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1 week ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
It was all right there, right from the beginning. The insults. The exaggerations. The braggadocio. The casual racism. The empty promises. It was all right there if you care to revisit that moment, 10 years ago, when game show host Donald J.
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2 weeks ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
What do you get for the man who has everything? The Presidentâs 79th birthday is almost here and, gosh, I just canât decide what to buy him. I thought I had the perfect gift all picked outâa 747âbut Qatar went ahead and got him one already. So there goes that idea.
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3 weeks ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
So little brings me joy these days but, girl, when I tell you I’m loving every second of the psychodrama apparently playing out between Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and Stephen’s wife Katie, I am loving every second of it.
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1 month ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
Please stop with the “we have to find a left-wing Joe Rogan” bulls***. For one thing, we have plenty of popular left and left-leaning voices who already fit the bill: among white dudes, Stephen Colbert, Seth Myers, and Howard Stern spring to mind. Younger, lesser-known voices like David Pakman, Destiny, and Adam Mockler are building sizable audiences on YouTube. Second – crucially – a “left-wing Joe Rogan” is a contradiction in terms. It’s like saying we need an intellectual version of Jackass.
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1 month ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
I admit it: I’m a dumb, average American. The product of an average high school and a college dropout. But, you know, I read and stuff. And I thought I knew a little something about America. Nope. Turns out, I’m an idiot. For decades, I was under the mistaken impression that presidential bribery is one of them fancy “high crimes and misdemeanors” I learned about in Social Studies.
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1 month ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
Trump made headlines this week for going all Marie Kondo on the American economy—and I am here for it.
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1 month ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
You ever rent a car? I do, all the time. And every single time I’m furious when I get the bill because there’s always more charges—many, many more charges—than I’d anticipated. Concession fee recovery. Vehicle licensing cost recovery. Customer facility charge. State tax. And on and on. By the time you’re done, you might end up paying up almost double the stated rental cost. You might have a problem with all the extra charges, but at least you know what they are.
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2 months ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black
A lot of people are clowning on Pete Hegseth for being an unqualified, incompetent, hard-drinking idiot who should never have been trusted to lead a softball team, let alone the world’s largest military. I am not one of those people. As our Secretary of Defense’s job hangs by a thread, I come to praise Hegseth, not to bury him. Here is a man who has demonstrated that one not need talent, nor discipline, nor intellect to rise to this nation’s greatest heights.
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2 months ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Daly |Michael Black |Janna Brancolini |Kenneal Patterson
The Trump administration’s five-page extortion letter threatening to withhold federal funding for Harvard if the university does not comply with onerous ideological demands was addressed to its president , Dr. Alan Garber. It was also addressed to the most senior member of its board of governors, Penny Pritzker. Pritzker is also widely viewed as the dominant member of the ultra-wealthy Pritzker family that was Donald Trump’s partner in his first big real estate deal in Manhattan back in 1975.
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2 months ago | 
thedailybeast.com | Michael Black |Kali Holloway |Anthony Fisher |Lauren Lewis
Harvard said no. No to government minders, no to intellectual dishonesty, no to conservative DEI. In a forceful letter of rebuke to the Trump administration’s threat to withhold federal money from the university if it does not acquiesce to a series of “ham-handed” demands—including government audits to monitor “ideological capture”—Harvard president Alan M. Garber basically told the government to f--k all the way off. He said it in a more Harvard way, but that was the message.
