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How do people like Bolton, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson or (when he eventually departs) Pompeo justify their witting, willing service to this witless, wicked president?

In a superb essay in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum draws on the inspiration of Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Captive Mind” to address the question. There is the relief, and pleasure, of political conformity. There is the allure of power, or proximity to it. There is a profit motive. There is a kind of savior complex, in which officials like the “Anonymous” New York Times Op-Ed writer from 2018 claim to form part of a secret resistance within the upper reaches of government.

there’s an additional factor at work, described by Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” How do demagogues get away with their nonstop lying — even with those who at some level understand they are being lied to? Arendt observed “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.”

A grand jury didn’t charge any officers with shooting Ms. Taylor in her Louisville apartment. A former officer, accused of firing recklessly, was indicted on three counts of “wanton endangerment.”

“If we simply act on outrage, there is no justice — mob justice is not justice. Justice sought by violence is not justice. It just becomes revenge.”

Many legal experts said before the charges were announced that indictments for killing Ms. Taylor would be unlikely, given the state’s statute allowing citizens to use lethal force in self-defense. John W. Stewart, a former assistant attorney general in Kentucky, said he believed that at least Sergeant Mattingly and Detective Cosgrove were protected by that law.

Seven GOP senators voted with Democrats — the most bipartisan impeachment vote in U.S. history — but well short of the 17 needed to convict the former president

"When this process started, I believed that it was unconstitutional to impeach a president who was no longer in office," he said. "I still believe that to be the case. However, the Senate is an institution based on precedent, and given that the majority in the Senate voted to proceed with this trial, the question of constitutionality is now established precedent."

This impeachment trial is not about any single word uttered by President Trump on Jan. 6, 2021," she said. "It is instead about President Trump's failure to obey the oath he swore on January 20, 2017. His actions to interfere with the peaceful transition of power – the hallmark of our Constitution and our American democracy – were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction."

“I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”

You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable.

Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.

Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over.

there was really no way to avoid disappointment.

Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.

We have reached the tragic endpoint of President Trump's war on truth.

Trump and his media allies continue to contest the results. Baseless "Trump won" conspiracy theories continue to fill up social media feeds and far-right-wing TV shows

As CNN's Daniel Dale noted on Monday, "almost nothing Trump is saying about the election is true."

in the past five years the relationship between the world’s superpower and its Asian challenger has deteriorated in a manner that suggests few are paying heed to history.

Under Xi Jinping, China has become more aggressively assertive abroad and more authoritarian at home.

Under Donald Trump and now Joe Biden, American policy towards China has shifted from hubristic faith that it could be integrated into the existing American-led world order to something closer to paranoid containment, marked by suspicion of China’s intentions and a fearful bipartisan consensus that America’s global pre-eminence is at risk.

The ceremony belatedly jolted Germany into reappraising Merkel’s role in the years leading up to today’s European crises—and the verdict has not been positive.

Merkel’s critics argue that the close ties she forged with Russia are partly responsible for today’s economic and political upheaval. Germany’s security policies over the past year have been, in many ways, a repudiation of her legacy. Earlier this month, Berlin announced a new $3 billion military aid package to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and an approaching NATO summit is expected to discuss how to include Ukraine in Europe’s security architecture—an extension of the alliance that Merkel consistently resisted.

Merkel was a key architect of the agreements that made the economies of Germany and its neighbors dependent on Russian energy imports. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed that strategic partnership, forcing Germany to find its oil and natural gas elsewhere at huge costs to business, government and households.

It’s true that voters who cited inflation as their biggest concern tended to vote Republican — more than seven in 10, according to CNN’s exit poll. But if you think about it, that statistic raises problems of cause and effect. Did people concerned about inflation tend to vote Republican, or did people who were already going to vote Republican tend to identify inflation as their key issue? Probably some of both.

NBC News asked a somewhat different question: Which party do you trust more to handle inflation? Republicans were favored — but by only 52 percent to 44 percent, which strikes me as a surprisingly narrow margin, given the historical tendency of voters to blame the party holding the White House whenever bad things happen.

What were the political consequences of Bidenomics?

The paperbacks were intended to help soldiers pass the time. But they were also meant to remind them what they were fighting for, and draw a sharp contrast between American ideals and Nazi book burnings.

That’s an aspect of the story that has only grown more resonant, amid today’s partisan battles over book bans. And Manning, for one, sees a clear lesson.

“During World War II, the American public came out very much one way,” she said. “And that was that there should be no restrictions on what people read.”

So it turns out that of the two largest crypto exchanges, one was a fraud and the other was a money launderer. Whoever could have guessed?

Skeptics of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have had their prejudices reinforced. The two main use cases—fraud and crime—have been exposed to the public in dramatic fashion, so now all we have to do is sit back and wait for the inevitable collapse in value.

There must be something underpinning this value, so what is it? Here are the options:

It’s a long and winding road for Epic. The firm lost the Apple case, which is on appeal, but got the Google case to a jury, along with several other plaintiffs. Nearly every other firm challenging Google gradually dropped out of the case, getting special deals from the search giant in return for abandoning their claims. But Sweeney was righteous, and believed that Google helped ruined the internet. He didn’t ask for money or a special deal, instead seeking to have Judge James Donato force Google to make good on its “broken promise,” which he characterized as “an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants.”

Specifically, Sweeney asked for the right for firms to have their own app stores, and the ability to use their own billing systems. Basically, he wants to crush Google’s control over the Android phone system. And I suspect he just did. You can read the verdict here.

Google is likely to be in trouble now, because it is facing multiple antitrust cases, and these kinds of decisions have a bandwagon effect. The precedent is set, in every case going forward the firm will now be seen as presumed guilty, since a jury found Google has violated antitrust laws. Judges are cautious, and are generally afraid of being the first to make a precedent-setting decision. Now they won’t have to. In fact, judges and juries will now have to find a reason to rule for Google. If, say, Judge Amit Mehta in D.C., facing a very similar fact-pattern, chooses to let Google off the hook, well, he’ll look pretty bad.

The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.

I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.

Gay interpreted the question not at face value but as pertaining to whether Harvard students who had brandished slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” which many people interpret as tantamount to a call for genocide, could be prosecuted under Harvard’s policies. Though the slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.

The Russian military, beaten down and demoralized after three months of war, is making the same mistakes in its campaign to capture a swath of eastern Ukraine that forced it to abandon its push to take the entire country,

And since the war started, Russia has lost 1,000 tanks,

Russia still has not established any kind of air superiority

Monica Lewinsky weighed in on the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial in an op-ed Tuesday, calling it "courtroom porn and a "pure car wreck."

"We are drenched in the taint of the dirt and aggression of the social media wars," wrote Lewinisky, 48, who is no stranger to scandal. 

"Having been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty, I can tell you the scars never fade," she wrote, noting that the negative online discourse was predominantly directed at Amber Heard, "the woman."

Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.