This past week, the corporate media apparently met in a secret conclave and emerged with a new decree for the American electorate – Joe Biden was old. Politico announced that "the first litmus test of the 2028 campaign" would be whether or not Democratic candidates would be able to
Even more so than his exhausting first term, the second term of President Donald J. Trump has been a seemingly endless onslaught of outrages. There's so much incompetence, so much stupidity, so much criminality going on at any one moment that it's hard to think straight.
As Donald Trump lumbers towards the first major milestone of a new presidency this week, hitting the marker of the First Hundred Days, it's worth taking a moment to marvel at just how badly he's doing. The latest polls show Trump's approval rating has
Whether it's been an intentional strategy of "shock and awe" or just the inevitable result of a bunch of ignorant assholes being empowered at the same time, the opening months of Trump's second administration have been a complete clusterfuck of utter chaos. Between Trump&
As a historian, I prefer my subjects to be long dead before I start poking them with a stick. It's just safer that way, to be honest. I'm well aware of how often people make predictions about politics that turn out to be wildly wrong, and
The Trump administration has tried to subdue us with a "shock and awe" approach that has been deliberately designed to overwhelm our senses with an endless stream of outrages and divide our reaction to its intentional cruelties, but every now and then an outrage manages to poke its
As I noted on Bluesky, many Americans – including me – have tended to treat Donald Trump's comments about annexing Canada as a joke. That attitude is a mistake on our part, but let me explain why we've made it. We've treated the idea of a
In one of this morning's Daily Presidential Rants, Donald Trump insisted – as he has many times before – that the European Union was "formed for the primary purpose of 'screwing' the United States of America." Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the president
Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS, in which I share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s. (This is normally a feature reserved just for paid subscribers,
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