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Rebuilding industry requires celebrating masculinity

National Columnists

Society has spent decades telling boys that masculinity is toxic, and now there’s a shortage of skilled tradesmen. The connection should be obvious. Through his on-again, off-again tariff dance, President Donald Trump has made one thing clear. He wants more things built in America. He’s bragged about already securing more investment dollar commitments than former President Joe Biden did during his entire term. And he wants more. Trump has long championed the rural communities devastated by factory shutdowns. It’s one reason that he has enjoyed such strong support in Middle ...

Trump is serious when he makes promises

National Columnists

Venezuelans are celebrating in the streets of Caracas and around the world after U.S. forces staged a flawless removal of brutal dictator and narco-trafficker Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Not celebrating are most congressional Democrats, a few Republicans and the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, whose foreign policy credentials are akin to dining at International House of Pancakes. Even The Washington Post, which is no fan of President Trump and most of his policies, spoke well of the operation that captured Maduro, calling the action “a major victory for American ...

These were best of times on unified homefront

National Columnists

Scene: the Midwest in midcentury. The Madison, Wisconsin, neighborhood lived through the 1930s and 1940s, depression, wartime and polio. President Franklin Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats built morale. My father’s mother, Marie, a widowed nurse with four children, never missed Eleanor Roosevelt’s column, “My Day.” Her husband, Reuben, a University of Wisconsin doctor, died young. “Father’s death left me with shame. And I felt shame at feeling ashamed.” At age 8, just before Pearl Harbor, Richard felt bereft. Yet the 1940s were the best of times on the unified ...

Something much greater awaits us in 2026

National Columnists

The year 2025 passed pretty quickly, almost in the blink of an eye. It began with tragedy as soon as January hit, with 14 people being killed in New Orleans when a driver rammed his truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street. A similar deadly incident happened in Las Vegas when an active-duty U.S. Army Green Beret exploded a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel and killed himself. The news continued to be filled with troubling and sad events as political disputes on issues like immigration and vaccines intensified, and beloved celebrities passed away. I did a quick ...

Time does not pause but moves forward

National Columnists

The hot take that floated into my inbox this week was that resolutions are passe. Apparently, thinking about “next year” is outdated. We’re in this grind of time and marking it arbitrarily doesn’t matter. But, really, we time-travel constantly. It’s one of the best things about being human. We can rehearse future sticky conversations in the shower. We can relive our moments of wildness while folding laundry. We can imagine a future version of ourselves who has it together, so she is not constantly behind on laundry. Yet every January, the naysayers trot out the idea that it ...

Republicans face some big questions entering 2026

National Columnists

“Are the Republicans going the way of the Whigs?” During President Trump’s first term, this question was asked a lot. The answer then: No. But one year into his second term it’s worth revisiting the question, not so much because the answer is different this time, but because the question illuminates how much our politics have changed in the last decade. Just in case you forgot — or never knew — the Whigs were one of the two major American parties from the 1830s to the mid-1850s. We’ll return to them in a moment. A decade ago, the conversation about the Whigs ...