With the unemployment rate still at 3.7% and GDP growth at 2.0%, the American economy remains solid, if not spectacular. But with more warning lights flashing yellow, Team Trump is growing more concerned about the direction of the so-called best economy ever just as the 2020 election heats up. The president and his advisers have […]

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a not-so-bold promise about the stewardship he would provide for the American economy. "I can tell you," he guaranteed, "after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent--perhaps a little […]

When Senator John McCain was laid to rest on Sunday at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the nation lost one of the giants of American public life. For six decades, McCain served his nation as a naval airman, a military liaison to Capitol Hill, a congressman, a senator and as a two-time […]

So, 13 months after Donald Trump took the oath of office, it's come to this for the Republican Party. Its putative leader used to be pro-choice. He routinely boasted about getting "everybody" insured, only to then promise to "kill" Obamacare. He not only reversed past positions at a rapid-fire rate, he lied to voters at […]

On Feb. 8, 2009, CNBC talking head Rick Santelli helped launched the tea party movement with an epic rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But eight years later, as Republicans are now learning the hard way, the tea bag is on the other cheek. The signs of sizable, sustained, and seriously angry […]

For much of the past week, President-elect Donald Trump boasted about saving 1,000 jobs at the Carrier air conditioning plant in Indianapolis, Indiana. Representing only about half of the positions candidate Trump promised to protect from relocation to Mexico, the murky Carrier deal appears to be a one-off bargain combining the carrot of state tax […]

The article below ("The Othering of the President") originally appeared on February 23, 2015 in response to Rudy Giuliani's obscene claim that "I do not believe that the president loves America." But with Donald Trump's presidential campaign trying replace its old Birther slander with a new one (that the Birther movement itself was started by […]

When it comes to its electoral strategy, it's not often that a presidential campaign gives the game away so easily. This week, new Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway did it twice. Last Sunday, she personally confirmed that Donald Trump's laughable outreach to black voters wasn't intended for African-Americans at all. "I live in a white […]

Just days after recording robocalls for Marco Rubio in Florida, failed 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney joined Governor John Kasich on the campaign trail in Ohio on Monday. Bizarrely, Romney wasn't there to endorse Kasich, but instead merely to oppose Donald Trump. But in trying to keep alive his faint hopes of rescuing the […]