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President Donald Trump is forcing “religious nuttery” on the rest of the United States through the military, according to an ex-adviser to a different Republican president.“I want this religious extremism, I want this religious nuttery, I want this religious nationalism, I want this evil buried under a concrete f—— sarcophagus,” Steve Schmidt, a podcaster who was once a top adviser to President George W. Bush, said on Sunday. “Do not disappoint the president. Tell me

President Donald Trump is betraying his voters in a way that could hurt Republicans in future elections, but a conservative commentators doubts whether they will capitalize on it.“It happened on Wednesday, during a private Easter luncheon at the White House,” wrote The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn. He quoted Trump as admitting that because of Republican support for the military-industrial complex, “we can’t take care of daycare,” that states which want to support their citizens will “have to raise their taxes” and that “Medicaid” and “Medicare” are also on the chop

President Donald Trump has fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, but that does not mean his draconian anti-immigrant agenda will wind down. According to a recent report, the architect of that agenda remains as entrenched in power as ever."Far from acknowledging defeat, Mr. Miller appears to have simply adjusted his strategy in an effort to minimize political fallout," wrote Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz, Christopher Flavelle, Emily Cochrane and Glenn Thrush of The New York Times in a Sunday report.The report elaborated that, even as Trump’s “crackdown” has become unpopular in pretty much every American political group outsi

President Donald Trump and his Republican supporters have “played” themselves in their latest attempt to rig the 2026 midterm elections, according to a key conservative critic.Because Trump’s executive order is likely to fail in court, “Trump’s latest and most madcap executive order on mail-in voting isn’t just a policy pivot; it’s a full-frontal assault on the plumbing of American democracy, delivered with the Cromwellian subtlety of a sledgehammer to a stained-glass window,” wrote Rick Wilson, a former adviser to Trump’s fellow Republican, President George H. W. Bush. “It’s classic Trumpism: find a functioning, if unglamorous, part of the civic infrastructure, set it on fire becaus

Christian conservatives, including but not limited to supporters of President Donald Trump, like to claim that there is a Christian revival occurring right now in America, but The New York Times’ Lauren Jackson pointed out Sunday that the truth is much more complicated.“But anecdotes don’t make a national trend,” Jackson wrote. “And experts have urged caution: ‘These stories are a very small drop in a very large ocean, whose currents have for decades been taking people away from religion,’ said David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame who researches secularization. ‘For us to call this a true revival, we would need

President Donald Trump has realized in his second term that no one can stop him — and this demonstrates why we need to rein in the executive branch, at least according to one conservative think tank.“On day 1 of his first term, Trump issued only a single executive order,” wrote Gene Healy, senior editor at the right-wing think tank the Cato Institute, in a Sunday editorial for Reason Magazine. “The Beltway freak-out over the new administration was largely about presidential style rather than policy substance. An NPR item—’Yes, All This Happened. Trump's First 2 Weeks As President’—captured the reigning zei

President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, recently mused aloud that he looks forward to billionaire David Ellison taking over CNN. For the same reasons that Hegseth is excited about this prospect, CNN employees and advocates of free journalism are filled with dread.“Since 2015, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented more than 3,500 anti-press social media posts from Trump,” The Washington Post reported on Sunday. “Hundreds of them specifically mention CNN.”The paper added, “The cable news network is currently run by the Brit

In a country characterized by antiquated systems for regulating how electricity is produced and transported to homes and businesses, one utility in Arizona may be the most outdated. In 1903, almost a decade before Arizona became a state, a group of landowners around Phoenix secured a federal loan for a dam on the Salt River. The dam collected water to irrigate farms and produce hydroelectric power to run irrigation pumps. The landowners created the Salt River Project Association to govern the operation of the dam, and gave each landowner a vote for every acre of land they owned.This story was originally published by Grist. S

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect that the Val Kilmer play "Citizen Twain" was renamed "Cinema Twain" upon being released as a film.In theory, “A Great Awakening” could have been a fascinating film. It depicts the real-life friendship between American founding father Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield, one of the founders of the evangelical movement. Franklin was a deist intellectually and a lapsed Puritan emotionally, while Whitefield was Calvin

U.S. President Donald Trump is defending his war with Iran as a campaign against terrorism and extremism, repeatedly saying that the regime in Tehran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But critics of Trump's Iran policy, including retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling — former commander of U.S. Army Europe — believe that he is only adding to the instability in that part of the world.Another critic is Virginia-based counterterrorism expert Erfan Fard.In an