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Party unity is no easy feat

Donald Trump has long complained that Democrats are better at sticking together than Republicans are. He’s already revisited this gripe. In meetings with Republican leaders from the House and Senate and with the House Freedom Caucus, he reportedly insisted that Republicans need to be unified the way Democrats are. Whether it’s true that Democrats are better at sticking together than Republicans is debatable, particularly given that, not too long ago, the Democratic Party defenestrated a sitting president seeking re-election. What is more interesting, and ominous, is President ...

Trump’s 1st week, the real story

The New York Times describes Trump as leading “a global wave of hard-line conservative populism.” Rubbish. What Trump is undertaking has nothing whatever to do with conservatism, which is about conserving institutions and shrinking the size of government. And it has nothing to do with populism, which is about confronting elites. Trump is leading a move to replace democracy with oligarchy. He’s implementing a plan to make the wealthiest people in America far wealthier and more powerful, including Trump himself, and to turn American democracy into a giant corporation run by ...

Programs at Head Start negligent, mismanaged

Head Start has been something of a sacred cow in Washington since its creation in 1965. The $12.3 billion federal program provides pre-school services to nearly 790,000 low-income children each year. But a report released last week by the Government Accountability Office reveals serious negligence and fiscal mismanagement in Head Start, putting at risk the very children the program claims to help. The report studies Head Start programs that are operating under interim management, meaning those whose former managers—usually local agencies or nonprofits—gave up or lost their federal ...

Trump is dominating the news

When President Trump threatened to slap tariffs on Colombia if President Gustavo Petro did not accept criminal migrants deported from the U.S., he did not get the initial response he expected. Instead of immediately caving to Trump, Petro countered with plans for his own tariffs on U.S. goods coming into Colombia, then issued a fiery statement in which he called the U.S. president a “white slaver” who is trying to “wipe out the human species because of greed.” In a category of over-the-top statements, that one is currently in the lead. After a tense back and forth, Colombia has ...

Trump leads US boldly into decline

Not a month old, the second Trump presidency is barreling toward the decline that big-mouth leaders have been sending their countries for centuries. Theodore Roosevelt warned of such dangers. Speaking at the 1901 Minnesota State Fair, he famously shared the African proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Roosevelt elaborated: “If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble.” For a nation, he added, “It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and, above all, in loose-tongued denunciation ...

An invitation to worship

The tone was set by Franklin Graham’s invocation. Preachers are a fixture at presidential inaugurations, but until now they’ve confined their words to asking the Almighty to bless the new president and his family and to guide the nation to goodness and mercy. The prophets were popular choices. Not this time. Graham used the opportunity not to praise God but to worship Donald Trump. Regarding the inauguration, Graham exulted, “Look what the Lord has done!” It was a theme the most glassy-eyed Trump acolytes have sounded since the Pennsylvania assassination attempt — that God ...