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Alex Shephard

Alex Shephard

New Republic

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Everyone Hates This Election

Every presidential election is billed as the most important of our lifetime. But in 2020, voters seemed to actually believe it. Amid the Covid-19...

wednesday 6

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Utter Joy of Watching Trump Watch People Who Despise Him

The fact that Donald Trump is being forced to sit in a chilly New York courtroom for weeks, during a period when his presidential campaign should be...

19.04.2024 7

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Why Attacks on Trump’s Age Will Backfire

As his attorneys and prosecutors barter over pretrial motions and potential jurors in the first criminal trial of a former president in American...

17.04.2024 4

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Donald Trump Is an Anti-Abortion Extremist

On Monday, Donald Trump released a short, pre-taped video that ostensibly revealed, after months of speculation, his position on abortion. “My view...

11.04.2024 40

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Our Entire Society Is Becoming Addicted to Sports Gambling

As the MLB season ramps up and NBA season winds down, both leagues are making headlines with rather bizarre gambling scandals. ESPN revealed last...

03.04.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Case for Not Worrying (Too Much) About RFK Jr.

On Tuesday, as he announced Nicole Shanahan, a top donor and little-known 38-year-old Silicon Valley lawyer with no political experience, as his...

28.03.2024 30

New Republic

Alex Shephard

NBC News Has a Bigger Problem Than Ronna McDaniel

NBC News should have seen this coming. Since the network announced last week that it had hired Ronna Romney McDaniel, the recently ousted chair of the...

27.03.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Real Corruption Risk Facing Trump

Donald Trump is broke. He has spent the last month desperately searching, and failing, to find an underwriter for the $464 million bond he owes the...

20.03.2024 30

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Simple Reason Trump Is Suddenly Defending TikTok

Until last week, there was rare bipartisan agreement in Washington on the most pressing national security issue of our time: TikTok, the Chinese-owned...

13.03.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

American Institutions Are Not Ready for a Second Trump Presidency

A month ago, the consensus in legal and political circles was that the Supreme Court was on the verge of a grand bargain. The justices would...

05.03.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Trump’s 2024 Campaign Looks a Lot Like Hillary Clinton’s in 2016

In the wake of Tuesday’s Michigan primary, much of the media attention has understandably focused on the warning it represents to President...

29.02.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

There’s Only One Viable Alternative to Biden

Democrats are in a panic about Joe Biden. His approval rating hovers at a dismal 40 percent. His age, 81, is becoming impossible to ignore, thanks to...

23.02.2024 4

New Republic

Alex Shephard

No, Trump Isn’t Pivoting to the Center on Abortion

Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson offered a chilling thought: Donald Trump, she said, “is...

21.02.2024 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Merrick Garland Is Too Weak to Be Attorney General

When Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur as special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s investigation into Joe Biden’s...

17.02.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Trump Pretends He’s Still President. Biden Should Treat Him That Way.

Donald Trump pretends he’s still the president. You will not find the word “former” in any of his official statements or social media accounts;...

09.02.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The GOP’s Populist Rebrand Is a Sham

A year ago, a freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, displacing hundreds of residents and poisoning the air and...

07.02.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Hubris Is Not Killing the Media. Tech Giants Are.

One version of the abrupt, spectacular downfall of The Messenger, the news site that shuttered abruptly on Wednesday after its founders blew $50...

02.02.2024 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Trump Is Doing Biden a Massive Favor on the Border

Joe Biden wants to shut down the border. On Friday, as the Senate continued negotiations over legislation to provide aid to Ukraine in exchange for...

30.01.2024 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Nikki Haley Might Actually Be Helping Trump—and Hurting Biden

Donald Trump is desperate for the 2024 Republican contest to be over. Instead of celebrating his decisive win in New Hampshire earlier this week, the...

26.01.2024 8

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Trump Routs the Republican Establishment Once Again

Eight years ago, when Donald Trump romped to victory in New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary, his critics within the party could be...

24.01.2024 4

New Republic

Alex Shephard

House Republicans Only Have One Way out of Their Government Funding Debacle

Mike Johnson should have seen this coming. In October, the then-backbencher became speaker of the House after far-right radicals ousted Kevin McCarthy...

15.01.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Biden’s Pro-Democracy Message Needs More

Joe Biden wants the 2024 presidential election to be a referendum on the future of American democracy. It’s not hard to see why. There is an...

08.01.2024 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Why Are Republicans So Bad at Podcasting?

For decades, the dullest rite of passage in American politics has been the campaign book. In the months before any presidential election, the...

02.01.2024 6

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Elon Musk Is The New Republic’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year

In one sense, Elon Musk has gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his talk about free speech, his primary motivation for sinking $44 billion into...

27.12.2023 9

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Does Tucker Carlson Matter Anymore?

Not so long ago, the idea of a bespoke Tucker Carlson-run news network would be a terrifying proposition to many. During the period marked by Donald...

13.12.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Does Anyone Know Where Joe Biden’s Second-Term Agenda Is?

Presidential reelection campaigns are rarely dynamic or exciting. The theme is carrying on rather than change: The emphasis is on continuing work that...

29.11.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

How the Club for Growth Fell Out With Trump

In the late spring, the Club for Growth, the conservative organization that has spent more than two decades excommunicating any Republican it deems...

28.11.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

George Santos Is a Buffoon. The Bigger Story of Corruption in Congress Is Less Funny.

George Santos is emblematic of Congress’s reality television era—where fame for its own sake, rather than legislative accomplishments, earns you...

18.11.2023 5

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Democrats May Come to Regret Elevating Mike Johnson

Even by its own dismal recent standards, this has been a chaotic week in Congress. On Tuesday, the chamber nearly saw an outbreak of physical violence...

16.11.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Donald Trump Is an Authoritarian. He’s Also a Normal Republican.

Donald Trump is talking like a Nazi again. Over the weekend, in both a speech and a subsequent social media post, he referred to his enemies as...

14.11.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Democrats Had a Great Day on Tuesday. Joe Biden Is Still in Serious Trouble.

As voters went to the polls on Tuesday, Democrats were in a panic. A New York Times/Siena poll released on Sunday showed that a year out from the...

08.11.2023 4

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Everyone Is Talking About the Wrong Biden Poll

Even the most dismal political poll usually has some silver lining for the trailing candidate: a demographic in which the flailing politician is...

08.11.2023 7

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Mike Johnson Has Already Run Out of Ideas

Mike Johnson became speaker of the House last week practically by default. A relatively unknown backbencher, the Louisiana Republican snatched the...

02.11.2023 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Establishment Republicans Are Reviving the Myth of Mitt Romney’s Martyrdom

On Thursday, after weeks spent in clownish limbo, House Republicans finally banded together and unanimously elected a speaker. Mike Johnson, a...

26.10.2023 4

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The GOP’s Fetish for Political Violence Is Reaching Dangerous New Heights

As Jim Jordan and his allies attempted to whip speaker votes last week, they kept running into a familiar refrain from their skeptics: Their brass...

24.10.2023 40

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Real Reason House Republicans Can’t Elect a Speaker

The House speaker’s race has entered its Groundhog Day era. Every day, Republicans meet to try to elect a new speaker and every day they fail in new...

20.10.2023 6

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Inexcusable Omission in Biden’s Big Israel Speech

Much of the coverage of Joe Biden’s speech in Israel on Wednesday has understandably focused on a warning. “Justice must be done,” Biden said,...

19.10.2023 40

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The House of Representatives Is About to Get Even Crazier

Not so long ago, Ohio Republican Representative Jim Jordan’s candidacy for speaker of the House looked dead in the water. Jordan, a founder of the...

17.10.2023 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Robert Menendez Is Screwed

Senator Robert Menendez, who was already facing a slew of bribery charges, was hit with a raft of new accusations on Thursday, with federal...

13.10.2023 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Week Twitter Went Evil

Early Tuesday morning, as Israeli rockets struck Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s devastating attacks over the previous weekend, X owner Elon Musk...

11.10.2023 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Crucial Lesson the Political Media Missed on Trump

Despite having several years to learn about their quarry, most of the media never really figured out how to cover Donald Trump. Some journalists got...

10.10.2023 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

House Republicans Finally Did Something Smart

The televised debate to be the next speaker of the House of Representatives is off—for now. On Friday, only hours after speaker candidates Steve...

07.10.2023 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

With Jon Fosse’s Win, the Nobel Prize in Literature Is So Back

After enormous dramas, intense scandals, a notable awardless year, a subsequent year in which one of the winner’s politics were very ... fraught,...

05.10.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

The Republicans Booted Their Leader, so of Course It’s Democrats’ Fault

To hear Republicans tell it, Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House on Tuesday was all the fault of their Democratic colleagues. “I think...

05.10.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Kevin McCarthy Got What He Deserved

If there’s one thing to say about Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House by a 216–210 vote , it’s this: This week’s chaos was...

04.10.2023 50

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Rupert Murdoch Made the World Worse

The worst thing that you can say about Rupert Murdoch, who resigned from the board of the Fox and News Corporations on Tuesday, is that no one has had...

21.09.2023 2

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Kevin McCarthy Has (Once Again) Lost Control

The best way of understanding House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to back a baseless, ridiculous impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden is...

18.09.2023 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Joe Biden’s Impeachment Opportunity

Democrats are right to laugh off House Republicans’ futile effort to impeach President Joe Biden, as Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman did on...

14.09.2023 3

New Republic

Alex Shephard

Biden’s Bad Poll Numbers Won’t Turn Themselves Around

There is little good news for Joe Biden in a recent poll in The Wall Street Journal that has the president neck and neck with Donald Trump in a...

07.09.2023 10

New Republic

Alex Shephard

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