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The simple question posed by Donald Trump's second impeachment trial that begins Tuesday is whether a president who loses reelection can get away with a violent coup attempt in a desperate bid to stay in power.

The answer contained in the former commander-in-chief's likely acquittal for inciting a deadly mob assault on the Capitol will echo through generations and may influence the outcome of some unknowable future test of US democracy.

Events of the next week or so will inform the country's capacity to move on from a traumatic presidency that left it as divided as at any time since the Civil War.

On Dec. 30, just weeks before the inauguration, the European Union clinched an important investment agreement with China, days after a tweet by Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, asking for “early consultations” with Europe on China and seeming to caution against a quick deal.

But if by “leadership” Mr. Biden means a return to the traditional American assumption — we decide and you follow — many Europeans feel that world is gone, and that Europe must not behave like America’s junior wingman in fights defined by Washington.

Mr. Biden quickly took many of the easiest steps toward reconciliation and unity with Europe, including rejoining the Paris climate agreement, renewing an emphasis on multilateralism and human rights, and vowing to rejoin the disintegrating 2015 Iran nuclear deal

the costs of the Jan. 6 attack will exceed $30 million, as his office works to provide mental health services, increase security and repair historical statues and other art damaged in the riot.

Farar Elliott, the House curator, requested $25,000 for emergency repair and conservation of objects in the House collection

Outside the physical damage, the officials detailed a substantial increase in demand for mental health counseling, with an office that typically handles about 3,000 calls per year surging to more than 1,150 interactions with employees, managers and members of Congress in six weeks.

This Moment of historic holding to account, of looking inward, deserves a commensurate, totalizing event that explains what is being reckoned with, demanded and hoped for, an experience that rubs between its fingers the earth upon which all those toppled monuments had so brazenly stood. The Moment warrants a depth of conversation the United States has never had. It demands truth and reconciliation.

In 1968, in the wake of the racial conflagrations roiling American cities during the mid- to late 1960s, Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois presented the findings of his so-called riot commission, whose politically moderate and racially uniform makeup (two of its members were Black; there was one woman) was strategically cast for ho-hum results. What it delivered to President Lyndon B. Johnson was, instead, shockingly, comprehensively grim. The United States, the commission concluded, is a hopelessly divided nation that has locked its Black citizens in impoverishment and swallowed the key, that good white folks were out-to-lunch and therefore as culpable as the white supremacists were malignant.

When it was published as a book early in ’68, the report became a best seller. But it ought to have been part of a one-two punch. Part two should have been a televised, multipart presentation of the commission’s intensive effort: its conclusions, considerable field work and still-bracing historical contextualizing put before the public, alongside the disgruntled, despondent, enraged, hurt Black Americans whose circumstances swell the report. The country watched the cities burn but never met the human beings who lived in them.

after inauguration day on January 20, 2021, the curtain will rise on the opening act of the hard and unglamorous business of governing again.

Which means both parties will have to own their part in contributing to forty years of declining economic mobility, an unconscionably racist prison-industrial complex, 1 in 5 children living in poverty, a stock market economy wholly unhooked from the workers who drive it, and so much corruption and money in politics that the percentage of Americans who support a given law has literally 0% bearing on whether that law will pass.

Now we have to fix it. And a little humility won’t hurt that process a bit.

President Trump paused to muse about the pros and cons of testing people for the coronavirus. “The media likes to point out” that the United States has the most covid-19 cases in the world, he observed. “But we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

The United States does not do “the most testing,” at least not on a per capita basis — not by a long shot

And if the United States did “very little” testing, that would not change the number of people infected, although it would hamper efforts to reduce that figure and limit our understanding of where the virus is spreading.

the important message out of Massachusetts: The progressivism of the young is now dyed deep green.

It’s been clear for a while that the word “socialism” is no longer a dealbreaker for younger voters. If the old associate it with the oppression of the Soviet Union, the young think of it as describing Denmark or Norway — lovely, livable places with decent social programs

And the young left, as AOC knows, sees climate change as a decisive voting issue because it’s the existential challenge of our time. This is also increasingly true among older Democratic middle-class suburbanites and city voters living in the rehabbed neighborhoods of lofts and exposed brick.

Janet Yellen isn’t going to blow up the economy. Antony Blinken isn’t going to blow up the free world. Alejandro Mayorkas isn’t going to put kids in cages. All this promises to make 2021 better than 2020 purely by default.

so many rank-and-file Republicans refuse to accept that Trump lost fair-and-square is a very bad sign about the sanity — or lack thereof — of the party.

rump is going to skip the inauguration so that he can announce his next run for president is another bad sign for and about the party’s future. Together, they augur for the QAnonization of the G.O.P., which is just awful news for a democracy with a two-party system.

On the other hand, there’s a lot that worries me, too. The fact that so many rank-and-file Republicans refuse to accept that Trump lost fair-and-square is a very bad sign about the sanity — or lack thereof — of the party. The possibility that Trump is going to skip the inauguration so that he can announce his next run for president is another bad sign for and about the party’s future. Together, they augur for the QAnonization of the G.O.P., which is just awful news for a democracy with a two-party system.

Maybe my biggest worry, though, is that we’re living in a country where the Dow just hit 30,000 at the same time that people are waiting in line for hours at food banks. That’s a recipe for potentially catastrophic social friction.

The rich will always figure out how to avoid taxes, if not evade them, whether it means setting up complex trusts to protect their wealth or moving to some offshore tax haven. Just look at the Trump family. The people who really get walloped by high taxes are upper-middle class types who don’t have exit options but aren’t exactly the malefactors of great wealth.

President Trump is signaling that he may try to become only the second president in American history to win another term after being defeated.

Mr. Trump has been laying plans to run again in 2024 with a kickoff as early as this month or possibly on his successor’s Inauguration Day.

“It’s been an amazing four years,” he told guests in remarks posted online by a member of the Republican National Committee. “We’re trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”

The President-elect revealed the galvanizing, altruistic, first national rallying call of his administration in an exclusive CNN interview on Thursday with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, previewing a sharp change of direction when he succeeds President Donald Trump.

"Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days. And I think we'll see a significant reduction," Biden told CNN's Jake Tapper,

the first 100 days have marked the apex of a new US leader's power and often the most prolific period for policy wins.

“That continuity of government is always in place,” the speaker said later. The

debate gives both Mr. Pence, 61, and Ms. Harris, 55, a chance to talk about how they view their roles given the advanced age of the men at the top of their respective tickets. Mr. Trump is 74; Mr. Biden, if elected, would be 78 at his inauguration—making him the nation’s oldest president.

Republican and Democratic strategists say one of Ms. Harris’s most defining characteristics may be that she is hard to pigeonhole: at one time a hard-charging prosecutor, and at another, a champion of progressive causes.

Because of the Trump administration’s barbaric family separation policy, 545 children may be lost to their parents forever. America has lost its status as a leading democracy.

Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him.

The easiest place to quantify the cultural impoverishment of the Trump era is in book publishing. There have been so many books about Trump and the fallout from Trumpism that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada has written a book about all the Trump books

Long before Covid-19, Alexis de Tocqueville described a presidential election as a form of sickness in which the body politic became dangerously “feverish” before returning to normal.

That was true in 1860, as the most toxic campaign in American history delivered Abraham Lincoln

But before he could save the Union, Lincoln had to survive his election and a difficult transition, bitterly resisted by an entrenched political establishment that had no intention of giving up power.

President-elect Joe Biden urged Americans to wear a face mask Monday, saying that doing so "is not a political statement"

In a speech Monday after meeting with the 12-member coronavirus task force advising him during the transition before his January 20 inauguration, Biden implored Americans to stop the politicization of basic public health precautions

"The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible, and masks are critical to doing that. It won't be forever."

Still, Biden's coronavirus advisory board co-chair Vivek Murthy says they're doing everything they can to ensure plans are ready to go on Inauguration Day — including stronger mask requirements.

"The worse this pandemic gets, there are more leaders, elected leaders, who are coming around to the fact that as unpalatable as these mandates might be, they are important and they actually work," Murthy said.

What is clear, he said, is that strict lockdowns aren't always necessary if people comply with less restrictive measures.

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office in January, nearly half of the transition team laying the groundwork for his administration is made up of people of color, and women are in the majority.

Forty-six percent of the transition staff are people of color, according to new diversity data of the transition team provided to CNN, and 41% of the senior staff are people of color. The majority of transition staff -- 52% -- are women, and 53% of the senior staff are women.

The new diversity figures come as Biden is set to announce his Cabinet picks and senior staff for the White House in the coming weeks

The federal agencies were required by law to prepare for a transition before the 2020 election, but the flurry of activity that would normally be taking place during a presidential transition sits on hold thanks to President Donald Trump's refusal to accept the election results.

Agency officials in the Trump administration put in charge of the transition are in the awkward place of effectively twiddling their thumbs until the General Services Administration, an agency led by a Trump appointee, signs off on the election results

Cabinet leaders, meanwhile, have suggested there will be a second Trump term,

For a few hours on Tuesday, it looked as though two Republican officials in Wayne County, Mich., might reject the will of hundreds of thousands of voters.

But hundreds of Michiganders logged on to a Zoom call to express their fury. And around 9 p.m., the Republicans reversed themselves, certifying the count.

Could the results of a free election really be blocked that easily, in such a routine part of the electoral process?