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President Donald Trump frequently professes admiration for a different Republican commander in chief, William McKinley, who served from 1897 to 1901. According to a columnist who has studied 19th century America, this fixation reveals a great deal about Trump’s personality and values — none of it encouraging.“At the beginning of 2025, he expressed admiration for William McKinley, the 25th president,” Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times wrote on Sunday. “McKinley had, in Trump’s view, made America great with tariffs and aggressive imperial expansion, including a war with Spain, a war in the Philippines, and the annexation of Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico as territories.”Indeed, Bouie po

President Donald Trump claimed he would “drain the swamp” upon being elected, but a new report on a lavish party to be held at his Mar-a-Lago estate contradicts the promises of reform embedded in that claim: The top 297 investors in his meme coin $Trump will attend an April 25th “conference” at the swanky mansion.“According to the invitation, the top 29 holders of $TRUMP will have a ‘VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, and other Superstar guests!’” reported The Daily Beast's Mary Papenfuss on Sunday. “Join the ‘most exclusive crypto and business finance conference in the world,’ the announcement gushes.”Papenfuss added, “Th

President Donald Trump is desperate to avoid the historical fate of President Jimmy Carter, whose administration is remembered for struggling with a bad economy and a hostile Iran.“It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours,” reported The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey. “The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been

President Donald Trump likes to claim that his administration has been a radical departure from the past, but one conservative commentator has statistics which tell a very different story.Simply put, Trump has continued a pattern that began under Republicans like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush of running as fiscal conservatives and then continuing the high-spending policies of their predecessors Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason Magazine, wrote on Sunday. Indeed, each president has actually spent more than the one before

President Donald Trump has done his best to curry the favor of Europe’s far right, but after seeing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán go down to humiliating defeat despite Trump’s support, the far right now wants to put daylight between itself and America’s leader.“President Donald Trump’s offensive behavior toward Christians and his unnecessary and unpopular war in Iran isn’t just splitting his political base at home — it’s also alienating his allies abroad,” wrote MS NOW’s Zeeshan Aleem on Sunday. “Right-wing nationalists in Europe are becoming more an

President Donald Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward America’s allies may please his domestic political base, but it is harming America’s international standing — perhaps permanently.“Trump, for so many people, epitomizes the ugly American — somebody who is bumptious and vulgar and ignorant about foreign cultures,” former Time Magazine editor Rick Stengel said in a recent podcast appearance on The Bulwark with former Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon. “So I think people sort of have come to the end of their patience with America.”Avlon replied to Stengel by noting that polls

When conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year, President Donald Trump and his supporters vowed that his death would change things. In at least one tragic sense, this has been true — politicians are now spending campaign money on personal security.“Since the assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, more than 15 states have passed laws or approved rule changes allowing lawmakers to access campaign funds for personal security, a sign of growing concern about political violence in America,” Politico’s Natalie Fertig

President Donald Trump may fear his own wife, First Lady Melania Trump, as she navigates the fallout of her longtime friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.“Why had the presser been called?” wrote The Independent’s Sarah Beth Spraggins about the first lady’s surprising April 9th press conference. “There have been growing rumors that Paolo Zampolli – the modeling agent Melania credits with encouraging her to move to the United States – may have used his ties to the Trumps to have his ex-partner Amanda Ungaro deported.”If true, this detail would fill in a lot of

It has been another long, brutal week of lies, misdirection and lawlessness from Donald Trump and his political party of sycophants, who spend the majority of their time somewhere in the vicinity of their master’s wobbly knees.Prices are soaring, our democracy is crumbling, we are seemingly at war with the world to include the Pope, and the corporate media, or whatever you want to call ‘em, still have no idea what to make of any of it.All this is especially galling to their consumers, who are angry as hell and scared to death as we try to navigate through the most precarious

You can almost feel the change in the air we breathe. It’s not just that Dems are winning special elections by wide margins (and even where they’re not, they’re “overperforming” in ruby-red areas by an average of 16 points).Nor just that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was overwhelmingly defeated after 16 years of authoritarian rule, with almost 80 percent of eligible voters turning out. (The victor, Peter Magyar, overcame Orbán’s rigged system by focusing on Orbán’s corruption and linking it to the economic