MIAMI — Hispanics are 60% of the population of Miami-Dade County, according to the U.S. Census. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton won Hispanic votes here by a margin of about 290,000, which was not enough to win the state for her. An NBC News/Marist poll last month showed President Trump with a 50% to […]

“I didn’t know.” Those were the first words my friend, a white guy named Dave, spoke to me the day after the first episode of “Roots,” which depicted the capture and enslavement of an African boy named Kunta Kinte. This was 43 years ago. So you can perhaps imagine my frustration last year when the […]

If this is the most important election of our lifetimes, is it too much to ask that the president of the United States act like it? The president’s most devoted backers talk about the election in apocalyptic terms – Michael Anton of Hillsdale College, author of the famous “The Flight 93 Election” essay in 2016, […]

“Are you not entertained?” — Maximus, in “Gladiator” It helps if you think of it as a show. Certainly, that’s the way the man in the middle of it does. So just consider last weekend the latest bizarre episode in season four of the Donald Trump presidency. Call it “The One With COVID-19.” Granted, it’s […]

President Trump’s infection with COVID-19 adds to a year no fiction writer could have contrived. The image of Trump last Friday walking out of the White House wearing a mask and traveling by helicopter to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was an optic we have not seen with this president, and it was sobering. […]

Asked about race at Tuesday’s presidential debate, one candidate gave a very disappointing answer. The other was Donald Trump. Which is not to suggest Trump had satisfactory answers. To the contrary, asked by moderator Chris Wallace why America should trust him to heal its racial wounds, he was, as is his norm, nonsensical and miles […]

I had initially thought of Tuesday night’s first presidential debate as the equivalent of a heavyweight boxing match, something like the classic fights between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali in the 1970s. Instead it was less a “Thrilla in Manila” or a “Rumble in the Jungle” and more like a phony professional wrestling match. Let’s […]

Just last week, the headlines were inescapable. They stemmed from a story in The Atlantic detailing what amounts to the Republican Party plotting a coup. Which is to say, cooking up Electoral College schemes designed to keep Donald Trump in office even if voters turn him out. Even worse, Trump himself explicitly refused to say […]