The situation in Virginia keeps getting worse: Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, third in line for the Virginia governorship, now says he, too, wore blackface in the past, at a college party nearly 40 years ago. “In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like […]
President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, scheduled for 9 pm ET Tuesday, was supposed to be a unity speech. Early spin from the White House was that Trump was supposed going to reach across the aisle, make nice with Democrats after a bruising shutdown fight, and look for policies that could build common […]
In the formal Democratic response to President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech, Stacey Abrams made the case for fundamental election reform, particularly in light of today’s dynamics in Washington. “This is the next battle for our democracy, one where all eligible citizens can have their say about the vision we want for our […]
If there is an intellectual core in President Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech, it came in the section on undocumented immigration. In it, Trump cast the country as divided between elites and the working class, with Trump on the side of the working class and Democrats as the champions of the elites. […]
I’ll be honest. There were parts of President Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union that I liked. But then I remembered the reality of his presidency. I liked when he called on the country to “reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution, and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common […]
“Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” said President Donald Trump during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. “And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: All children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.” In uncharacteristically extensive comments on the subject, […]
State of the Union speeches are defined by a charade: The president gives his laundry list of policy priorities, and the lawmakers watching in the House chamber promptly forget about most of them. With the president’s constitutional duty to update the Congress on “the state of the union” met, life continues as it had before. […]
As recently as two weeks ago, it wasn’t clear that this State of the Union was going to happen. Amid the government shutdown and continued brinkmanship between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump on funding for a partial border wall with Mexico, “will the State of the Union happen” became a major subplot, […]
President Donald Trump’s most famous book, The Art of the Deal, says “you can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch […]
President Trump’s State of the Union speech will hit many of the classics — the need for aggressive immigration enforcement, to fix the bad trade deals of the past, to spend a lot of money on American infrastructure — based on early excerpts released by the White House. The speech is supposed to be a […]