Susan Glasser

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Susan Glasser

It’s hard to find a simpler and clearer statement of the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. The second time around, Trump is doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants, with little regard for the constraints that held him back before. This applies to tariffs and the unleashing of an international trade war—and to many far less consequential personal obsessions of the President.

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Susan Glasser

By the standards of world-historical events, much of Donald Trump’s Wednesday afternoon speech in the Rose Garden was remarkably forgettable.

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Susan Glasser

Is there any stupider—or more revealing—scandal of the many that Donald Trump has already unleashed in his second term than the President’s sudden, arbitrary decision last month to ban the Associated Press from the White House press pool because its editors refused to go along with his whim to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America?

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Susan Glasser

On Monday, Donald Trump attended his first board meeting at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since installing himself as its chairman and firing its leadership. During the session, he surveyed board members about which musical was better—“Les Misérables” or “The Phantom of the Opera”—and reminisced at length about seeing the 1982 Broadway première of “Cats” from a fourth-row seat that he’d been given.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Susan Glasser

If there’s one truth Donald Trump seems to have absorbed in his seventy-eight years, it is that there are advantages to lying all the time—foremost among them that no one knows when you’re bluffing and when you actually mean what you say. Imposing crippling tariffs on allies? Selling out Ukraine? Using the government to enact retribution on political enemies? The President may have threatened all these things, may have said—over and over again—that he is, in fact, intent on carrying them out.