By THE EDITORIAL BOARD The crackdown on dissent and speech in Minnesota this winter follows a pattern that is common in countries that slide from democracy to autocracy: A leader enacts a legally dubious policy. Citizens protest that policy. The government responds with intimidation and force. When people are hurt, the government blames them and lies about what happened. The New York Times editorial board published an index in October tracking 12 categories of democratic eros

President Donald Trump addresses the 74th National Prayer Breakfast, at the Washington Hilton in Washington, on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times) By MAUREEN DOWD It seems etymologically, metaphysically, geologically and ethically impossible that President Donald Trump could reach a new low. But he has. Every Friday, when I’m planning my column, I find fresh evidence that the president is unfit for his office. He taunts his foes in crude, creepy ways a

Then-presidential hopeful and “proto-Trumpian provocateur” Pat Buchanan during a news conference in Falls Church, Virginia on Oct. 2a5, 1999. (Paul Hosefros/New York Times) By JAMELLE BOUIE Donald Trump is president of a United States but it is too much to say that he is president of the United States. A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are just a little more American than others, and that this is a

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California speaks to reporters before the start of a debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in Philadelphia, Pa., Sept. 10, 2024. (Damon Winter/The New York Times) By BRET STEPHENS Gavin Newsom has a memoir coming out this month, “Young Man in a Hurry” — another heavy hint that he intends to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. To judge by some of the more fawning media profiles (Vogue describes hi

A volunteer for Taylor Rehmet, a Democratic candidate for the Texas Senate, grabs a stack of campaign postcards in Fort Worth, Texas, Jan. 14, 2026. (Desiree Ríos/The New York Times) By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN One of the biggest political lessons I learned covering the Middle East for four-plus decades is that there is only one good thing about extremists: They don’t know when to stop. As a result, they eventually go too far and drive themselves over a cliff. That lesson came to m

People walk past a domestically built missile “Khaibar buster,” and banners showing portraits of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, center, and the late armed forces commanders who were killed in an Israeli strike in June, at Baharestan Square in Tehran, Oct. 1, 2025. It’s “left to the United States to impose meaningful consequences on the Iranian regime” for massacring thousands of its own people in “one of the worst atrocities of this century,” New York Time

Google’s chips, called tensor processing units, or TPUs, in Sunnyvale, Calif., Oct. 29, 2024. (Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times) By ROSS DOUTHAT On a recent snowbound day, I took up “Conquistadores,” Fernando Cervantes’ history of the European arrival in the New World, and found myself meditating on the period in the early 1500s when the Americas had been discovered by Europeans, but nobody in the European world quite understood what that discovery meant. In that mom

Snow covering flowers left at a memorial to Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Jan. 17, 2026. (Mark Peterson/The New York Times) By CARLOS LOZADA Just days before a winter storm overwhelmed much of the United States with snow and ice, President Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and declared that America was “the hottest country anywhere in the world.” The hottest. It’s an adjective Trump likes to use, whatever the weather. Nearly 40 years ago, when