As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson fends off another conservative rebellion over his four-part foreign aid plan, he’s garnering support from former speaker — and infamous conservative pugilist — Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, who claimed the gavel in 1995 after leading Republicans to their first majority in the House in nearly 40 years, is a somewhat surprising ally for Johnson. As a junior member of the House, Gingrich pioneered the style of confrontational conservatism and bare-knuckle partisan brawling that today’s Republican hard-liners — led by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz — have seemingly made th ..read more

In 1986, when David Whelan was just a baby, his mother Joan had her first psychotic break. Throughout David’s childhood, Joan spent time in institutions and eventually was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. David always wondered whether something in her past had triggered it; all he knew was that his mother had been adopted from Greece when she was young, and that something tragic had happened to her parents. As a kid, David never dared to broach the subject. But in 2013, when he was 26 and back home visiting from grad school, he worked up the nerve to talk to his father. “Did something happen t ..read more

According to Donald Trump, he oversaw sky-high economic growth, soaring markets and half-century-low unemployment. Joe Biden says Trump was the first president to preside over a net loss in jobs since Herbert Hoover. Biden boasts that his own presidency is defined by booming job growth and plunging deficits. Trump says consumers haven’t felt worse in decades, because of inflation. The weird thing is, they’re both right — about everything. Voters have the unusual opportunity to choose between two candidates that have already worked in the Oval Office. But the pandemic irreparably garbled data t ..read more

If Mike Johnson’s plan for Ukraine aid fails in the House, he might have Sen. J.D. Vance partially to blame. Last week, the Ohio Republican authored a New York Times op-ed headlined “The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up,” and he’s followed that up by meeting with the House’s Republican Study Committee on Wednesday to whip against Johnson’s Ukraine bill. Earlier this year I spent months speaking to Vance for an extensive profile exploring how the freshman Republican has become Donald Trump’s most loyal ally in the Senate, while also laying the groundwork for an even more expansive and radical vis ..read more

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the preeminent historian and chronicler of presidential lives, had some advice for Joe Biden when he took office: Skip the soaring Kennedy-style rhetoric and give more fireside chats, like FDR did. It was interesting guidance coming from someone whose husband, Richard Goodwin, was a confidant of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and speechwriter extraordinaire to Lyndon B. Johnson. Although he was only in his 20s and 30s at the time, Dick Goodwin was author of some of the most memorable speeches in American history, inventing phrases that came to define the era, from the ..read more

You can’t use a mega-sound system to hold a political rally in front of a hospital in the middle of the night. You can’t pack a theater so full of people that no one can reach the fire exits without being trampled. In the physical world, these kinds of noise control and fire safety regulations uneventfully coexist with our First Amendment free speech and free assembly rights. They’re accepted as common-sense ways to keep us safe and preserve our sanity. The same ideas can be applied to social media. By reverse engineering the noise and lack of crowd control that has overrun social media platfo ..read more

NPR business editor Uri Berliner earned a five-day suspension without pay from his bosses this week for having violated the network’s policy prohibiting unauthorized work for other outlets. Warned that if he did it again, he could be fired, Berliner made the next move and resigned. There's no doubt that Berliner is guilty. He acknowledges that he did not clear the writing of his essay in the Free Press, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” which napalms NPR’s reputation and the news standards of his NPR colleagues. The piece enjoyed an extended run on X, where e ..read more

The criminal trial of former President Donald Trump is an unprecedented moment for the U.S. — but across the globe, South Korea has already convicted its fair share of former presidents. Three of the last four presidents were investigated by prosecutors over the span of a decade. Roh Moo-hyun, from the liberal party, died of suicide while he and his close circle were investigated for bribery. Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye were convicted and sentenced to prison over bribery and abuse of power. Yoon Suk Yeol, the current president of South Korea, played a key role in the indictment of Park Geu ..read more

When I asked the U.S. official what President Joe Biden’s Iran strategy is, I was immediately met with laughter. Then, the official said, “You know, a lot of people inside the administration ask that same question. Sometimes they ask it on the first day. Sometimes they ask it six months later. ” I have an answer for them: There is no Biden strategy for Iran. If he wants to end the growing chaos in the Middle East, he might want to come up with one. The Islamist regime in Tehran is, by many measures, at the root of much of the destabilization across the Middle East and more of a threat to U.S ..read more

Like many Americans, Richard Haass is still trying to understand why Iran decided to attack Israel directly over the weekend with a barrage of more than 300 missiles and drones, most of which were shot down. The attack was a retaliation for an airstrike by Israel earlier this month that killed a top general with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Damascus. But Haass believes Tehran has miscalculated and will come to regret its decision to shift from its longtime strategy of using proxy forces in places like Syria and Iraq into launching a direct attack on civilian areas in Israel, whi ..read more