“We’re doing trade deals that are going to get you so much business you’re not even going to believe it,” President Trump told an American Farm Bureau Federation meeting in January. The attendees cheered. Meanwhile, farmer income for the first three months of this year fell almost $12 billion. Farmers account for only 2 percent […]

The last thing the world needs is more of Robert Mueller’s commentary, but Congress is determined to have him hold forth at a public hearing. It’s not as though we don’t already have the special counsel’s version of events. He mustered enormous investigate resources and took two years to write a 400-page report that is […]

There are people who do not matter much. That’s a painful truth, starkly at odds with our Jeffersonian creed and national mythology. But it is a truth, nevertheless, one frequently proven in actions if denied in words. In this country, by dint of race, gender, class or status, some people just don’t seem to matter. […]

Spies have always targeted more than military secrets. Gathering political intelligence and compromising personal information on enemy leaders is as old as our species. “Spying for profit” (economic gain) is old news, though globalization has increased the value of commercial and financial data. Likewise, spies have long pursued what we now call “proprietary knowledge,” particularly […]

WASHINGTON — With the end of the Mueller probe and the news that the U.S. economy is performing far beyond expectations, President Donald Trump has reached an inflection point in his presidency. He has the chance to turn the political tides decisively in his favor, if he takes it. On Friday, we learned that the […]

In a country preoccupied with presidential candidates preaching extreme liberalism and even unabashed socialism comes America’s greatest living historian, David McCullough, with a new and needed book. It’s called “The Pioneers” and the subtitle is its theme: “The heroic story of the settlers who brought the American ideal west” (Simon and Schuster). Nowadays, while students […]

I oversee the care of an ailing man who’s pushing 90. When I’m with him, the sound of his phone ringing sends a minor shock to my system. And his phone is ringing all the time. “That’s probably a robocall,” he says, obviously aware that these autodialed spam and scam calls are usually up to […]

WASHINGTON — We live in an age obsessed with economic inequality. There is too much of it, most people seem to agree. After Donald Trump — his personality, behavior and policies — inequality may well become the dominant issue in the 2020 election. This poses dangers, the most obvious being the tendency to blame the […]

An investigation into whether the president of the United States committed treason has devolved into a squabble over Attorney General Bill Barr’s brief letter saying that he didn’t. We’ve gone from Donald Trump allegedly betraying the nation to Bill Barr allegedly betraying the nation, from potential Trump impeachment to potential Barr impeachment. Barr’s offense, of […]

It took a few days, but the New York Times finally got around to apologizing for publishing in its international edition a grossly anti-Semitic cartoon depicting a blind President Trump wearing a yarmulke and being led by a dog resembling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The dog wore a Star of David around its neck. […]