In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote an influential book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb argued that Black Swan events (e.g., 9/11 or the development of Google) share three criteria: they are extremely rare, extremely impactful, and—in spite of being outliers—explainable and even predictable after the fact. Both Donald Trump’s … Read more
.jpg "Donald Trump Has Always Been Obsessed With Status—Even If He Had to Borrow It")
A couple of months after his thirteenth birthday, Donald Trump rode in his father’s Cadillac sixty miles north to rural Orange County, New York, just outside tiny Cornwall-on-Hudson. The car pulled into a narrow drive that led to the quadrangle of the New York Military Academy, a spread of grass about eighty yards long framed … Read more
Don’t worry about it, Little Marco …. Low energy …. You are the single biggest liar…. The first 2024 presidential debate is set for Thursday, and there may be wisdom in the old adage: Past is prologue. A case can certainly be made that one of the main reasons Donald Trump earned his party’s nomination … Read more
You couldn’t have 2020s America—and the half-witted half-decade of Trump that preceded it—without the 1990s. Newt Gingrich walked so that Donald Trump could run. The Brooks Brothers’ Riot (okay, it happened in November of 2000, but you get the idea) was the Oxford-cloth precursor to the fur-lined, horned-hat insurrection of January 6, 2020. Everything that … Read more
Joe Biden has been focused on his presidential legacy for so long that he wasted no time ushering a group of historians into the White House once he finally got the job. Six weeks after taking office, he met with presidential scholars in the East Room to discuss what sort of president he could be, … Read more
