What if they held a tumultuous election, with an early one-sided debate, a candidate substitution and third-party withdrawal, and no voters changed their minds? Well, that's not exactly what has happened in America's 60th presidential election year, but it's not so far off, either.
Learning isn't necessarily cumulative. Human experience over the centuries provides lessons, some clearer than others. But each generation has to learn lessons anew, and some do not.
"There's a lot of opposition to just hearing what President Trump has to say," Elon Musk said at the beginning of his two-hour interview on X with the 45th and would-be 47th president.
There is an uncanny symmetry in the two presidential candidates' choice of vice presidential running mates. There are a few superficial differences -- Republican J.D. Vance is 40, Democrat Tim Walz 60. Vance is bearded, Walz balding.
Monday night's "White Dudes for Harris" Zoom call, with some 90,000 registered to participate, was surely a landmark in political history. Nearly 200 years ago, when the Democratic Party was being formed to elect and reelect Andrew Jackson, the entire American electorate, with exceptions, such as Black New Englanders, property-owning Black New Yorkers, and New Jersey widows, was made up of "white dudes."
The astonishing political events of the last four weeks make plain, once again, how much of America's history depends on what voters have come to accept as the choice of one person: each presidential nominee's choice of a vice presidential candidate. Even as the nomination process was expanded, half a century ago, to include millions of primary voters, the choice of the vice presidential nominee has devolved from smoke-filled rooms of bosses who represented large constituencies to the choice of a single person.
For those of a certain age, or with more than a woke education, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump brings back echoes of history.
Fourteen days after his disastrous debate, President Joe Biden is still in the race for reelection. Multiple elected Democrats, New York Times editorial writers and columnists, and Democratic Party megadonors -- "elites," sneers the perceptive David Dayen -- have called on him to step aside. A secret ballot of congressional Democrats, the procedure under which they choose their own party leaders, would surely go against Biden, probably by a wide margin.
Between 1998 and 2003, the budget of the National Institutes of Health was doubled. This was an extraordinary enterprise after the multi-year, post-Cold War decline in defense spending and at a time when government agency budgets tended to be increased marginally or carried over from previous years.
Four weeks after former President Donald Trump's conviction in a much-criticized Manhattan prosecution and a week before the first and earliest-ever scheduled post-primary presidential debate, it's a good time to look at how these two unusually elderly and oft-reviled candidates stand in the contest.
"The far right made big gains in European elections," reads the Associated Press headline on last week's European Parliament elections. Lest you wonder why you should dread gains by the "far right," the lead sentence of the article notes that the EU has "roots in the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy."
"A sham case, and everyone knows it." So writes the iconoclastic Matt Taibbi, once counted as a left-wing writer, and he's not the only one from outside MAGA precincts who has been appalled by the Manhattan district attorney's case that produced a guilty verdict against former President Donald Trump.
For three and a half years, the Biden White House has seemed remarkably leakproof. Even amid popular backlash to administration policies -- the spending splurge in 2021 that was followed by sharp inflation in 2022 and 2023, the changes in enforcement of immigration laws that have produced numbers of incoming illegal immigrants unmatched even in border boom periods in the 1980s and '90s, and the endorsement of policies allowing biological men to compete in women's sports -- top officials have stuck to talking points and avoided finger-pointing.
If you want to explain to a puzzled, left-leaning writer like The Atlantic's Annie Lowrey why most voters this year rate the economy during former President Donald Trump's term more favorably than the economy during President Joe Biden's, you might start with a pair of simple charts.
Will the world be better off with fewer people? For years that has been a hypothetical question posed to suggest an affirmative answer. Fewer people, it was claimed, would mean less depredation of natural resources, less urban overcrowding, more room for other species to stretch their (actual or metaphorical) legs. Mankind was a parasite, a blight, and overpopulation a disease. Fewer people would mean a better Earth.
The violent campus takeover by protesters -- some of them students, many not -- has had the unintended effect of discrediting the premise underlying the protest. That premise is that the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed, and that the oppressors are always evil and their victims already virtuous.
As the philosopher and baseball player Yogi Berra once (supposedly) said, it's deja vu all over again. Student protesters are occupying campuses of famed universities across the country. In New York, Columbia University protesters occupied administrative offices in Hamilton Hall and were cleared out by police, exactly 56 years to the day after student protesters occupied and were thrown out of that building in 1968.
Was the passage by the House last Saturday and the Senate on Tuesday of the foreign aid package with money for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan a turning point in American foreign policy?
Why was America in the Revolutionary War era, with 3 million people, able to generate leaders of the quality of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, while today's America, with 333 million people, generates the likes of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump?
When are we going to trust our fellow Americans again? When are we going to allow qualified individuals with responsibility to make decisions without consulting detailed rulebooks and formal procedures?
