It was at the first meeting of the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity that Donald Trump asked the question, “What do they have to hide?” He was referring to the state election officials who refused to turn over voter records sought by the Commission. That Commission had been established by the president ostensibly to gather […]

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Our Dishonest President The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board Introduction by Davan Maharaj and Nicholas Goldberg Berkeley: Heyday, 2017 On January 27, 2017, the Urban Dictionary added a new word: “Trumpion: A die-hard follower of Donald Trump.” The Trumpions loyally follow their president in word and in deed, defending his ever-changing manipulations of alternative reality […]

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Ever since the current occupant of the White House blamed mainstream journalists for generating fake news, some of us have countered by blaming social media and armies of trolls and bots (robotic tweets). But it’s as silly to blame social media for causing fake news as it would be to blame the internal combustion engine […]

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In September 2015, two months after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, I asked in these pages if he could accurately be described as a fascist. I decided against the designation. The true fascist states, I concluded—Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Chile—“suffered weakness in their institutions that are just about unimaginable in the United States. For […]

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“Texas is the national testing ground for bad public policy,” the journalist Molly Ivins used to say. It was a Texas attorney general, Gregg Abbott, who sued in federal court in Brownsville, Texas, challenging Barack Obama’s 2014 executive memorandum that attempted to provide temporary legal status for undocumented parents of children born in the United […]

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