Jonathan Chait

This morning, House Democrats released emails from the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that claim, among other things, that Donald Trump spent hours at Epstein’s home with one of his victims. Later in the day, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if this was true—that Trump had spent hours at Epstein’s place with a sex-trafficking victim.
“These emails,” she replied, “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.

The conventional wisdom about government shutdowns is that they always fail. Senate Democrats probably assumed as much when they shut down the government. Perhaps they thought they were giving partisan activists something to root for, even fleetingly, before eventually caving.
That was a reasonable, if somewhat cynical, calculation.

Zohran Mamdani is an extraordinary political story: a generational political talent, an out-of-nowhere success, and—measured by the number of citizens he will soon govern—the most powerful elected democratic socialist in American history.
But his allies have tried to turn his victory into something different: a model for the national Democratic Party.

The one Republican elected official who has a serious and workable plan to end the government shutdown is, surprisingly enough, Donald Trump. The president’s idea is for the Senate to change its rules to allow the chamber to keep the government open with a majority vote, rather than to permit 41 senators to shut it down.
To be sure, Trump has not always framed his argument in the most cogent way.

The revelation that Donald Trump has demolished the East Wing, with plans to rebuild it at jumbo size with private funds, provoked an initial wave of outrage—followed by a predictable counter-wave of pseudo-sophisticated qualified defenses.
“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” editorializes The Washington Post.

This week, Politico revealed the contents of Young Republican leaders’ group chats, which were filled with rampant bigotry, endorsements of rape, and praise for a certain fascist dictator (“I love Hitler”).
Some Republicans, including those who have directly employed the people in these chats, condemned these messages. But Vice President J. D. Vance had a different, and more telling, response. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching,” he posted on X defiantly.

Until recently, open support for Hamas in the United States was confined to the far left. The national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which circulated talking points supporting the October 7 attacks, has lately declared on Instagram “DEATH TO COLLABORATORS.” But the notorious terrorist organization has found a new defender: President Donald Trump.

Donald Trump likes to say that his campaign of vengeance is only fair. Given that he had to endure years of (supposedly) phony legal claims and censorship on various social-media platforms, Trump insists that he now has the right to retaliate in kind.
“They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!,” Trump wrote in a social-media post last week. “They did it with me for four years,” he told reporters.

The Trump administration’s systemic attack on free speech is hard to defend. The easier move for the president’s apologists is to attack critics for their hypocrisy.
“The left has amnesia when it comes to the cancel culture they perpetuated. It is a game they created with rules they made up. Now they hate that it’s being applied to them,” the USA Today columnist Nicole Russell writes.

Yesterday, Stephen Miller delivered a eulogy for Charlie Kirk that served as a battle cry for the Trump administration’s state-sponsored war on his perceived foes—a war for which Miller is the primary strategist. The speech was a jarring piece of rhetoric.

From the moment an assassin shot Charlie Kirk, my social-media feed began filling up with people decrying the attack. The sentiment of horror—both at the murder itself and at what it portended for American political culture—was overwhelming and cross-ideological.
From the pro–Donald Trump conservatives in my timeline, however, I detected another sort of response.

This story was updated on September 8, 2025, at 8:49pm ET.
When The Wall Street Journal reported two months ago that Donald Trump had written a suggestive letter to Jeffrey Epstein in celebration of the notorious child abuser’s 50th birthday, in 2003, the administration had a choice of available responses. The strategy it went with was indignant denial.
“Democrats and Fake News media desperately tried to coordinate a despicable hoax,” said the White House spokesperson Liz Huston.

Donald Trump is famously reluctant to commit troops abroad but salivates at the prospect of using them against Americans at home. That is the context in which one must understand his takeover of the Washington, D.C., police force; his deployment of the National Guard; and his threats to occupy other cities.
Trump claims that he is acting to quell a spike in violent crime.

Whatever quarrels one might have with Senator Bernie Sanders, his thinking would seem to be immune from medieval anti-Semitic influence. Yet last month, after Sanders denounced “the Netanyahu government’s extermination of Gaza,” the pro-Israel group AIPAC attacked Sanders’s statement as a “hate-filled rant” and “despicable blood libel.

Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves come in two flavors. The first is devious plans that help him amass power (say, turning the Departments of Justice and Defense over to lackeys, or using regulatory threats to bully media owners into favorable coverage). The second is foolish impulses that he follows because they make him feel momentarily better.

Last week, the Trump administration made its latest and most comically desperate attempt to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that she had unearthed bombshell proof of a Barack Obama–era plot to invent the conclusion that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Soon after, Trump’s Truth Social account circulated an AI video depicting Obama being led off to prison.

Donald Trump’s ham-fisted reversal on his promise to release a secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients has accomplished something long considered impossible by virtually everybody, including Trump himself: He has finally exceeded his followers’ credulity. The Epstein matter is so crucial to Trump’s base, and the excuse offered is so flimsy, that the about-face has raised questions within perhaps the most gullible movement in American history.

The Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will reduce Medicaid spending by about $800 billion over the next decade by kicking some 8 million Americans off the program’s rolls. That is, if you listen to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the hospital industry, or the basic intuition that any plan to spend drastically less money on giving health care to poor people will result in those people ceasing to have health care.

Not long ago, I ran into an old friend, a well-regarded Democratic intellectual who recently has moved to my right, but who still holds liberal values and is not a Donald Trump supporter. After we commiserated about the excesses of the far left, I mentioned offhandedly that Trump’s maniacal authoritarianism makes the fact that Democrats can’t get their act together so much worse.
He reacted, to my surprise, with indignation.

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In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a scene in The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being brought into the crew.

The Trump administration is carrying out a brazen crackdown on academic freedom: deporting students for writing op-eds, withholding funds from colleges that defy his control, and justifying it all as a response to anti-Semitism. Who is to blame for this? According to one popular theory on the left, the answer is liberals who have consistently supported free speech and opposed Donald Trump.
The logic of this diagnosis has a certain superficial appeal.

A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition.

Several top members of the Trump administration have been evading constraints on their lawless actions by playing a clever game of feigned ignorance as to the plain requirements of the Constitution and a series of adverse court rulings.
Then there’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose ignorance appears to be utterly genuine.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on May 16, 2025
Earlier this week in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump delivered what the White House billed as a “major address,” which is a long-standing way to signal that a particular speech is meant to lay down a historical marker communicating the president’s values. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. Trump’s message was that, unlike interventionist Americans of the past, he did not take account of democracy or human rights when dealing with foreign states.

A generation ago, the Republican Party’s preferred symbol of government-funded indolence was the “welfare queen,” a quasi-mythical figure who collected checks to sit at home watching television. Today’s GOP has fixated on an even stranger target: unemployed adults who take advantage of the taxpayer by collecting free … health insurance.
The fiscal centerpiece of the “big, beautiful bill” now making its way through Congress is to take Medicaid away from jobless adults.

Of the innumerable insults directed at Donald Trump and his supporters, the one that seems to get under their skin the most is “woke right.” The epithet describes the Trump movement’s tendency to counter left-wing illiberalism with a mirror-image replica. “The woke right,” my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams explained earlier this year, “places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought.

When Chris Van Hollen travelled to El Salvador to check on the status of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been deported to a notorious prison, the Trump administration erupted in delight. Here was a golden opportunity to accuse the Democratic senator and his party of sympathizing with violent criminals. “His heart is reserved for an illegal alien who’s a member of a foreign terrorist organization,” the Trump adviser Stephen Miller told reporters.

The markets are going haywire, and consumer confidence is nosediving. You might be wondering why the Trump administration decided to burn down the healthy economy it inherited. Is it pure incompetence? Or is there a plan?
The answer to both questions appears to be yes. The incompetence is undeniable. But the administration does have a plan, or at least a vision, for what will spring up from the ashes. The trouble is that the long-term economic program is even worse than the short-term one.

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Only yesterday, President Donald Trump was mocking Republicans nervous about his global trade war as “Panicans.” In a defiant speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, he insisted, “This time I’m doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,” and that only he had the courage to defy “the globalists.

Last November, Republican Representative Troy Nehls of Texas told reporters that “if Donald Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Period. Because Donald Trump is really never wrong.” This expression of faith in the great leader is a precept of MAGA-ism. The pigs in Animal Farm had a similar way of thinking: “Comrade Napoleon is always right.