This article originally appeared on Politics Whip. Trump chief of staff John Kelly will leave the White House by the end of the year to go to a much better place: anywhere that isn’t the Trump White House. Of course, Kelly doesn’t deserve that place. What Kelly deserves is to ...read more
Stop me if you've heard this before: A older white man who dislikes Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party says that the left needs to abandon identity politics and get back in touch with "the working class." [Slavoj] Žižek, a frequent critic of both capitalism and the ...read more
One of my least favorite traits about Democrats is that we tend to get dissatisfied with our leaders pretty quickly. In the year following Obama’s inaugural, major news outlets were already writing articles saying Obama was disappointing them, despite the fact that he hadn’t ...read more
Donald Trump's war on the news media reached all new depths this week. It doesn't take a lot of sleuthing to see how the brutal torture and murder of The Washington Post's Jamal Khashoggi has Trump's fingerprints all over it. Indeed, as we learn more and more about the story, it ...read more
For just a moment, try to ignore the fact that the following allegedly independent voters made colossal errors in judgment by voting for Donald Trump in the first place. Yes, they were successfully duped by a despot whose entire career, reaching back to the 1970s, has been all ...read more
I suppose it was inevitable that during an era in which Donald Trump is perpetually flooding the zone with madness that we'd also get a Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who brings with him a seemingly endless syllabus of baggage. Now, after weeks of speculation as well as ...read more
Not that facts matter anymore, but in the off chance there are some Red Hats stopping by today, it's time to bring some truth in response to Donald Trump's ongoing lies about the alleged political motives of Robert Mueller's team. For several months now, Trump has been hurling ...read more
Like most on the left, I fully expect Trump's negotiations with North Korea to spectacularly implode. Like most on the left, I also dread the prospect that this implosion will push the already unstable Trump to retaliate against his fellow ridiculous dictator Kim Jong Un by ...read more
The cold wind of fear is gripping Trump country and it's pretty damn funny. Paul Waldman writes: In the endless search for the magic key that Democrats can use to unlock the hearts of white people who vote Republican, the hot new candidate is “respect.” If only they cast off ...read more
We're in the middle of another right wing meltdown over the latest revelation that the FBI was investigating Trump's treasonous collusion with Russia by the summer of 2016, well before they had even heard of the Steele Dossier. After a drunken George Papadopoulos blabbed to the ...read more
You don't have to like John McCain to feel bad that he's dying from cancer. Conversely, you don't have to hate him to acknowledge that his legacy is going to be a seriously mixed bag of warmongering combined with vanishingly rare Republican integrity. You do, however, have to be ...read more
Last week, the US House Intelligence Committee released approximately 3,517 Facebook ads purchased by the Russians between 2015-17, meant to influence the 2016 election, all of which are available to download. USA Today conducted a study of the ads and concluded that more than ...read more
Since the election of Donald Trump, Maxine Waters has become one of the most visible icons of the Resistance. Whether she's "shoving" TYT correspondent Michael Tracey, appearing on t-shirts with her catchphrase "reclaiming my time," or openly calling for impeachment following ...read more
As we move closer to the midterms, it's important to understand exactly what is at stake. This goes far beyond just sticking it to Trump or, more urgently, putting a check on his insanity; we are on the brink of collapse as a nation. I want very badly for this to be hysterical ...read more
On Tuesday, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, released a document detailing millions of dollars paid to Trump's mobbed up lawyer Michael Cohen by both a Russian oligarch and several corporations: Among the other payments to Mr. Cohen’s company described in the ...read more
Last night's primaries in Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia garnered more attention for who lost rather than who won. In Ohio, Dennis Kucinich, the former Congressman and perennial Presidential candidate lost the nomination for governor this fall. Although his old ...read more
Let's get the obvious out of the way: Fuck Eric Schneiderman. I know we're supposed to do the whole "innocent until proven guilty thing" but just like with Roy Moore, Schneiderman's victims told their friends about what had happened so there is contemporaneous collaboration of ...read more
My personal rule for evaluating Donald Trump's presidency continues to be: Trump always makes things worse for Trump. No matter which way the president zigs or zags, every decision somehow worsens Trump's peril, be it legal or political or miscellaneous. It's kind of a miracle ...read more
On Friday, Trump gave another one of his rambling campaign speeches to a crowd of delusional NRA members that came to celebrate their hatred of gun control and gun free zones in a gun free zone with total and absolute gun control. During the almost hour long ode to his ego, ...read more
Neil Cavuto is no hero. The Fox News Channel host has always been a team player, dutifully cheerleading first for George W. Bush and now for Donald Trump. We've seen Fox News people occasionally criticize Trump and, before him, Bush, but we've never quite seen a ...read more
Every now and then, a new article (or a repost of an old one) makes the rounds on social media discussing how liberals are more likely to unfriend people over politics both online and in the real world. Usually the context of the post is to show how "intolerant" the left is but ...read more
Since he was first elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2010, Scott Wiener has proven to be a highly effective legislator, passing bills regulating the environment, housing protections, and the LGBT community. Now, as San Francisco's representative in the ...read more
Now that Rudy Giuliani has openly confessed that Trump violated a couple of different campaign finance laws, the right is scrambling to clean up the mess. Since perennial boogeyman Hillary Clinton doesn't appear to have any notable run ins with the FEC, Fox News contributor Ari ...read more
If there's one thing liberals want more than anything else in the world, it's for conservatives to suffer the consequences of voting Republican and leave the rest of out of their suicide pact. And according to Vox, at least as far as having health insurance, we may be getting ...read more
If you don't follow Elliott Lusztig (a pseudonym) on Twitter, you really should. He's insightful and his tweets are good for clarifying the ongoing tragedy that is American politics. One of Wednesday's threads is a helpful look at why Republicans are ignoring the threat Trump ...read more
Yesterday, Reuters/IPSOS released a new poll that, if you believe the headlines, could mean trouble for Democrats in the 2018 midterms. The poll is accompanied by a look into the primary for New Hampshire's First District, where millennials appear wishy-washy as to which ...read more
The White House Correspondents Dinner has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since Stephen Colbert mocked the Bush Administration back in 2006. Back then, the press debated about whether he was too mean to the sitting President while forgetting that the purpose of comedy ...read more
The Banter Long Read: Even at my lowest points, when everything looks bleak and horrible and the light at the end of the tunnel is all but eclipsed by a deranged orange Death Star, I know mankind will get past this. I know this because I have something that conservatives will ...read more
It looks like Arizona and Nevada are on the brink of becoming beachfront property. Republican Senate candidates are stumbling under the weight of the Trump albatross around their necks just as a tidal wave of highly engaged Democratic voters appears ready to crash on top of ...read more
Last night Democrats lost a special election. Republican Debbie Lesko beat Indian-American ER physician Hiral Tipirneni by roughly 6 points to represent Arizona's 8th district after Congressman Trent Franks resigned over charges of sexual harassment. Republicans had reason to ...read more
Kanye West's recent statements make him appear like a permanent resident of the Sunken Place. The hip-hop giant recently got back on Trump's favorite social media outlet to send out a series of missives that have baffled his fanbase, most notably his praise for Candace Owens, an ...read more
Greg Sargent at The Washington Post is worried about the growing trend of Republican candidates aping Trump's authoritarian style to excite the GOP's base: The question all this raises is whether there is a large swath of GOP primary voters who are fully prepared to march behind ...read more
This week, to the shock of absolutely no one, former BernieBro extraordinaire H.A. Goodman, who built his brand on mindless, conspiracy-laden hatred of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, has come out as a Trump supporter. In a tweet to his followers released Friday, April 20th, ...read more
Last year, Republicans in Virginia tried to walk a fine line between keeping their distance from Trump while trying to sound like him. The result was a brutal rout despite Virginia being one of the more heavily gerrymandered states in the country. Democratic gubernatorial ...read more
Yesterday, the Associated Press published former FBI director James Comey’s memos from his meetings with President Trump. The memos reveal things we either know or have assumed about Trump: he’s petty, vindictive, obsessed with loyalty, and has an attention span that makes fleas ...read more
While we're focused on the big ticket items like the Mueller probe and Michael Cohen's impending polonium poisoning, it's important to keep track of all the other horrible things Trump is doing if for no other reason than to keep conservatives from claiming they were innocent ...read more
Regardless of what you might think of the Bush family and their political legacy, Barbara Bush was by all accounts a highly intelligent and decent woman in her personal life. Furthermore, she was horrified by the emergence of Donald Trump in the 2016 election and spoke out ...read more
In the year since Donald Trump's election, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau has become an important voice for the Resistance. With his White House colleagues Dan Pfeiffer, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, he started Crooked Media, which produces the popular podcast Pod Save ...read more
Wednesday morning, Donald Trump woke up and started rage tweeting at California and its governor, Jerry Brown: Ignoring the gibberish of "breeding concept", who says the people of California aren't happy? Only 4 polls since 2013 have shown Brown's popularity dipping below 50%. ...read more
Last month, California State Senator Scott Wiener introduced bill SB-822, which would extend net neutrality protections throughout the state and strike a major blow to the FCC and its chairman, Ajit Pai. Today, the bill received a hearing from the State's Energy, Utilities, and ...read more
Ann Coulter and Alex Jones are pissed off. They're not pissed at the usual gallery of enemies: the globalists, the alleged "liberal fascists," or the perennial threat called "knowledge." Today, Jones and Coulter have had it up to here with Donald Trump. In case you missed it, ...read more
The Washington Post continues to justify Donald Trump's absolute loathing of it with another humiliating scoop, this time undermining Trump's "tough on Russia" narrative. In an uncharacteristically bold move, the Trump administration expelled a massive 60 Russian diplomats ...read more
Nina Turner, the former Ohio State Senator and head of the SuperPAC Our Revolution, has managed to offend almost every reasonable center-left Democrat in the last two years. One of the only prominent African-American women to endorse Bernie Sanders in the primary, she refused to ...read more
Fareed Zakaria is rewriting history to give conservatism a pass. Rather than Trump being the natural evolution of Republicanism, he's now the "end" of Reagan's revolution, destroying the "libertarian" GOP and turning it into something ugly and crass: The Reagan redefinition of ...read more
Societies have long known that when inventors don't ask hard questions of themselves, the results can be catastrophic. Mark Zuckerberg learned this the hard way this week when he testified before Congress over two consecutive days concerning Cambridge Analytica's breach of ...read more
Lost in the news between Trump threatening World War III and Paul Ryan slinking away from Congress like the spineless coward he is was yet another brutal Republican loss in yet another special election: State Rep. Lori Berman (D) has handily defeated Tami Donnally (R) to replace ...read more
Yes, folks, you read that headline correctly. In a story broken by Axios this morning, Paul Ryan, the 54th Speaker of the House of Representatives, will retire from Congress at the end of this current session, becoming the first sitting Speaker to forgo re-election in an ...read more
Donald Trump spent a good part of Monday ranting about how there's a conspiracy by "the other side" to destroy him and once again talked about firing Special Consul Robert Mueller. But, as Bob Cesca keeps pointing out, everything Trump does makes things worse for Trump and this ...read more
Republicans are legitimately starting to panic over the midterms. It's gotten so bad that the cracks are starting to show as the party is on the brink of writing off the House as a lost cause: Republicans are increasingly worried they will lose control of the House in the ...read more
Last weekend, a fire broke out on the 50th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, injuring six firefighters and killing 67-year-old resident Todd Brassner. The President took to Twitter that evening to congratulate the brave firemen who safely contained the blaze. The tragic irony ...read more