Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore   This spring, Donald Trump added a new phrase to the stock of improvised riffs he throws out at his rallies: “I love my protesters.” And if my Twitter mentions are any indication, there are a lot of people who think they know why: disruptions inside or outside Trump’s events just […]

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Photo Credit: Tristan Bowersox   Donald Trump keeps on upping the ante. Consider what he said at a rally last week in Fresno, on the subject of California’s apocalyptic drought. Make that “drought,” for according to Donald J. Trump, there isn’t one. Never mind that the years between late 2001 and 2014 have been the […]

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Photo Credit: Thomas J. O’Halloran, U.S. News & World Report Magazine   When the end finally came, I felt like crying: first Ted Cruz, then John Kasich, pulling out of the presidential election, denying a political historian like me the keys to a bona fide time machine. I refer, of course, to what the Quicken […]

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Photo Credit: Derzsi Elekes Andor   I’ve been studying the history of American conservatism full time since 1997—almost 20 years now. I’ve read almost every major book on the subject. I thought I knew what I was talking about. Then along comes Donald Trump to scramble the whole goddamned script. Now, historians must begin to consider […]

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  Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore Somewhere in the annals of the world’s folklore—perhaps somewhere in the collected Brothers Grimm—there must exist some allegorical tale that lays bare the folly of what happened yesterday in Salt Lake City. There, Mitt Romney inhabited the voice of probity, caution, trustworthiness, and integrity in order to warn the unwashed […]

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