Section: The Atlantic (USA)
No One Is Left to Restrain Trump
The debate on President Trump’s foreign policy in his first two years in office revolved around the question of what mattered more: the policy or the tweets. Trump administration officials, sympathetic conservatives, and a significant number of foreign government officials argued that the policy pursued by the administration was sound even...
Trump Is Running Out of Defenses
It is a quirk of our current highly-polarized political environment that a party can plausibly claim its opponents are acting in a partisan fashion by insisting upon doing so itself. It takes two to tango, but refusing to tango takes only one. And if Democrats and Republicans aren’t dancing together, then any action becomes a partisan...
Trump’s Reverse Cover-Up
In an interview with the Washington Examiner on Thursday, Donald Trump floated a new idea.“This is over a phone call that is a good call,” Trump said, referring to his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “At some point, I’m going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the...
The Impeachment Inquiry Is Fully Legitimate
In declaring the initiation of a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, : Nancy Pelosi’s predictions for impeachment]The seriousness and circumspection of this process stands in marked contrast to the president’s attacks on it. He and his defenders have declared the inquiry not just a “: Impeach Donald Trump]If you...
Trump’s First Impeachment Win
So this is how the impeachment of President Donald Trump is going to go.The House this morning cast its first vote in a process that could lead to just the third Senate impeachment trial of a president in U.S. history. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced plans for the vote earlier this week, there was at least some promise of drama: Which House...
The Party-Line Impeachment
Legally, the passage of a House resolution on the impeachment inquiry on Thursday doesn’t mean much. Democrats have already launched the inquiry, and a federal judge ruled last week that they didn’t need to have a vote.But it’s not clear that the resolution had much political effect, either. The final vote on the resolution was...
Bad Arguments for Limiting Speech
In a Washington Post op-ed titled “Why America Needs a Hate Speech Law,” Richard Stengel, who once edited Time, begins by recalling, “When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting ‘free thought for those who agree with us but freedom...
Anonymous Is a Coward
The Ukrainian scandal has been marked by profiles in both courage and cowardice.A succession of career officials from the State Department and the Department of Defense—beginning with Bill Taylor, the chargé d’affaires at the embassy in Ukraine—have defied the Trump White House, testifying under oath to Congress about presidential abuses of...
Meet the Spiritual Leader of the Hong Kong Protests
HONG KONG—When reports of a possible law banning face masks at protests first surfaced this month, chat groups and online messaging boards popular with demonstrators lit up in fury over what seemed to be yet another (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to quell unrest here.Attention quickly turned to a snippet of a by-election debate from 2016,...
Nancy Pelosi’s Predictions for Impeachment
Nancy Pelosi wants you to know that the House Democratic leadership has not committed to impeaching President Donald Trump—notwithstanding the muscle she’s thrown behind the inquiry, or tomorrow’s vote on how its next stage will proceed.“We have not made any decision to impeach,” the House speaker insisted during a meeting with a...
