When debating current issues, it's helpful to avoid inaccurate depictions of past policy, especially on immigration, in which both opponents and advocates of President Donald Trump's policies have views based on not altogether accurate renditions of the past.
Here's a clue that the off-year elections in November 2026 may not go the way conventional wisdom suggests. That conventional wisdom is that the president's party almost always loses the House and, slightly less often, Senate seats.
For a generation, Americans have had a historically large number of ex-presidents around, a possible source of counsel from one of only 45 people who have exercised the broad powers conferred by Article II of the Constitution.
Nine months after the 2024 election, we've been graced with definitive dissections of the electorate and how it has changed since that escalator ride 10 years and one month ago. There's wide agreement in the analyses of the Associated Press/Fox News Vote Cast, the Democratic firm Catalist's What Happened and the Pew Research Center analysis.
Not many people today remember the exhilaration so many Americans felt after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967. The liberal folks around me at work and law school then had been frustrated and puzzled at the lack of progress being made in Vietnam by the 448,000 U.S. troops stationed there, and the sudden and astonishing success of the Israel Defense Forces, symbolized by the eye-patched Gen. Moshe Dayan, was a refreshing contrast. No talk then of Israelis as colonialist settler oppressors.
Zohran Mamdani's lead in first choices in New York City's ranked-choice mayoral primary, and his inevitable victory when second, third, fourth and fifth choices of trailing candidates are allocated to candidates voters ranked lower, mean that he'll be the Democratic nominee for mayor of the nation's largest city and the likely winner of the general election in November.
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.
