David A. Graham

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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.

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If you’re looking for reasons to be skeptical about the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s home last week, you don’t have to look very hard.

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“The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton declared 29 years ago. Donald Trump never got the memo.
In his second term, the president is embracing perhaps the most sweeping expansion of federal power since that of Franklin D.

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Do Democrats need their own Stephen Miller? That’s what the Rolling Stone journalist Asawin Suebsaeng reports hearing from many people on the left. Imagining a progressive version of Donald Trump’s far-right-hand man is hard enough, much less justifying why this might be a good thing.

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On the surface, yesterday’s White House summit on Ukraine showed an impressively unified front among President Donald Trump, major European leaders, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The participants all smiled and expressed optimism.

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One week after Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., the militarization of the city is escalating.
Trump now says that he expects Congress to allow him to maintain control of D.C. police after a legally mandated 30-day limit.

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Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has made himself a spokesperson for Democratic resistance to Republican plans for a brazen mid-decade gerrymander, and on Sunday, he appeared on Meet the Press to state his case. “It’s cheating,” Pritzker said of the Texas redistricting that the president has demanded.

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For years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. They labeled everything—a report on homegrown extremism, IRS investigations into nonprofits—a sign of impending authoritarianism. Measures taken by state governments to combat the spread of COVID? Tyranny.

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Activists and organizers like to say that the world is run by those who show up, so the fact that what Texas’s Democratic legislators need to do to further their agenda is not show up is inauspicious for them.

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Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read this article.
Don’t let it go to your head, and I won’t let it go to mine; we’re not special. He doesn’t want anyone reading anything about Jeffrey Epstein, or his own relationship with the late sex offender.

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One of Donald Trump’s tells is his talk of the “Russia hoax.” When that phrase passes his lips, it’s a sign that the president is agitated about something.

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Awarding superlatives in the Donald Trump era is risky. Knowing when one of his moves is the biggest or worst or most aggressive is challenging—not only because Trump himself always opts for the most over-the-top description, but because each new peak or trough prepares the way for the next.

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Tomorrow is Donald Trump’s deadline to agree to trade deals before he imposes tariffs, and he means it this time. Why are you laughing? (In fact, since saying that yesterday, he’s already chickened out with Mexico, putting the “taco” in, well, TACO.

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In theory, the proposition seems foolproof: Everyone hates the taxman and loves to keep their money, so a tax cut must be politically popular.
But Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act has tested the theory and found it wanting.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a cunning political operator, but even he can’t weaken President Donald Trump’s bond with television. The two leaders are at odds again over Gaza, now because of human-rights-organization warnings of widespread starvation.

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Shortly after becoming president, as Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn’t be worth the electoral hit he’d take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted.

Building an empire takes decades. Destroying it can only take a few years, and sometimes the vandals are in the palace, not outside the gates.
For much of the 20th century, American broadcast television revolved around three networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS. William S. Paley, CBS’s longtime CEO, made sure that his company—the Columbia Broadcasting Service—was a leader among them. The network was home to Edward R.

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In his first term, President Donald Trump was assiduous in courting his base of committed supporters, often at the expense of voters who were persuadable. Those decisions helped lose him the 2020 election.

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One thing that’s helpful in a crisis is steady leadership. Unfortunately, disaster-stricken Americans are stuck with Kristi Noem instead.
Noem, the secretary of homeland security, was unequivocal at a March Cabinet meeting: “We are eliminating FEMA.

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Not that long ago, believe it or not, Donald Trump ran for president as the candidate who would defend the First Amendment.

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Signs were all around, but the clinching evidence that the Tea Party is back came this week in New Hampshire, where the Republican Scott Brown announced that he’d be running for U.S. Senate.

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In March, President Donald Trump was preparing to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport noncitizens.

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Jessica Ramos, a Democrat running for mayor of New York, has had scathing words for Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who is also running for mayor.

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When Donald Trump raised the idea of toppling Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei yesterday, it wasn’t just the idea that was surprising. It was the particular phrase he used to describe it.

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Back in March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard delivered a view of Iran to the House Intelligence Committee that was in line with Trump-administration policy: hostile toward Tehran, but also skeptical of the need for American intervention.

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This past weekend marked a high for opposition to Donald Trump, and another low for the opposition party.

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Donald Trump is focused this week on cracking down on the people he calls “insurrectionists”—but not so much on the ones who fought an actual armed rebellion against the U.S. government in the 1860s.
On Tuesday, Trump traveled to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.

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For months, as Donald Trump has hollowed out the executive branch, defied courts, and worked to suppress dissent, his critics have rightly worried about the lack of visible public opposition.

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Under Donald Trump, the federal government is like a bad parent: never there when you need him but eager to stick his nose in your business when you don’t want him to.
The relationship between Trump and California has always been bad, but the past few days represent a new low.