The Deep State Did Not Begin with Trump
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Fears over the “deep state” have been chalked up to paranoia. And indeed the idea of a hidden counter-government has attracted the ranks of the paranoid. Conspiracies of a tentacled clique of career bureaucrats, wire diagrams of sinister assets and agents have piled up in the Trump era. Still, to write…
The Nixon Act
PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY: The often-rumpled United Press International (UPI) stringer George Reedy covered Richard Nixon as a young congressman. Reedy would become a loyal and often self-effacing press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson and would go on to serve as journalism dean at Marquette University. But decades after covering the Nixon congressional beat, he could…
‘Deep state’ versus a president? It didn’t begin with Trump.
An article about the tradition of the “deep state” I was interviewed for–Christian Science Monitor.
How Paranoia about the ‘Deep State’ Brought down a President
WASHINGTON POST: With the Mueller report deposited (if not yet released), the right has set its sights on rooting out the “deep state” agents behind the alleged conspiracy to take down President Trump. They look for collusion behind the investigation of collusion. They dig for an illicit report buried even deeper than the report we cannot yet see…
The Irrational Rationality of Conservative Conspiracism
WASHINGTON POST: It is tempting to think of these conspiracies as a rejection of reason, part of the faith- or instinct-based anti-intellectualism of Trump and the right more broadly. And yet such a characterization misses the very nature of political conspiracy. For conspiracism does not reject rational thought, but actually metastasizes reason itself. Conspiracies are based on vast trails of evidence…
Speaking President
WASHINGTON POST: Republican leaders’ focus on Trump’s rhetoric is a striking deviation from how we are used to thinking of the power of the bully pulpit. The key–whether taboo or embraced–has been an unflagging view, a through-line in American history that maintains just how powerful the act of presidential speech is…[FULL ARTICLE]
The Putin Paradox
VOX: It is perhaps a distinctly American faith that authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin rule purely by force, corruption, or trickery…How unctuous to agree with the Russian state media’s contention that Putin is ‘wildly popular’…” [FULL ARTICLE]
The Case for Trump’s Nobel
WASHINGTON POST: Despite the popular association of the Nobel with great thinkers, diplomats and statesmen, the prize has also routinely rewarded the undeserving, the frauds and the criminals. By its very nature, the dogged determination to reward “great men” of their time has led to a list of recipients that is a mixture of the…
Little Little Lies
A new piece I wrote for The Washington Post
