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 president does pretty much nothing to advance the cause of traditional Republicans. If the Republican Party is going to rediscover a semblance of its better self, he needs to be stopped.
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.
William Barr brings to mind “The Best and the Brightest,” the term for the liberal intellectuals who became architects and defenders of the Vietnam War. They too were capable and decent men who allowed their capabilities and decency to become lost in a void of self-delusion.
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.
What Joe Biden is saying is that our history may not move in a straight line all the time, but it always ends up moving, ultimately, in the right direction (or at least it always has).
Joe Biden’s only path as a candidate is to stand for a return to normalcy. It’s to speak for all those Democratic voters who want a turn back to rationality, pragmatism and governance.
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?