American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic.

Eight years ago, President Donald Trump got generally good reviews for his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Back then, it would have seemed both incredible and churlish to suggest that the man who delivered that relatively conciliatory, relatively presidential speech, might within four years try to overturn an election by violence.
But that’s what happened. And that attempt remains the single most important fact about Trump’s first term as president.

The near-total freeze on foreign aid from the United States has many vocal detractors, but it also has passionate backers—and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy” has made him a darling of the global far right and an ally of President Donald Trump.

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In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January.

In the months between Donald Trump’s election and his inauguration, cryptocurrency prices soared on speculation that the president would appoint crypto-friendly regulators and set up a “strategic bitcoin reserve.” Trump has delivered on the regulatory front: The Securities and Exchange Commission has a new pro-crypto commissioner and has dropped or paused lawsuits against crypto exchanges.