In a speech yesterday, Joe Biden condemned Donald Trump’s handling of the wildfires devastating the American West and pledged to “put our nation on the road to net-zero emissions by no later than 2050.” That’s good news. But it was Biden’s first speech on the subject, even though California, Oregon, and Washington State declared states of emergency almost a month ago. He still hasn’t visited the devastation. …
On Wednesday, in response to criticism that Donald Trump and other administration officials violated federal law by using government resources at the Republican National Convention, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows declared, “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares. They expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values.” If Meadows is referring to those Americans outside the Beltway who dislike Donald Trump, he’s ...
This year’s Democratic convention is heavy on biography, light on history. Speaker after speaker has told the story of Joe Biden’s personal life: his working-class roots, his family tragedies, his resilience. The message is that Biden cares about ordinary Americans because he sees their struggles as an echo of his own. What no speaker has done is put Biden’s personal history in the context of ...
The racial-justice movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd had two quite different effects on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. It intensified the pressure on Biden to choose a Black woman as his running mate. And it also intensified the pressure on him to choose a running mate with a history of challenging police brutality. Those two political imperatives collided in the debate over whether ...
Almost halfway through Chris Wallace’s July 19 interview with Donald Trump, an exchange occurred that encapsulates the current state of the presidential race. The president claimed that his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, “wants to defund the police.” Wallace contradicted him, which led a furious Trump to instruct his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to “get me the charter” of the unity task force that the Biden ...
“Have you ever met anyone who’s read the party platform? I haven’t,” the former Republican House Speaker John Boehner said during a 2012 interview about his party’s manifesto. Last week, the Democratic National Committee released a draft of its new platform. But in this case, when it comes to China, the document merits a close read. It shows how dramatically President Donald Trump has reframed ...
On Monday, the Associated Press reported that former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich would speak at the Democratic National Convention in August. For one party to dragoon a notable from the other side into endorsing its presidential candidate is hardly unprecedented. And most of the time, it makes no difference. But, every now and then, a partisan defector perfectly amplifies the ...
When some presidents leave office, politicians and political thinkers jockey to be their intellectual heirs. Even Ronald Reagan, a Republican, claimed the legacy of John F. Kennedy. Even Barack Obama, a Democrat, claimed the legacy of Reagan. If Donald Trump loses this fall, few will be in a hurry to claim his legacy. Commentators on the left and in the center—and even some on the ...
In December 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. interrupted himself during a speech on desegregation to discuss an event on the other side of the world: the prodemocracy uprising then being quashed in Hungary. “Our minds leap the mighty Atlantic,” he told the National Committee for Rural Schools, because we are “concerned about the Hungarians as they confront the desperate situation that they stand amid everyday.” ...
On a modest scale, police defunding is happening. For years, powerful police unions have made law-enforcement funding all but untouchable. As The New York Times noted in 2018, the number of police per capita has risen over the past three decades even as crime rates have plunged. Last week, however, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that he would shave at least $100 million from ...