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“Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion,” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”

Yet with Washington as polarized as at any time in recent history, political winds may not blow strongly enough. As long as impeachment is a Democratic priority driven by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), it will be difficult — if not impossible — for Senate Republicans to get on board, argued Alex Castellanos, a longtime GOP strategist.

“The more passions swell in Pelosi’s world, the more McConnell will deflate them,” Castellanos said. Impeachment proceedings, he predicted, will be “an overhyped movie with an unsatisfying end.”

while older generations have always looked down on younger kids or talked about things “back in their day,” she and other teens believe older people are actively hurting young people

“Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making,” she said. “Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.”

“Essentials are more expensive than ever before, we pay 50 percent of our income to rent, no one has health insurance,”

Take the biggest actual social change, hailed by liberals, of the last couple of decades: marriage equality. We did not spend our time calling out homophobia, attacking the churches, or describing our opponents as “deplorable.”

We made our case carefully; we engaged the other side respectfully; we lobbied state legislatures; more and more gay people told their stories; brilliant lawyers fought various cases, beginning with failure until achieving success at the Supreme Court.

I can’t tell you how many times I debated religious fundamentalists, while never disparaging them. I produced an anthology of the best arguments on both sides.

It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.

The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.

now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.

a fact that has puzzled me ever since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago. In every other country in which I’ve lived—Germany and Britain, France and Italy—it is far easier to buy glasses or contact lenses than it is here. In those countries, as in Peru, you can simply walk into an optician’s and ask a store employee to give you an eye test, likely free of charge. If you already know your strength, you can just tell them what you want. You can also buy contact lenses from the closest drugstore without having to talk to a single soul—no doctor’s prescription necessary.

why does the United States require people who want to purchase something as simple as a curved piece of plastic to get a prescription, preceded by a costly medical exam?

On the one hand, some number of Americans who visit an optometrist to get a new prescription will indeed discover that they have a serious condition that requires immediate care. On the other hand, it is likely that a much greater number keep wearing glasses that are too weak—or won’t wear glasses at all—because they want to avoid the cost, time, or stress of a visit to a doctor.

In their heyday, they were monuments to consumerism that doubled as cultural touchstone, inspiring films like “Mallrats” and board games like Mall Madness. But in the past decade, as shopping dollars migrated online and a parade of well-known retailers toppled, the malls that didn’t evolve fast enough stumbled into a devastating cycle of dwindling traffic, lower sales and disappearing storefronts. One in four U.S. malls is expected to close by 2022, according to a 2017 report by Credit Suisse.

Those that are thriving are spending millions reinventing themselves as integrated lifestyle hubs — adding yoga studios, medical clinics and microbreweries — populated with more upscale shops. But such targeted investments are often coming at the expense of mall operators’ lower-tier properties — and analysts say the divide between rich malls and poor malls is widening.

“There is an accelerating polarization between the ‘best’ and the ‘rest,' ” said Neil Saunders, managing director of research firm GlobalData Retail. “Newer, nicer malls have become magnets for consumers, pulling them away from struggling properties."

China is heavily exposed to the U.S. dollar, but now, with the risk of “decoupling,” Beijing is silently diversifying its reserves to reduce its dependence on the world’s largest reserve currency, analysts say.

Beijing will therefore manage its risk by diversifying its foreign exchange reserves into other currencies, ANZ predicted, as well as build up its “shadow reserves.”

“Diversifying its currency holdings, in a way is very much in line with the recent political moves of the Xi administration to focus on China’s trade relationships beyond just the United States. China and, more broadly, the Asian region is still highly exposed to movements in the US dollar,” Hsiao said.

The Fox News/talk radio machine — part mob, part cult, part business racket — has come up against a variety of honorable, respected professionals, trying to testify honestly about the abuse of power

But the triumph of ad hominem arguments on the Trump right also has a deeper and darker meaning

Fox News is no longer content to spout pro-Trump propaganda. It must destroy Trump’s opponents, even if they are honorable people. Especially if they are honorable people. The goal is not to dispute their testimony — which, on the facts, seems indisputable — but to discredit them as witnesses and as human beings.

“Lincoln devoted his second term to uniting people rather than feeding red meat to a small base of people,” Holzer said. “Today, the party is more devoted to the accumulation of wealth and restrictions on voting rights."

Another obvious difference is the Lincoln-era Republican Party’s support of immigration. In his last State of the Union address, Lincoln featured a proposal to pay foreigners to come to the United States so the workforce would increase.

“Lincoln was a pro-tariff man, and Trump is sporadically in favor of tariffs as a punitive weapon,” he said, adding that tariffs were not punitive for Lincoln. Then, tariffs were the major source of income.

he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.

This is Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it.

Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working poor, not the decadent rich.

There has never existed a political system similar to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In the fervor of a 1978 social revolution against the Shah and his neocolonial relationship with the United States and Europe, a group of Shi’i clerics won the upper hand and created the world’s only current theocracy.

Most American political reporting on the Islamic Republic, therefore, simplifies Iranian politics to a struggle between “moderates” or “reformists” and “hardliners.”

there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him.

Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation.

At Princeton, however, conservative-leaning students and professors are mostly insulated from the day-to-day tumult. They’re more interested in a bigger question: What should conservatism—and America—look like moving forward?

Elite conservative circles at these universities tend to focus on great books and big ideas, on statesmanship and lofty principles. Nothing could be further from the culture of American politics at the national level today, driven as it is by tribalism and thirst for the blood of political enemies.

Even something so basic as collegiality can seem quaint these days. Although American politics have always been ugly and divisive, elite manners and sensibilities at least superficially governed how political life was conducted. The art of persuasion was at the very least afforded lip service. Not so much anymore.

But as Mr. Pompeo and other Trump administration officials know full well, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the generals who guard his power in Tehran will never shape their foreign policy to the United States’ liking. What Mr. Pompeo implied was less a change in Iran’s behavior than a change in its leadership.

“We support the Iranian people and their courageous struggle for freedom,” Mr. Trump said at a rally Tuesday night in Milwaukee, referring to recent antigovernment protests in the country.His approach is a contrast to the one pursued for years by the United States during the Obama administration, which, along with Europe, tested the possibility that Iran could be coaxed, not pressured, into a new era.

Conservatives called Mr. Obama’s vision doomed from the start, and have argued that the relief from economic sanctions Iran won in exchange for limits on its nuclear program only funded more Iranian aggression in the Middle East and beyond. Nor did Iranian politics show much sign of moderating, despite conciliatory talk from Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani and its American-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Now the Trump administration is testing an alternate approach, having abandoned the nuclear deal and adopted its “maximum pressure” posture.

some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side.

We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.

“epistemic crisis.”

More than half of the five top-polling candidates competing in the Iowa Democratic caucuses are preparing to close out the campaign exactly where they never hoped to be — 1,000 miles away on the floor of the U.S. Senate, acting as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Trump.

Buttigieg’s campaign has argued that staying out of the polarized impeachment conversation will bolster his pitch as the candidate who can mollify partisan tensions and disrupt the traditional Washington ways of doing things.

Biden’s campaign has recently pivoted to embrace its complicated presence, arguing that the president’s alleged efforts to find disparaging information on the Biden family in Ukraine is a reflection of the candidate’s strength, not evidence of a potential weakness.

ordinary people worn out by the dramas and lies of the past four years have a right to refuse to take Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters seriously. To reject further debate with people whose views are completely incoherent is not only understandable, but sensible.

I am not talking about all 74 million people who voted for Trump. Some voters may well have supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020 with a sense of hesitancy, perhaps focused on a single issue, such as abortion, or because they were making a raw and self-interested calculation about taxes.

Instead, I am talking about the people who are giving Trump their full-throated support to the very end, even as he mulls a military coup; the people who buy weird paintings of Trump crossing the Delaware, or who believe that Trump is an agent of Jesus Christ, or who think that Trump is fighting a blood-drinking ring of pedophiles. These supporters have gone far beyond political loyalty and have succumbed to a kind of mass delusion.

His style is deceptively simple. Nearly every Twitter message begins “Florida Man.” What follows, though, is almost always a pile of trouble

“Stephen King comes here for material now,” Mr. Hiaasen said. “He’s out on the west coast.”

Now I think there are people who actually aspire to Florida Man-ness,” said Dave Barry, who celebrates Florida’s brand of madness in his popular columns and best-selling books. “It’s like the big leagues. It’s the Broadway for idiots.”