Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast On the one hand, Donald Trump isn’t saying anything he didn’t say in 2016—I’ll respect the results if I win, and so on. On the other, though, there is one thing that’s very different: He’s president now. He wasn’t then. And when a sitting […]
Michael Tomasky
21 posts
Every once in a great, great while, life is more delicious than you’d dared to hope. I was reading early Wednesday afternoon about what may be the big scoop from Bob Woodward’s new book on the Trump administration: that on February 7, while Trump was pooh-poohing the virus publicly, he […]
So off goes Joe Biden to Kenosha on Thursday with wife, Jill, to host a town hall meeting and “to make a local stop,” as the press release put it, which we can perhaps presume means a visit to Jacob Blake’s family (sans nonexistent pastor). I guess this is a […]
Here we go. It’s law and order week. And with the eyes of the nation fixed on Kenosha, Joe Biden is going to… southwestern Pennsylvania, to give a speech on why you aren’t safe in Donald Trump’s America. And Trump is going to Kenosha on Tuesday. So we confront one […]
If you just returned from 40 years (or even four) in a jungle in Borneo without television and modern communications and watched Tuesday night’s Republican convention, you’d think these were lovely people doing wondrous things. There was the former robber and the FBI guy who befriended him (needless to say, […]
It’s amazing how often it happens that we elect as president someone whose personal attributes are the opposite of the exiting incumbent. Jimmy Carter was a bit of pious moralist preaching sacrifice; Ronald Reagan said set that thermostat wherever you want. It’s gone on like that ever since. Donald Trump, […]
So here it is, convention week. Yes, it will be weird, without the crowds and the applause. But we’ve gotten used to a lot of weird things, and we’ll get used to this. There are many more important things about this convention to discuss than its virtual-ness. We have 80 […]
As news has dribbled out recently that a coronavirus vaccine might hit the market as early as October, lots of Democrats and liberals have reacted with some combination of suspicion and panic that Donald Trump is somehow rigging the trial process to rush out a vaccine to help him win […]
If the election were this Tuesday, Joe Biden would win at least 321 electoral votes. Sunday morning I went through every state poll on fivethirtyeight.com and toted them all up. It came out Biden 321, Donald Trump 121. And that was without the six states where the margin based on […]
Baseball is back, and I guess that’s nice. But it’s not so nice at all for one group of people—the nearly 40,000 stadium workers who won’t have jobs because there are no fans to be served and catered to. These people—some of whom work part-time, but some full-time throughout the […]
There’s no doubt where Donald Trump is going campaign-wise. Race race race. Getting smoked by Fox News and Chris Wallace over the weekend obviously won’t shame him. He’ll just get worse and worse. My bet is he’ll overplay the race card. I remember Lee Atwater once saying something like yes, […]
Hard as it is to believe that anyone could think Donald Trump could be better than Joe Biden at anything, from running the country to drinking from a glass of water, there are such people. And it was those people to whom Biden pitched his economic speech Thursday afternoon in […]
That Mt. Rushmore speech will go down as one of the sickest, most debased moments in the history of the presidency. First of all, it was officially not a campaign speech, but a presidential speech, meaning that we the taxpayers paid for it. More importantly Donald Trump was delivering this […]
Joe Biden gave another big speech on Tuesday, his third this month. It was pre-billed as him stepping up his attacks on Donald Trump, and he did that (“Donald Trump failed us. Month after month, as many of us urged him to step up and do his job, he failed […]
Donald Trump’s aides tried their best to explain to The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng that POTUS really does have an agenda for a second term, but, as the headline says, his real reason is fear of becoming a one-term loser. He doesn’t want to accomplish much of anything as a […]
Republicans have now put themselves in the position of palpably hoping and praying that a vaccine arrives by Election Day. The virus is now worse in this country than it’s ever been, and it’s likely to get worse still. Meanwhile the vice president is bragging that sure, infections may be […]
Fifty years from now, historians will point to this moment as one of the great surges of freedom in American history. Think about that—be alert, as you slog through your daily grind, to what a thrill it is for all of us to be here as this mass movement continues […]
Tom Brenner/Reuters “American history isn’t a fairy tale,” Joe Biden said from Philadelphia City Hall Tuesday morning. “The battle for the soul of this nation has been a constant push and pull for 240 years. At our best the American ideal wins out. But it’s never a rout. It’s always […]
So many shocking things have become normal now under this administration that it’s kind of hard to imagine what would genuinely jolt the nation at this point. And with regard to November’s election, the shocking-but-normal reality is that we know Donald Trump will cheat. There was a terrifying piece in […]
On Monday, Major League Baseball owners approved a reopening plan under which the season would start around the Fourth of July and consist of about 82 games, almost exactly half of a regular, 162-game season. If players agree, the schedule would be close to normal in the sense that teams […]
So I was asking Sherrod Brown about going back to work in the United States Senate last week, and he gave me the most Sherrod Brown answer you could imagine: “McConnell summons us back,” he told me. “Think about this. Forget about senators and our safety. And most of us […]