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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.

Recent Articles

What Should We Do About Syria? Don't Ask Trump.

Paul WaldmanApr 08, 2018
(Photo by Cheriss May/Sipa USA via AP Images)
(Photo by Cheriss May/Sipa USA via AP Images) President Trump leaves a join press conference with Baltic heads of state in the East Room of the White House on April 3, 2018. I wonder if, after some of his national security aides brief him about the latest developments in Syria, President Trump shakes his head and says, "Boy, nobody knew wars in the Middle East could be so complicated." That, you'll recall, is what he said about health care, when in fact everyone, except for him, knew how complicated it is. But perhaps I'm being unfair. There are reasons to think that Trump already had a sense of how complicated the Middle East can be, which is why as a candidate he expressed much more of a distaste for military adventurism there than your average Republican. Just last week, Trump declared his intention to bring all of our troops home from Syria, where they have been working to eradicate ISIS. "I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home," he said . But then came an...

Voters' Belief in Fairness Will Toss Republicans from Office

Paul WaldmanApr 01, 2018
(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images) House Speaker Paul Ryan leaves the podium after a press conference on March 14, 2018. I n a well-known experiment involving capuchin monkeys, researchers set up a scenario in which some of the moneys were treated unfairly—getting mundane cucumber slices as a reward while another monkey received a delicious grape—and found that the unfairness caused a rebellion. "Monkeys refused to participate if they witnessed [another monkey] obtain a more attractive reward for equal effort," they wrote, "an effect amplified if the partner received such a reward without any effort at all." Which is why Republicans are going to lose the 2018 midterm elections. Well, that's not the only reason. But the thing that Republicans hoped would save them from a shattering defeat this November—their tax cut bill—is not going to have anything like the effect they hoped it would have in mitigating the losses they are likely to suffer. That's because fairness is...

Students Have Transformed the American Gun Debate

Paul WaldmanMar 25, 2018
(Sipa via AP Images)
(Sipa via AP Images) Emma González speaks at the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on March 24. E very social movement in history has been greeted by "concern trolls," long before that term was invented. You're doing it wrong, activists are inevitably told. You're asking for too much too quickly, or your message should be more specific. You don't understand the issue deeply enough, or you're getting lost in the weeds. You've got the wrong spokespeople. You're being rude. Your tactics are alienating those you're trying to persuade. This is never going to work. It's possible for the criticism to be perfectly valid; some movements are indeed more skilled than others, and you can certainly do it wrong. But every movement hears these criticisms, including the new gun reform movement that is doing such extraordinary things right now, most visibly the spectacular March For Our Lives that took place on Saturday, led by a group of teenagers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in...

Mueller's Firing Is Getting Closer Every Day

Paul WaldmanMar 18, 2018
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File Special Council Robert Mueller speaks in Washington I s President Trump going to fire Robert Mueller? This question is gripping Washington more with each passing day, and the truth is that none of us know the answer, if only because the future is always uncertain. But here's what we do know: We know that Trump madly, fervently, desperately wants to. We know that he's being held back not by his own sense of propriety or restraint (ha!) but by aides who understand that, as Senator Lindsey Graham said , "if he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency." But Trump probably doesn't understand that. He continues to insist that the entire investigation is illegitimate, making clear that he believes he would be perfectly justified in ordering Mueller's firing: The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid...

What Elizabeth Warren Is In For

Paul WaldmanMar 11, 2018
Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
(Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images) Warren during a hearing in the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on January 23, 2018. F rom the moment he began running for president in 2015, it was apparent that Donald Trump was a kind of political idiot savant, even if the idiot part blinded so many people to the savant part. He seemed to know nothing about anything, yet he had an intuitive sense of what would get certain voters angry and excited. And he was nearly alone in believing there was almost nothing he couldn't get away with; his off-the-cuff assertion that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's like incredible" will stand as one of the most profound insights of the entire Trump era. Trump could also take the preferred tactic of the fourth-grade bully—mocking nicknames for those he seeks to dominate—and turn it into a potent political weapon. Liddle Marco, Lyin' Ted, Crooked Hillary—in every...

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