New York Magazine

On Tuesday night, one of the crazier news nights since Election Day occurred when MSNBC host Rachel Maddow failed on a level akin to Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s vault when she falsely claimed to have a bombshell exclusive (that wasn’t hers) in the form of President Trump’s 2005 tax returns.

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…

In a rather pointless article published by New York magazine Wednesday evening, associate editor Madison Malone Kircher conducted an amateur forensic analysis of President-elect Donald Trump’s obviously staged speech writing photo, taken at his Mar-a-Lago resort, with the objective to mock it. “Live by Twitter, die by Twitter,” she declared at one point, “Or, at least, have your photographs…

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 “…

After Donald Trump chose former presidential candidate Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), journalists ridiculed the choice, mocked Carson’s beliefs and labeled him a “scammer.” Squawk Box co-anchor Joe Kernen anticipated the liberal media reaction on Dec. 5, saying, "Let's see, he's not a billionaire, so how's the mainstream media going to trash him? He's a…

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…

Is the Social Network also the Electoral Network? Yes, says Max Read, who suggested in a piece for New York magazine that Mark Zuckerberg had more to do with Donald Trump’s win than did James Comey, Julian Assange, or Bernie Sanders. “It can be clarifying,” Read wrote, “to identify the conditions that allowed access to the highest levels” of politics to Trump, “a dangerous and unpredictable bigot…

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…

He was the toast of the liberal media for a few days after first hitting the national scene last Sunday in St. Louis during the second presidential debate. For a very brief time he was hailed as a cuddly bear stuffed into a tight red sweater who was so cute that it made you want to hug him. And then by Friday...he became an instant non-person to liberals due to very un-PC Thought Crime remarks…