ArcaMax

WASHINGTON -- "Don't be a PANICAN," President Donald Trump cautioned on social media. Critics have questioned the universal tariffs he unleashed last week, and Americans have had to steel themselves before checking the balance of their 401(k)s.

The Trump tariffs came fast and larger than expected. The markets responded.

Now Republicans and ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Former President Joe Biden is a bitter man whose ambition outstripped his abilities while Vice President Kamala Harris was unusually loyal. Those are two of my takeaways from the 2024 campaign autopsy book "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

By comparison, the drama that ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump likes to troll Canada. He has been threatening our neighbor to the north with additional tariffs, and he thinks it's funny to dangle his dream of turning our longtime trading partner into America's 51st state.

And yet Wednesday in the Rose Garden, when Trump declared a national emergency and announced a 10...Read more

WASHINGTON -- It's not what DOGE is doing; it's how DOGE is doing it. That's been the Beltway take on the dream child of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency. Or, "the so-called Department of Government Efficiency," as The New York Times put it.

That's probably why Musk and DOGE lieutenants sat down ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Over the past 48 hours, President Donald Trump's national security team has looked like a pack of amateurs.

On Monday, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he somehow got plugged into a group text among President Donald Trump's national security top guns as they went over plans to bomb the Houthi ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- After reading in Monday's New York Times story about actor Mel Gibson's failure to have his gun rights restored, I asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at the press briefing that afternoon about the administration's take on restoring gun rights for offenders who have served their sentences.

The story interested me ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League graduate charged with fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in December, has pleaded not guilty in connection with the killing. Like all defendants, Mangione enters the courtroom with the presumption of innocence. But if a jury finds him guilty of the capital ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Kudos to President Donald Trump's administration for canceling $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University "due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."

"Since Oct. 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- When Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya challenged COVID lockdown orthodoxy in 2020, critics glued posters of his face across the campus -- which he saw as an incitement to violence -- and colleagues tried to marginalize him for spreading misinformation.

It didn't matter that he was right.

But it matters now. President ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- I don't like the way President Donald Trump abruptly fired swaths of federal workers during his first weeks back in office. But I know why he did it this way.

Trump campaigned on a promise to cut the size of government -- and this go-round, he's actually doing it.

The administration has offered buyout packages, which some 77,...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos sent a wake-up call to Big Media Wednesday when he announced on X "a change coming to our opinion pages."

"We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets," Bezos explained. "We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- A madness swept the nation during President Joe Biden's term in office: the unfettered promotion of gender transitioning, even among children and, oddly, in the wide world of sports.

President Donald Trump quickly put an end to that. On his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order, "Defending women from...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Kudos to President Donald Trump for moving to cut off the spigot of federal funds for the California High-Speed Rail project during the first month of his second term.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday that $4 billion in funding, slated for projects that are part of a promised bullet train from Merced to ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- The number of border apprehensions was down in January -- 29,116 illegal aliens were apprehended along the border, the lowest number since May 2020.

In January 2022, the number of southwest border encounters exceeded 150,000.

The White House calls it "the Trump effect."

With the whole world listening, President Donald Trump's ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Sunday night's "SNL50: The Anniversary Special" celebrated the long-running NBC show as you knew it would -- with the soothing reassurance to its ostensibly liberal viewers that they own comedy and that, in their world, the right's only place in their orbit is as the butt of their self-satisfied jokes.

Even though President ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- "My uncle started USAID in 1961, for humanitarian purposes, to put our country on the side of the poor," Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pronounced Thursday at the White House as he was sworn in as Health secretary.

"It has been captured by the military industrial complex. It has become a sinister propagator of totalitarianism" across the...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Years ago, when I visited Pelican Bay State Prison on the northern coast of California, prison staff explained the rules. They gave me a stab vest and a handy piece of information: If I were taken hostage, prison officials would not negotiate for my release. I should know that before I entered the institution, they said.

Guess ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Communications Commission pulled a "60 Minutes" on "60 Minutes."

In a complaint filed against CBS, the FCC charged that "60 Minutes" and "Face the Nation" last year engaged in "news distortion" that involves "significant and substantial news alteration made in the middle of a heated presidential campaign." The FCC ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- "We will build a massive missile defense shield to protect us," Donald Trump told a crowd at an Arizona campaign rally in October. "And it's going to be made in the USA, a lot of it right here."

It was a timely proposal given that in 2023, Americans spent more than a week watching a Chinese spy balloon travel from Asia to Alaska...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Caroline Kennedy, the surviving child of the late President John F. Kennedy, is leading the charge against her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump's pick to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services.

In a letter released Tuesday, she wrote that her cousin Bobby's "views on vaccines are dangerous and ...Read more