David Atkins

In the ninth month of his presidency, it seems clear that Donald Trump is motivated by little more than bigotry, narcissism, dominance posturing, and the desire to anger anyone with a sense of basic decency. Today’s reported decision to end the DACA program with only a six-month delay fits all of those criteria. But at […]

Donald Trump’s 3AM phone call has arrived, in the form of a North Korean nuclear test that the regime claims proves it has a hydrogen bomb. Here’s hoping he ignores the call. Even if Pyongyang’s claims are true, the political reality will be much more dull than the frantic overreaction to it. There is very […]

Is Donald Trump just trolling us? With each new appointee, one has to wonder just how many of the Trump administration’s decisions are made for political or ideological reasons, and how many are made just to troll and anger liberals. The news of the last few days has been filled with dismaying appointments that reflect […]

Republican presidential hopefuls have long made a boilerplate campaign promise of cutting and eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency. Donald Trump is no exception. Since his election, Trump has been doing all he can to sabotage the EPA and render it unable to do its job. Part of this sabotage has been its willfully ignorant neglect […]

Assuming no utter self-inflicted catastrophes occur in the Trump administration’s remaining time, perhaps its greatest lasting damage will be that its shocking transgressions against basic decency leave us numb to its more banal evils. For instance, the scandal over Russian interference has mostly driven the Trump family’s open profit-seeking out of the headlines. Myriad promises […]

In a normal week, Elizabeth Warren’s speech at Netroots Nation last weekend would have driven several days’ worth of news and opinion pieces. Unfortunately, it was not a normal week: few weeks are in these days of Donald Trump and white supremacy marches. The events in Charlottesville drowned out what should have been a dramatic […]

Donald Trump’s character defects are so flagrant and his childish affect so obvious, that managing his communications is practically impossible. Amazing as it may be in the year 2017, the proper response to white supremacist rallies continues to confound the president of the United States. Coming off his catastrophic response to the events in Charlottesville, […]

Of all the critiques of western monotheism, perhaps the most troublesome is the theodicy, also known as the Problem of Evil. It’s a three-part syllogism that contains its own inescapable contradiction: if God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good, then evil should not exist. Because evil exists, at least one of the postulates must be wrong […]