In the wake of Trump’s surprise win, some journalists, scholars, and political strategists argued that economic anxiety drove these Americans to Trump. But new analysis of post-election survey data conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found something different: Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump.

Page's response to the Senate Intelligence Committee's request for information. Remember, this is the guy that Trump once included in his "top-of-the-line" list of foreign policy advisors.

Matthew Yglesias: In the months since Election Day, it has become increasingly apparent that a reasonably large number of Republican Party legislators either didn’t understand that the campaign against Obamacare was based on lies or else had never really considered the implications of that reality.

Either way, the problem with passing a law that is going to make people’s health coverage worse while promising that it will get better is pretty obvious: People will notice when they lose insurance or when their deductible skyrockets.

Though I'm not ultimately persuaded, this the most insightful and compelling case for center-left politics that I have read.

A surprisingly cogent and sympathetic analysis of anti-Trump protests by a Tea Party organizer. Worth the read.

I understand the vehemence. Trump is a demagogue who vilifies and scapegoats refugees, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, racial minorities, who strikes me as a danger to our national security. By all means stand up to him, and point out his lies and incompetence. But let’s be careful about blanket judgments.

My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they’re profoundly wrong, but please don’t dismiss them as hateful bigots.

A penetrating and thought-provoking piece by a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist about the danger Trump poses to journalists, conservatives, and the nation.

From what I can see, H.R. McMaster may be Trump's best appointment by far. If you've been following the news, you know about his acclaimed Ph.D. dissertation: "Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam." Here are some of takeaways from the dissertation:

The president was lying, and he expected the Chiefs to lie as well or, at least, to withhold the whole truth. Although the president should not have placed the Chiefs in that position, the flag officers should not have tolerated it when they had.

One of the overlooked takeaways from Thomas Piketty's groundbreaking Capital in the 21st Century was that the reduction of wealth inequality in the 20th century came about largely because of the World Wars and the Great Depression. This Atlantic article takes that bleak conclusion to the next level, arguing that only catastrophic violence, disease, or institutional collapse can produce substantial gains in income equality.

A prescient passage from a forgotten book has been making the rounds since Donald Trump’s election. It’s plucked from a 1998 book titled Achieving our Country. The author is Richard Rorty, a liberal philosopher who died in 2007. The book consists of a series of lectures Rorty gave in 1997 about the history of leftist thought in 20th-century America.

To read the viral passage is to recognize immediately why it has caught fire:

On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich. The 34-year-old researcher had come to give a lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) about the dangers of Big Data and the digital revolution. Kosinski gives regular lectures on this topic all over the world. He is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data-driven sub-branch of psychology. When he turned on the TV that morning, he saw that the bombshell had exploded: contrary to forecasts by all leading statisticians, Donald J.

Last, week, under the cover of a media bliss-out except among Koch funded right-wing channels, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would effectively repeal future standard setting under every important environmental, public health, consumer protection, labor standards, occupational safety and civil rights law on the books.

An interesting thought piece on the ideological left - pragmatic center debate (aka Jonathan Chait and the Failure of "Grown Up" Liberalism)

Permit me to sit out the Great Media Apology Tour of 2016. Since election night, we have been fed a steady stream of mea culpas for the press’s failure to see it all coming, and especially for negligently ignoring the fear, anxiety and despair in the Rust Belt, the oil patch and rural America. Benighted Trump voters were singing the Red America Blues while we elites were tuned to Live from the Met or some such.

What a crock.

Over a cheeseburger, fried calamari and an “Ivanka Salad” at the Trump Grill in the basement of Trump Tower last week, several aides flipped open a laptop and loaded the popular website 270towin.com, which allows users to create their own winning electoral maps.

For 10 minutes, they clicked through the country, putting Democratic-leaning states won by Mr. Obama four years ago, like New Mexico and Colorado, into Mr. Trump’s column.

Their analysis seemed more atmospheric than scientific.