Author: Lance Garrison
Former President Donald Trump handily won the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, bringing him one step closer to the Republican nomination. But was his victory inevitable?In this conversation, the Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg asks that question of the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, and the two discuss what a second Trump inauguration would mean for America.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some…
On a Saturday morning last May, Julia Sachdev, a mother of a 2-year-old and 4-year-old, woke up to an email from her children’s preschool. The school — which her children adored and had been in operation for over 50 years — announced that it would be closing in a month.In the following days, she and her husband scrambled to find an alternative that was a reasonable driving distance from their home. Most of the places they reached out to had long waiting lists. Some said their waiting lists were full. Some never even called them back.“It was so stressful,” reflected…
Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’The fact that Donald Trump is the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination in 2024 has created a chasm in our politics. In the past, Democrats and Republicans at least understood why members of the other party liked their chosen candidates. Most conservatives weren’t confused why liberals liked Barack Obama, and vice versa for George W. Bush. But for a lot of Democrats, it feels impossible to imagine why anyone would cast a vote for Trump. And as a result, the two parties don’t just feel hostile toward each other; they feel increasingly unknowable.[You can listen…
The history of voting in the United States shows the high costs of living with an old Constitution, unevenly enforced by a reluctant Supreme Court.Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote. We have nothing like Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, providing that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein,” or like Article 38 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic…
New Year’s Eve is an important holiday in Ukraine. At the end of December, I asked my sister how she would be celebrating this year. “In the bomb shelter,” she said, matter-of-factly. She planned to cook sandwiches, which would be easier to carry down to the safe room from the 10th floor if there was an air-raid siren.In 2023 there were more than 6,000 air alerts in Ukraine. Last month alone, Russia launched some 624 drones carrying explosives, according to official sources. On Dec. 29, more than 120 Russian missiles and drones targeted towns across the country, killing 44 people.…
Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses was resounding enough to make the race for the Republican nomination look essentially finished at the start. But it wasn’t resounding enough to remove the sense that it could have been otherwise, that yet again his opposition within the Republican Party made things ridiculously easy for his candidacy.Trump is essentially running an incumbent’s campaign, presenting himself as the default leader of the party, declining to debate, rolling up endorsements. But his opposition combined, it appears, for reasonably close to 50 percent of the caucus vote. And for a normal incumbent, losing almost half…
On the day in 1968 when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, he was in Memphis to show support for striking sanitation workers. By then, he had come to see fighting for economic equality as a crucial part of the struggle for civil rights.Unfortunately, there was little progress on that front for the next half-century. By many measures, the economic divide between Black and white Americans was as wide in the late 2010s as it was in the late 1960s.The good news: Over the past few years, we’ve seen a significant decline in inequality on multiple dimensions,…
None of the governors who set interest rates have dissented from a rate decision since 2005.
To the Editor:Re “America’s Diet Is Feeding a Groundwater Crisis” (“Uncharted Waters” series, front page, Dec. 30):The world has been making meat basically the same way for about 10,000 years, by feeding crops to animals, so that humans can eat animals.This method of meat production is inefficient, requiring vast quantities of land and water, and shifting crop production to lower-value crops for animal feed from high-value crops for human consumption.Plant-based and cultivated meat use far less land and water, and they have a host of other benefits. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a report in May documenting…
Why is Donald Trump continuing to poll so strongly with voters?As unpalatable as a second Trump term would be, many pundits who tackle this question have ignored a striking fact: The typical household’s living standard improved during the three Trump years before the pandemic. Under President Biden, Americans have (at best) struggled to keep even with inflation.Mr. Trump’s huge personal negatives — his meanspirited personality, his toadying to dictators and shunning of American allies, and his unpardonable effort to steal an election — should more than offset his economic record. The old saw that Mussolini got the trains to run…