Michael Tomasky

This Thursday, America gets its long-awaited moment as Joe Biden holds his first press conference as president. Actually, I doubt most people care. I did not sense at my daughter’s soccer game Sunday that the assembled parents were consumed with thoughts of the presidential debut; not a single person has mentioned it on the neighborhood list-serv. But there’s one group of people who can’t wait—the right-wingers who’ve convinced themselves, although thankfully not the rest of America, that Biden has advanced dementia and has lost his marbles and is supposedly under intense sedation that the press is covering up as he robotically […]

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos Getty So, it sucks that the minimum wage got cut out of the relief bill, and it sucks that there clearly aren’t (at least now) 50 votes in the Senate for $15. I still think a minimum wage bill will pass this Congress in some form, but obviously it would have been great to see it sail through from jump street. It also seemed kind of pointless to cut the benefits as the Senate did, but that’s what it took to get Joe Manchin’s vote. That’s the Senate. But don’t let those setbacks […]

It sounds so easy: Kamala Harris just has to ignore the parliamentarian’s ruling that the minimum wage increase doesn’t belong in the COVID relief bill, and just like that, the minimum wage increase happens. So why don’t these feckless Senate Democrats—and the Senate takes up the bill this week—just do it? Because it isn’t that easy. Legislating isn’t easy. It’s really hard and slow and tedious. But what about Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, you ask? They were bold, not like these timid corporate ninnies today! Bullshit. Roosevelt and Johnson had Democratic majorities that don’t exist now and will never exist […]

I remember a political cartoon early during the Reagan administration that poked fun at his fondness for quick vacations, which became a running meme in the media decades before that word was invented. It went something like: Mr. President—inflation is high, unemployment is bad, your signature legislation hasn’t passed yet, and your Interior secretary is a walking disaster. What are you going to do? To which Reagan answers, go to Aruba and Barbados for five days. That was a mostly harmless little jape, as Reagan’s taste for a little R & R did the republic no real harm. Plus, the Republican […]

Well, now we know. We know how the Republican Party wants to go down in history. They’ve made it as clear as could be. First, two-thirds of the members of the Republican caucus of the House of Representatives voted on Jan. 6 to refuse to affirm the results of the presidential election. They continued doing so, we know, after the riot, after Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick lay dead, after a mob had defaced the Capitol building. Denying Joe Biden the presidency was, of course, the mission of the mob. So two-thirds of House Republicans voted to condone the mob. […]

I see that people are apoplectic on Twitter about the Democrats “caving” on impeachment trial witnesses after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a handful of other Republicans abruptly called their bluff and voted to allow them. But people shouldn’t be upset. That was the right move for Democrats for two reasons. First, witnesses or no witnesses, this is a foreordained reality show, so let’s just get on with it and get it ended. And second, to the extent that there is a hunger to get to the bottom of everything that happened on Jan. 6—and I hope that extent is considerable […]

Spencer Platt When word leaked out that the House managers had “new evidence” in their case against Trump, the reflex was to think: Well, okay, but if you’re going to leak this in advance, it better live up to the hype. I’m here to tell you: It lived up. Wednesday’s video presentation—led by Eric Swalwell, whose intelligence we knew about already, and Stacey Plaskett, who was the day’s rock star and makes me want the U.S. Virgin Islands to be a state so she can be a senator tomorrow—was gutting. There’s no other way to describe it. The feelings of sadness, […]

Yes, it’s amazing how much calmer life is now that we don’t have to listen to Donald Trump all the time. And it’s simultaneously amazing that Republicans continue to stick to the crazy at such a head-spinning rate that we can’t keep up. Lauren Boebert and her guns. Mary Miller and her “Hitler was right.” Marjorie Taylor Greene and exhibits A through double-Z. Kevin McCarthy and his bottom that knows no bottom. McCarthyism used to mean guilt by association. Now it means providing cover for fascism, which is worse if you ask me. At least Joe McCarthy wasn’t one of his […]

Getty So the Democrats have pushed open the door. The Senate passed—at 5:34 a.m. Friday, 51-50, strict party line—a budget resolution that clears the way to passage, probably next month, of Joe Biden’s COVID relief bill. It may not be exactly $1.9 trillion, but it looks like it’ll be something close to that. First of all, please note: Working in harmony here were: President Biden; Bernie Sanders, who as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee was in charge of seeing this thing through; Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, who voted to move the resolution along; Vice President Kamala Harris, who cast […]

Joe Biden is off to a pretty impressive start. Not a single false public note, from the wonderful ceremony the night before his inauguration honoring the COVID dead (see, a president can actually do these things provided that president is a decent and mature human being) to his on-point inaugural address to Jen Psaki’s strange insistence on not lying to and picking at journalists. The executive orders are great, especially the one on racial equity, which is quite brave. It orders all executive branch agencies to study the extent to which their policies perpetuate systemic racism and make changes where needed. […]

At first, it felt like the Democrats would do what they always do. What Congressman Hakeem Jeffries said they’d do when he was asked whether the Democrats would impeach Donald Trump over his Michael Corleone phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. No, he said, in that typical Democratic way; he hadn’t viewed the transcript, and “we’re not looking backward, we’re looking forward.” Dear God, not again. When Congress adjourned after certifying the electoral count, after the most shocking terrorist-insurrectionist-riot in the history of this country, it looked like the Democrats were going to do their usual duck and […]

If you pay unusually close attention to debates about the American political economy, you will have seen people on the political left saying nice things about Josh Hawley. The Missouri Republican senator is… interesting, is usually the word. The reason is that he acknowledges that the free market isn’t perfect and argues that his party needs to do more for the working classes. He especially hates Big Tech. He’s even writing a book to be called The Tyranny of Big Tech that’ll be published next year, not by one of those kook-houses like Regnery but venerable old Simon & Schuster itself. […]

Remember when the Bob Woodward-Donald Trump interviews first became public? The biggest news break was that Trump admitted to Woodward that he knew the virus was more dangerous than he was saying publicly. But the most morally corrupt moment of that episode came when Trump was called upon to explain why, and he said he didn’t want to “create a panic.” This patently ridiculous statement was met with every bit of the contempt and scorn it deserved, as any human being who wasn’t brainwashed could see that there’s quite a lot of space between Trump hiding the truth from the public […]

So the electors are voting on Monday, and Joe Biden, who won the election, will get 306 electoral votes, and it will all be official. But if you think this will be the end of it, I have a tower in Moscow to sell you. I see zero signs that Donald Trump and his people are ready to accept this. You’re familiar of course with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous five stages of grief. What we’re living through now is Donald Trump’s 10 stages of dealing with defeat, which go something like: denial, lies, more denial, more lies, blame, self-pity, rage, still more […]

I don’t know about you, but I feel better. For a few days now. At first, I couldn’t figure out why. I was just lighter in my step. Whistling more. Then I figured it out. I’m thinking about him less. He’s taking up far less space in my brain than he has for these past four years, years during which his stupid voice and his pasted-on hair and his orange makeup (historians will marvel that a society ever took seriously a man who pancakes that much orange stuff on his face every morning) and his laughably long ties to “hide” his […]

The Donald Trump tweet that best encapsulates his confused desperation in finally having to face reality is without doubt this one, from 10:35 a.m on Wednesday: After those five frantic, all-capped words, there’s a note from Twitter that “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” and if you “click to learn more” you are directed to the company’s “civic integrity policy,” which opens with: “You may not use Twitter’s services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes.” (If you […]