As part of its ongoing crusade to roll back the clock and return America to some mythical golden age, the Trump-Musk administration has just launched a new wave of tariffs against China, Canada and Mexico. These actions from the US, of course, immediately inspired a reciprocal wave of tariffs and
I'm delighted to announce that, at long last, I've finally managed to move CAMPAIGN TRAILS away from Substack over to its new home at Ghost. This move has been a long time coming. More than a year ago, I signed on to this letter expressing the
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I realize we’re all overwhelmed by the firehose of insanities that President Musk and Vice President Trump are blasting us with these days, but it really is worth pausing to note that one of the forty scandals that dropped yesterday — the mass resignations over the Eric Adams prosecution — is
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While everyone expected Trump II: Trump’s Revenge to get off to a quick start, it’s still been a bit breathtaking to see just how fast and how far his enshittification of the federal government has already spread. The assault has burst forth across multiple fronts. This is, as
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It’s only been a week, and the Trump administration has already done plenty of damage. The Republican campaign and their allies in Project 2025 made no secret of their plan to sabotage and subvert the agencies of the federal government, but it’s still been a bit breathtaking to
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In case you thought the script for 2025 wasn’t heavy handed enough, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday falls on the same day that Donald Trump will be inaugurated. The two men, of course, could not be any more different from one another. King dedicated his life to combatting
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As the Biden administration winds down to its final week, Many People Are Saying™ that Merrick Garland turned out to be the worst attorney general in all of American history. Well, I’m here to say that’s not true — but only because the competition for that particular dishonor is
Using the Past to Make Sense of the Present
In case you missed it, President-Elect Donald Trump lumbered before the cameras to deliver a rambling, incoherent press conference today. It was a sobering reminder of what the last Trump administration was like, especially during the COVID days, when Trump used the crisis to claim the spotlight each night and
Even though “the year 2025” sounds like something from the opening titles of an old sci-fi movie, I’m told that it’s actually a real thing. This past year seemed like it was especially brutal for everyone I know. While we all experienced the collective trauma of the return
As I noted it the earlier installments on this topic, the nominations that President-Elect Donald Trump is making for his second administration have been coming out at a fast and furious rate, and have been flailing a bit as a result. But as I noted in the last piece, only
As I noted previously, the 2024 Trump transition has been remarkable not just for the breakneck speed of the nominations, but for the reckless choices they’ve made as well. While most incoming administrations would only just now be starting to roll out their first major nominees, Trump has been
It’s not surprising that the various toadies, lickspittles and henchmen who have attached themselves to the Trump movement are repeatedly insisting that Trump’s re-election win — which is one of the narrowest in presidential history — was actually a staggering landslide that carries with it an enormous mandate. It’s
Fresh of his election victory, Donald Trump has begun rolling out the Cabinet picks for his next administration. First and foremost, we should note that he’s moving incredibly quickly here. Typically, this process takes a good deal of time, as an incoming administration works through potential names and makes
As I noted in this piece, I don’t make predictions about elections because that’s not what historians are trained to do and that’s not something I’m comfortable with. But even then I noted that I thought this was leaning Harris’s way and, boy, that was
This presidential race has been going on for approximately our entire lifetime, but it’s finally the last weekend of the campaign. While I’ve explained that I have my reasons for not making predictions in moments like this, I do think I can offer some encouragement. Not about the
I know you’re sick of hearing that This Is The Most Important Election of Your Life, but as a scholar who’s devoted his career to studying American political history, I am telling you that No, Seriously, This Is The Most Important Election of Your Life. Despite the incredibly
As I’ve noted on Bluesky, one of the hazards of being a scholar who works on modern American politics is that when this nation goes through an important presidential campaign, especially one with high stakes, there’s a constant stream of friends, family members and, of course, random people
Before I dig into my topic today, I wanted to apologize for the relatively light posting the last month. I’d planned on posting more as we hit the homestretch of the presidential campaign, but a recent family tragedy — a swift decline in my mom’s health and then her
Part of the appeal of Donald Trump’s gauzy promise to “Make America Great Again” is that it’s vague enough to appeal to constituencies who have little more than an unfocused nostalgia for some mythical golden age in the American past. Whenever reporters have tried to pin Trump or