It’s impossible to know whether the U.S. president will carry out his threats to strike Iran, how the regime might retaliate or what the long-term fallout would be. What’s surer is that neutering the threat posed by Iran and encouraging a better future for its people will take more than bombs and missiles.

With possible talks in flux, ...Read more

Even if the administration has temporarily backed off threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests in Minnesota, the idea will come up again. That’s partly because the power — which would allow the president to use active-duty troops to conduct domestic law enforcement — is dangerously vulnerable to abuse.

What’s known as ...Read more

Americans are getting bigger-than-usual tax refunds this year. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been talking up this windfall for months, saying that it will help spark “a non-inflationary boom.”

That’s unlikely. First, the estimated $90 billion to $100 billion increase in refunds, a result of several provisions of the budget law ...Read more

The U.S. government is using unaccountable federal forces to violently suppress dissent and reinforce its power through force and fear. This behavior is designed to make the people feel powerless and the governing authority impenetrable. It may feel shocking in America today, but it’s a common approach used by repressive regimes around the ...Read more

Tariff turmoil. Threats against Iran. An anti-immigration surge that has taken two innocent lives.

And there's a sizable slump hitting the stock, bond, precious metals and cryptocurrency markets.

What's the connection?

The answer is: Not much.

When it comes to Trump policies, investors have come to realize that Trump is often all talk, ...Read more

The latest nauseant from MAGA types pretending to care about children was dished up last week, but amid the internment of kindergartners, the slashing of funds to catch child predators and a measles outbreak at a detention center, you are forgiven for missing it.

I am talking about a coordinated campaign launched by the religious right to ...Read more

Silicon Valley’s most ideologically driven company may have become its most commercially dangerous.

This week’s $300 billion selloff of software and financial services stocks was apparently sparked by Anthropic PBC, and a new legal product the artificial intelligence startup had released. However pointless you may think it is to attribute ...Read more

What has followed the forced extraction of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela is neither transition nor collapse, but takeover. The dictator is gone; the dictatorship is not. Whatever its strategic objectives, the American intervention did not remake Venezuela’s political order; it replaced its commander.

That distinction matters because...Read more

There was a deep chill in the air the day President Donald Trump said he’d consider invoking the Insurrection Act after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in south Minneapolis. Something came to mind: Inhumanity follows atrocities as the “jackal follows the wounded beast.” That dictum feels newly ...Read more

Federal Judge William G. Young of Boston left no room for doubt about what he thought of President Donald Trump's approach to governing.

In September, the Reagan appointee found that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had "intentionally" breached the 1st Amendment, with Trump's support, by ordering the ...Read more

Donald Trump is proposing to violate the U.S. Constitution by calling for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” in upcoming elections. That doesn’t bother the president, who is constantly repeating his debunked claims that the 2020 presidential election results were doctored and he really won.

In truth, he lost. But he doesn’t care ...Read more

America just passed the 50th anniversary of one of its truly terrible days — one that future historians can track as the beginning of the end of our democracy.

On Jan. 30, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Buckley v. Valeo, overturned three of the major federal campaign finance reforms Congress enacted after the Watergate scandal. ...Read more

Jeffrey Epstein has become one of the few scandals that unites Americans in cynicism.

The case is about far more than sex crimes. It has crystallized a suspicion many Americans across party lines already carried — there is one set of rules for the powerful and another for everyone else.

With each new release of documents, flight logs and ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Frank Clem, a pickleball pal of mine, recently put out the word that he was collecting whistles to deliver to the front lines of anti-ICE demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles, Highland Park, Pasadena and other locations.

I was out of the country at the time, but shortly after I returned, I thought about Clem when Minneapolis ...Read more

Gov. Ron DeSantis likes to talk about how “Florida was DOGE before DOGE was cool.” He spends a lot of time pointing fingers at government entities across the state that he accuses of abusing taxpayer money.

But DeSantis should write the playbook on how to spend lavishly on his political priorities — the same ideology-driven spending he ...Read more

Fusion has been in the news a lot recently given its promise as an abundant and clean source of energy that could help power the AI revolution.

Late last year, the Trump administration overhauled the Department of Energy by phasing out several clean‑energy offices while shifting the focus to fusion (along with AI, quantum and critical ...Read more

The search continues for a framework to make sense of, or at least label, the baffling state of world affairs since Donald Trump took his second oath of office as president of the United States. And now we have a new contender: Neo-royalism. At first — and even second — glance, I’d say it fits.

First, a recap of some of the “isms” ...Read more

January 20 marked the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Like previous presidents, the Trump White House will be measured by how well the president has fulfilled his campaign promises. We’ve already seen headlines that so far the president has failed to cut our grocery bills, one of candidate Trump’s ...Read more

If you wake each morning already angry at news of some latest outrage from President Donald Trump or some unhinged, malevolent message he posted online overnight, and if you then go to bed already burdened by nightmares from the headlines of the day, there's good news: You're not alone.

Being social animals, humans find comfort in company. ...Read more

The Donald Trump administration’s criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has engaged allies in Congress. Yet the real threat to the Fed isn’t Trump’s investigation — it’s the erosion of public support. The Fed’s only real strategy to successfully pushing back against attacks on its independence is to engage the...Read more