David A. Graham

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Sometime in the next 15 days, the Justice Department is set to release a huge cache of files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The release, mandated under a law passed by Congress last month, has been the subject of a great deal of anticipation—but not a lot of clarity.

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Even today, nearly five years later, listening to Donald Trump’s call is shocking.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes,” he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and a few aides on January 2, 2021.

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For the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has seemed uncharacteristically passive. His own Republican Party bucked him on the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein—in a movement partly led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who once seemed like his staunchest apostle. His U.S.

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In his new memoir, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania shows little love for his current job, but he’s even more dismissive of his previous gig: serving as lieutenant governor. It was, he writes, “the easiest job in all of America, with few mandated duties.

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Last week, Leonardo Williams, the mayor of Durham, North Carolina, received a call from the office of Governor Josh Stein.

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Donald Trump is not worried about the Jeffrey Epstein files. Please don’t put in the newspaper that he is worried.

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The bulletins come every few days now. On Tuesday, a U.S. strike in the Caribbean Sea killed four people. On Sunday, two strikes in the Pacific Ocean killed six, and two people died in a November 4 strike. The MO rarely changes: a bellicose announcement from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

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Gambling is a numbers game, so here are a few: The pitcher Emmanuel Clase’s 2025 salary from Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians is $4.5 million dollars. This weekend, prosecutors unveiled charges that he had made just $12,000 from two recent rigged pitches.

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What did last week’s elections tell us about how the Democratic Party can win in the future? Probably a lot less than we’re going to learn this week.

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Every government shutdown is a game of a chicken between Democrats and Republicans, or sometimes between Congress and the White House. And every administration tries to use its power to squeeze opponents, moving around money to keep some programs running and closing others.

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You can’t find many clichés hoarier than Tip O’Neill’s rule that “all politics is local.” A truism is supposed to be true, though. Does this one still hold?
Tomorrow’s elections make the case that the opposite is more accurate these days: No politics is local.

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Did you hear about the new Democratic Party postmortem on the 2024 election? Perhaps I need to be more specific: There’s this one, that one, and also this one, and probably more that I’m missing.

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Every two years, politicians declare the most important election of our lifetimes, and becoming inured to that is easy. But as I reported on how the 2026 election could be in danger for my recent story, I started to wonder if maybe the assertion was true this time.

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President Donald Trump dropped the news casually at the very end of a White House roundtable this past Thursday.

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Gather round and let me tell you a fantastical tale of the past, when government shutdowns were highly unusual. They didn’t even occur until the 1980s, and none lasted for more than three days until 1995. We’re now in the sixth shutdown since the start of the Clinton administration.

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With each new communication medium comes new opportunities for politicians to get themselves into trouble. Congress demanded that letters from envoys to the French government be turned over in the XYZ Affair, thwarting President John Adams’s desire to maintain a tenuous peace with France.

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Say what you will about Donald Trump’s effect on American civic life as a whole, but he’s done wonders for public participation. Voter turnout in the past few elections has reached record highs, for example.

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Sometimes just a few news items over a couple of days can capture an entire zeitgeist. Here are several that caught my eye this week: The Supreme Court is poised to weaken or destroy one of the last remaining pillars of the Voting Rights Act.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Partisan claims of fraud in the presidential election. Elaborate statistical analyses. Reports of shadowy, closed-door doings. All of this, they say, points to one conclusion: The results were compromised, and the real winner was kept out of the White House.

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When a person is naturalized as a U.S. citizen, they receive not just a new citizenship but also typically a few other objects: an American flag, a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and a greeting from the president.

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A strange thing happens when a notable public figure is killed: Their rough edges are sanded down, and a multidimensional person is flattened into the simplicity of a myth.
This has happened with jarring speed to Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer murdered last week in Utah.

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Updated at 7:23 p.m. ET on September 12, 2025
One small relief in an awful week is that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was the man leading the official response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, the high-profile conservative activist, is apparently the latest in a string of terrifying acts of political violence in the United States. Real America’s Voice, which aired Kirk’s show, announced his death. He was 31.
Kirk was shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University, just north of Provo, Utah.

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For a man openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump sure does love the rhetoric of violence.
On Saturday, the president posted an image of himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the Wagner-blasting cavalry officer in Apocalypse Now.

Photographs by Lisette Model
“I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America,” the photographer Lisette Model once said. America is many things—joy and pain, freedom and repression—and Model’s photos of jazz musicians and their audiences captured the full range. Model, a Viennese Jewish émigré, is best known today for her street photography, but in the early 1950s, she set out to create a book of jazz pictures, with an accompanying essay to be written by Langston Hughes.

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The best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.

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Because the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021, was caught on camera, what happened isn’t really in doubt.
Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was part of a crowd that stormed the U.S.

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The Trump administration broke the law. Its officials knew they were breaking the law. And they’ll likely try to do so again.

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The fried chickens have come home to roost. Cracker Barrel is reverting to its old logo, fewer than 10 days after announcing a new, stripped-down version. The ensuing controversy has been at once a welcome distraction from other news and an outgrowth of all the most annoying impulses in American life.