Sebastian Gorka, a onetime adviser to Donald Trump, wore a medal from the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group historically aligned with Nazism, to one of Trump’s inaugural balls. Gorka was reportedly a member of the group, whose founder, the Hungarian autocrat Miklos Horthy, once said, “For all my life, I have been an anti-Semite.”
In the second season of the serial drama “The Good Fight,” Diane Lockhart, an attorney played by the regal 67-year-old actress Christine Baranski, makes a heated speech at a meeting about a legal strategy for impeaching Donald Trump. “I have spent the last few months feeling deranged,” she shouts, though she uses an expletive before “deranged.” “Going numb! All Trump, all the time. What’s real, what’s fake? Well, you know what? I just woke up.”
In 2017, a brilliant visual effects expert created a video montage called “It’s Mueller Time! Trump Administration Season Ending.” Set to crooning of the 1963 song “From Russia With Love,” it shows FBI agents rounding up the central figures who brought us Donald Trump’s presidency, culminating in Trump himself being led away with hands behind his back. I’ll admit to having watched this over and over again; it’s one of the most satisfying bits of wish fulfillment I’ve ever seen. Wish fulfillme...
The identity politics fiasco surrounding Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been excruciating. Half of me is angry at her. The other half is furious for her.
Amid the unceasing awfulness of the Trump administration, I’ve lately found comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time,” which has in turn informed my thinking about the almost utopian ambitions of the Green New Deal.
Under current law in Virginia, third-trimester abortions are permitted when a woman’s physician and two other doctors certify that continuing a pregnancy would result in a mother’s death, or “substantially and irremediably impair the mental or physical health of the woman.” This week Kathy Tran, a Democrat in Virginia’s House of Delegates, testified in favor of a bill that would end the requirement for two extra doctors to sign off on such abortions, and strike the words “substantially and ir...
<em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The New York Times asked</em><em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> readers to send questions for Michelle Goldberg about her </em><em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">column on the rise of liberal gun enthusiasts</em><em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> or about her other work as a columnist. She has responded to several questions below.</em>
This year’s Women’s March, set to happen Saturday in cities across the country, has become extraordinarily messy. In 2017, the marches that took place in Washington and nationwide — the largest protests in American history — were radiant symbols of hope and resistance at a bleak, terrifying historical juncture. Two years later, the Women’s March organization has become a depressing study in how left-wing movements so often implode in the digital age.
Immediately after Donald Trump’s election, alarming stories appeared of school bullies who seemed to be inspired by the new president. In York County, Pennsylvania, two students marched through their high school hallways holding a Trump sign while a third shouted, “White power!” A teacher in Kansas reported students taunting classmates with the refrain, “Trump won, you’re going back to Mexico.” At several schools, white school sports fans chanted, “Trump! Trump!” at opposing teams with more p...
A few years ago, when I was self-employed and had recently had my second child, my husband went combing through my credit card statements, looking for tax deductions that I’d missed. I’m financially disorganized at the best of times, and with a baby and a toddler, I was barely even trying to keep track of my business expenses. So it’s not surprising that I hadn’t noticed the hundreds of dollars of weird recurring bank charges that my husband discovered.
This year is ending with one truly surprising development, a real man-bites-dog story: Donald Trump is poised to sign bipartisan legislation that will make America a slightly more decent place. I’m talking about the First Step Act, the criminal justice reform bill championed by Jared Kushner. The measure passed the Senate, 87-12, on Tuesday and the House on Thursday, and Trump is expected to sign it soon. According to Inimai Chettiar, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s...
This week, a Georgia state representative, Ed Setzler, the sponsor of a bill that would ban most abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat could be detected, spoke to a conservative group in the Atlanta suburbs about the legal fight he’d embarked on. “We need to maximize our influence over the next couple of weeks and then close this deal,” he said. Then, he continued, conservatives must mobilize behind Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, as “he recruits the best legal team in the nation ...
Scammers and cheats are the paradigmatic figures of our age, and not just because a con man is president of the United States. Again and again in recent years, people who’ve scaled the cultural heights have been revealed as audacious frauds. The systems and institutions that confer status in our society keep being exposed as Ponzi schemes. Grift is turning into our central national narrative.
Donald Trump — or, as he’s known to federal prosecutors, Individual-1 — might well be a criminal. That’s no longer just my opinion, or that of Democratic activists. It is the finding of Trump’s own Justice Department.
The Mueller investigation is over, and the only people close to Donald Trump who have been criminally charged are his former campaign chairman, former deputy campaign chairman, former personal lawyer, former national security adviser, former campaign foreign policy adviser and Roger Stone, the president’s longtime friend and strategist. The report written by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to a quotation in a brief summary issued by Attorney General William Barr, says that “while th...
Ever since the 2016 election, it’s been common for some people to refer to whatever year we’re in as a synonym for dystopian weirdness. (Last year, for example, CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted “Peak 2017” about a headline saying, “US ambassador denies own comments, then denies denial.”) The world has felt continuously off-kilter, like a TV drama whose writers developed a sudden fondness for psilocybin. Last month astronomers at Harvard wrote that a strange oblong space object “may be a fully operat...
In a tweet this month, one of these men tarred the other as an anti-Semite. If you’ve been following the increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken, you can probably guess which one.
In 2003, journalist Vicky Ward profiled Jeffrey Epstein, the financier indicted Monday on charges of sexually abusing and trafficking underage girls, for Vanity Fair.
Say this for Donald Trump. He may be transforming American politics into a kleptocratic fascist reality show and turning our once-great country into a global laughingstock, but as least he’s humiliating John Bolton in the process.
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