Scholars have paid little attention to the role of media scandals in U.S. foreign policy discourse. This article suggests that journalists’ treatment of foreign policy failures as scandalous bears little relationship to the nature or effects of officials’ malfeasance. Scandalized news coverage is instead more fruitfully viewed through the lens […] Read more »
Trump has turned words into weapons and he’s winning the linguistic war
Donald Trump has been a salesman for nearly half a century. He is now selling himself, his worldview and his self-serving views of the law and the truth. … Language can shape the way we think. Trump knows this. Here are some of his favorite manipulation techniques. First, he weaponizes […] Read more »
‘That is what power looks like’: Why Democrats are losing the only fight that matters
… On Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton won, we might just be watching the NBA Playoffs or The Americans while browsing recipes on our second screen. But we live on a planet where Trump comes at us from every angle. In Trump’s world, you see something about Trump on television, […] Read more »
Defining the Terms of the Tax Reform Debate
Earlier this week the Democratic SuperPAC Priorities USA released a memo that publicly acknowledged concerns that Democrats had been privately expressing for a couple weeks that Democrats lack a compelling economic narrative for 2018. … The Priorities memo, as well as other non-partisan polling, finds that the majority of Americans […] Read more »
Democrats Shouldn’t Overplay Their Hands
… Some critics argue that Democrats may be hampered in the midterm elections by having no clear leader and lacking a single, coherent message. But it is rare for any party in the first couple of years exiled from the White House to have a clear leader. This is perfectly […] Read more »
How Republicans Learned to Sell Tax Cuts for the Rich
If anyone still believed that the Republican Party had become a party of economic populism, the tax bill that the party is set to pass in Congress will burst their bubble. … But the Republican tax strategy has roots in the American populist tradition, too. That strategy is to disregard […] Read more »