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What made this response all the more baffling is that Trump was clearly hoping to pull off just the kind of debate that transpired. He was more subdued, less outlandish, and far, far nicer than he has appeared in any previous debate. He was boring. His opening and closing statements sounded — unusually for him — as though he had practiced them. He appealed to party unity. He sought to rise above his competitors not by belittling them, as usual, but through magnanimity. In reality, Trump is the same uninformed clown he always has been. His response on every question...

In last year’s roundup of the top stories of the year, I argued that 2014 was the year we were all drafted into the culture wars. “This is the year when we were served noticed that we won’t be allowed to stand on the sidelines, because we will not be allowed to think differently from the left.” The signature story of the year was the comet shirt guy, a mild-mannered scientist caught wearing the wrong shirt on television. That case served notice that “To be targeted by accusations of misogyny, you don’t have to be a beer-chugging ‘bro’ who spends...

Don’t confuse this as a defense of the Bundy family or their team of armed militia members who have occupied an abandoned building located on a federal wildlife preserve in Oregon. Any rational-thinking American should be horrified at the amount of land the federal government has confiscated, especially in the American West, but once you use or threaten violence to further a cause, you have lost me. Their cause is just. Their methods are appalling and un-American. Also un-American is Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine openly hoping these militia men end up dead.

Republicans, and observers of the Republican Party, have concluded that Donald Trump’s gonzo commandeering of their presidential primary has defied their attempts to suppress it because he is crazy. This is broadly true, but not quite in the way Trump’s befuddled critics mean it. What they say is that Trump is winning because he attracts voters with nonsensical ideas. Lindsey Graham calls Trump “a huckster billionaire whose political ideas are gibberish.” Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson tells Evan Osnos, in Osnos’s paraphrasing, “anyone who runs for office discovers that some portion of the electorate is available to be enraged...

Jonathan Chait has joined the liberal choir experiencing buyers remorse for Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Maureen Dowd of the New York Times previously fired two bullets (here and here) at Hillary, first comparing her to Nixon (leading to the affectionate nickname “Grandma Nixon”), then encouraging her to run like a Tumblr Chick (I doubt Hillary has ever visited the site), or as Tina Fey’s “Bitch is the new black.” Chait, ever the liberal shill, blames Hillary’s Fukushima factor on Ol’ Bill. (I almost stopped reading his piece in New York Magazine after the second sentence: [TRIGGER WARNING]  “Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became...

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the **** up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs. This might appear to be...

They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting — which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question — make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.

When the history of this presidency is written, it will record that bold, progressive reforms dramatically reshaped the face of government, thanks to the vision, creativity, and political will of one man. And that man is Mitt Romney. President Obama already has Gina McCarthy, who designed Romney’s cap-and-trade program in Massachusetts, running the Environmental Protection Agency for him. Coral Davenport reports today that the administration’s new regulations of power plants, due for release Monday, will be designed to expand the structure Romney built: As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney was a key architect of a cap-and-trade program in nine northeastern...

Lynn Cheney has a theory about why Monica Lewinsky wrote a long Vanity Fair essay about her experience with Bill Clinton: It’s because the Clintons wanted it. Cheney explains her suspicions. “I really wonder if this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way,” Cheney, announced on an interview on Fox News. “Would Vanity Fair publish anything about Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton didn’t want in Vanity Fair?” There may be a couple of holes in this theory. The first is that, while it does account for the Clinton’s motivations, it fails to...

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a visit to Bladensburg High School April 7, 2014 in Bladensburg, Maryland. Last weekend, I appeared on Melissa Harris-Perry’s weekend MSNBC show to discuss my cover story on racial politics. It was … not quite what I expected. The segment lasted 12 and a half minutes, and Harris-Perry spent almost half that time on an extended soliloquy about how I am wrong, only allowing me to join the discussion about my story for the second half. There was also a panel following that segment, consisting of four panelists who agree with Harris-Perry and none...

Republicans, I come in peace.Until very recently, Rand Paul’s project of insinuating himself comfortably within the Republican Party, and positioning himself as a plausible presidential nominee, had gone along with remarkable ease. Yes, the author of his campaign book turned out to be an unreconstructed neo-Confederate. That was a speed bump. (Who among us has not entrusted the explication of his worldview to a man who has cheered on the assassination of President Lincoln?) Paul had staged a masterful piece of political theater with his marathon Senate speech denouncing the Obama administration’s drone policy. He has assembled a top-tier campaign...

Optimists hoped Obama would usher in a new age of racial harmony. Pessimists feared a surge in racial strife. Neither was right. But what happened instead has been even more invidious. A few weeks ago, the liberal comedian Bill Maher and conservative strategist and pundit Bill Kristol had a brief spat on Maher’s HBO show, putatively over what instigated the tea party but ultimately over the psychic wound that has divided red America and blue America in the Obama years. The rise of the tea party, explained Maher in a let’s-get-real moment, closing his eyes for a second the way...

The current furor over President Obama’s broken “keep your plan” promise confusingly melds together two very different claims. The first is a simple question of accuracy and honesty: Obama made a promise about his legislation, the promise has not come true, and a certain level of abuse is deserved. (Karl Rove huffs, “This is a serious breach of trust with the American people.” And you know that Karl Rove takes breaches of presidential trust with the utmost seriousness.) The justifiable scrutiny of Obama’s veracity has melded seamlessly into a second and very different claim: That Obama’s broken promise is not...

D.C. United, a Major League Soccer team, is going to be helping to publicize Obamacare's new exchange. Wait, you may be asking — how can this be happening? Earlier this summer, the Obama administration, attempting to copy a Massachusetts campaign to use the Red Sox to publicize Romneycare, floated a plan to enlist the National Football League to raise awareness of the new health care exchanges. In response, Republican leaders sent a threatening letter to the NFL warning it to stay out. And, for good measure, it sent the same letter to all the other major leagues: Major League Baseball,...

Mitch McConnell delivered a speech today at the American Enterprise Institute to officially signal that the IRS scandal has entered its post-fact phase. When the IRS first revealed that its Cincinnati office had attempted to enforce its nonprofit laws using a search function that disproportionately impacted conservatives, Republicans were certain it must have come from the White House. They were going to follow the facts. But all of the facts point in the same direction, which is that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it at all. That was the conclusion of the agency’s inspector-general report, as well...

My item on Rand Paul the other day, predictably, went over quite badly in the libertarian community. The Insomniac Libertarian, in an item wonderfully headlined “Obama Quisling Jonathan Chait Smears Rand Paul,” complains that my Paul piece “never discloses that [my] wife is an Obama campaign operative.” A brief annotated response: 1. I question the relevance of the charge, since Rand Paul is not running against Obama. 2. In point of fact, my wife is not an Obama campaign operative and has never worked for Obama’s campaign, or his administration, or volunteered for his campaign, or any campaign, and does...

Since the 2012 elections, there’s been an extended debate over the strength of the current Democratic majority and the future viability of the Republican Party. I’ve long argued that these postmortems are overwrought, and nothing about the results altered that. After all, the demographic changes in that election were more attributable to a surprisingly large number of white voters staying home (fewer whites voted last year than in 2004, despite steady growth in absolute numbers) than to any rapid growth in minority votes. The GOP performed about as well in November as we would have expected given the state of the...

When I pleaded with liberals to stop ignoring President Obama's failures on civil liberties, foreign policy, and the separation of powers, treating them as if they didn't even merit a mention, the quintessential example of the troubling phenomenon hadn't yet been published. Now it has. In New York, one of America's premier magazines, Jonathan Chait, a sharp, experienced political writer, has penned a 5,000 word essay purporting to defend the president's first term. It is aimed at liberal critics who, in Chait's telling, naively expected too much. Tellingly, as Chait writes for affluent urban liberals who railed against the Bush...

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....

It seems that, in the wake of the liberal celebrations over the passage of the Senate ObamaCare bill, their former vociferous, opposition to it has been tossed down the memory hole. And woe betide anyone who points out how much they used to hate it. Such was the case of The New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait who castigates your humble correspondent in this article for pointing out this inconvenient fact: P.J. Gladnick at Newsbusters accuses yours truly of hypocrisy: