Events are moving fast. Seven days ago, as I write, Israel had not yet launched its first attacks on targets in Iran. Seven days from now, things may well have changed -- significantly.
"How'm I doin'?" the late New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask constituents on his travels through the city. President Donald Trump, in the opinion of most Americans, is doin' pretty well.
You see the same pattern over much of the world. In three consecutive presidential elections in the United States. In the latest polls in Britain, where the 2016 Brexit referendum was the first notable outbreak. In France's most recent national election and in Germany's. In Canada's election last month. And maybe in Poland and South Korea last weekend.
"I'm not happy with what Putin is doing. He's killing a lot of people, and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin," said Donald Trump on Truth Social over the holiday weekend.
How does a political party with overwhelming advantages, including increasing support from the growing bloc of highly educated and affluent voters, almost monopoly support from the press and broadcast media, and with burgeoning financial and high-tech sectors of the economy, manage to lose just about everything across the board?
Mississippi leads the nation. That's not a typographical error. And it's not just a gotcha phrase, preparing the reader for learning that Mississippi leads the nation on all sorts of negative things.
If you are a graduate of Yale University, you can vote every spring for a member of the Yale Corporation, which selects the school's president. However, you can only participate if you vote for one of the two candidates nominated by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee, a group of university officials and graduates. There's no way to write in a name or, if you don't favor either candidate, to cast a blank ballot. You must vote for one of the insiders' choices or not vote at all.
"It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals."
Reality has a vote. That is one lesson administered to the body of politics in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump's second administration.
It hardly qualifies as news anymore, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership declined from 2023 to 2024, going from 10% to 9.9% of wage and salary workers. Some 32% of public employees are union members compared to only 5.9% of private-sector workers, down from 6% in 2023.
It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries' trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words -- say, "buyer-dominant" countries and "seller-dominant" countries.
Is President Donald Trump bent on political self-harm? It often seems that way. His overall job approval rating still hovers within a point or two of the 50% popular vote he received last November. But he is losing support on the economy and inflation, the No. 1 issue last year, while his overwhelming success in reducing illegal immigration has reduced the salience of what was the No. 2 issue.
"Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city," former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. "No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination."
Now they tell us.
Will the second Trump administration come undone by an economic policy based on what the British military historian Lawrence Freedman, describing Vladimir Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, calls "tendentious history"?
Some thoughts spring to mind after President Donald Trump's 100-minute address to Congress.
Sooner or later, The New York Times catches on to the news. In the case of immigration policy, the news it has caught up with is that mass immigration, legal and illegal, from less-developed countries is politically toxic.
If you follow these things closely, you may have seen a clip of the chairman of the Munich Security Conference breaking down in tears, unable to speak any further while reflecting on Vice President JD Vance's speech there. This breakdown is remarkable because the chairman, Christoph Heusgen, is not a minor apparatchik but a sophisticated and knowledgeable official who was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's national security adviser from 2005 to 2017.
As one who shared the hope, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that representative government, guaranteed liberties and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections would spread across the globe, I naturally look back over the intervening long generation and ask what went wrong.
After a flurry of activity -- the president's tariff threats and showdowns
