Donald Trump, Nate Silver, and the Value of Data Journalism
On Thursday, the Times’s media columnist, Jim Rutenberg, took journalists to task for underestimating Donald Trump’s prospects of winning the Republican nomination. “Wrong, wrong, wrong—to the very...
View ArticleIs Donald Trump a Flip-Flopper or a Wily Politician?
Emerson famously remarked that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Evidently, Donald Trump took the transcendentalist...
View ArticleNebraska and West Virginia Confirm It: Ted Cruz Is Done
Sad news out of Nebraska and West Virginia for horror-movie fans: Count Ted Cruz, the dark lord of Texas, won’t be returning from the dead, after all. Rumors to the contrary, which sped across the...
View ArticleRaghuram Rajan and the Dangers of Helicopter Money
Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is a rising star in central banking. Since moving to Delhi, in 2013, after taking a leave of absence from the University of Chicago’s Booth...
View ArticleDonald Trump and the “John Miller” Tape: A Question of Character
Back in the late eighties and early nineties, when I worked for the London Sunday Times out of New York and Washington, I sometimes wrote about Donald Trump—mostly covering his business deals, but also...
View ArticleJust How Rich Is Donald Trump?
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal became the latest publication to look into Donald Trump’s finances and question some of the claims that the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee has made about...
View ArticleA Narrow But Significant Win for Hillary Clinton in Kentucky
When she was last the center of national attention, Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat who is Kentucky’s Secretary of State, was being soundly defeated by Mitch McConnell in a 2014 Senate race that...
View ArticleClinton vs. Sanders: Peace Is Still Possible
In many hard-fought political races, there comes a time when tempers fray and emotion takes over. Right now, the Democratic Presidential primary appears to have reached such a point, with people on...
View ArticleThe Economic Arguments Against Brexit
On Monday, Her Majesty’s Treasury released a report claiming that a “Leave” vote in the June 23rd referendum on whether the United Kingdom should leave the European Union would plunge the British...
View ArticleThe Challenges Facing Hillary Clinton
With some people I know in panic mode about the latest opinion polls showing Donald Trump performing well in a prospective fall campaign against Hillary Clinton, I thought it might be worth stepping...
View ArticleSeventeen Words That Spelled Trouble for Hillary Clinton
I’d just posted a lengthy piece on Hillary Clinton’s general-election prospects when a long-awaited report from the State Department’s inspector general, a watchdog appointed by President Obama, was...
View ArticleWhat Game Is Bernie Sanders Playing with Donald Trump?
Update: On Friday afternoon, Trump backed out of appearing with Sanders. He said he would wait and debate whichever candidate emerged from the “rigged” Democratic primary.See the rest of the story at...
View ArticleEric Holder’s Twisted Logic on Edward Snowden
This month marks the third anniversary of Edward Snowden taking up residence in Russia. In this country, he is still a wanted man. “The fact is that Mr. Snowden committed very serious crimes,” the...
View ArticleThe Day of the “Roaring Jackass”
Even by the exacting standards of the 2016 campaign, which has turned into a theatre of the absurd and the disturbing, the past twenty-four hours have been bizarre. Barely had Americans returned to...
View ArticleTrump University: It’s Worse Than You Think
Following the release, earlier this week, of testimony filed in a federal lawsuit against Trump University, the United States is facing a high-stakes social-science experiment. Will one of the world’s...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Raises the Stakes for the California Primary
The Democratic primary season comes to a climax on Tuesday, when six states will vote: California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The biggest prize is California,...
View ArticleThe Media Called the Democratic Race a Day Early
Ever since late April, when Hillary Clinton won the New York Democratic primary and followed up by carrying four of the five states in the so-called Acela primary, it has been clear that she would...
View ArticleHillary Clinton Makes History
Eight years to the day after she delivered a poignant concession speech to Barack Obama, in which she talked of having made “eighteen million cracks” in the glass ceiling, Hillary Clinton walked onto a...
View ArticleHow to Feel the G.O.P.’s Pain Over Donald Trump
This post is something of a public-service announcement for liberals and Democrats: I’ve discovered a new guilty pleasure that you might want to get in on. It’s perfectly legal and harmless; the main...
View ArticleGun Laws and Terrorism: An American Nightmare
On Sunday, around lunchtime, I took my two daughters and our puppy to a dog park in Brooklyn Heights, near the East River. It was a fine, breezy day, and throngs of people were strolling along the...
View ArticleDonald Trump Steps on His Own Inflammatory Speech
After months of running his mouth freely, Donald Trump has evidently hired a proper speechwriter. Coming a day after the horrific attack in Orlando, the address that he delivered in Goffstown, New...
View ArticleObama’s Defining Attack on Trump and Trumpism
This morning, I took a mental-health break from coverage of the attack that took place in Orlando over the weekend. But, at lunchtime, when I turned on NY1 to check the local news, there was President...
View ArticleMurder of British M.P. Heightens Uncertainty Over Brexit Vote
As I sat down to write this post, on Thursday morning, there was a week to go until the British referendum on whether to leave the European Union, and a “Leave” vote was looking like a live...
View ArticleMore Fighting Words from Bernie Sanders
If there was any doubt what Bernie Sanders would say in his live online address on Thursday night, he quickly resolved it by making clear that this was no concession speech but rather a rallying cry...
View ArticleDonald Trump’s Problem Isn’t Corey Lewandowski. It’s Donald Trump
These days, American Presidential campaigns are ludicrously long, ludicrously bloated, and ludicrously costly—but the basic principles haven’t changed in decades. To win, you first have to put together...
View ArticleGetting Serious About Trumponomics
On Monday, as Hillary Clinton was preparing to fly to Ohio to give a speech portraying Donald Trump as a menace to the country’s financial well-being, Moody’s Analytics, the research firm, published a...
View ArticleWhat Do the Brexit Movement and Donald Trump Have in Common?
If things go as expected on Thursday, British voters will reject the option of leaving the European Union. Likewise, if things go as expected come November, American voters will reject the option of...
View ArticleBrexit Vote Throws Britain and Europe Into Turmoil
At about three-thirty in the morning British time on Friday, Nigel Farage, the loquacious head of the anti-European Union U.K. Independence Party, gave his second public address of the night. The first...
View ArticleWhy the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
To many people around the world, the United Kingdom’s vote, on Thursday, to quit the European Union came as a great shock. But the result, with fifty-two per cent of voters in favor leaving the E.U.,...
View ArticleWhy Brexit Might Not Happen at All
As I noted on Friday, Britain won’t be exiting the E.U. anytime soon. If and when the U.K. government invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty of 2007, which grants member states the right to leave,...
View ArticleSunderland and the Brexit Tragedy
In 1986, as a young reporter just out of the Columbia Journalism School, I went to Sunderland, an old and proud but depressed shipbuilding city on the River Wear, in northeast England, to report on an...
View ArticleBoris Johnson and the Crisis of British Leadership
Having started out as a drama and turned into a tragedy, the Brexit story line has now descended into farce. On a day when the governor of the Bank of England indicated that he and his colleagues would...
View ArticleA Damning Reprieve For Hillary Clinton
Shortly after eleven on Tuesday morning, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, announced that his agency wouldn’t recommend criminal charges be brought against Hillary...
View ArticleIs Donald Trump Losing It?
Here are two news ledes that were written on Wednesday night about a speech that Donald Trump gave at a rally in Cincinnati. One of them appeared in a major newspaper; the other I made up.See the rest...
View Article“Our Country Is Better Than That”: Two Responses to Tragedy
“We are hurting,” David Brown, the chief of the Dallas Police Department, said at the beginning of a press conference on Friday morning. “Our profession is hurting. The Dallas officers are hurting. We...
View ArticleBernie Sanders’s Philosophical Victory
The news that Bernie Sanders will appear alongside Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday shouldn’t surprise anyone, except perhaps the most deluded “Bernie or bust” types. For...
View ArticleBernie Sanders’s Fulsome Endorsement of Hillary Clinton
As one of the hosts and warmup acts at Portsmouth High School, in New Hampshire, on Tuesday morning, Senator Jeanne Shaheen seemed a bit unsure what to say, at least initially. “Go, Bernie, and go,...
View ArticleThe Huge Challenge Facing Theresa May
Compared to the laborious process of replacing an American President, the British system of transferring power is very rapid. On Wednesday afternoon, David Cameron, the Prime Minister for the past six...
View ArticleHillary Clinton and the Opinion Polls: Is It Time to Panic?
In an age saturated by data and opinion polls, most people know, surely, not to take the results of any one survey too seriously. There are rogue polls that use unreliable methods, statistical outliers...
View ArticleSeven Reasons It Made Sense for Donald Trump to Pick Mike Pence
Over the past couple of months, Donald Trump hasn’t done much right, but in picking Mike Pence, the staunchly conservative governor of Indiana, as his running mate, he probably made a wise choice....
View ArticleWhat Trump Needs to Achieve in Cleveland
The Republican Party’s 2016 Convention has just begun here in Cleveland, and the historical allusions are coming thick and fast. With the Party split and an insurgent candidate about to be nominated...
View ArticleA Dystopian Night at the G.O.P. Convention
In the lobby of the hotel where the New Yorker contingent is staying in Cleveland, there is a framed photograph of a smiling Ronald Reagan, which is part of a charity auction. On returning late on...
View ArticleMagical Economic Thinking at the G.O.P. Convention
After the drama of the first night of the Republican National Convention, when the Donald Trump campaign threw Benghazi, grieving mothers, and angry cops at Hillary Clinton under the rubric “Make...
View ArticleTed Cruz Spoils the Trump–Pence Party
Give one thing to the Republicans: they can’t be boring even when they try to be. On Wednesday night here in Cleveland, the idea was to force fifteen thousand or so journalists, many of whom have spent...
View ArticleDonald Trump’s Dark, Dark Convention Speech
In the history of democracies, there are numerous instances of authoritarian “strongmen” rising to power, and virtually all have based their appeal on a promise to restore order. Donald Trump clearly...
View ArticleThree Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Chose Tim Kaine
On Friday, word that Hillary Clinton would pick Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, as her running mate spread across the Internet, accompanied by a chilly reaction from some quarters. There have been...
View ArticleWhy Some of Bernie Sanders’s Supporters Are Angry
As the Democratic Convention opened in Philadelphia on Monday, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the controversial former head of the Democratic National Committee, had virtually disappeared from the...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Goes All In for Hillary Clinton
When Bernie Sanders walked out to address the Democratic National Convention, on Monday night, at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, which normally serves as home to the N.B.A.’s hapless 76ers, he was...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Gives Hillary Clinton Another Boost
As the second day of the Democratic National Convention opened, Bernie Sanders was still garnering almost as much attention as Hillary Clinton. Despite the strong endorsement of Clinton that Sanders...
View ArticleObama’s Powerful Message: Donald Trump Is Un-American
It was about 8:40 P.M. last night when President Obama climbed aboard Air Force One for the hop to Philadelphia, where he was scheduled to speak at about 10:30 P.M. As an accomplished speaker, he must...
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