The Trump administration has been exhaustingly eventful, but almost none of the events have involved Congress. The beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency has been an extension of the past six years of the Obama administration, when Capitol Hill was largely a sideshow to the main event in the executive branch in general and the Oval […]

We have seen the enemy, and it is the robot. A wave of fear over automation is driving dire predictions about robots rendering swaths of Americans unemployable and has created a vogue for outlandishly stupid policy proposals. A popular idea in Silicon Valley is for a so-called universal basic income — the government would write […]

For the past couple of years, the most important word in American politics has been the worst — “rigged.” Emanating from slang back in the 17th century, developing into a description of financial fraud, and then branching out to apply to cheating in sports and elections, “rigged” had a breakthrough year in 2016, and it […]

The cliche about the Russia investigation is that there’s a lot of smoke, and with the firing of FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump rolled a military-grade smoke grenade into the room. There were many legitimate reasons to fire Comey, who repeatedly went outside Department of Justice guidelines to comment on the investigation of […]

Donald Trump is trying to do for Andrew Jackson what Lin-Manuel Miranda did for Alexander Hamilton. Trump, like Miranda, is out to restore the reputation of a great American figure once threatened with removal from U.S. currency. Trump doesn’t have the cultural pull of the writer and star of “Hamilton,” yet his salvage job might […]

White House official Steve Bannon is off the National Security Council, in a reversal of what had been an eyebrow-raising decision to put the president’s top political adviser on the NSC. It is a step toward normality in a White House that has struggled with it, especially in the Oval Office. One would have thought […]