Latest posts
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Welcome to the Golden Age of Layoffs: Where Jobs Go to Die and Stocks Go to Heaven
There’s an old rule in politics: if you can’t fix the problem, fire the statistician. And sure enough, President Trump has done exactly that, sacking the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the crime of arithmetic. Because in this second-term economy, math itself has become subversive. Without the Bureau’s honest numbers, the government
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The Hunger Games: Trump Edition — How to Manufacture a SNAP Crisis in Three Easy Bureaucratic Steps
When the Trump administration announced it was freezing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for more than forty-one million Americans during the shutdown, the official explanation was simple: fiscal responsibility. The unofficial one was simpler: cruelty is the point, and hunger is a feature, not a bug. Now, twenty-five Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C., are
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Deportation Nation: The Purge of ICE and the Rise of Border Patrol Theater
Every administration has its signature moment of bureaucratic chaos—the thing historians will point to and say, ah yes, that’s when the clown car caught fire. For Trump 2.0, that moment has arrived in the form of a mass decapitation inside ICE, where up to a dozen field office chiefs are reportedly being removed or reassigned
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Trump Passed His Dementia Test and Is Thankful He Studied
Some presidents measure success by legislation passed, crises avoided, or wars prevented. Ours measures it by whether he can remember five random words in the right order. This week, President Donald Trump announced—again—that he “aced” his dementia test, a boast that feels less like an assurance of cognitive health and more like a cry for
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Sudden Silence From Hunter Biden Outrage: How the Trumps Turned Public Office into Private Equity
America loves a good family business story—until it involves the government, a few billion in Gulf money, and a golf tournament sponsored by a monarchy. For years, the public has been treated to breathless coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Rosetta Stone of speculation and projection. But while every congressional hearing and cable chyron has
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The Doha Detour: How Trump’s Foreign Policy Became a Jet Lagged Choose-Your-Own-Adventure
By now, America’s allies have learned to read the signs. The tweet that drops at 3 a.m. Doha time. The “unscheduled meeting” that doubles as a refueling stop. The grinning photo op that becomes a tariff threat before the plane lands. Donald Trump’s second-term foreign policy isn’t so much a doctrine as a recurring flight
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The Forest Hills Compact: How the Left Finally Learned to Fill a Stadium Thanks To Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and AOC
It takes a certain kind of political gravity to fill Forest Hills Stadium with hope. Not the campaign-slogan kind, but the kind that hums under the skin, the kind that makes people believe power might still be something they can touch. On a humid New York afternoon, tens of thousands showed up for Zohran Mamdani’s
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Eat the Rich, Not the Ramen: America’s Favorite Pastime of Blaming Hungry People on SNAP for Being Poor
America has a long, proud tradition of punching down. We could have been the country that invented bullet trains or universal childcare, but instead we perfected the art of yelling “Get a job!” at someone carrying a bag of store-brand cereal and a SNAP card. Forty-two million people are on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
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The Basket Was Too Small: America’s Deplorable MAGA Problem Is a Feature, Not a Bug
There was a time when Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark was treated as a political scandal, a supposed gaffe that confirmed her elitism. The pundits clutched pearls, the right performed outrage, and the press dissected it like a frog in biology class. But looking back, she wasn’t wrong; she was being polite. If anything,
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The Dronefather: How Trump Turned the Sky into a Family Business
It starts, as all American dystopias do, with a slogan and a waiver. On June 6, President Trump signed two executive orders declaring it was time to “unleash American drone dominance” and “restore airspace sovereignty.” Which sounds patriotic enough—until you realize it’s the bureaucratic equivalent of saying, “We’re going to fill the sky with surveillance