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Category: History/Archeology

Presidential reform necessitates diminishing presidential power

Presidential reform necessitates diminishing presidential power

Jack Goldsmith writes: Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness. Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on…

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Every American child is born pre-polluted with synthetic chemicals

Every American child is born pre-polluted with synthetic chemicals

Mariah Blake writes: During the crucial early weeks of pregnancy, when fetal cells knit themselves into a brain and organs and fingers and lips, a steady flow of man-made chemicals pulses through the umbilical cord. Scientists once believed that the placenta filtered out most of these pollutants, but now they know that is not the case. Along with nutrients and oxygen, numerous synthetic substances travel to the womb, permeating the fetus’s blood and tissues. This is why, from their very…

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Tree-ring records suggest that drought played a role in Roman Britain’s decline

Tree-ring records suggest that drought played a role in Roman Britain’s decline

Molly Glick writes: Roman Britain collapsed into chaos in the spring of 367 A.D.—the rival Picts attacked by land and sea, while the Scotti barged in from the west and Saxons from the south. Anarchy ensued in an event that’s now known as the Barbarian Conspiracy: The invaders captured and murdered senior commanders, and some Roman soldiers may have even joined in. It’s considered a pivotal event in the abandonment of Roman Britain. Historians have surmised some of the potential…

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Dow headed for worst April since 1932 as investors send ‘no confidence’ signal

Dow headed for worst April since 1932 as investors send ‘no confidence’ signal

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Trump rout is taking on historic dimensions. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed almost 1,000 points on Monday and is headed for its worst April performance since 1932, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The S&P 500’s performance since Inauguration Day is now the worst for any president up to this point in data going back to 1928, according to Bespoke Investment Group. Worries about trade restrictions and the prospect of President Trump firing…

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Before Trump’s tariffs there were Hitler’s tariffs

Before Trump’s tariffs there were Hitler’s tariffs

Timothy W. Ryback writes: The Hitler tariffs, announced on Friday, February 10, 1933, stunned observers. “The dimension of the tariff increases have in fact exceeded all expectations,” the Vossische Zeitung wrote disapprovingly, proclaiming the moment a “fork in the road” for the German economy. It appeared that Europe’s largest and most industrialized nation would suddenly be returning “to the furrow and the plow.” The New York Times saw this for what it was: “a trade war” against its European neighbors….

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Wajahat Ali and Norman Ornstein: The contempt of a fascist regime

Wajahat Ali and Norman Ornstein: The contempt of a fascist regime

  Norman Ornstein: “Every student of history — of the history of the growth of tyranny — said over and over again: you need immediate resistance. And the strongest resistance from every entity in the society — from the business community, from the education community, the intellectual community, the scientific community, the press community, the elected officials — have to resist. And if you don’t do it right from the start, they will gobble up more territory until it’s too…

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Why dictatorships fail

Why dictatorships fail

Anne Applebaum writes: He blinked. But we don’t really know why. Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again. The Republicans…

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Globalization is collapsing. Brace yourselves

Globalization is collapsing. Brace yourselves

Tara Zahra writes: Before World War I, globalization was at a high point. Advances in technology, including the steamship and the telegraph, allowed people, goods and news to cross borders with extraordinary speed. Migration boomed. The economist John Maynard Keynes, conjuring an Edwardian version of Amazon, recalled how “the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect…

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Smithsonian braces for Trump rewrite of American history: ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’

Smithsonian braces for Trump rewrite of American history: ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’

The Guardian reports: In a brightly lit gallery, they see the 66m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. In a darkened room, they study the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. In a vast aviation hanger, they behold a space shuttle. And in a discreet corner, they file solemnly past the casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the US south. Visitors have come in their…

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Trade war explodes across world as it did in the 1930s

Trade war explodes across world as it did in the 1930s

The Wall Street Journal reports: Barriers to open trade are rising across the world at a pace unseen in decades, a cascade of protectionism that harks back to the isolationist fervor that swept the globe in the 1930s and worsened the Great Depression. It isn’t just President Trump’s extensive new tariffs, which have set off a barrage of retaliatory measures across Europe, China and Canada targeting hundreds of U.S. goods. Even before Trump retook the White House, many countries were…

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The masquerade of ‘America First’

The masquerade of ‘America First’

Danny Postel writes: The term “America First” is just as confusing and misleading as [Walter] Lippmann [in 1952] argued “isolationism” had become. Its advocates would have us believe that they are merely pursuing a realist foreign policy, one of neutrality and restraint, while in actuality they have dogs in various fights, both between warring countries and inside them. In one breath, they profess indifference about “what’s going on” in faraway lands, and in the next breath, they let slip their…

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Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the U.S. Constitution in 1789 – and his address to Congress showed it

Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the U.S. Constitution in 1789 – and his address to Congress showed it

President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images By Maurizio Valsania, Università di Torino If there are any limits to a president’s power, it wasn’t evident from Donald Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025. In that speech, the first before lawmakers of Trump’s second term, the president declared vast accomplishments during the brief six weeks of his presidency. He claimed to have…

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Trump just handed Putin the knife for carving up the world

Trump just handed Putin the knife for carving up the world

Masha Gessen writes: Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought what…

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Former U.S. ambassador to the EU: This administration ‘wants to destroy the European Union’

Former U.S. ambassador to the EU: This administration ‘wants to destroy the European Union’

  Anthony Gardner, former U.S. ambassador to the EU, tells Channel 4 News: “It’s time for European leaders including [British prime minister] Starmer to realize that this administration actually wants to destroy the European Union. And that sounds pretty — some people will think that’s pretty exaggerated, but it’s not. I think that’s actually what’s going on and I think the UK has a fundamental interest in ensuring that the EU remains strong.” Consider the multiple lines of attack and…

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‘After this, you’d really have to be a fool to trust the word of the United States’

‘After this, you’d really have to be a fool to trust the word of the United States’

  Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen bemoan the shameful meltdown in the Oval Office between VP Vance, President Trump and President Zelensky. They discuss Vance’s ambush and whether he executed it alone or in concert with Trump and note that those who are blaming Zelensky for rising to the bait are objectively pro-Putin. They discuss Vance’s dark political views and they consider what Europeans can and should do. They also discuss Trump’s delegation of responsibility to others and his “Trump…

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Trump’s Washington is starting to feel like Putin’s Moscow

Trump’s Washington is starting to feel like Putin’s Moscow

Peter Baker writes: She asked too many questions that the president didn’t like. She reported too much about criticism of his administration. And so, before long, Yelena Tregubova was pushed out of the Kremlin press pool that covered President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In the scheme of things, it was a small moment, all but forgotten nearly 25 years later. But it was also a telling one. Mr. Putin did not care for challenges. The rest of the press pool got…

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