Politics

  • John Lewis vs. Everybody: A Tale of the Tape

    Ever since John Lewis told Chuck Todd that he doesn’t consider Donald Trump a “legitimate president,” acolytes of the traffic-cone-colored, tiny-fingered dingleberry have streamed out of the woodwork to come for the civil rights hero and political icon. As soon as the president-elect heard the remarks, the troll-in-chief tweeted this: Congressman John Lewis should spend…

  • An Elegy for Obama

    I am in mourning. As the presidency of Barack Obama draws to a close, I keep thinking about a piece I wrote for The Root eight years ago when he was sworn in for the first time. Back then, I couldn’t stop singing anthems of joy and patriotism, grounded in what now seems like a…

  • Author’s Most Refreshingly Honest Take on Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect, Admiration

    Author and political analyst David S. King is a genius. He wrote the book Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect & Admiration. King’s publisher, Richard Sprake, called me to clue me in on this literary masterpiece, and I almost hung up on him after he said the title. And then, in his next breath, Sprake told…

  • Top 10 People Summoned to Trump Towers to Fix Black America

    Since the election of Donald J. Trump, we have witnessed an eclectic mix of black people streaming from Trump Tower, called upon by the dollop-shaped dictator to help him solve the problems of black America. Most of us have cast a skeptical eye at his selections because they seemingly have no training, expertise or qualifications…

  • Polls Show Donald Trump Has Low Favorability Ratings Going Into His Presidency; He Calls Them Fake and Rigged on Twitter

    Orange Foolius Donald Trump is just days away from his Jan. 20 inauguration, and recent polls show that he has the lowest favorability rating of any incoming president in the last 40 years. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll (pdf) shows that only 40 percent of Americans view Trump favorably and 54 percent view him…

  • A Tribute to Our Great Uncle Joe

    All this week, social media timelines, television viewing and news outlets will be flooded with praise, retrospectives and syrupy-sweet tributes to Barack Obama, lamenting the end of his tenure as president of the United States. I can already tell you that there will be a “speck of dust” caught in my eye all day on…

  • America Didn’t Deserve Michelle Obama

    I forgot exactly where we were in Pittsburgh. Maybe driving from the Target in East Liberty to the YMCA in the Mexican War Streets. Or, perhaps, at my wife’s grandmother’s house in the Hill District, eating smothered turkey burgers with smoked kale greens and washing them down with Pineapple Faygo. But I do remember who…

  • So, When Is It OK to Meet With Trump?

    Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States, and therefore people are going to have to talk with him. Some of those people will be black and will disagree with Trump, some of those people will be black and agree with everything Trump says, and some of those people will be black…

  • Mandarin Orange Mugabe Isn’t Distracting Us; He’s Really That Frail

    If I had a dollar for every headline our president-elect generates in a single day, let alone an entire campaign season, I would probably have enough money to pay off both my student loans and at least half of the debt his lying ass pretends not to have. As someone who can see, hear, read…

  • Shut Up, Bernie Sanders

    If hubris and the successful pursuit of headlines were genuine indicators of political aptitude, perhaps Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would actually be the Svengali he’s presently being sold as. Of course, Sanders, like our president-elect, the Marigold Manchurian Candidate, can rightly lay claim to scoring huge, albeit majorly melanin-deficient, crowds that found kinship in campaigns…