Over the past couple of weeks, Politico has drummed up buzz for its upcoming Playbook reboot by recruiting a who’s who of high-profile guest authors to helm the early-morning tip sheet, like Chris Hayes, James Bennet, Yamiche Alcindor, Kara Swisher, and Ken Burns. The guest columns were generating lots of attention. Open rates were up. The web versions were getting good traffic. There was a positive response overall. Everything was going swimmingly—that is until Thursday, when Politico gave the keys to right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro’s Playbook installment was about as popular with many Politico readers as Liz Cheney’s impeachment vote

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. For Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, as blinded by ambition as anyone has ever been in American politics, all this was supposed to catapult them to the top of the GOP heap, to make them the top contenders to lead the party post-Donald Trump. Instead, their starring roles in last week’s violent MAGA insurrection has made them pariahs, facing calls to resign and uncertain prospects moving forward.

For Cruz, this isn’t exactly an unfamiliar position. The Texas senator has long been one of the most widely loathed figures in Washington, and deservedly

In the aftermath of last week’s storming of the Capitol, during which Donald Trump supporters attempted to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, tech platforms have taken unprecedented steps to ban the kinds of far-right activists and organizers involved in the attack. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were used by the pro-Trump mob as their online staging ground, leading the networks to institute stricter measures to avoid culpability in future extremist organizing. But Trump’s most rabid followers and other far-right Americans are already evolving, as they move to other online spaces to stay connected and curb the

A couple months into the pandemic, as Donald Trump and his allies pushed for the country to loosen the restrictions that had only just begun to flatten the coronavirus curve, Chris Christie appeared on CNN to call for states to reopen: “There are going to be deaths no matter what,” he argued.

“Will people be able to swallow the notion, if these projections are right, of nearly 3,000 deaths per day?” Dana Bash asked him, referring to models that forecasted what were, in the spring, unfathomably high COVID body counts.

“They’re gonna have to,” replied Christie, who'd later end up himself in

There’s a plotline in the highly problematic movie The Help in which Bryce Dallas Howard’s character refuses to let her maid use the toilet in her house, instead forcing her to go outside when nature calls. One night during a rainstorm, when the maid played by Octavia Spencer desperately needs the facilities, she breaks the rule and is promptly fired. Later she gets back at her horrible boss by serving the employer a pie containing actual shit, which the evil woman unwittingly devours. All of which is to say, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner may have some feces-filled desserts coming

If there’s one thing you can always count on with Donald Trump, it’s that he’ll bilk the people who do work for him out of the money they’re owed. If there’s one thing you can count on with Rudy Giuliani, it’s that his lawyering more or less amounts to performing absurdist legal theater and occasionally butt-dialing reporters. When they entered into their professional relationship, each man should have known what they were getting into based on the other’s long track record. But, despite soliciting his services again and again and again, Trump has apparently found himself unhappy with his end