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Tag: Donald Trump

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Beverly Hillbilly Elegy
October 14, 2016
Imagine if you discovered one day that your father was a closeted polygamist, that your brother secretly sold meth, or that your sister the schoolteacher had an affair with one of her fifth graders. A similarly dark family secret confronted me recently, when I learned that my ...

Battle of the Brands
October 13, 2016
So it’s come to this: the most potentially explosive revelations about America’s Fifth Avenue Mussolini, Donald Trump, are behind an entertainment-industry paywall, one that no mere journalistic enterprise has the power or (in all likelihood) the resources to scale. Reality ...

Friend, Swipe Your Trump Card!
October 12, 2016
Of course, the fact that the glorious Presidential Black Card can be “activated” for a piddling $35 belies the intimidation factor of its “none more black” aesthetic. It’s the equivalent of spray-painting a pile of spaghetti red and telling people it’s a Ferrari. But ...

The Trump Train Is Actually a Trump Plane
October 10, 2016
The condition of our nation’s airports seems to be an obsession of The Donald’s—a somewhat unlikely fixation, as many were quick to point out, for someone who refuses to fly commercial. Trump is currently in possession of a small fleet of aircrafts: a Cessna Citation X ...

Lies of the Times
September 22, 2016
Sit up and take notice, monitors of plain speech in our elite journalistic discourse: the New York Times has at long last elected to call a lie a lie, at least as far as Donald Trump is concerned. What prompted this long-overdue linguistic breakthrough was the barking, bigoted ...

Protocols of Moron
September 20, 2016
What do you get when you combine an atomized, alienated public that possesses a deep and justifiable mistrust in institutions with a floundering press-political-entertainment complex that’s desperate to hold our nanoscopic attention spans? You get a nation of half-assed ...

Fairly Unbalanced
September 15, 2016
Never do our media savants look more blatantly biased than when they’re trying to wave off complaints about how they shape, and distort, the critical flow of political information. A case in point: New York Times public editor Liz Spayd’s absurdly complacent recent ...

The 1,000-Meter Whine
August 17, 2016
The Olympics and American presidential elections have a lot in common: both celebrate the absolute best humanity has to offer; both reward integrity and fair play; both are devoid of corruption; and both appeal to citizens’ highest ideals and are thus immune to cynicism and ...

The Ho-Hum Squad
August 09, 2016
Some time in April 2015, Jared Leto sent someone to throw a dead pig on a table during the rehearsals for Suicide Squad. Those who were present at the time recount their shock and fear beholding the scene, their worry that they might be working with someone who was genuinely ...

Treacherous Waters
July 28, 2016
All right, then—America’s own major-party-anointed oligarch has officially urged Russian cyberspies to hack State Department communications. And his underlying political rationale is enough to give M.C. Escher a throbbing migraine: Hillary Clinton is guilty of grave, if ...

The Art of the Con
June 23, 2016
Just as in the final chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the wheezing sociopath at the center of the Donald Trump campaign has revealed his true decrepit, disfigured nature at a moment when the belated appearance of the unvarnished truth likely will do zero good for any of ...