“A truism of life — right up there with ‘don’t read the comments’ — is that what goes around comes around. Put another way, if you live by the sword, you will eventually die by the sword. For more than a decade, these maxims didn’t seem to apply to President Trump — a man who once strongly suggested that Barack Obama had not been born in America, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, just to name a few of his whoppers. … Trump is finally discovering what it’s like to be on the losing end of a conspiracy theory. Trump’s failure to release Epstein files was probably the inflection point. But more recently, the conspiratorial thinking about Trump has metastasized.” (04/24/26)
“In every political system, wealthy and powerful people will try to write the rules to favor themselves. Liberal democracies should use a range of policy tools to resist elite capture.” (04/24/26)
“Washington is gearing up to crack down on ‘Big Medicine,’ with populist Sens. Elizabeth Warren [D-MA] and Josh Hawley, [R-MO] leading the charge. Over the past decade, America’s healthcare system has become increasingly consolidated, leaving patients with higher prices, fewer choices, and more bureaucratic frustration. But before lawmakers swing a scythe through the healthcare sector, they should ask how it became so consolidated in the first place. Insurance and hospital behemoths didn’t emerge by accident. They’re the predictable result of federal health policy — especially the Affordable Care Act — which has made size a prerequisite for survival. Obamacare’s rules have made it far harder for smaller insurers and independent healthcare providers to compete — while giving larger firms a decisive advantage. The law’s many mandates increase costs, complexity, and financial risk, all of which are easier to absorb at scale.” (04/25/26)
“It is increasingly clear to me that our systems and institutions — of government and technology, of religion and journalism, of justice and enforcement, of economy, of enterprise, even of entertainment — are run on abuse and for the sake of abusers. This convinces me that we are dealing with a culture of abuse, a collective spiritual alignment with abuse know as supremacy — the belief that only some people matter. It’s a sickness that is systemic and social and spiritual more than it is individual, which suggests to me that the remedy will need to be systemic and social and spiritual as well. How to heal from this systemic, social, and spiritual sickness?” (04/25/26)
“There is no victory coming in Iran. There are better and worse possible outcomes. There is no victory coming in Iran because it is an illegal war that will leave our constitutional mechanism, already running rough, further out of balance for a generation, with the presidential warmaking power now entirely untethered from Congress. There is no upside to that. Repairing the damage would take a generation of work by better men and women than we currently have in Washington. On top of this, the Trump administration has effectively conceded sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, a privilege Iran did not previously enjoy regarding the international strait, which is partly in the territorial waters of Oman. … In this war, the United States will lose no battles, but Iran has, in effect, gained territory.” (04/24/26)
“More than three weeks ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) agreed to Democratic terms to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), except for its immigration enforcement agencies. That bill has still not become a law, prolonging the longest shutdown of any government agency in history. Nobody has even thought about the DHS shutdown for a while, because President Trump signed executive orders to first pay airport security agents on March 27, and then all other agency personnel on April 3, under the guise of emergency action. It should be said plainly: This is illegal, it has always been illegal, and the precedent it sets pushes Congress, the branch of government with the power of the purse, into total irrelevance.” (04/24/26)
“Expect the fight against fraud to dominate the Republican agenda in Congress and on the campaign trail in the months ahead: It’s past time to stop the theft of tens and even hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars from programs meant to help the sick, needy and otherwise vulnerable. Wednesday saw Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) unveil the Protecting American Taxpayers Act, a major package of legislation produced by the DOGE Caucus, a group of senators aiming to continue the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, the executive branch agency spearheaded by Elon Musk that targeted fraud and waste.” (04/25/26)
“At this very moment the President is at the peak of his cognitive powers. He will not get saner at 80, and the odds are pick ‘em that when he does shuffle off this mortal coil he will attempt to take all of us – and the copper wiring from the coil – with him. Yet Trump’s defenders sicken me more than Trump. They constantly claim deeper perspectives for his actions, as though the Trump Presidency were an inverse Picture Of Dorian Gray, and locked away in the Oval Office was a pristine portrait growing more fair with each act of indecency. But the moral leper behind the Resolute Desk is the reality, and no tacky amount of gold or cheap bordello flourishes can camouflage its pustules.” (04/24/26)
“Amid a spate of cellphone and social media bans for young people around the world, there’s a parallel, quieter shift taking place in education. It is away from the ubiquity of digital technology and back to the analog tools of paper, pen, and pencils. And, in an interesting twist, this change is being led by the Scandinavian nations that pioneered the shift to ed tech learning more than a decade ago. Today, they are grappling with restoring – or, rather, redefining – what contributes to meaningful and enduring education.” (04/24/26)
