President Trump boldly announced last week that he would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to talk disarmament, working to fulfill his recent State of the Union promise to prevent Pyongyang from obtaining nuclear missiles that could hit the U.S. homeland. In making that pledge, Trump declared, “I will not repeat the mistakes of past administrations.”
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The former defense minister has tapped into a wellspring of resentment of the ultra-Orthodox, attracting a new base of voters.
The announcement on Thursday night that President Trump planned to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, likely in May, was weird. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seemed blindsided by the move, it breaks with U.S. precedent (no sitting commander in chief has ever met with a North Korean leader), and it was announced at the White House in part by South Korean officials, rather than senior U.S. figures, like Tillerson or national security adviser H.R. McMaster or Trump.
Late last year, graduate students watched as legislators in the House debated giving them a hefty new tax bill: A version of the GOP tax plan proposed to treat tuition waivers as taxable income. Although that plan was later dropped, Congress is once again considering legislation that could affect graduate students’ bottom lines. And the federal government is considering ending some of its student loan forgiveness programs, which could raise the economic barrier to entering certain public service professions and leave social workers, teachers and other people in public-service fields that require graduate degrees paying thousands of dollars more for their education.
Every president’s election-year nightmare — a recession — is suddenly looming over the 2020 race. In a survey released earlier this week by the National Association of Business Economics, 38 percent of economists predicted that the country will slip into an economic downturn next year, and another recent poll of economists put the chances of a recession in the next 12 months at 1 in 3. Those predictions are getting a lot of attention, and it’s not hard to see why — an economic slowdown in the middle of the presidential election cycle could reshape the race, potentially changing the calculus of Democratic primary voters and undermining President Trump, who has made the strong economy a central selling point of his presidency.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter made an improbable journey from Georgia peanut grower to Democratic president in part by playing on his humble roots and receiving support from America’s farmers. Yet this bedrock voting constituency abandoned a fellow farmer to back Ronald Reagan four years later, after Carter punished Moscow for invading Afghanistan by cutting off grain sales to the Soviet Union. U.S. farmers were already struggling with collapsing crop prices, and the embargo may have been the final straw. Farmers threw their support behind Reagan, who had promised to lift the hated restrictions.
Happy Equal Pay Day! (Or, as I like to call it, Women’s New Year.) Today is the day that marks roughly how far into 2018 women had to work to earn a salary equal to what men got the year before.1 We’d throw a parade and street fair, but we were too busy working to organize one.
Why couldn’t we all just get along?
The tweet came before 6 a.m., as President Trump’s tweets often do. It was early March, and the Trump administration had just announced steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. That did not make China or America’s European allies happy. Last week, after the U.S. imposed tariffs on $60 billion worth of Chinese goods, it was reported that China would respond with their own tariffs on $3 billion of U.S. goods.
