Author: Heather Cox Richardson

At a Trump rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, a shooter on the roof of a building about 400 feet from the stage apparently shot eight bullets at the former president and into the crowd. Trump appeared to flinch and reach for his right ear as Secret Service agents crouched over the former president. When the agents got word the shooter was “down,” they lifted Trump to move him out. He asked to get his shoes and then to put them on. With that accomplished, Trump stood up with blood on his face, exposed to the crowd, and...

“The Washington Post” published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who...

The Republican National Convention is a moment to reintroduce Trump and MAGA Republicans to voters who have not seen them up close since at least 2021. So far, the convention has proved that the Republican Party is now the MAGA Party. It has not been a smooth unveiling. Just after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that delegates were formally nominating Trump as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate on July 15, the teleprompter failed. Unable to continue without it, Johnson quickly left the stage. This was awkward, since two weeks ago, Johnson said on the Fox News Channel of...

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” Also known as the “Lee Resolution,” after Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee, who had proposed it, the resolution was the final break between the king and the thirteen colonies on the North American continent that would later become the...