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 […]
Michael Tomasky
45 posts
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Here’s a question for you. You live in Los Angeles. You have a laptop that’s acting up; needs some work. Do you: A) Find a computer repair shop in your neighborhood via Google or whatever and take it there; B) Send it back to the manufacturer; C) Say to yourself, “Oh, I know, I think I’ll go to Wilmington, Delaware, and take it to a legally […]
I kept a little running tab of questions Amy Coney Barrett said she couldn’t possibly answer without compromising her future Supreme Court tenure. I’m sure I missed a lot of them, but here were six: One: Lindsey Graham asked her if there existed a constitutional right to polygamy. She couldn’t say. Two: Pat Leahy asked if a president could self-pardon. Couldn’t touch that one. Three: Amy […]
As Savannah Guthrie grilled Donald Trump on QAnon at Trump’s town hall event, he did his usual lying and dodging and then whined to Guthrie about Antifa and asked her: “Why aren’t you asking Joe Biden questions about, why doesn’t he condemn Antifa?” Let’s settle this. Joe Biden does not have to denounce Antifa. He’s done so, anyway, but even if he hadn’t, he has utterly […]
Not this time. In 2016, many mainstream media outlets let themselves be used by Donald Trump and his henchmen (Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, etc.) to amplify nutso Hillary conspiracy stories. It helped put Trump in the White House, where he has violated the Constitution and his oath of office and common-sense decency pretty much every day of his presidency. So far this time around, […]
Donald Trump is losing it in a big way, and the polls are widening. Still, I say don’t get overconfident. This may yet be close—close enough that Trump can challenge the results in some key states and try to steal it. And if Trump and the Republicans can get away with it, they can produce some outlandish scenarios. Maybe one in which a minority of House […]
The next time you’re in the presence of someone who tries to tell you that Donald Trump is a political genius, I’d like you to grab the nearest copy of Men’s Hairstyles magazine and whack them upside the head. Maybe not too many people are saying that these days, as he’s clearly in the early stages of a ’roid-driven meltdown. But people have remarked many times […]
Well. I need a shower. That was a disgusting event, and we all know why. It’s been said a million times, but it’s never been truer than on this night: Donald Trump drags everything down to his level. And the moderator let him. That was the most shocking and pathetic moderator performance that we’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine Trump helped himself with that performance. I […]
Joe Biden, unless he has some huge brain fart, is going to win the debates. But it’s not likely to help him very much, for two reasons. So I would caution his campaign against thinking they can lock this thing down with solid debate performances. My advice would be: Rather than trying to win the debates, Biden should give Donald Trump the room to lose them. […]
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 president refuses to commit to the peaceful transfer of power, that’s a flag that’s as red […]
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 told Woodward: “This is deadly stuff.” In fact, five times as deadly as the normal flu, […]
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 good idea. The first principle of campaigning against a bully is don’t be bullied. Show you’re […]
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 of the enduring questions of American presidential politics, which goes back to Richard Nixon’s time: Can […]
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, across racial lines). The New Mexico cop who adopted the heroin addict’s baby and helped her […]
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, a coarse braggart who thinks the White House is a dump, was the opposite of Barack […]
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 days to go until Donald Trump and his propaganda network try to steal the election. There […]
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 the election. The White House has dubbed the vaccine effort Operation Warp Speed, after all. Democratic […]
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 more than one poll was three points or less—Texas, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Alaska. […]
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 year for different teams playing different sports in the same city—are just out of luck. For […]
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, you can get many white people to vote based on racial fear, but you have to […]
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 Dunmore, Pennsylvania, outside of Scranton, where he famously grew up in the pre-Dunder Mifflin era. It […]
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 address not as a political candidate but as the servant of the whole people, those who […]
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 us”), both in prepared remarks and in response to press questions. But he also did something […]
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 matter of policy. There is a war going on in what passes for Trump’s soul, and […]
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 up, but death rates are not, as if that’s reassuring. Donald Trump pulls back federal funding […]
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 day after day, to see it bring together millions of patriots of all races, across the […]
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 a fight.” It is, and maybe more people are joining it. I’ve noticed something interesting on […]
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 the Times on Sunday laying out all the different moves he could pull to steal the […]
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 will have home stands and road trips and three- and four-game series like they always do. […]
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 aren’t bringing any staff in, except maybe one person, or zero. There’s the generally well-paid floor […]