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  • Trump Cancels Talks, Shutdown Clock Ticks Louder

    Trump Cancels Talks, Shutdown Clock Ticks Louder

    There are rituals in Washington that feel less like governance and more like reruns of a bad reality show. One of the longest-running is the shutdown dance: leaders promise to meet, promise to negotiate, promise to avert disaster—and then someone flips the table, storms out, and insists the other side ruined dinner. This week, the

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  • Trump at the U.N.: When the General Assembly Became a General Farce

    Trump at the U.N.: When the General Assembly Became a General Farce

    There are speeches you remember because they alter the course of history. There are speeches you remember because they contained a moral appeal so clear that even enemies nodded. And then there are speeches you remember because the escalator broke, the teleprompter glitched, and the President of the United States called climate change “the greatest

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  • Democracy with a Matchbook: How America Learned to Love Political Violence, Tribalism, and Excel Spreadsheets

    Democracy with a Matchbook: How America Learned to Love Political Violence, Tribalism, and Excel Spreadsheets

    Pod Save America did what it does best: deliver the bad news with a podcast ad break for magnesium powder and underwear that “feels like on-body AC.” The guest of honor was Dr. Liliana Mason, Johns Hopkins political scientist and unwilling Cassandra of our collapsing republic. Her subject? The roots of political violence in America

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  • Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dead, and Resurrected: Disney, the FCC, and America’s New Speech Test

    Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dead, and Resurrected: Disney, the FCC, and America’s New Speech Test

    Disney can reanimate cartoon deer and resurrect billion-dollar franchises, but even they didn’t think they’d have to stage a primetime Lazarus trick for Jimmy Kimmel. Yet here we are. After an extraordinary two-week suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!—a late-night show that once got canceled only for recycling too many “Matt Damon” bits—Disney announced the show

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  • Everyone Knows Trump Administration Are Crooks. Trump Just Posted Watergate Online—Then Deleted It

    Everyone Knows Trump Administration Are Crooks. Trump Just Posted Watergate Online—Then Deleted It

    Donald Trump has always been good at one thing: saying the quiet part out loud. In another era, a president who leaned on his attorney general to prosecute political enemies would’ve done it in smoke-filled rooms, tucked between Nixonian “deep six the tapes” orders and plausible deniability. But Trump, bless his broken filter, skipped the

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  • How Trump Invented the Two-Tiered System of Human Decency

    How Trump Invented the Two-Tiered System of Human Decency

    The Scene at Glendale The memorial for Charlie Kirk was never going to be quiet. A man whose career thrived on microphones and grievance could hardly be remembered in whispers. So when President Donald Trump stood at the podium in Glendale and declared that this was a time for “respect” and “civility,” it was almost

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  • Weekend Double Feature: Superman vs. Weapons (Guess Which One Actually Had Teeth)

    Weekend Double Feature: Superman vs. Weapons (Guess Which One Actually Had Teeth)

    Matthew and I hunkered down over the weekend with two very different films, each asking of its viewer something slightly dangerous. One asked, Can a hero still mean something when it feels like the world has moved on? The other asked, What if the horror came early, in the night, from your own backyard? The

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  • The Stadium as Cathedral: Charlie Kirk’s Resurrection Tour

    The Stadium as Cathedral: Charlie Kirk’s Resurrection Tour

    America has never been subtle about grief. We brand it, stream it, and sell t-shirts out of the trunk. But even for a country that once turned the O.J. trial into a daytime soap, what happened inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale was… operatic. Or maybe that’s too generous—let’s call it what it was: a

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  • Cash in Hand, Case Closed: Trump’s Border Czar’s Fifty-Grand Mulligan

    Cash in Hand, Case Closed: Trump’s Border Czar’s Fifty-Grand Mulligan

    There are a lot of ways to bribe a man. Some are delicate—offshore accounts, art loans, consulting contracts that pay for “advisory” work never rendered. Others are cinematic—duffel bags of crisp bills, shady meetings in garages. Then there’s Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, who apparently prefers the Costco version: fifty thousand dollars in

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  • Charlie Kirk: The First Time the GOP Has Cared About a School Shooting

    Charlie Kirk: The First Time the GOP Has Cared About a School Shooting

    They say tragedy unites. They also say power corrupts. In America right now, we’re seeing how the former becomes the latter—fast. Because in the days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Republicans escalated their post-martyr politics from solemn resolutions in Congress all the way into statehouses, into speech bills, statues, free speech holidays, and threats of passport

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