Category: Politics

Everyone has been asking me how Donald Trump can possibly thrive politically once his voters discover that what he said on the campaign trail was categorical bullshit. I respond by pointing out that people only know what they know, and what they know about Trump will be determined by a campaign of White House disinformation […]

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What does it mean to be a feminist in the age of Trump? Discussions around this question have been percolating since Donald Trump won enough electoral votes to defeat the only woman to ever run as major-party candidate for the presidency of the United States. But they came into sharp focus on January 21, when […]

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Less than 24 hours after the presidential inauguration, the women’s protest it inspired—the largest demonstration in U.S. history, a massive uprising that sent three million people into the streets in more than 500 American cities as well as all seven continents, including Antarctica—felt like stepping into a time warp. President Trump’s inauguration—like his family and the […]

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Thomas Jefferson was so dismayed by political deceptions that he coined a word for it. “Twistifications” referred to a brew of willful misinformation, tortured logic, and artful language designed to sway credulous audiences. This would be a good moment to resurrect Jefferson’s term—to better describe the “post-truth” Donald Trump, especially after Sean Spicer and Kellyanne […]

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“Read the first page of Many Minds, One Heart,” Larry Goodwyn said. It was the last time I saw the Duke University historian, at his home in Durham six months before his death in September 2013. Goodwyn, best known for his defining work on American populism, almost recited the first paragraph of Wesley Hogan’s history […]

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