Chapter 21: Fake Leader
For five years, we kept a Google Doc of the most deeply idiotic episodes of this monumentally stupid era. Now it’s time to share our work with the world.
Here we go again: 221 days ago, the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act for coronavirus relief. That bill had another round of $1,200 direct payments to people. So did the compromise $2.2 trillion bill they passed 82 days ago. The occupier of...
Words matter. But numbers tell stories, too. Presidential historians and others will plumb them as they assess President Donald Trump’s legacy, Trump's presidency...
Threatening to tank Congress’ massive COVID relief and government funding package, President Donald Trump’s demand for bigger aid checks for Americans is forcing Republicans...
President Donald Trump took to social media to lash out at South Dakota U.S. Sen. John Thune, saying his political career is over. The attack on Thune comes...
When has Donald Trump ever cared one whit about anybody else in the world ? Never. He has shown himself to be a complete and utter narcissist. Look at his “management” of the novel coronavirus response (and this is only one example). His recorded words...
"We can pass $2,000 checks this week if the Senate GOP agrees to stand down," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Not in a century and a half, since the post-Civil War era, has a defeated U.S. presidential candidate continued to challenge the election results past those electoral college meetings. But that's where Donald Trump finds himself.
Trump's attempt to overturn the election has failed. But the larger plan to subvert democracy is working perfectly
President Donald Trump and 17 U.S. states on Wednesday threw their support behind a long-shot lawsuit by Texas seeking to overturn his election loss by asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the voting results in four states.
He said that purging advisory boards and replacing members with "political partisans" had "put the nation's safety and security at risk."
The pharmaceutical company offered the government a chance to lock in additional supplies before its vaccine was proved effective in clinical trials.
“You’ve got to move on," Laurence Tribe told the president.
The only questions now are how many more times President Donald Trump wants to lose the election to President-elect Joe Biden and whether his Republican acolytes on Capitol Hill will wake up and recognize reality.
"It is difficult to overestimate the continuing harm to our beleaguered democracy and its people, should Trump and his cohorts not be brought to justice."
President Trump lost. But there is money and political advantage in denying reality.
Understanding the method to the president's madness
Trump has raised $207.5 million since Election Day, with a flurry of fundraising appeals focused on election integrity.
As thousands die each week from an uncontrolled pandemic, Trump's focused solely on saving his political life.
"He's looming over everything, as he always does," said one senior Republican aide.
It's been 199 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 63 days since the House passed its compromise $2.2 trillion bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, back in town after a week off for Thanksgiving, once again trolled Democrats and the nation, saying on the Senate floor,...
The president made a string of claims but provided little evidence.
A government watchdog group is suing President Trump, his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, and the White House to prevent the deletion of official emails and WhatsApp messages before they can be archived.
The Republican dodge on Trump’s lies has run its course.
Donald Trump could easily have won re-election while riding an approval rating in the mid-50s. I’ll tell you how in just a second. But if you were to ask him, Trump would tell you all about how the “fake news”, the “China virus” and the “corrupt” Biden campaign stopped him from achieving a successful presidency. This […]
I have often dubbed “fascism” mental pathology in politics, and as a fascism scholar and author of the new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is as psychologically-minded as historians come. The way mental health professionals have brought the context of our experience with patients to understanding the turbulent presidency of Donald […]
The president is trying to transform the professional civil service back into the spoils system of the 1800s.
Maybe Trump is having a genuine existential crisis. That’s his problem.
It appeared the court’s right-wing supermajority wasn't inclined to go along with Trump’s plan to shift congressional seats to Republicans by excluding undocumented immigrants.
The silence of congressional Republican leaders as President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of election fraud grow wilder and more venomous increasingly resembles the party's deference to Sen. Joe McCarthy during the worst excesses of his anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s.
He needs to make the G.O.P. pay a price for obstruction.
The president’s campaign has ratcheted up its appeals for cash, but the first 75 percent of every contribution is going to a new political action committee that could fund his next political move.
Be outraged, don't accept the election results…and send money.
Those aren’t my words. They’re the words of Former CIA Director John Brennan who has a few other choice parting words for the outgoing President. The Hill “For four years, I spoke out vigorously against Donald Trump’s craven dishonesty, corrupt pursuit...
Trump's campaign blitzed U.S. courts with new lawsuits this week. Judges have so far rejected most of them.
President Donald Trump took one minute out of his day on Tuesday to hold a press conference in which he took credit for gains in the stock market, which came after President-elect Joe Biden’s transition was allowed to formally begin. At his press conference which lasted almost exactly one minute, Trump credited his administration for […]
There’s a meeting of Trump and GOP lawmakers in Gettysburg PA where they will discuss a fraud to which Rudy has yet to admit under oath in court. The path to the bunker is circuitous, and the choice of an historic site raises the question of the...
Of more than 1.3 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide, over 257,900 of them have been in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — and the worst might be yet to come this winter. Dr. Irwin Redlener, founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia U...
Ever since Election Night became Election Week, we have been collectively wondering when Donald Trump might take the hint and bow out gracefully. Not that we ever really expected it, based on past behavior, but we hoped that a candidate now thirty...
President Donald Trump is making several moves ahead of leaving office on Jan. 20, 2021, to destroy President-elect Joe Biden's term in office, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in part of a video series Sunday.Ben-Ghiat explained that she started the series of videos because she knew that Trump wo...
Overturning elections sounds like the stuff of secret deals in smoke-filled rooms, but President Donald Trump's not even trying to hide his effort to subvert the results of the election as President-elect Joe Biden's margin widens to more than 6 million votes.
Despite what President Donald Trump may say, he lost the election. The White House is the people’s house, not the exclusive domain of any politician or potentate no matter what party.
President Donald Trump's four-year history of undermining American rights and legal norms is fittingly ending with his attack on one of the most fundamental: the right to vote.
Silence is complicity.
The man who always has to be the alpha is about to be the biggest loser. It'll likely leave him unhinged, uninhibited and more dangerous than ever before.
Trump was already destined to go down in history as a lousy president. Now he seems intent on shredding what was left of his reputation.
Critics say the dismissals threaten to destabilize the federal bureaucracy in the fragile period during the handover to the next administration.
For a week and half Donald Trump has been throwing an infantile tantrum over having lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, someone he has tried unsuccessfully to characterize as a mentally deficient socialist. And he even worried that he would...
‘It’s almost incomprehensible to me that he would want that information out,’ says Andrew McCabe