What a difference a week makes. On May 19, President Donald Trump took off in Air Force One for the Middle East and Europe. He left behind a Washington and a nation buzzing about his firing of FBI Director James Comey, the multiple reasons he had given for doing so, the meeting he'd had with the Russian foreign minister a day later and his statement that Comey is a "nut job."
DURHAM, England -- When I first visited England to cover a British election 20 years ago this month, there were striking similarities between British and American politics.
Why did President Donald Trump fire FBI Director James Comey now? The answer, as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York has argued, is that he waited until after his impeccably apolitical deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, was in place as Comey's direct superior. Rosenstein was confirmed April 25, and his memorandum titled "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI" was appended to Trump's firing letter exactly two weeks later.
"Cultural appropriation" has become the latest evil denounced by soi-disant social justice warriors, on campus and off. Examples:
"I was taught that white people shouldn't listen to rap music because it's cultural appropriation and could be offensive to my classmates," writes Pomona College student Steven Glick in The Washington Post.
Capital vs. countryside -- that's the new political divide, visible in multiple surprise election results over the past 11 months. It cuts across old partisan lines and replaces traditional divisions -- labor vs. management, north vs. south, Catholic vs. Protestant -- among voters.
What to make of the results of the first two of this spring's special House elections? Start off by putting them in perspective. They pose a challenge to both political parties, but especially to Republicans, who have been used to an unusually stable partisan alignment, an alignment that has become scrambled by Donald Trump.
With the inauguration of Donald Trump this year, we have now had, for the first time in our history, three American presidents who were born in the same year. There have been three pairs of presidents born in the same year -- the very dissimilar John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, in 1767; Richard Nixon and his surprise successor, Gerald Ford, in 1913; and Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, in 1924.
Donald Trump's unorthodox campaign and unexpected victory have produced a culture of mistrust permeating our politics and threatening to undermine the rule of law. That's not healthy, whatever you think of Trump or his political opponents.
"Dare I suggest," writes the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, "that the quality of governance in this country has taken a downward turn of late?" Or as Casey Stengel, while managing the New York Mets on their way to a 40-120 season in 1962, reportedly asked, "Can't anybody here play this game?"
In a week chock-full of news, the party that on the night of Nov. 8 found itself, much to its surprise, very much out of power has been having difficulty finding a way to return.
Perceptions matter. People make decisions, even life-altering decisions, based on what they perceive as likely to happen. To the extent that public policy affects such decisions, the perception of likely policy change can affect behavior even before the change happens -- even if it ends up never happening.
"Most Americans don't like change very much," writes economist and Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen, "unless it is on terms that they manage and control." That's just one of many provocative sentences you can mine from the riches threaded through his new book, "The Complacent Class."
The afternoon before President Donald Trump's Tuesday night speech to Congress, Twitter watchers were treated to a flurry of tweets, inspired by comments at the traditional lunch with network anchors, that the president was going to endorse something very much like the "comprehensive" immigration bills that foundered in Congress in 2006, 2007 and 2013.
Substance and style -- it's easy to get them confused or mistake one for the other. And they're never entirely unconnected, though exactly how much so is a matter of debate.
Amid the turmoil of the first month of the Trump administration, with courts blocking his temporary travel ban and his national security adviser resigning after 24 days, the solid partisan divisions in the electorate -- modestly changed in 2016 from what they'd been over the previous two decades -- remain in place.
Amid all the hurly-burly of President Donald Trump's first weeks in office, let's try to put the changes he's making and the feathers he's ruffling in a longer, 20-year perspective. Start off with his trademark issue -- one that clearly helped him win the 64 crucial electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin: trade.
Donald Trump's second week as president has been full of surprises and Sturm und Drang.
"From this day forward, it's going to be only America first, America first," Donald Trump proclaimed in his inaugural address. As has been his habit, he added to the prepared text the word "only" and employed the rhetorical device of repetition by repeating "America first."
The United States has just had three consecutive eight-year presidencies, and it's only the second time in history that that's happened. The only other such moment came on March 4, 1825, 192 years ago.
On Wednesday, in his first news conference as president-elect, Donald Trump came out swinging -- against some of the media (while praising others), against the policies and performance of the Obama administration, and against the intelligence community.
