Discussions

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images With his extreme new round of tariffs in effect as of Wednesday morning, President Trump’s trade war is at full throttle. Stock markets around the world keep plummeting, and chaos and uncertainty are the order of the day. but in order to gain a modicum clarity into the situation, […]

Photo: Courtesy of HBO Amy Carlson wanted to be special. She tried astrology, and she tried men — angry, violent, useless men. One held a knife to her throat, which forced her to get a restraining order. One fathered her first child, but the relationship didn’t last. She married another man and gave birth to

Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been a very busy man the past week. By all accounts, he played a huge role in convincing at least some people on Wall Street (and in Congress) that Donald Trump doesn’t really mean what he’s been saying about tariffs and trade deficits for decades now and

Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Autocratic leaders love to have parades that show off military might. And it’s even better if the display of power glorifies them personally in some manner. So, naturally, Donald Trump has long dreamed of holding a military parade in Washington, D.C. For years, he has been thwarted, but now he may

Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump’s return to the presidency was made possible by two conclusions reached by a crucial bloc of swing voters: that Democratic management of the economy had become intolerably bad, and that in retrospect Trump’s management of the economy during his first term had been tolerably good, despite dire circumstances

Photo: Roy De La Cruz/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images As the crawling pace of congressional Republican action on Trump’s legislative agenda has shown, cutting taxes by a few trillion dollars when the federal government is already running record deficits and debt is hard work. Sure, regular MAGA folk may think that federal spending is just a target-rich

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images This morning, American markets fell and rose by trillions of dollars over a misinterpreted cable news interview, a few headlines, and a flurry of misleading posts on X. As the chaos continued, harried financial professionals and journalists tried to piece together the particulars. Was it a Reuters misreading of a CNBC

Photo: Daniel Cole/Reuters Much has been made recently of the Democratic Party’s systemic problems. Donald Trump won the popular vote, Republicans netted a healthy Senate majority, and almost every demographic group, absent the white and wealthy, gravitated to the GOP. As Trump has laid waste to the government and cowed civil society, few Democrats could

Photo: Lauren Sopourn/Getty Images As global markets continue to melt down in reaction to the president’s tariff program and his manifest willingness to wage a trade war, the question of the day is whether these adverse signals of real-world economic consequences will restrain him. To answer that question with another: Why would anyone imagine such

Photo: Jason C. Andrew/Bloomberg/Getty Images In February, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared to downplay the seriousness of an ongoing measles outbreak in Texas after an unvaccinated child became the first person to die from the virus in the United States since 2015. “There’ve been four measles outbreaks this year. In