Author: Heather Cox Richardson

The first presidential debate of 2020 was unlike anything we have seen before. CNN’s Jake Tapper said: “That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck.” “He was his own tweets come to life.” “We’ll talk about who won the debate, who lost the debate … One thing for sure, the American people lost.” Conservative pundit William Kristol called it “a spectacle… an embarrassment… a disgrace… because of the behavior of one man, Donald Trump. The interrupting and the bullying, the absence of both decency and dignity—those were Donald Trump’s distinctive contributions to the evening,...

The New York Times published a story on September 27 that the American public has been waiting for since 2016: the story of Donald Trump’s taxes. There was never any doubt that whatever was in those taxes was bad or he never would have worked so hard to hide them. But the picture the New York Times story revealed was worse than expected. The New York Times obtained more than two decades of Donald Trump’s tax information, including that of his companies, through his first two years in the White House. The picture they paint is of a man...

Flowers are strewn on the steps of the Supreme Court, where “Equal Justice Under Law” is carved in stone. More than a thousand people gathered there tonight to mourn the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on September 18 from cancer at age 87. Justice Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933, in an era when laws, as well as the customs they protected, treated women differently than men. Ginsburg would grow up to challenge the laws that barred women from jobs and denied them rights, eventually setting the country on a path...

Long before Donald Trump was elected to the highest office in the land, many scholars shared their fear that American democracy was in jeopardy. Since the 2016 election, it has become clear that the system envisioned by the Founding Fathers is ending. Farhad Manjoo warned about this in his recent New York Times column, I’m Doomsday Prepping for the End of Democracy. Manjoo pointed to political violence on the streets, the pandemic, unemployment, racial polarization, and natural disasters, all of which are destabilizing the country, and noted that Republicans appear to have abandoned democracy in favor of a cult-like...