Jonathan Chait

This past Tuesday, three prominent left-wing writers examined Paul Ryan’s health-care bill; what they see as the typical Republican attitude toward health insurance; and the modern GOP as a whole. Unsurprisingly, they found all three wanting. For example, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall contended that on occasions like this that call for wonkery, Republicans are ill-…

How is Donald Trump “not a normal Republican”? Let New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait count the ways. Trump is “crudely ethno-nationalist,” wrote Chait in a Tuesday post, and he’s “personally ignorant and undisciplined in a manner that sets him apart not only from traditional Republicans but most human adults.” That’s pretty much it for Trump’s deviations from orthodoxy, according to Chait, who…

Even though Donald Trump won the presidential election, thereby causing “pessimism about the liberal project,” Barack Obama is winning the post-election, and Obama’s “vision of the country…will ultimately win out,” asserted New York’s Jonathan Chait last Sunday. According to Chait, the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration and last weekend’s protests over his executive order on…

“The most important development of the last half-century in American politics,” believes New York magazine’s Chait, is “the Republican Party’s embrace of movement conservative ideology.” In a Thursday post, Chait cited six books, none of which was written by a conservative, that “help elucidate” this phenomenon. Among Chait’s choices: E.J. Dionne’s Why the Right Went Wrong; Richard Hofstadter’s…

Next Tuesday, three days before the current POTUS becomes an ex-POTUS, Jonathan Chait’s Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail will be published. On Tuesday, New York magazine, where Chait is the chief political pundit, ran an excerpt from the book in which he claimed, “The truth is that Obama enacted careful, deep, and mostly popular solutions to a…

Donald Trump is a visceral and emotional conservative, not a philosophical conservative, but that’s good enough for government work, suggests New York blogger Chait. The main aim of Chait’s Thursday post was to slap down the argument from some righty pundits that candidate Trump was, as Chait paraphrased it, “a non-ideological figure, or even a progressive…who chose the Republican Party for no…

After nearly eight years of competing theories, the essence of the Tea Party has been determined, says Jonathan Chait. In a Wednesday post, Chait claimed that Donald Trump’s election as president verifies liberals’ explanation of what the movement stood for. The right, wrote Chait, was wrong to argue that the Tea Party was all about “timeless principles of conservative movement thought” such as “…

On Tuesday, Zach Schonfeld, a senior writer for Newsweek, decided to mine what is "now a massive, unprecedented content graveyard of articles celebrating or analyzing Hillary Clinton's would-be historic victory," presenting "a small sampling ... of what the internet would have looked like on November 9 if Clinton beat Trump, as so many pundits forecast." It's mildly entertaining, but it comes…

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who’s also Donald Trump’s transition director, was not a defendant in the Bridgegate trial, in which two of Christie’s allies were just convicted on all counts. Still, argues New York’s Chait, the verdicts “would shake up an ordinary presidential election,” since Trump himself has said that Christie “totally knew about” Bridgegate, and since the Donald has made…

Unlike a lot of his fellow liberals, Jonathan Chait doesn’t believe presidential-debate moderators should be on-camera fact-checkers, but Chait’s reason for opposing the idea is unambiguously anti-conservative. In an item posted a few hours prior to Monday night’s Clinton-Trump clash, Chait argued that the way Republicans dealt with Candy Crowley’s intervention in a 2012 Romney-Obama debate “…

Many consider Donald Trump an anomaly in the Republican party, but they really shouldn’t, suggested New York’s Chait in a Tuesday piece. Chait argued that the GOP which nominated Trump for president is pretty much the same GOP which has freaked out for several years over the Affordable Care Act. As Chait put it, “Republican hatred of Obamacare exemplifies the madness that left its elite unable to…

To borrow a phrase from President Obama, let New York magazine’s Chait be clear: “Republicans nominated Donald Trump [because] Republican voters like Donald Trump. This theory has the virtues of simplicity and truth.” Chait’s peg for his Friday post, however, was an “alternate theory” he rejects: that “Trump prevailed at least in part because liberals blew their credibility by hyperbolically…

Proving how the Clinton Foundation scandal has become increasingly difficult for the media to ignore, Monday’s The Last Word on MSNBC featured liberal host Lawrence O’Donnell and lefty New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait agreed that the foundation represents “a bigger problem than the Clinton campaign really seems to be aware of” and has been different than the set-up for another famous…

Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine blasted Hillary Clinton's ethics. Of course, being a Hillary supporter he must have realized he went too far so he also bizarrely slammed people who dare to criticize Hillary. Finally he ends up worrying that her corrupt image could harm her in the election or even beyond. Yes, it is a real rollercoaster ride so let us join Chait in his initial blast mode as…