It has been a difficult few years for the media industry, with newspapers being raided by vulture capitalists, once-great websites being gutted by private equity firms and the President of the United States referring to journalists as “enemies of the people,” rhetoric that inevitably led to disturbed people trying to kill them. The news media is the least trusted institution in the United States (other than Congress, of course), which is a bad sign when your entire reason for being is to inform, and to be trusted by, the public. It’s a rough time all around.

But one thing that…

I understand — I strongly endorse, in fact! — not wanting to look at or think about Donald Trump anymore. The man took up every available ounce of oxygen in American life for more than a half-decade, which was of course the point of his whole self-aggrandizing bull rush of an experiment in the first place. (The world exists for Donald Trump only in how much it’s currently talking about him.) It’s quite reasonable if you have decided that you have had enough. Lord knows I get it. I’ve tried to do the same.

But. I cannot stop watching the…

Adam Kinzinger is a Republican congressman from Illinois representing roughly the Rockford area, an area that voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Kinzinger didn’t grow up in Rockford, though; he grew up in Normal, Illinois, home of Illinois State University, where he went to college before joining the Air Force and flying missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I know Normal. It’s about an hour and a half from my hometown of Mattoon, and when I was in high school, Normal played baseball in our conference. We swept a doubleheader from them my senior year. Kinzinger…

Former President Donald Trump’s lies led to a bloody riot, desecration of the Capitol building, mass violence, and the tragic deaths of seven people. Now that he has again been impeached by the House but avoided conviction in the Senate, one thing is clear: His party has learned nothing.

Or perhaps more troubling, they’ve learned to imitate him.

The shameful January 6 display at the Capitol began long before that day. It began as soon as Trump started telling what critics have called “the big lie”— the claim that the election was stolen by Democrats. Trump didn’t mean the election…

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump presents a series of unusual constitutional questions. There is little argument about the facts of the case: Donald Trump repeatedly tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and then, on January 6, 2021, egged on a crowd that would later storm the Capitol, terrorize lawmakers, damage historic property, and kill a policeman. Instead, the debate and Trump’s likely defense have pivoted on questions of law. Can a federal official be impeached after leaving office? And were Trump’s actions an impeachable offense? …

The world remains a scary, perilous place and we remain in a period of grave danger. But it is undeniable that whatever your politics, the last two weeks have been so pleasant, so quiet. It turns out not having an attention-famished monster obsessed with authoritarianism and social media in the White House does wonders for the volume dial on the national stereo. There have been whole hours where I have not thought about politics one whit. Eventually, I might even make it a full day. It’s nice.

But the quiet should not provide the illusion that everything is better, that…

On Monday afternoon, Sen. John Cornyn, a grown human being for whom nearly 6 million Texans voted to represent them as their Senator just last November, tweeted this:

Now, we can all argue about whether or not Donald Trump should be impeached, or how his impeachment trial should be run, or who should be in charge of it. There are debates to be had about that, to be had about everything.

But there are at least two sides to this specific debate: Should a sitting senator preside over an impeachment trial of a former federal official? Or should a…

There was no adoring throng of supporters wishing him well from the White House lawn. There were no final goodbye tweets. There was no friendly welcome to the Bidens, no participation in the pageantry of the peaceful democratic transition of power. A president who never called his successor to concede, who fought for months to overturn the election he lost with a toxic mix of inflammatory lies and rallies that culminated in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, has finally left the White House, and Washington, D.C.

We will not have seen the last of Donald Trump, but for…