Trump
Story Stream
Close, But No August 11, 2025
During Trump’s first term, there was a designated White House staffer whose job it was to sing: specifically, to play the sorts of songs known to calm and soothe the losses of temper that Trump often, it seems, experienced. Any small or large sort of...
When the Drugs Stopped Working August 06, 2025
New Yorker journalist Emily Witt’s autoethnographic memoir Health & Safety is part elegy for the previous decade’s NYC-Berlin rave scene, and part indictment of America in the years leading up to and including Trump’s first term. The book progresses ...
What Does a Journalist of the Woke Era Think Now? August 06, 2025
For many, Taylor Lorenz was one of the defining media personalities of the woke era. She was a “star reporter” at the New York Times and pioneered a characteristic style of controversy-filled social media engagement. Politically, she was reliably lef...
The First Tech Right August 04, 2025
The term “tech right” seems to have been coined by Richard Hanania in a 2023 Substack post that heralded the rightward turn of various Silicon Valley luminaries, most prominently PayPal mafiosi Elon Musk and David Sacks and venture capitalist Marc An...
Galt Gets Greenlit August 04, 2025
Back when he was just Donald Trump and not President Trump, the subject of Ayn Rand came up and, in particular, her novel The Fountainhead. “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” Trump said almost a decade ago. “That book relates ...
Reading the New Conservatives August 01, 2025
We are now months into the second Trump presidency, one that is markedly different, with significant changes not only from how past Republican presidents have governed, but also from Trump’s first term. Trump’s first administration enacted sweeping t...
Toward a National Restoration July 23, 2025
It has been a little over 10 years since Donald Trump, with characteristic flair, descended the escalators at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.Today, we can say in the words of Henry Olsen, the always astu...
Stephen Colbert Fans’ Cancellation Hysteria July 23, 2025
Stephen Colbert is at the center of a conspiracy theory.It was born last week, when news broke of CBS canceling Colbert’s late-night talk show. The network’s move wasn’t hard to understand: “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” reportedly loses $40 mi...
Why Crypto Won’t Free You July 22, 2025
In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14178, “Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology.” The order banned federal agencies from taking any action to develop, issue, or promote a Central Bank Digital C...
The Teaching Problem July 18, 2025
Higher education is much in the news, but the central challenge that colleges and universities are failing to meet is receiving hardly any attention. The big stories have been student loans, protests and demonstrations, affirmative action, ratings an...
Turning Trump-hate into Gold July 18, 2025
“Anything you regret about your presidency?”So asked Ben Meiselas of the MeidasTouch podcast of Joe Biden in December in a rare one-on-one sit-down, conducted during Biden’s lame-duck period, as he and the nation awaited President Trump’s return to t...
Damage Being Done to Museums in the Nation’s Capital July 15, 2025
It’s funny how you can see things over and over without really seeing them. How many times have I visited the National Gallery of Art over the years? Plenty, but it never struck me until recently that it has a direct and uninterrupted sightline acros...
The 5 Best Stand-Up Comedy Specials of 2025 (So Far) July 11, 2025
You might expect in a year when everything has gone to shit that comedians—being the social critics in clowns’ clothing that they are—would have plenty to say about it. The mileage Bill Burr could get out of Trump and Musk’s messy divorce would surel...
The Census Fight That Could Reshape U.S. Politics July 10, 2025
In this episode of The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller is joined by RealClear Investigations’ Ben Weingarten to break down his latest investigation outlining the high-stakes legal and political battle over who gets counted in the ...
The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism July 04, 2025
There’s a genre of right-wing social media posting that’s dedicated to retro-Americana aesthetics: Norman Rockwell paintings, pictures of cute New England towns, preppy clothing, 1950s family scenes, Beach Boys-era Southern California, and similar th...
I Watch the Witch Burn July 02, 2025
I WALK PAST the organic juicery on Sunset. Its slouching marquee screams “COFFEE: IT’S GOOD AS F*CK,” the exterior plastered with adverts for a festival appearance by Paris Hilton—2007 was very loud, and now it seems to reverberate. Down the street a...
Helicopter Parenting July 01, 2025
This all began a little more than six months ago. My three-year-old daughter and I were driving from our house in Washington, D.C., to her preschool in Northern Virginia. It was a cool day, Donald Trump had not yet been elected president, and the who...
Rehearsing for the Apocalypse June 26, 2025
WHEN KAREN RUSSELL STARTED writing her new novel The Antidote, Trump hadn’t yet gained a second term. When we spoke in March, Trump hadn’t taken over the Kennedy Center, revoked NEA grants, torn apart climate protections, or sent worldwide markets in...
Model Collapse June 26, 2025
A peculiar development is on hand. The people in power, the people who make the news and shape history, no longer want to wait for someone to play them, years later, in a movie; they want to play themselves, now, live on TV, with dramatic flair. They...
Trump’s Return to Shakespearean Politics June 26, 2025
Israel’s attack on Iran has been, and continues to be, negotiated largely in public — on X and Truth Social. This is not fully explicable in terms of President Trump’s personal style or willingness to flout precedent, but rather by slower-gestating, ...
The Real Reason Men Should Read Fiction June 25, 2025
There’s always something going on with men. They can’t make friends; they’re very lonely; they’re “losing” to women; they listen to Andrew Tate. And, we are told, they do not read. Over the past few years, multiple articles have observed the so-calle...
Against Optimization June 24, 2025
As anyone who reads me will recognize, I am not a language pedant, but there is one usage over which I am a bit of a stickler: “begging the question.”The incorrect usage conflates “begging the question” (or “begs the question”) with essentially, “rai...
The Genius & the Impresario June 23, 2025
I am certainly glad that the Trump Administration is doing its best to crush the ideology of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. While the terms themselves can be used in ways that are positive and laudable, the way in which they are used in the th...
Trump Should Take Note of Italy’s Cultural Strides June 16, 2025
President Trump inaugurated his personal chairmanship of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by attending a performance of Les Misérables this week. While he was there, I hope he considered looking to Italy for ways to f...
Turbo America June 13, 2025
It was a crisp March morning in Austin, and just outside the Texas Capitol a swarm of protesters large enough to fill a sports arena had gathered to wave signs and shout into megaphones. Packs of bureaucrats who worked in the building stood together ...
