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There are days in American politics that feel loud in retrospect but subtle in the moment. No fireworks. No tanks. No resignation letters slid dramatically across polished desks. Just a series of institutional “no’s” delivered calmly, bureaucratically, and—perhaps most painfully—without fear. Thursday was one of those days. It wasn’t a collapse. It wasn’t a downfall. It was something far more revealing: a routine workday in which Donald Trump tried to bend multiple institutions to his will—and watched them bend back. Not with protest signs or heroic speeches, but with votes, rules, grand juries, committee chairs, and one particularly devastating phrase in Washington: there’s no there there. For a political figure whose power has long depended on intimidation, spectacle, and the assumption that resistance is futile, that’s the real danger zone. Because authoritarian gravity doesn’t disappear all at once. It weakens incrementally. And Thursday offered a rare glimpse of what that weake...

Act I: Welcome to the Pig Pen Every government shutdown has a mascot. 2013 had Ted Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor like a toddler forced to perform for dessert. 2018 had Trump holding the government hostage for his wall, proving once and for all that Mexico wasn’t paying for anything except maybe his ego therapy bills. And now, in 2025, we have what Chris Stirewalt aptly dubs “the Rosie O’Donnell shutdown” — loud, theatrical, politically messy, and somehow still the least absurd part of this country’s political circus. This one’s different, though. Not because Americans are suffering new hardships (spoiler: we always are), but because the Democrats decided to cosplay as Gingrich-era Republicans — except instead of trying to cut spending, they’re shutting down the government to spend more . Yes, we’ve officially reached the stage of American politics where “fiscal responsibility” is just a vintage concept — like dial-up internet or bipartisan friendship. Repub...

France, land of wine, cheese, and eternal political drama, has once again decided to outdo itself in the theater of democracy. Prime Minister François Bayrou—yes, the one who thought threatening to scrap national holidays would be his ticket to saving France’s economy—has just been unceremoniously tossed out after losing a confidence vote. The tally? 364 MPs gave him the boot while 194 stuck around to at least pretend they cared. For those keeping score at home, that means France is on track to welcome its fifth prime minister in less than two years. That’s not a democracy, that’s speed dating with worse lighting. Let’s break this circus down and savor every morsel of chaos, shall we? Section 1: Bayrou’s Blunder – A Confidence Vote Nobody Asked For François Bayrou, who apparently thought his job was “Finance Prophet-in-Chief,” decided to gamble it all on a confidence vote. Not because he had to. Not because the Assembly demanded it. But because he wanted to “make history.” Trans...

So, Barack Obama finally snapped. After years of measured tones, rhetorical elevation, and the eternal hope that maybe, just maybe , the Democratic Party would eventually get its act together, the former president put on his best disappointed-dad face and basically told the Democrats to stop crying in their LaCroix and man up . That’s right, folks. At a private New Jersey fundraiser—because where else do liberal dreams go to die?—Obama dropped the pretense, chucked the hopey-changey tone, and gave his party a long-overdue political wedgie. In a speech that CNN delicately described as a “call to action,” but which more accurately resembled a noogied dressing-down, Obama told Democrats to quit navel-gazing, stop whining, and get out of their fetal positions. His words, not mine. You know it’s bad when the human embodiment of optimism is telling you to toughen up like an aging high school football coach barking at the JV squad. Let’s dive in. ❝Don’t Say You Care About Free Speech The...

Remember when Barack Obama was the north star of the Democratic Party? When every Democrat worth their blue tie was tripping over themselves to get a quote in his memoir or maybe—just maybe—a campaign trail shoutout that could sanctify their candidacy? Fast forward to 2025 and—spoiler alert—Obama’s once-glittering political orbit is falling faster than a Chinese spy balloon over Montana. But hey, nobody tell him. He’s probably busy negotiating his next Netflix special about hope, change, and why the 2008 campaign still matters more than whatever the Democratic Party is doing now. (Spoiler: not much.) Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Democratic Party is standing around the smoking crater where the Obama coalition used to be, wondering if it’s too late to get a refund on David Plouffe’s consulting fees. Let’s break this mess down. From Cool to Cold: Obama World Loses Its Shine Once upon a time, being “from Obama World” was a golden ticket. Now it’s more like walking around with a Blac...

Well, well, well. CNN gathered four members of Congress from districts where politics is a full-contact sport — and boy did we get a 90-minute glimpse into the chaotic blender of half-baked policy, poorly masked regret, and awkward Elon Musk name-drops that is American governance in 2025. Picture a high school debate club, but everyone’s polling in the low 40s and scared of their own donors. You had two Republicans: Mike Lawler from New York (the guy who took down the Democrats’ campaign chair in 2022 and still reminds you of it like a divorced dad telling you about his fantasy football win) and Ryan Mackenzie from Pennsylvania (freshman, immigration hawk, and walking MAGA Mad Lib). On the Democrat side, we had Jahana Hayes from Connecticut (backtracking like she’s being chased by a regret-shaped ghost) and Derek Tran from California (new kid on the block, still deciding if he wants to be a moderate or just look like one). So what did they talk about? Oh, you know — just minor things...

Buckle up, folks, because we’re living in the age of Trumpian foreign policy, where alliances are optional, facts are negotiable, and entire geopolitical strategies can change with a single phone call to the Kremlin. Over the course of just one week, President Donald J. Trump managed to flip decades of U.S. foreign policy on its head, leaving allies slack-jawed, critics howling, and Twitter threads ablaze. It all started innocuously enough. In the early days of his second term, Trump appeared to be taking a hard line on Russia—something even his most ardent detractors would have struggled to predict. There were stern warnings to Moscow, promises of sanctions, and a bit of classic Trump-brand swagger. He even tweeted, “We can do it the easy way, or the hard way ... It’s time to ‘MAKE A DEAL’.” The world, for a brief and shining moment, thought it knew where America stood. And then, like a soap opera character returning from the dead, Vladimir Putin entered stage right, and Trump threw t...

Stephen Collinson’s incisive analysis of the icy rapport between President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump is the kind of political drama that makes Washington D.C. feel less like a seat of governance and more like the setting for a soap opera with an unlimited budget. As Biden’s administration packs up to vacate the White House and Trump’s team gleefully prepares to redecorate in gold leaf, the tension between these two titans of American politics is, unsurprisingly, dialed up to eleven. Enemies of State (of Mind) It’s a tale as old as time—or at least as old as 2020: Biden, the elder statesman whose political career has been a marathon, versus Trump, the brash disruptor who turned the Republican Party into his personal stage. This isn’t a rivalry; it’s a feud. Think Hatfields and McCoys, but with nuclear codes. Biden’s polite disdain for Trump’s leadership style—if you can call “decency, decency, decency” polite—and Trump’s delight in publicly eviscerating “Sleepy Joe” are...