I have spent several years now thinking about the idea of authenticity, because I believe it is the quality that American society most craves, but also one that is rare and incredibly hard to define. We clearly see this in our presidential race, in which Donald Trump’s supporters view him as a straight shooter who...
Election polling shows that a large percentage ofAmericans are concerned about threatstotheir democracy. Not surprisingly,theperceived source of that threat is different for those ontheLeft than ontheRight. Partisanship aside,Americans would do welltoheadtherealrisks ahead fortheAmericanrepublic. TheAmericanhistorian Will Durant once correctly described democracies as “hectic interludes” inthehistory of governments. Understanding that, long before Durant, Benjamin Franklin respondedtothequestion of...
Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.It’s running in short supply in the Biden White House and the Harris presidential campaign by extension. After a head-spinning July, the Harris campaign has 93 days to stand up a national political operation. The trust deficit threatens to subsume Vice President Harris’ admittedly strong start, even...
In 1958,theNational Election Study began surveying Americans’trustingovernment, revealing that approximately 75% believedthefederalgovernmentwould dotheright thing almost always or most ofthetime. However, according to Pew Research in 2023, thistrusthas plummeted to a seven-decade low of merely 16%. Alarmingly, only 2% of Americans now believe thatthegovernmentconsistently acts correctly, and confidence in elected officials continues to erode.Theprimary reason for...
The release of Western hostages from Russian captivity is a near-term success for the Biden administration — but it is purchased at great cost. By trading Russian spies and criminals for wrongfully imprisoned Americans and dissidents, the deal risks encouraging Russia and other authoritarian regimes to take more hostages. The scale of the prisoner swap...
When it comes to high level competitive sports, it makes total sense that there should be no competitive advantage. That’s why doping is universally banned, and why there are frequent doping tests. It is also why so much consternation and international friction exists between the U.S. and China over suspected doping cases that China and...
According to the conventional wisdom of the chattering class, Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance for vice president has been an abject disaster that has the former president doubting his instincts. But the story on the campaign trail looks a little different, and the GOP may be forging a new funding base. In conversations with...
For most of the past three years, Vice President Kamala Harris has been even more unpopular than her historically unpopular boss, President Biden, due largely to her responsibility as a key player in the administration’s disastrous open border policies. In light of Harris’ failures and unpopularity, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Biden had decided...
As the former governor of the great State of Texas and then as secretary ofenergy, I know firsthand theenergychallenges we face as a country – fromenergygeneration and diversification to distribution capabilities, to grid resilience and security. Though we have made great strides as a state and a nation in many of these areas, much work...
Just a week after President Biden abandoned his re-election campaign – and his vice president quickly sewed up the support of the Democratic delegates – a series of polls are beginning to measure the impact of the attempted assassination of former President Trump, the Republican convention – and the impact of the substitution of Kamala...
