Mike Matson

I’m disappointed. Actually, that word doesn’t cut it anymore. I’m disgusted. Not simply that Donald Trump has managed to turn the presidency into something resembling a family business with nuclear weapons. I’m disgusted that he’s getting away with it. Ezra Klein of the New York Times put it beautifully in July, if “beautifully” is the appropriate adverb for governmental rot. Republicans he talks to privately, Klein said, acknowledge we’re dealing with corruption “maj

It was 1992. He had already run for vice-president once, president twice, and was laying the groundwork for the ’96 White House run in which he’d actually win his party’s nomination. His re-election that year to the U.S. Senate from Kansas was a mere formality. Formality or not, Bob Dole always took care of Kansas. As the political reporter for WIBW-TV in Topeka, I’d be fed a news release or two a week from Dole’s machine, touting some new manna from Washington. A senio

I spent my summer reading about Nazis and Donald Trump. Not exactly the beach reading I had in mind, especially when you consider I have yet to make it to the beach. It started innocently enough when a friend recommended a book. That book led to another, and eventually I found myself comparing two governments separated by nearly a century and an ocean, wondering how people recognize the erosion of political restraints when they are standing in the middle of it. The first