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 […]
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President’s Trump’s plan to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Saturday to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court is a shocking political spectacle. The formal announcement Saturday will come the day after Ginsburg became the first woman and the first Jew to lie in state at the Capitol, […]
Everything about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has felt wrong. I don’t mean surprising—she was an 87-year-old woman who had battled cancer multiple times and been hospitalized earlier this year; it’s not uncommon for people with that medical history to die. But every second of what’s happened since the news broke […]
Who was that masked man going nuclear on Trump proxy and part-time ophthalmologist Sen. Rand Paul? Could that be Anthony Fauci, usually as buttoned down as his shirts, shooting down Paul’s nonsense about COVID-19, the same Dr. Paul who tested positive for the virus and then swanned around the Capitol […]
When I look at the smears already being aimed at potential Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett, I’m left with one conclusion: This is how we got Donald Trump. Long before Trump took that now-famous escalator ride, conservatives were regularly attacked in pretty unfair ways. The closer to an […]
Sometimes there is a difference between law and justice. On Wednesday, Kentucky Attorney General Dan Cameron announced that a police officer would be charged in the shooting incident that killed Breonna Taylor. But the officer who was charged is not one of the officers who shot at her. Former Detective […]
When a Louisville grand jury chose not to charge any of the police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor for their role in killing a 26-year-old Black woman, it was confirmation that, to many, my life as a Black woman does not matter. And as a native Kentuckian, […]
Joe Biden didn’t mince words as Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump abuse and corrupt the Constitution in their rush to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. “The infection this president has unleashed on our democracy can be fatal. Enough. Enough. Enough.” He has since added that […]
How fast the Supreme Court nominee talk began, with the monumental life that precipitated it surreally relegated in its shadow. It’s there in Donald Trump’s creepy, elated stump speeches, and Mitch McConnell’s pathetic justifications for his own hypocrisy; in the liberal scramble to avert their idea of disaster; and in […]
As COVID-19 deaths in the United States approached 200,000, the toll among health-care workers came to include a 28-year-old doctor who had gone about with a toy stethoscope as a youngster in upstate New York. Dr. Adeline Fagan had grown up to become an OB-GYN resident at HCA Healthcare in […]
There’s a Jewish tradition that someone who dies on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, must have been a tzaddik, a righteous person. After all, God waited all year to carry out the decree. Perhaps that offers some comfort to those mourning the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Hebrew […]
If Michael Caputo, a top official at Health and Human Services, hadn’t melted down and spewed out on Facebook Live that his job description included suppressing “rotten scientists” in a “resistance unit” at the CDC, he would still be twisting the apolitical data coming out of the single most important […]
There is no shortage of local topics that interest the Kremlin—from the poisoning of an inconvenient dissident, to the events in neighboring Belarus and the ongoing battle against the coronavirus. In the thick of it all, America remains front and center of the Russian state media’s steely focus. In Putin’s […]
TEL AVIV—Assuming last-minute disputes about mask-wearing and social distancing can be ironed out in time, the South Lawn of the White House will once more be the site of a historic Middle East peace deal signing. Two deals, in fact, as both Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates normalize ties […]
Appearances are everything down South, part of the region’s noted cordiality and social decorum. Yet on coastal Alabama’s Mobile Bay, a group of residents is determined to peel back their languid locale’s veneer of colonnaded mansions and Spanish moss-draped oaks to confront the proverbial “ugliness that cuts to the bone.” […]
Trump’s four-year mantra to Black voters, people like me, has been “what do you have to lose?” He has proclaimed it loudly since the summer of 2016 to all who will listen. Trump has stepped up that refrain in recent months, saying, “I have done more for Black Americans than […]
The most heartbreaking exchange between Donald Trump and Bob Woodward came on March 19, when the president dramatically informed the reporter that the virus could infect young people after all. If Trump had acted on that inside info, instead of just using it to impress Woodward, 100 children might be […]
Picture this. You’re a fan of President Donald Trump. But you’re on the fence about donating to his campaign. The pandemic has taken a toll on your finances. And giving $50 to a billionaire’s election bid seems like a foolish thing to do when paying for groceries on a fixed […]
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 […]
Government regulators in the United Kingdom have ordered Cambridge-based pharma AstraZeneca to pause development of its novel-coronavirus vaccine candidate after a patient in the U.K. apparently had an unspecified adverse reaction to the vaccine. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the stand-down order came from the […]
As more than a million viewers tuned in to see ‘90s icons Brandy and Monica, singers of the hit song “The Boy is Mine,” in the same room for the first time in nearly a decade last week, a familiar face suddenly popped up on the screen between them: Senator […]
Remember when the worst President in American history was George W. Bush? While his dad’s good old days of being able to “read my lips” are long gone, The Daily Beast is helping people get their voice heard in these strange times with our new line of designer face masks. […]
If you want to know who will win the presidency in 60 days, the real question may be this: What crazy story will dominate the news between now and then? In politics, the battle isn’t just over which candidate you prefer. Often, that determination is downstream from a more urgent […]
Ronald McKeithen was trying to beat a clock he could not see. He’d gathered close to 100 certificates from programs completed during his three decades in prison: meditation, anger management, visual arts. He wrote a court petition by hand, then asked a friend to type it. He needed three copies, […]