The Post’s Editorial Board consistently writes about the biggest news of the day. This year, it has tackled issues of gun violence, the Mueller investigation, the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi and much, much more. Here is a look back at 2018.
Gratuitous malice toward children is not a characteristic one generally associates with the United States, but under Ms. Nielsen’s guidance, the Department of Homeland Security seems intent on changing that.
In any normal administration, Mr. Pruitt would be gone. Instead, even as revelations about Mr. Pruitt piled up this week, Mr. Trump was reportedly still entertaining the idea of installing Mr. Pruitt as attorney general, a position for which his primary qualification may be willingness to squelch the Russia investigation. An ideologue who has arrogantly abused his position, Mr. Pruitt does not deserve a promotion. He deserves to be fired.
We could start rattling off the Krauthammer columns that they should have put on Voyagers 1 and 2 as more genuine evidence of the worth of humanity. Columns about chess, and baseball, and astronomy, and philosophy and war and peace and, always, about politics — what he called “the crooked timber of our communal lives.” Everything else depends, he knew, on getting the politics right.
We also try not to toss insults around. We believe in civil discourse and in trying to understand the other side’s point of view. But when it comes to tearing children away from their parents at the southern border, there is only one legitimate side. Mr. Trump’s policy for the past weeks has been repugnant, reprehensible and repulsive.
In Helsinki, Mr. Trump again insisted “there was no collusion” with Russia. Yet in refusing to acknowledge the plain facts about Russia’s behavior, while trashing his own country’s justice system, Mr. Trump in fact was openly colluding with the criminal leader of a hostile power.
The Catholic Church’s decades-long practice of enabling and systematically covering up the rape and molestation of children by priests is by now sickeningly familiar. Yet the scale of abuse; the breadth and depth of trauma inflicted by predators wearing Roman collars; and the coldbloodedness of senior church figures zealous in their resolve to protect the church but indifferent to the suffering of minors, retain their power to shock the conscience.
We have not opposed a Supreme Court nominee, liberal or conservative, since Robert H. Bork in 1987. We believe presidents are entitled to significant deference if they nominate well-qualified people within the broad mainstream of judicial thought. When President Trump named Mr. Kavanaugh, he seemed to be such a person: an accomplished judge whom any conservative president might have picked. But given Republicans’ refusal to properly vet Mr. Kavanaugh, and given what we have learned about him during the process, we now believe it would be a serious blow to the court and the nation if he were confirmed.
Tuesday was a good day for Democrats. It may also be a good day for Republicans, if they take the lessons of their House defeat to heart and reconsider the devil’s bargain they have made with Mr. Trump. Indeed, if the results help lead to a reemergence of that party’s better angels, then it will have been a good day for America as a whole.
Three years ago, after nine people were gunned down at a community college in Roseburg, Ore., we published a list of some of the other victims of mass shootings in the United States. “Our hope,“ we wrote, “is that we never become numb to these terrible, preventable events, but instead honor these victims by acting to prevent future shootings.”Sadly — maddeningly — Congress has failed to do that. And the list has only gotten longer.
President Trump on Tuesday confirmed what his administration has been signaling all along: It will stand behind Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even if he ordered the brutal murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In a crude statement punctuated with exclamation points, Mr. Trump sidestepped a CIA finding that the crown prince was behind the killing; casually slandered Mr. Khashoggi, who was one of the Arab world’s most distinguished journalists; and repeated gross falsehoods and exaggerations about the benefits of the U.S. alliance with the kingdom. Mr. Trump has betrayed American values in service to what already was a bad bet on the 33-year-old prince.
There are marvels aplenty worth giving thanks for, encountered in the course of quotidian events and also amid the direst headlines — authentic heroism, real selflessness, genuine altruism.
Mr. Trump’s last best chance for the wall, his signature 2016 campaign promise, may come during this lame-duck session of Congress. The window is narrow and the odds long, but the president could exercise his influence over the soon-to-disappear Republican majority in the House to press for a deal that would trade substantial funding for border security — including portions of a wall — for legislation that would assure a stable future for the dreamers.
Read more:
Follow Editorial Board's opinionsFollow