David A. Graham

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Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges.

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Is Donald Trump strong or weak right now?
Usually, telling whether a president is up or down isn’t difficult, but the past few weeks have offered reasons to believe both.

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Local election officials are the lifeblood of American democracy. They, and not the president or Congress, are most important for functional elections, and that’s what made Tina Peters’s crimes especially egregious.
Peters was the county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, during the 2020 election.

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Donald Trump deserves plenty of criticism for his serial dishonesty, but on the rare occasions when he speaks frankly, that causes problems too.
This week, a reporter asked the president whether the deteriorating economic situation has created any urgency for him to reach a peace deal with Iran.

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The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, effectively demolishing a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is a “five-alarm fire,” former Representative G. K. Butterfield Jr. told me this week.

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Donald Trump loves to pit his advisers and staffers against one another—many aspects of Trump’s persona on The Apprentice may have been manufactured, but not this one.

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I have a confession to make: I love listening to bad music.
This realization came to me a few months ago, while I was working on an obituary for the guitarist Steve Cropper and relistened to his 1980 record, Playin’ My Thang. Cropper’s work as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.

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Seven years ago, midway through a multiyear demolition of the Voting Rights Act, John Roberts’s Supreme Court heard a case on a slightly different topic: partisan gerrymandering. Republican legislators from North Carolina had drawn a map of U.S.

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Most wars take a long time to achieve quagmire status, but Donald Trump’s Iran war is precocious. Just 60 days have passed since the president formally notified Congress about the military action there, on March 2. (The first air strikes had begun two days earlier.

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Staying in Donald Trump’s good graces while also protecting your own political future requires supreme political agility, and most people who try end up failing at both. Just ask Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Paul Ryan, and any number of other faded GOP stars—if you can find them.

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Seven years ago, during a marginally more innocent time, the Trump administration announced plans to hold the 2020 G7 summit at Donald Trump’s resort in Doral, Florida.

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Within hours after an attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, President Trump declared that the incident showed the need to build a ballroom at the White House without delay. “We need the ballroom,” he told reporters in a press conference.

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Pity poor Tucker Carlson. Watching Donald Trump’s war in Iran—which Carlson has branded “the single biggest mistake” by a U.S. president in his lifetime—he is ruing his strong support for Trump in the 2024 election.

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When Lori Chavez-DeRemer was nominated, she had a chance to be a pathbreaking secretary of labor, supposedly tasked with shepherding the Republican Party in a more worker-friendly direction. Instead, she turned out to be a typical Trump Cabinet member: disempowered and disgraced.

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Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down.

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Donald Trump, as even some of his fiercest admirers will admit, is not always a paragon of personal virtue. Although the president’s aides sometimes treat him like he is a toddler, as the political scientist Daniel Drezner has observed, he’s not an especially well-behaved one.

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Anxiety among election officials and experts had been building for months before Donald Trump issued his latest executive order purporting to ensure election integrity late last month.

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Many people get the Sunday scaries, but most of them are not a sitting president facing self-inflicted global chaos and the growing possibility of a bruising midterm election in a few months.

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Legal opinions tend to be dry, wordy, and intentionally vague. One issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel earlier this month is none of these.
“You have asked whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (‘PRA’ or ‘Act’) is constitutional.

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In an earlier, somewhat more innocent era of Donald Trump’s social-media posting, one could still chuckle darkly at his 2017 declaration that his approach “is not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.

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Critics have used many phrases to describe Donald Trump’s presidency, some of them unprintable. Scholars and journalists have debated whether Trump’s approach is “authoritarian,” “white supremacist,” or “fascist.

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A popular joke in the 1850s concerned a man who, upon being convicted for the murder of his parents, throws himself at the judge’s feet and begs for mercy on a poor orphan.

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To national audiences, the news that a North Carolina state senator had apparently lost a Republican primary race by two—yes, two—votes seemed like one of those quirky election stories that come around every year, such as when the mayor of Boca Raton, Florida, recently won by five votes.

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Mike Pence should have been a warning to J. D. Vance about the inevitable abasement in store once you join a ticket with Donald Trump.

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Readers’ faith in publications and writers relies on a belief that the information provided is true and accurate to the best of the writer’s knowledge. When I get something wrong, I owe it to you to correct myself. Today, I have that unpleasant task.

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No one could accuse Representative Andy Ogles of using dog whistles. The Tennessee Republican prefers a bullhorn.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles wrote on X on Monday. “Pluralism is a lie.”
The statement’s open bigotry is jarring.

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Partisan gerrymandering—the practice of drawing districts in a way that is designed to aid one party and hurt the other—is one of the more pernicious phenomena in American politics today. It’s fundamentally antidemocratic because it’s designed to circumvent or at least dampen the will of voters.

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Any legislation titled with a backronym is automatically suspect, and the SAVE America Act—that’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility—is no exception.

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Stephen Colbert’s Late Show ends in May, and he’s in almost open warfare with his soon-to-be ex-bosses at CBS. Last night, he had planned to broadcast an interview with James Talarico, a member of the Texas state House who is running in a heated Democratic primary for United States Senate.