detailed WashPost account of how Trump and Stephen Miller sidelined serious lawyers so they could fabricate a justification for committing murder www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

My skeptical take (with Lindsey O'Rourke of Boston College) on regime change in Venezuela. www.foreignaffairs.com/venezuela/re...

📣 Job alert! 📣 Harvard Kennedy School is running 2 open-rank faculty searches in technology & public policy. One position is specifically for scholars using data science to address public problems. Please help us spread the word! academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15561

Faculty searches at Harvard Kennedy School in applied microeconomics and in technology and public policy www.hks.harvard.edu/more/about/l...

He promised not to do this. He lied. What a surprise.

It is good to see the pushback on Trump lead to real losses for him. But it's hard to be optimistic when he still wields the enormous power of the presidency. ICE is still rampaging, HHS is harming people, the U.S. may be about to sell out Ukraine, the boat strikes...he's still doing so much damage.

For what it’s worth, as a commander and officer it was my duty, moral obligation, and legal requirement to first question and then to not obey any illegal order I was given. The same is true for everyone who swear their oath. Hope that clears things up.

He’s never set food in a grocery store as a customer, has he.

Trump shrugged off the murder of Jamal Khashoggi this week by saying "things happen," an attitude towards violence that has huge implications for our country. @rosabrooks.bsky.social and @djrothkopf.bsky.social discuss and look for answers in our history: ow.ly/urX550Xut82 youtu.be/FJFgW2c5m8o

Not that he cares about facts, but 92% of Medicaid recipients are working or fall within an exempt category, and thanks to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (🤮), immigrants generally have to wait 5 years to enroll in Medicaid. RFK Jr. is making shit up.

This is what competitive authoritarianism looks like - regime ally trying to purchase media and remove critical voices

It remains a national shanda that we have totally moved on from the attempted and actual assassinations of elected Democrats, as if they never even happened. It's why we're here, dealing with this should-immediately-end-a-presidency stuff today.

Strangling the world-beating export industry which cross-subsidizes higher education for Americans. The White House says that's good news!

In related news, the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killings shows that rightwingers don't actually mind cancel culture—so long as it's done against their ideological adversaries. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

There is something darkly poetic, in an Orwellian sense, about the aspiring dictator saying to the press, "Quiet, quiet, piggy".

Oh, I get it now. MAGA = Make ARABIA Great Again.

The press corps sure could do a better job of challenging Trump when he lies, when he refuses to answer questions, when he attacks colleagues. The first reporter who says to him, "Why are you being such a jerk?" will become a folk hero. And i hope he or she keeps their job.

Important stuff here from @pattynieberg.bsky.social and Jeff Schogol in light of the recent Venezuela news.

*Every single* institution, organization, and individual who caved into Trump already looks worse for having done so. And every one that stood up continues to look better.

I spent October traveling to schools throughout the South talking to students about American history. What I found were young people who understand we can tell a story that includes both the positive and the negative. As one 8th grader in Memphis said, “Doesn’t seem that hard, just say both things.”

And then they came for Buddy Holly… www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/u...

The core risk of a U.S.-Saudi defense pact is structural: Saudi Arabia would gain protection; the United States would gain obligation.

Those boats we are sinking in the Caribbean and Pacific are small and at best very lightly armed and we have the most powerful Navy in the world. Yet somehow we can’t stop them, detain the crews, seize the drugs (if any), and we prefer to just kill people instead. Not a good look…

Dani Rodrik in the NYT the other day with a pretty compelling argument about making service sector jobs into good jobs www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/o...

The Founders were so concerned about bribery that the Constitution forbids it three separate times. Two emoluments clauses ban officials—unambiguously including the president—from accepting things of value, plus bribery is the only named impeachable offense besides treason. Unprecedentedly corrupt.

This is a thoughtful article but what's omitted and now threatened, free speech, is the foundation of greatness. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/o...

Mafia governance in action "the only offer on the table was that I needed to resign by 5pm that day or the DOJ would basically rain hell on UVA... If I did not resign that day, I was told that the DOJ would extract/block hundreds of millions of dollars from UVA before they would even negotiate."

I was told there was a crisis of free speech on campus that must be reversed

Israel has destroyed more than 1,500 buildings in Gaza since ceasefire (or, to use Trump's words, since he achieved "the peace that has been sought for at least 3,000 years") www.bbc.com/news/article...

Look, everybody! It’s an economist who can’t read a chart.

This Veterans Day, columnist @stephenwalt.bsky.social reflects on how the military’s role in American society is changing for the worse.

For Veterans Day, a warning about where civil-military relations are headed in the US, and its dangerous effects on readiness. Latest FP column here: foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/11/v...

The #CaveCaucus got Thune to promise he'd pay them Tuesday for a hamburger today all the while knowing that Mike Johnson is holding Thune's wallet and is never going to pay the debt. Pathetic.

tomorrow's announcement on truth social

JUST NOW: Donald Trump gets loudly BOOED by the crowd at the Commanders game. What a loser!

As a lawyer who advised and represented international financial institutions making loans and guarantees on major investment projects in Uzbekistan for 15 years, I can say with 100% certainty that Uzbekistan does not have $135 billion to invest in the US, or anywhere else outside of Uzbekistan.

Chris Rufo/Ron DeSantis overhauled New College and made it "the most financially inefficient school in the university system" Degree yield is 19%, 2nd-worst in Fla. Operating funds per student at New College: $83,207 Same category at Univ of Florida: $45,765 www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/e...

but #SomeHeroesThrowHeroes

The elimination of USAID was an unforgivable moral atrocity that should haunt Trump, Elon Musk and Marco Rubio for the rest of their days and beyond

this looks like a trick daffy duck would put up to get bugs bunny into "the oval office"

It is revealing that some of most effective weapons against Trump’s creeping authoritarianism have been inflatable frog suits and a deli sandwich.

None of what Trump is doing is popular and voters are telling us that

Call me old-fashioned, but as these election results come in, let me just say that I don’t think anyone’s ethnic background is a good reason to vote for or against them. There are plenty of much better criteria.

A pass so hard that it crushes diamonds.

Is this the long-awaited, much-ballyhooed replacement for Obamacare? You message the president on social media and hope he intervenes?

The global damage this one election inflicted will be impossible to tally www.ft.com/content/4e0a...

Want to read what I really think about the Trump administration and the Asia Pacific? Here you go. It’s a goddamn catastrophe for U.S. national interests and for the regional economic and diplomatic order.

Yet in 2010, Noem—then a congressional candidate—had “20 speeding tickets, three stop-sign violations, two seat-belt violations and a citation for driving with no driver’s license.” She had six court notices for failing to appear, and had two warrants out for her arrest. trib.al/uQSDaqR