Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Long before Donald Trump was elected to the highest office in the land, many scholars shared their fear that American democracy was in jeopardy. Since the 2016 election, it has become clear that the system envisioned by the Founding Fathers is ending. Farhad Manjoo warned about this in his recent New York Times column, I’m Doomsday Prepping for the End of Democracy. Manjoo pointed to political violence on the streets, the pandemic, unemployment, racial polarization, and natural disasters, all of which are destabilizing the country, and noted that Republicans appear to have abandoned democracy in favor of a cult-like...

Trump is running far behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the polls. In early February 2020, at its best, his overall popularity rating hovered close to 50%. In the same month, according to a Gallup poll, 63% of Americans approved of the way he was handling the economy. To keep this economic success story going, Trump downplayed the coronavirus, leaving us wide open to its devastation. It hit the U.S. in earnest shortly after this poll was taken. The economy shut down, and we plummeted into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But Trump is determined to...

America needs at least two healthy political parties, and right now, with Republicans attacking the legitimacy of the Democrats, we are in danger of having none. For the past generation, Republicans have tried to delegitimize the Democrats. Calling their opponents “socialists,” Republicans have suppressed Democratic voters and gerrymandered congressional districts to shut Democrats out of the government. When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama president, Republican lawmakers vowed not to work with him, and scrapped the norms of our system to slash his power. Now, with Trump trying to steal a presidential election and Republican lawmakers looking the other way,...

Donald Trump admitted on August 13 that he opposed additional funding for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots. In an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump came out and said it: he wants to starve the United States Postal Service to destroy mail-in voting. Falsely claiming that mail-in voting favors Democrats, he said: “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots… Now, if we don’t make a deal, that...

The New York Attorney General’s Press Office announced late on August 5 that Attorney General Letitia James would make “a major national announcement” at 11:30 AM on August 6. When James appeared, she announced she was launching a lawsuit to disband the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA was chartered in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship of Americans who might be called on to fight another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting. By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular sport. In the 1930s, amid fears...