constitutional democracy — would be Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who exerted far more power than Scalia over the court’s decisions during her almost 25 years (1981-2006) on the bench.

  • Learning to live in Trump House

    In trying to make sense of Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday, it helps to take the long view. A good place to start is with the tumult of the 1960s. Trump’s stunning election is the unintended — but actually unsurprising — consequence of a great and essentially positive revolution in society and politics that is still far from over. His rise to power carries great risks, but it is possible that his time in office will be part of a turbulent, sometimes traumatic process that we can still use to work toward a better future.