Opinion

By multiple measures, workers are faring poorly under Donald Trump compared to his predecessor. Yet Trump keeps telling workers that because of him they are doing better. Let’s examine the facts.

America is a deeply divided nation. That fact may be the only thing that Americans of all racial, ethnic, and political groups can agree about. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted in late 2017 indicated that 70 percent of the American people think the country is “as divided as during the Vietnam War.”

The last time a deadly virus spread quickly across continents, Republicans in Congress ramped up xenophobic rhetoric to fear-monger ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. Echoing Donald Trump, who at the time hosted a weekly "Fox & Friends," Republicans called for a travel ban and spread misinformation. "[President] Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!" Trump tweeted in October of 2014. Public polls right before the midterm elections showed that nearly 80% of Republicans thought the U.S. government should quarantine people who had recently been in a West African country with a major Ebola outbreak and nearly 50% worried they would be exposed to the Ebola virus. It was a catastrophic election for Democrats, with Republicans winning nine Senate seats and 13 House seats.

If you’re pondering the question of who won last night’s final Democratic primary debate, one possible answer, depending on your perspective, is secular Americans. Religion, after all, hardly came up in the raucous affair hosted jointly by CBS News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute in Charleston, SC.

On Monday morning, feeding my unhealthy habit, I pressed the Twitter application on my iPad and was immediately confused. The year, as far as I knew, was 2020, yet there was a vicious debate scrolling in my feed over the civil war that engulfed Nicaragua when I was a small child. Red-hot arguments about the Sandinistas versus the Contras were being rolled out, as if that conflict was being freshly fought, instead of part of the era when MTV actually played music videos.

Nobody saw this coming. Turns out it may not be Bernie, Mike, Joe, Liz, Pete—or even Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff—who bring down Donald Trump.

There has been a lot of discussion over the past few days about Bernie Sanders' comment on "60 Minutes" that the authoritarian Cuban leader Fidel Castro had boosted literacy among his people. Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist so I suppose it's not surprising that this would attract some attention, but his comment really wasn't anything a standard-issue liberal wouldn't have made. In fact, the most revered Democrat in America, Barack Obama, said pretty much exactly the same thing when he moved to normalize relations with Cuba in his final years in office.

President Trump’s ongoing purge of the intelligence community, along with Bernie Sanders’ surge in the Democratic presidential race, has triggered an unprecedented intervention of U.S. intelligence agencies in the U.S. presidential election on factually dubious grounds.

Michael Bloomberg has been pummeled over the treatment of women at his media and data company. Yet that is not the only blemish on the employment record of Bloomberg L.P. The company also has a serious problem with wage theft.

When he was a private citizen in 2014, Donald Trump railed against President Barack Obama about the unfolding Ebola crisis, even though the outbreak never had a major impact on the United States mainland. But with a keen instinct for political winds, Trump rightly saw that the Ebola news could be effectively weaponized against the president. For all his many failings, then, one might have hoped that President Trump would be highly attentive to the possibility that a significant pandemic — in an election year — could hurt his own political standing, and he would have a strong incentive to implement a strong response.

Well, that's was a complete disaster.

Michael Bloomberg has been pummeled over the treatment of women at his media and data company. Yet that is not the only blemish on the employment record of Bloomberg L.P. The company also has a serious problem with wage theft.