David Atkins

Hillary Clinton has had a pretty good week, all things considered. Clinton’s appearance on Between Two Ferns was widely watched and well received, humanizing her in a millennial-friendly setting. She has refocused her campaign to be less about Trump’s weaknesses than on her agenda to improve Americans’ lives. Both of these should help shore up […]

Donald Trump has somehow managed to achieve an even lower bar of reality-show indignity. Not content with the reality show circus the 2016 campaign has already become (far eclipsing even the shallow veneer of fluff that normally constitutes our presidential elections), Trump has actually invited Gennifer Flowers to first debate. Flowers, for her part, has […]

In an election year that has been mostly depressing and full of bad news, one bright spot has been the number of judicial decisions against voter suppression by Republicans all around the county. The last blow to their antics came in Ohio yesterday: he Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals today reversed an earlier ruling that shot […]

The results of a recent poll showing that large percentages of voters think that Trump will use a nuclear weapon and default on the nation’s debt have been raising eyebrows, and rightly so. About half the country doesn’t just think that Trump is crazy. They think he’s crazy enough to destroy the world’s economy and potentially […]

The Washington Post is, like many media outlets, a mixed bag. On one hand, they have some seriously great investigative journalists bringing important stories to light. Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman at The Plum Line are national treasures. The editorial page, on the other hand, is a different matter. But worst of all is Chris […]

It seems almost beyond doubt that Donald Trump directly paid off Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to stop investigating his Trump University scam with a $25,000 “donation.” No criminal charges will come of it absent a special prosecutor because the person who would be in charge of prosecuting the case would be…the Attorney General who took […]

Fifteen years ago, Al Qaeda operatives put into action a plan they had been hatching for years: use commercial airlines as human-guided bombs to attack several of America’s most visible and iconic symbols. Tactically, the operation succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. They caused thousands of deaths and forever altered Americans’ pysche. Opinions differ as to […]

The right wing and much of the press are all aflutter today over Clinton’s statement at a fundraiser that half of Trump’s supporters are in a “basket of deplorables” driven by bigotries of all kinds. Honestly, though–how is that even controversial at this point? Clinton herself already signaled that she believed exactly that when she […]

Reading David Brooks is always a mixture of pleasure and pain. On the one hand he does seem to understand reality a little bit better than most of his conservative colleagues, and you can tell that unlike most of his conservative colleagues he genuinely means well. On the other hand, his faulty premises, New England […]

It’s common in election season writing to talk about the “days until election day.” If a candidate is trailing in the polls, articles will discuss whether they can turn things around in the XX days until election day. There’s a good piece at Politico today in the genre, describing how Trump is running out of […]