Tag
Donald Trump
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“2020 Isn’t Over”: Eric Klinenberg on Pandemics, Politics, and Solidarity
“What we needed was wisdom and clarity. What we got was chaos and confusion.”
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The Big Picture: Religion and the Republic
I still remember reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time, as a freshman in college. I was astonished! How could this French aristocrat have understood us so well, I wondered …
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The Big Picture: Social Solidarity
Like mom and apple pie, football brings Americans together. It enables spectators to participate in collective life loudly and (sometimes) proudly, despite competing team loyalties. Because such moments of unfettered collective effervescence are so rare in the United States, the #TakeAKnee movement is generating strong emotions on all sides of the conflict. To patriotic fans,…
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The Big Picture: Trump, Trade, and War
President Trump has proven to be a reckless leader. His refusal to denounce white supremacists, his repeated attacks on journalists and free speech, his courting of Vladimir Putin, his attempts to belittle and provoke the North Korean leader—every single one of these acts is corrosive and destabilizing. While the media has understandably focused on the…
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The Big Picture: Jews and Trump
Exit polls conducted during the 2016 election yielded a fact about the political allegiances of American Jews that was at once totally unsurprising and potentially misleading: over 70 percent of respondents who identified as Jewish cast ballots for Hillary Clinton. For all the attention heaped upon the prospect of Ivanka Trump as the nation’s first…
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The Big Picture: Criminalizing Immigrants
Peering out the windows of John F. Kennedy Airport in the early morning hours of January 29, 2017, I had hope for this country’s future on immigration policy. Hundreds of ordinary New Yorkers were still gathered outside the airport protesting the first iteration of President Trump’s Muslim Ban. Inside the airport, desperate but resilient individuals…
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The Big Picture: Trump’s New York
The lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, right next door to Grand Central Terminal, presents a generic corporate luxury—an aesthetic of high ceilings, sleek fountains of black granite, dark wood pillars. As a reporter for the New York Times wrote in 1980, shortly before the hotel opened, the glass-wrapped exterior looks like…
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The Big Picture: Unholy Alliances
Andrew Jackson had good reason to believe that his first presidential election, of 1824, had been rigged. He had won the popular vote but not an Electoral College majority. Jackson was hated by elite political players. The Tennessean’s crass demeanor, uneducated manner, and disconnection from the dominant elite strongholds of Massachusetts and Virginia—all previous presidents…
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The Big Picture: Women Voters, Left and Right
Trump won the presidency despite being recorded saying “grab ‘em by the pussy,” and despite numerous accusations that he had sexually abused women over a period of decades. There is misogyny at the core of Trump’s persona. So it isn’t surprising that, in office, he has championed policies that would harm millions of women in…
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The Big Picture: The Devastated House of Labor
American workers are heterogeneous politically, as well as racially, ethnically, and educationally. Unions are equally mixed. Some unions focus primarily on the narrow economic interests of their members, and others have strong commitments to social justice. Despite their differences, virtually all unions and their confederations in the post-WWII era increasingly advocated racial inclusiveness and greater…
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The Big Picture: Confronting Manhood after Trump
If it were fiction, it would have been dismissed as preposterous. America elected a grotesque, slobbering id to the highest office of the most powerful country in the world: a thundering narcissist who, without irony, describes himself as “the world’s greatest person.”1 And central to his persona is a vulgar and vindictive masculinity; not cold…
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The Big Picture: Trump’s Charisma
Accepting the presidential nomination at the 2016 Republican convention, Donald Trump painted a picture of America in crisis, with “poverty and violence at home” and “war and destruction abroad.” But, he proclaimed, “I am your voice” and “I alone can fix it.” The fired-up delegates, booing on cue and cheering when prompted, roared in response…
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The Big Picture: Unequal America
The US was once widely—and quite uncynically—viewed as a land of prosperity and opportunity. During the expansionary decades of the mid-20th century, it was treated as the world’s test case on the matter of whether capitalism, once properly tamed, could deliver prosperity and opportunity for all. Although no one imagined that the taming of capitalism…
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The Big Picture: Violence and Criminal Justice
On a rainy day in December of 2013, I visited the Heritage Foundation, one of the country’s most prominent conservative think tanks, to talk about how to reform the criminal justice system. I sat at a long oval table with a politically diverse group of researchers, policy makers, and institutional leaders and discussed what we…
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The Big Picture: Rule by Misrule
Posters declaring “No Trump, no KKK, no Fascist USA!” and the like feature in most anti-Trump rallies. Viscerally, it’s clear what the posters mean: no more threats to children of illegal immigrants, no more sympathy for white supremacists … but the placards do not convey that something more is at stake in the leader’s behavior…
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The Big Picture: Evangelical Voters
In the 2016 US presidential election over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump—more even than for Mitt Romney in 2012 or for John McCain in 2008. Candidate Hillary Clinton had her …
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The Big Picture: School of Trump
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, education policy has not been a priority for the new administration. And, given his views on the matter, including an obsession with promoting alternatives to “government schools,” leaving it on the back burner may truly be a good thing. After nearly a year in office, it’s clear that other issues…
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The Big Picture: Coalthink
If we trust the president, we believe that he is, if nothing else, a businessman. Towers glittering across real estates seem to proclaim the truth of this; but when it comes to coal, both business and sense exit the scene. Mercurial to his core, the diligence with which Mr. Trump maintains his fidelity to coal—the…
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The Big Picture: Trump on Twitter
On its face, Twitter appears to be a quintessentially democratic medium. It promotes individualized expression, helps build social networks, and, until recently, seemed to epitomize the decentralized public sphere long called for by liberal theorists and digital utopians alike. During Donald Trump’s campaign for president, however, it became an engine of authoritarianism. Day after day,…
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The Big Picture: Resource Extraction
Trump has a range of cons going, but one of the most outrageous is this: he is about to fleece his working-class supporters in the Rust Belt, coal country, and the rural Pacific Northwest …
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The Big Picture: The Office of the Presidency
To borrow a phrase from his own reckless comment on North Korea, Donald Trump has debased the office of the Presidency to an extent “like the world has never seen.” His policies are capricious, often cruel, and potentially disastrous. But there is something rotten in the state of Trump that goes beyond even that. He…
