He couldn’t be serious with this statement. It’s a shameful explanation, an exercise in gaslighting, and a wad of phlegm spit simultaneously in the face of voters. It’s a ‘hawk tuah’ moment that is beyond comprehension. The pardon of Hunter Biden has self-immolated liberal America in more ways than one. For starters, it shows what happens when you try to take the moral high ground and exude a snobbish attitude as such: you become Icarus, soaring too close to the sun.  It's bad that the...

Donald Trump will not be the first elected leader who wants to fix inefficiencies and waste in government. But will he do it to benefit the American people or the authors of Project 2025? The two motives would produce vastly different outcomes.  Waste and inefficiency are present in any large organization, and the U.S. government is one of the biggest. Its 2024 budget was $6.75 trillion; it spends over $760 billion annually on goods and services, making it the...

It’s a Washington ritual that over the years has tripped up big-shot nominees, intimidated small-fry job-seekers, and turned countless Beltway types into character witnesses for friends and co-workers. And now it may be on the verge of extinction. I’m talking, of course, about the official background check, the process that has subjected appointees to FBI examination since the Eisenhower years — but which the incoming Trump administration appears keen on ignoring when it comes to the...

President Joe Biden spent his final days in office rolling out a full and complete pardon of his criminal son, Hunter Biden. “I will not pardon him,” Joe Biden said in June after a jury found him guilty on three federal gun charges. NBC News reported on the pardon: The decision marks a reversal for the president, who has repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence. The pardon comes ahead of Hunter Biden’s Dec. 12...

Joe Biden had repeatedly denied that he was going to pardon his son Hunter for his gun and tax evasion convictions or commute what was shaping up to be a substantive prison sentence. On the Sunday evening after Thanksgiving – at a moment when the American public’s attention was decidedly elsewhere – he announced he had changed his mind. “There has been an effort to break Hunter - who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective...

As Republicans prepare to take control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat turned independent, has a question for his former Democratic teammates: “How do you like that filibuster now?” Mr. Manchin is feeling sassy these days. His ex-party just got its clock cleaned and is facing two years, minimum, in the political wilderness. And, no surprise, as Mr. Manchin prepares to retire in January, he has plenty of thoughts on...

To do otherwise would be self-sabotage. On Saturday night, President-elect Trump announced that he is nominating Kash Patel — a former Trump administration official, top congressional staffer, and Justice Department national security lawyer — to lead the FBI. That is, the bureau’s current director, Christopher Wray, is to be fired before his presumptive ten-year term expires. By the time this news broke, I had already put to bed for publication on Monday a fairly long essay...

President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday named Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman who is the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, as a senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos arranged Trump campaign efforts to engage the Arab American community in Michigan, organizing dozens of meetings in areas with large Arab American populations angered by Democratic President Joe Biden’s backing of Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon. Trump won the majority...

Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson's advocacy group is launching a new corporate scorecard to shine a light on the secretive practices companies use to silence workers about sexual harassment and discrimination. Why it matters: The idea behind the Lift Our Voices scoring system is to track employers' use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and forced arbitration (secret courts outside the public system) — similar to how other surveys examine benefits like health...

From the Center Perhaps the most audacious gamble of Donald Trump’s audacious campaign was his outreach to young working-class men. For months before the election, Trump’s team believed that these low-propensity voters—men of all racial and ethnic backgrounds who did not attend college and had struggled economically since the pandemic—could be convinced to turn out in large numbers for the former president. Because those without college degrees tend to pay less attention to politics,...