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Her cause is anti-bullying, which is making the first lady's silence deafening.Melania Trump has yet to speak out in the wake of President Donald Trump's mocking tweet directed at 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, in which he told the teenager to "work on her anger management" and "chill" out.

"A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it," Melania Trump tweeted after Karlan, a law professor, mentioned Barron Trump during impeachment hearings on Capitol Hill. Karlan later apologized for making reference to the youngest Trump child's name.

"BeBest is the First Lady's initiative, and she will continue to use it to do all she can to help children. It is no secret that the President and First Lady often communicate differently -- as most married couples do. Their son is not an activist who travels the globe giving speeches. He is a 13-year-old who wants and deserves privacy," Grisham said.

The scattershot efforts to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's election victory are coalescing into a movement led by top Republicans determined to exploit a manufactured crisis for broader political gains.

Nearly a dozen more GOP senators, a handful of whom will be sworn-in Sunday, have now announced they will challenge Biden's clear Electoral College win over President Donald Trump next week during what has traditionally been a ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill.

The President is, predictably, cheering on the charade. And in a taped phone conversation on Saturday, reported by The Washington Post, encouraged Georgia's top elections official to "find" enough votes to overturn Biden's victory in the state.

Sitting peacefully, a few miles from where I write, the crowd of protesters had resolved to have our government face us, and cease killing us.

slap women trying to enter the passport office

DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen

DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had.

I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract

The difference, Uscinski says, is “we have a president who has built a coalition by reaching out to conspiracy-minded people.”

Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political scientist who studies conspiracy theories, notes that psychological measures of paranoia have been “entirely stable.” Conservatives are inherently no more conspiratorial than liberals; only low education (and, relatedly, income) predict such tendencies

The bad news: For the first time in our history, a president and a major political party have weaponized paranoia, to destabilizing effect.

Four years ago, I wrote that whatever one thought about the Obama administration’s economic and foreign policy record, it had succeeded in at least one area. Based on Pew polling data, it was clear that President Barack Obama had convinced the world that even after the 2008 financial crisis, America was great again: Eight years after Obama’s inauguration, “the United States is looked upon more favorably in most (although not all) parts of the globe, and perceptions of American economic power have returned to pre-2008 levels. Americans themselves have greater confidence in the relative power of the U.S. economy than at any time in the post-2008 era.

Donald Trump ran in 2016 on the premise that this was not true, that only he could make America great again. He has repeatedly said that “America is respected again.” Just last week he claimed that before the pandemic hit, “we created the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

“In at least seven nations, including key allies like Britain and Japan, approval ratings for the United States plunged to record lows,” Tharoor notes, “Perhaps the most damning indicator is that the publics surveyed, on the whole, placed less confidence in Trump doing ‘the right thing regarding global affairs’ than autocrats like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Former President Barack Obama reemerged on the campaign trail Wednesday in Philadelphia, delivering an across-the-board indictment of his successor's first four years in office.

That, for me, is the best and most succinct argument that former Vice President Joe Biden can make in the closing 12 days of this race.

It's about a country absolutely exhausted by Trump -- his norm-busting, his misinformation, his junior high school bullying, and his tweeting, his tweeting, his tweeting...

The first time I realized that Donald Trump took pleasure in violence was back in March 2016. In an interview, I asked him about the brutish rhetoric and violence at his rallies and the way he goaded supporters to hate on journalists and rough up protesters. Even then Mitch McConnell was urging Trump to ratchet down the ferocity.I told Trump that I had not seen this side of him before and that he was going down a very dark path. With his denigrating mockery of rivals and critics, he had already taken politics to a vulgar place, and now it was getting more dangerous.Shouldn’t parents be able to bring children to rallies without worrying about obscenities, sucker punches, brawls and bullying, I wondered?

He brushed off the questions and blithely assessed the savage mood at his rallies: “Frankly, it adds a little excitement.”

A couple weeks later, I pressed him again on his belligerence and divisiveness, and, with utter candor, he explained why he was turning up the heat.“I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1 and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?” he said. “I’ve come this far in life. I’ve had great success. I’ve done it my way.” He added, “You know, there are a lot of people who say, ‘Don’t change.’”

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

From the start it appeared an impossible contradiction. Evangelicals for years have defined themselves as the values voters, people who prized the Bible and sexual morality — and loving your neighbor as yourself — above all.

Donald Trump was the opposite. He bragged about assaulting women. He got divorced, twice. He built a career off gambling. He cozied up to bigots. He rarely went to church. He refused to ask for forgiveness.

t is a contradiction that has held for four years. They stood by him when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.

If the administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was denial, its failure to control the pandemic since then was driven by dysfunction and resulted in a lost summer, according to the portrait that emerges from interviews with 41 senior administration officials and other people directly involved in or briefed on the response efforts.

Right now, we’re flying blind,” said Thomas Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Public health is not getting in the way of economic recovery and schools reopening. Public health is the means to economic recovery and schools reopening. You don’t have to believe me. Look all over the world. The U.S. is a laggard.”

the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country. A senior administration official said there was a desire to focus on the economy in June.

What did they think was going to happen?

The president has a real job. His words have real consequences. Electing someone to that position who has no compunction about stoking racial tensions and a history of incendiary, violent, racist rhetoric—and totally uninterested in even the idea of national unity—was always a ticking time bomb.

no one should be surprised that we’ve gotten to this point.

as the week went on, the sense of crisis seemed to lift: The protests became more peaceful, and the troops and law enforcement in D.C. receded into the background

A lot of the credit for the shift has to go to the protesters themselves. In the first few days of the demonstrations, looting and violence were genuine problems in some cities. But soon protesters imposed order organically, remaining peaceful and working to stop those among them who were trying to provoke trouble

The president could tweet “LAW AND ORDER!” all he wanted, but the protests looked neither lawless nor disorderly—and whatever disorder there was seemed to come from the police themselves. He could mobilize federal forces and law enforcement in D.C. But as the looting stopped and the message in the streets became ever more simply one of political protest, the gesture seemed ever more transparently authoritarian.

In the rise of China, we might be witnessing the emergence of a paranoid superpower. It is increasingly clear that paranoia — both as an internal disorder and a trigger for (exaggerated) external threat perception — is driving China’s grand strategy.

The CPC is obsessed with avoiding the mistakes that brought about the downfall of USSR

Supreme leader Xi and a generation of party leaders have minutely studied, learnt and internalised lessons from Soviet Russia’s collapse that ranged from blaming Mikhail Gorbachev’s twin reform gambits of glasnost and perestroika to noting the mistakes made by a corrupted, bloated and incompetent Soviet Communist Party that failed to tighten political control and mitigate the challenges thrown by the rise of nationalist impulses in areas under USSR from Ukraine to Azerbaijan

Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia tweeted an altered WrestleMania video in which the president was portrayed as pummeling senseless an opponent with a spiked coronavirus head. “President Trump won’t have to recover from Covid,” Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida gloated. “Covid will have to recover from President Trump.”

What if Mr. Trump’s style of bullying and bombast aren’t relics of the old manhood, but emblems of a masculinity very much au courant? If that’s so, we may be fooling ourselves in declaring that his noxious model is heading for a natural extinction.

Mr. Trump could not be more at odds with that ethic. His is a Potemkin patriarchy, the he-man re-engineered for an image-based, sensation-saturated and very modern entertainment economy.

public health experts are coalescing around Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s call for a “national mask mandate,” even as they concede such an effort would require much more than the stroke of a presidential pen.

it is time to seriously consider a national mandate to curb the spread of the virus.

Mr. Trump is opposed to a mandate, and Mr. Biden has conceded that a presidential order for all Americans to wear masks would almost certainly face — and most likely fall to — a legal challenge.

Mr. Trump’s bullying behavior had no obvious precedent in presidential debates, even the one that Mr. Wallace previously moderated, to acclaim, in 2016. In the interview, the anchor said that when Mr. Trump initially engaged directly with Mr. Biden, “I thought this was great — this is a debate!”

In the spotlight, Mr. Wallace was keenly aware of the complexity of his task: ensuring an evenhanded debate, avoiding taking sides, allowing candidates to express themselves while keeping the discussion substantive.

And he noted that cutting off the audio feed of a presidential candidate is a more consequential act than some pundits give it credit for. “People have to remember, and too many people forget, both of these candidates have the support of tens of millions of Americans,” he said.

But as a description of the belligerent, earsplitting, deeply depressing first debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he was dead on. It didn’t end well. It didn’t begin well. And the parts in between were pretty lousy, too.And that seemed to be very much the president’s strategy.The advantage to being the one who derails a debate is that people assign symmetrical blame for asymmetrical behavior. They throw up their hands and complain about the bickering from “both sides.”

Tonally, the challenger wanted to show he could stand up to a bullying, brawling debater, and to make the case that he would be a steady alternative to a constant earthquake of a presidency.

Mr. Biden also needed to avoid a repeat of his worst performance of the campaign, in his first Democratic debate, when Senator Kamala Harris — now his running mate — challenged his record on school segregation. Then, Mr. Biden seemed surprised, abashed and unprepared.

Shouting, interruptions and often incoherent cross talk filled the air as Mr. Trump purposefully and repeatedly heckled and blurted over his rival and the moderator alike in a 90-minute melee that showcased the president’s sense of urgency to upend a race in which polls show him trailing.

The impact on the race of the messy affair — given that 90 percent of voters say they are already decided — is an open question.

He bulldozed Mr. Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace, throughout the evening. But his goal, other than making for a convoluted contest, was less clear. Mr. Trump seemed principally focused on undercutting and disorienting Mr. Biden, rather than on presenting an agenda or a vision for a second term in the White House.