Politics Features

GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan —It was around 5:35 p.m. on Saturday when the leaders of the Michigan Republican Party, whose members had spent the day sermonizing about election integrity, realized their nominating convention might be lacking that virtue. This issue revealed itself at an ironic juncture: A runoff to determine who …

Award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, is an explosive deep dive into the forgotten history of American military imperialism in the early twentieth century. At its center is one of the United States’s most …

It started off as a joke. In the summer of 2019, a comedian named Matty Roberts created a Facebook event called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” The plan, if you could call it that, was as audacious as it was moronic: If enough people rushed the …

Gina McCarthy logged on to Zoom one day in early February and saw a crowd of Cabinet secretaries and other agency chiefs staring back at her, a Brady Bunch of senior bureaucrats. It was the first meeting of the Biden administration’s National Climate Task Force, a team of nearly two …

If there’s ever a Hall of Fame for climate scientists, Michael Mann will be among thefirst to be inducted. More than 20 years ago, Mann — now a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, as well the director of the university’s Earth Systems Science Center — co-authored a …

If you asked Donald Trump whether the president of the United States had the general power to overrule governors and mayors, I’m sure he would say yes. Putting it in language suitable to his background, I’m sure he believes that the org chart for the business he currently runs — …

This story appears in the May 2020 issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands May 5th. While Americans died of the modern plague, President Trump sang happy birthday to a fading Fox News personality. On March 7th, a who’s who of the Republican establishment gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish retreat in …

It was the rarest of sightings: Last week, a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives approved a resolution to restrict the president’s ability to go to war with Iran. The vote happened one week after the Trump administration assassinated via drone strike Iran’s top general. Government officials have offered …

[Originally published in RS 150, December 20th, 1973] Richard Goodwin is perhaps best known as the brash special assistant to Senator, and then President, Kennedy. He was one of JFK’s two main speechwriters and also became the President’s specialist in Latin American Affairs (even once holding a midnight-to-dawn secret meeting …

WASHINGTON — Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, increasingly looks like the last man standing at the powerful gun lobbying group. LaPierre orchestrated the departures of Oliver North, the former NRA president who raised the alarm about questionable accounting under LaPierre’s watch, and Chris Cox, the former …