Syndicated columns

It’s never a great time to purge millions of Americans from critical safety-net services. But if we are indeed barreling toward recession, as many economists predict, now is an especially bad time.

If you watch HBO’s “The Last of Us,” you see how a pandemic didn’t destroy the world – failure to communicate did. Trust collapsed. Institutions froze. And the people paid the price.

In 2022, after I wrote a column arguing that Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection, I had a bunch of conversations and at least one cable TV debate with Democrats who thought I was wrong. I don’t remember there being much difference between what these Democrats said publicly and privately; I certainly wasn’t hearing off-the-record whispers about Biden’s decline. Instead, officials and pundits I spoke to seemed convinced that it would be crazy for the party to give up the advantages of incumbency, that a primary risked creating nasty fissures among various Democratic factions, and, most relevantly, that Biden’s legislative successes proved he was still up to the job.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the MAGA ideology is how often it fulfills the left-wing policy wish list. The latest example is a proposal for so-called MAGA accounts, which House Republicans are considering as part of their $4 trillion tax bill.

There is nothing legally wrong with President Donald Trump’s accepting a Boeing 747-8 from Qatar for use as a temporary new Air Force One. But he would be unwise to do so.

Recently I went down to Washington to speak to Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, after he gave a speech marking Donald Trump’s calamitous first 100 days in office. At a time when many Democrats feel leaderless, Jeffries, usually a relentlessly on-message inside operator, had been stepping further into the public eye. Not long before we spoke, he’d appeared on a live taping of the “Raging Moderates” podcast in New York City; it was, he said, probably the 18th or 19th podcast he’d done since February. On April 27, he spent more than 12 hours holding a livestreamed sit-in on the Capitol steps with Sen. Cory Booker to draw attention to Republican plans to ravage the federal safety net.

The selection of Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, means there will be no turning back from the direction charted by Pope Francis, who made Prevost a cardinal in 2023.

Pope Francis’ version of diversity, equity and inclusion had special importance for me as a Black man and a devotional Catholic.

Most climate-change deniers don’t even bother fighting the established science anymore: The planet is warming, human activity is the cause, and we can do something about it if we really try. Modern deniers will concede all that, but fire back that the “do something about it” part is too hard, too expensive to be worth trying. We have to be pragmatic, they’ll say, and keep burning fossil fuels to make life easier on people.

What do you see when you look at pictures of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet?

Maybe it’s Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who should be writing books about the art of negotiation.

I first met Dane Chapin, a San Diego-area entrepreneur, in 2012, when he gave me a ride in his Prius and told me I was dead wrong about climate change. We’ve been close friends ever since. Sometimes he’s to my left politically, sometimes to my right. I’ve always admired his curiosity, optimism and independent thinking, especially when we disagree – as we did over his vote for Donald Trump in the last election.

About a decade ago, conservatives would often denounce Muslim immigration on the grounds that it threatened Western progress on gay rights. This posture, sometimes called homonationalism, got its start in Europe, then made its way into U.S. politics with Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.

I’ve detested at least three-quarters of what the Trump administration has done so far, but it possesses one quality I can’t help admiring: energy. I don’t know which cliche to throw at you, but it is flooding the zone, firing on all cylinders, moving rapidly on all fronts at once. It is operating at a tremendous tempo, taking the initiative in one sphere after another.

The U.S. says Ukraine should accept the settlement it has negotiated with Moscow, so everyone can get on with building “a better Ukraine.” That’s the right goal, but if the deal is written as reported, it wouldn’t be achievable.

In 1854, Abraham Lincoln, who would not be elected president for another six years, mused about the purpose of the government he would one day save. He concluded that “the legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do for themselves – in their separate and individual capacities.” In this, as in so many things, Lincoln saw to the heart of an issue that still plagues us. His insight tells us that many of the DOGE cutbacks, which are supposedly aimed at “waste, fraud and abuse,” are slashing away at government’s core function: providing public goods.