Kevin Williamson

4 days ago | thedispatch.com | Jamie Weinstein |Kevin Williamson |Grayson Logue |James Sutton

‘Once you’ve won, there’s no second place.’ Published June 2, 2025 Megan McArdle joins Jamie Weinstein to react to the first few months of Donald Trump’s presidency and to explain why America needs to win the A.I. race. The Agenda:—Liberation Day: “It was shambolic”—Trump’s shadow Cabinet—What DOGE got right (and wrong)—Elon Musk: A “managerial mad genius?”—Paul Ryan vindicated again—How to adapt to an A.I. world—Calm before the A.I. storm

1 week ago | thedispatch.com | Kevin Williamson

Politics ‘Outsider’ is another way of saying ‘dilettante.’ Published May 30, 2025 Scroll to the comments section Audio versions are only available to subscribers of The Dispatch. Join Today! to listen to this post. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Elon Musk, the billionaire dilettante tasked by that other billionaire dilettante with reforming the federal bureaucracy, said earlier this week.

1 week ago | thedispatch.com | Kevin Williamson

There’s a story about Donald Trump—who knows if it is true?—teetering on the edge of one of his many bankruptcies and using the occasion as a teaching moment for Ivanka on the streets of New York: “See that bum over there?” he supposedly said, pointing out a vagrant sleeping on the street. “He is worth $1 billion more than me.” In Trump’s own telling, his unpaid debts added up to a sum of not $1 billion but billions.

2 weeks ago | thedispatch.com | Kevin Williamson

Your Illinois driver’s license is good in Texas. Should your Texas concealed-carry license be good in Illinois? Congressional Republicans are pushing for a bill that would establish mandatory national reciprocity of concealed-carry permits, meaning that residents of states in which it is relatively easy to get a license to carry a firearm would be able to carry in states that make it more difficult—or, in effect, impossible. The usual hysterics are engaged in the usual hysteria.

2 weeks ago | thedispatch.com | Kevin Williamson

Given that Donald Trump is a borderline illiterate, he has chosen a strange strategy as president: being a writer. He is a writer of “executive orders,” many of them press releases disguised as diktats. He is a writer of memos and tweets and presidential statements. I mean that he is a writer of these in the same way he is the writer who wrote The Art of the Deal—which is to say, he didn’t write the thing, but it is, in a broader sense, his work. And the thing about work is, Trump does not like it.