Syndicated columns

With the Jeffrey Epstein controversy still dogging him, President Donald Trump has embraced his favorite distraction: the culture wars.

By Jason Bailey

Conspiracy theories, particularly those that involve and seem to implicate the rich and powerful, are hard – maybe impossible – to contain. They’re predicated on the assumption that elites are orchestrating cover-ups to manipulate the great unwashed or to mask wrongdoing. No amount of disclosure fully stems the suspicions that fuel conspiracy theories because those theories, by their very nature, assume that ruses are designed to be perpetual. The truth may never be known. Something will always be hidden. The man is out to get you.

After six months, with seven times that much time remaining, Trump 2.0 seems as transformative as the New Deal was, but different. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy was the institutional architecture of the welfare and regulatory state. Donald Trump’s legacy will be a demonstration: How a purely transactional politician, untethered from any political philosophy and uninterested in norms of self-restraint (e.g., unforced respect for the separation of powers) can exploit this architecture for unconstrained executive power.

Few initiatives of the Trump administration more seriously undermine our understanding of the nation’s past than Executive Order 14253 from March 27, which promises “to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments.”

President Donald Trump, like many Americans, has something of an obsession with gasoline prices. He might be better off focusing on another cost with which Americans are regularly confronted: electricity bills.

You have seen the blizzard of scary images – immigration agents taking parents away in front of their kids, masked officers raiding neighborhoods, men detained in remote centers – but here is the surprising fact behind the mayhem: Donald Trump has deported fewer people per month than Barack Obama did, and barely more than Joe Biden during a similar span last year, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by NBC News.

Two groups must be especially thrilled by the prospect of Zohran Mamdani becoming New York’s next mayor.

For a quarter century, nearly every American president had made the same mistake, treating Russian leader Vladimir Putin as someone who shares the U.S. interest in a safer, more predictable world.

Over the past squalid decade, many of us have let go of the hope that Donald Trump could do or say anything to shake the faith of his ardent base. They’ve been largely unfazed by boasts of sexual assault and porn star payoffs, an attempted coup and obscenely self-enriching crypto schemes. They cheered wildly at his promises to build a wall paid for by Mexico, then shrugged when it didn’t happen. The BBC reported on a 39-year-old Iranian immigrant whose devotion to Trump endured even when she was put in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. “I will support him until the day I die,” she said from lockup. “He’s making America great again.”

There’s more than one way to cook the books. You can doctor or delete data after it’s been collected. Alternatively, you can ensure the numbers are never collected in the first place.

It was a Jack Nicholson-Tom Cruise moment. President Donald Trump couldn’t handle the truth. He didn’t even know the truth. And he has no respect for truth, so even if he knew, why would he tell the truth about the truth?

It’s hard to think of a major piece of legislation more hated by more people than the monstrous bill Republicans passed earlier this month. It is, of course, almost universally reviled by Democrats, but there’s also opposition to it in every part of the Republican coalition. Susan Collins, perhaps the most moderate Republican senator, and Rand Paul, one of the most conservative, both voted against it. Elon Musk called it “insane” and threatened to form a new political party over it. Sen. Lisa Murkowski tried to distance herself from it immediately after casting the craven vote that put it over the top.

The United States this week reached an unenviable milestone: Health officials have recorded the highest number of new measles infections in more than three decades. So far this year, 1,288 measles cases have been confirmed. In Texas, the epicenter of the largest outbreak, 753 people have been infected.