Democratic Alarm Over an Unbound Trump Fuels Shutdown Standoff

The threat of rising Obamacare premiums has been Democrats’ main focus in the public debate, but the president’s defiance of laws, norms and congressional constraints has helped hold them together in opposition.

Democrats haven’t won a positive campaign since Obama

Democrats haven’t won a national election without running against Trump since 2012.

This poses a problem for them: In 2028, Trump will be off the ballot. This span of more than a decade epitomizes the breadth of the Democrats’ dilemma: In three years, do they want to run on the past and what has worked, or positively on the future, which hasn’t succeeded for them in 16 years?

The last time Democrats won a national election running for someone, that someone was Barac...

Republicans are making boogeymen of their own voters on Medicaid

Republicans love their boogeymen; the grotesquely exaggerated villains they use to justify their worst policy ideas. President Trump loves to parade his favorite boogeymen: the “criminal aliens,” the dishonest media, the Democrats, and so on. These dehumanizing caricatures help him rile up his base and lead them to back his cruelest initiatives. 

As the GOP-controlled Congress argues the merits of the cuts included in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” act — which is deeply&nb...

Trump wants to make the census count 

The 2020 U.S. census faced multiple challenges during the pandemic. A good case can be made that it should be redone — which President Trump says he will do. The problem is that Trump can be so divisive that Democrats and the media will denounce his census-retake efforts as just another partisan political ploy. 

On Aug. 7, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had instructed the Department of Commerce (which oversees the census) to “begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS...

Trump’s bill will feed the rich and starve the poor

These are the times that try people’s souls and tax their faith in human nature. The House of Representatives just passed President Trump’s big bad bill that awards huge tax breaks for rich people and big corporations and rips a gaping hole in the social safety net that protects the poor in bad economic times. The draconian proposal undermines the already shaky health, wealth and wellbeing of millions of struggling American families.  

The MAGA endgame is to fatten u...