[ Posted Monday, June 12th, 2017 – 17:11 UTC ]
There are three separate court cases which are making news today, so I thought it'd be worthwhile to take a quick look at all of them, to see the potential impact they might have. The three cases are in very different stages of completion. One was just filed in federal court. One got a just got a ruling from the Ninth Circuit of Appeals. And one is about to be ruled on by the Supreme Court. So let's take them one at a time.
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[ Posted Friday, June 9th, 2017 – 17:20 UTC ]
President Donald Trump and former F.B.I. chief James Comey engaged this week in an extended game of "Liar, liar!" Or, more properly: "Liar!" "No, you're a liar!" Yes, it was "Super Bowl" week in Washington, folks!
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[ Posted Thursday, June 8th, 2017 – 18:01 UTC ]
On a day chock full of breaking news from Washington, it's rather extraordinary that one of the biggest stories was about something which didn't happen. Not unlike Sherlock Holmes noting the significance of the dog which did not bark in the night, one of the most astonishing things about this morning's congressional testimony by fired F.B.I. director James Comey was that President Donald Trump did not angrily tweet about it while it was happening. Yes, this is precisely where we now find ourselves as a nation -- it's a big story that the president didn't fly off the handle publicly, in reaction to seeing something he didn't like, on television.
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[ Posted Friday, May 26th, 2017 – 17:22 UTC ]
President Donald Trump went on a tour of foreign countries this week, and World War III did not erupt. So things could have been worse.
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[ Posted Monday, May 22nd, 2017 – 16:41 UTC ]
President Donald Trump has only just begun his first road trip outside the United States, and he's already "exhausted," according to one of his own advisors. This may or may not be true, since anything either Trump or any of his spokespeople say at this point has to be taken with a grain of salt -- especially considering the "exhausted" comment was given as an excuse for a Trump gaffe (more on that in a bit). But this week's calendar for Trump seems to have been constructed on the theme of: "Any Trump campaign promises left unbroken? Well, let's see how many we can break in a single week!"
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[ Posted Friday, May 19th, 2017 – 17:44 UTC ]
We'd like to begin today by apologizing for not including whatever scandal broke while we were writing this column. It takes us hours to write these, and while we're typing we're not reading news headlines. So this weekly wrapup will doubtlessly not mention whatever scandal broke in the past few hours, and for this we apologize. We would direct you to the final talking point today to cover this lapse (from which we also borrowed our subtitle today, because Daniel Drezner's article is such a hilarious piece of satire).
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[ Posted Thursday, May 18th, 2017 – 17:12 UTC ]
From the beginning, the administration of Donald Trump has been providing roughly one scandal per week. Not a week went by without some explosive story appearing in the headlines. That pace, obviously, was unsustainable. Incredibly, however, this pace is now rapidly increasing. Last week, we moved into "scandal of the day" territory, and are now fast approaching "scandal of the hour." Welcome to the Scandalpalooza that is the Trump administration!
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[ Posted Friday, May 12th, 2017 – 16:49 UTC ]
This week will go down in American political history as the week people stopped comparing Donald Trump to Andrew Jackson, and instead began comparing Trump to a different Oval Office predecessor, Richard Nixon. If we had a dollar for every time the word "Nixonian" was written or uttered onscreen this week, we could retire tomorrow.
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[ Posted Wednesday, May 10th, 2017 – 16:36 UTC ]
Donald Trump hasn't even been in office for four whole months, and already he's being compared to Richard Nixon. That is both stunning as well as somewhat expected, really. Just on personality alone, Trump seems the most Nixonian figure to occupy the Oval Office since Tricky Dick himself roamed the hallways. Sooner or later, Trump's penchant for vengeance against his perceived enemies was going to cause some problems. It's now obvious that "sooner" won out over "later."
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 9th, 2017 – 16:37 UTC ]
I had an article all ready to go today, and then I took a quick peek at the news. Which caused me to go back and start all over again. Because James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has just been fired. Obviously, I'm not going to have any in-depth analysis, since this happened less than an hour ago (as I write this).
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