Joel Mathis

My latest at The Week: Biden is thinking big. If the tone of the speech was quiet and personal, the ideas were big and transformative: proposals to spend billions upon billions of dollars to create jobs, support young families, and expand affordable access to both health care and education. In the first 100 days of his term, Biden and Democrats in Congress have already done much to expand the breadth and scope of the federal government, but so much of that has been done on a one-off basis, necessitated and made possible by the COVID-19 pandemic and floundering economy. After a generation of watching Democratic presidents genuflect toward the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Biden's willingness to put his credibility on the line for such proposals is still fairly astonishing . Read the whole thing, as they say.

I found myself moved by Damon Linker's column this morning about these awful times: "Maybe we can love the world, mourn our losses, and recognize the awfulness of so much of what swirls around us while also striving to place it in a perspective that makes some space for wry smiles. In dark times, a little irony can go a long way — transforming a tragedy not so much into a comedy as into a chapter with a mixture of darkness and light and an indeterminate end that leaves a little room for hope."

My colleague David Faris: It struck me anew how unfathomable it is, or should be, that the person entrusted with the presidency, whose actions and inactions can have terrible and unforeseen consequences for millions of people, purposefully concealed his own knowledge about the coming of one of the worst crises to afflict humanity in close to a century. The selfishness and the bad faith are staggering. While Trump couldn't have stopped COVID-19 from getting here, his lies and inexcusable inaction sent a lot of people to their graves and caused millions of others to this day not to take this virus seriously.

My latest: The president claims to put "America first." But in the most important sense — defending the integrity of this country's governance and elections from foreign interference — the man is a good old-fashioned globalist. There is no such thing as a " sh--hole country " if Trump himself is the beneficiary; the president will do business with anybody willing to help him profit, personally or electorally.

Why can't liberals take yes for an answer? "We cannot loudly and publicly say, 'Where in the hell are the Republicans who are willing to call out Trump?' then boo them when they do so," writer/activist Shaun King said Tuesday on Twitter . "When people you don't like do the right thing, the important thing, even if they've been enemies before, that's progress."  We don't have to forget that John McCain is overly hawkish, or that Bob Corker wanted to be Trump's secretary of state, or that George W. Bush was a historically awful president. But right now, the priority for lefties should be to contain and eventually end Donald Trump's presidency. They shouldn't be so eager to turn away allies. Liberals must learn to take "yes" for an answer. Read it all! 

The culture wars are all Trump has left : Trump can't pass a health-care bill (at least so far). Getting a tax cut looks like it might be tricky. The wall he promised looks no closer to reality than it did six months ago. There are real questions these days about whether Republicans are capable of governance.  In that climate, all Trump and the Republicans will have left are identity politics and the culture wars. It's why Trump — after promising to be a president who would protect LGBTQ rights — came out against them. It's why he spent a Tuesday night speech describing the crimes of illegal immigrants in torture-porn detail .  And it's the reason conservatives are cheering the prospect of Kid Rock making a Senate run against Stabenow; policy, these days, matters to them much less than all the "real America" virtue signalling that the entertainer provides. For Trump Republicans, that posturing is all that seems to really matter.