New Republic

Separatist and secessionist talk has burgeoned in 21st-century America. The day after the 2004 presidential election, sulky liberals began circulating a map that represented pro-Kerry regions of the country as part of the “United States of Canada” and pro-Bush regions as “Jesusland.” Grouchy conservatives weren’t sure they belonged in a nation that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Now comes…

In a Friday guest post on The New Republic’s website, Steven Beutler surmised that explaining President Donald Trump’s “bizarre, volatile behavior” and concerns “raging among mental health professionals about Trump’s mental state” could be put to rest with his guess that Trump’s been battling a Sexual Transmitted Disease (STD) and specifically syphilis.   

Chuck Schumer is the leader of Senate Democrats and, arguably, the current face of his party. For a narrower role -- congressional Dems’ chief Trump-mocker -- Graham Vyse nominates another senator, Al Franken. Vyse remarked in a Thursday piece that Franken “has largely shunned the spotlight” on Capitol Hill, but now he needs to “harness his talent as a public entertainer and take on Trump as only…

The image of America as “a shining city on a hill” (or a similar phrase) has been a staple of conservative political rhetoric for several decades. In a Tuesday piece for The New Republic, Matthew Pratt Guterl, a professor at Brown University, adapted the metaphor for leftist domestic use: “The nation as a whole seems no longer interested in celebrating any vision of equity, justice, and mutual…

Aaron Hanlon thinks anti-conservative bias at colleges and universities is a molehill that a lot of people try to make into a mountain. To the dismay of Hanlon, a professor of English at Colby College, some of his fellow liberals are among those who, in his opinion, exaggerate the problem and thereby bolster the right’s case. Last Thursday in The New Republic, Hanlon went after New York Times…

According to TNR’s Lovia Gyarkye, one of the less tangible things President Obama has tried to forge is “a liberalism that fuses identity politics with the idea of American greatness.” As for Obama’s successor, “the answer to the Trump presidency is not to abandon the progress we have made. It is not to yearn for the past glories of a nation that has wronged so many people. It is to do the hard…

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the "everybody knows" conventional wisdom in the establishment press which never went away, even as some contrary evidence appeared, was that Donald Trump's campaign, away from his rallies, was a haphazard operation which was doing very little to identify, target and persuade voters. At the New Republic in mid-June, Jeet Heer confidently summed up the media…

In their respective articles alleging that the mainstream media facilitated the election of Donald Trump, Brian Beutler of The New Republic and Eric Alterman of The Nation overlapped somewhat. For example, each claimed that the Hillary e-mail story was wildly overcovered, with Beutler citing it as the shining example of how the media “failed abysmally” regarding the “framing and contextualizing…

Generally, pro-lifers support Donald Trump not because they believe he’s truly one of them, but because he’s clearly preferable to Hillary Clinton. Sarah Jones, however, claims Trump is “the candidate the pro-life movement deserves.” That’s not meant as a compliment to either Trump or pro-lifers. Jones wrote that “Trump understood that he simply needed to repeat a few pieces of boilerplate in…

For almost two hundred and twenty years, every president of the United States was white and male. If Hillary Clinton serves two full terms as president, that will make it sixteen years without a white guy in the White House. The prospect of that discrepancy explains Republicans’ choice of Donald Trump as their nominee, contends Jeet Heer. “By making Trump the face of the party,” wrote Heer in a…

Jack Hitt thinks the mainstream media have started to push back against politicians’ lies because of “the sheer magnitude of [Donald] Trump’s horseshit.” In his cover story for the November issue of The New Republic, Hitt asserted that “thanks to Trump, some television hosts have discovered the ratings pull of a different style of journalism. Jake Tapper of CNN grilled Trump about his bigotry…

There’s been a lot of talk in the past few days about “presidential temperament,” and where that quality is concerned, Brian Beutler firmly believes that President Obama has the right stuff. In a Friday piece, Beutler lauded Obama’s "unflappable" performance at CNN’s military-themed presidential town hall Wednesday at Fort Lee in Virginia. By contrast, Beutler opined, Donald Trump "lost his…

A current hot topic in campaign coverage is Hillary Clinton’s underperformance among millennials, an unusually large number of whom favor the second-tier candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Brian Beutler thinks those 18-to-29-year-olds who aren’t #WithHer don’t grasp what happened the last time a significant portion of the left was lukewarm about the Democratic nominee: 2000, when lefty…

Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment isn’t just campaign fodder, believes Brian Beutler, who in a Monday piece argued that by telling “impolite truths,” Clinton pulled an already-loose thread and may have furthered the unraveling of the GOP. Assuming Donald Trump doesn’t become president, some Republicans will “wish to dislodge Trump and Trumpism from the party,” observed Beutler,…