Erika D. Smith

When President Donald Trump announced in April that he was creating a task force to root out fraud and corruption from social safety net programs, he promised it would recover enough “stolen” federal funding from Democrat-led states to “literally be able to balance our American Budget.”

At a time of widening wealth inequality and rising anger over the influence of billionaires in politics, just how far are voters willing to go with eat-the-rich populism? Will policy be ruled by emotion, or is there still room for pragmatism?

Rebuked more than once by the US Supreme Court this past term, President Donald Trump is hanging onto what he’s calling a “BIG WIN” — the 6-3 decision allowing states to bar transgender students from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

If not for the thousands of Haitians who live there, Springfield, Ohio, may have suffered the same fate as countless small cities and towns: It would’ve fallen into decline. Instead, new businesses are opening and neighborhoods are thriving.

With its ancient sequoias, towering waterfalls and glacier-carved granite cliffs, California’s Yosemite National Park has long been one of the most visited destinations in the national park system, helping to inspire its very creation. The vistas, which span more than 1,100 square miles along the Sierra Nevada mountain range, are inspiring to say the least. Yet the stories out of Yosemite this year — particularly this month, the official start of the busy season for national parks — are anything

Elections have consequences — and so do votes in Congress. Just ask Senator Susan Collins of Maine.

In his much-hyped prime-time address last week, President Donald Trump — once again — fell far short of proving that he won the 2020 election, that any ballots were altered or that any voting machines were compromised. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to stop millions of Americans from believing that election fraud is real anyway.

In the little more than two weeks since Graham Platner was forced to halt his Senate campaign in Maine, his career in tatters after a rape allegation, the Democratic Party has been trying to move on and forget about the oysterman’s problematic candidacy.

A year ago this month, an exuberant President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, praising Republicans for having the supposed political foresight to vote for it and mocking Democrats for refusing to join them. “They didn’t vote for tax cuts,” he said during an Oval Office ceremony. “They didn’t vote for taking care of people.”

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Max Miller, the Republican congressman from Ohio at the center of an ugly, he-said, she-said, he-said family feud that has roiled Capitol Hill this week.