As Donald Trump begins his second term, America’s health care system is in crisis: medical costs are skyrocketing, life expectancy has stagnated, and burnout runs rampant among health care workers.

These problems are likely to become worse now that Trump has handed the job of cutting the federal budget over to Elon Musk. He will lead the ...Read more

To be a first responder at this stage in the climate crisis is to face an escalation of violence. For many wildland firefighters, the unprecedented scenes from the last couple of weeks in Los Angeles — dozens dead, tens of thousands without homes, hundreds of thousands more displaced — will appear part of a familiar pattern.

The national ...Read more

President Donald Trump loves to keep us guessing. This is exactly what we’re all doing as his second term in the White House begins. It’s one way he controls the narrative.

Trump’s off the cuff, unfiltered, controversial statements infuriate opponents and delight his supporters. The rest of us are left trying to figure out the difference ...Read more

I rushed to my computer to stock up on $TRUMP crypto meme coins but couldn’t find a place that would take my money for nothing.

You might pause at the getting-nothing-for-something scenario, but that just shows how we are all psychological prisoners to dead tree currency, or so our Crypto Edgelords would have us believe.

But nothing for ...Read more

The pandemic reshaped our world in countless ways, but perhaps the most insidious effect is the pervasive feeling of being stuck.

A recent survey revealed that a majority of Americans feel socially stagnant —unable to take a major step toward a better life, better job, or better community. The barriers range from the tangible to the ...Read more

The endless debate over what went wrong for Democrats in the last election has almost entirely avoided what has become the party’s signature issue: abortion.

Democrats believed they could ride the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade to victory, and not without reason. Polling consistently showed that more than half of Americans...Read more

If President Donald Trump’s claims about California water management are to be believed, then there is a basically a giant faucet in the north of the state that could unleash a welcome deluge on the south, refilling reservoirs and fire hydrants and soaking the arid land. But Governor Gavin Newsom refuses to turn on the faucet because he wants ...Read more

Ordinarily I’m a sucker for the ceremonial trappings of our republic. I always watch the State of the Union address. Whether I approve of the president, whoever he may be, I derive a modest patriotic pleasure from observing his speech and the attendant rituals. I like the announcement of the president’s arrival by the House’s sergeant-at-...Read more

Between a series of executive orders and agency policy shifts, President Donald Trump is doing more to damage our national immigration enforcement (which does need reform) than improve it.

Most worrisome, he’s axed enforcement prioritization and directed the division of ICE that normally investigates things like trafficking and child abuse ...Read more

As Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell engineered many of the wins of Donald Trump’s first term, but he was right Friday night to finally say no to Trump in opposing the unqualified Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary. McConnell, who for years carried Trump’s water, must now continue to be an independent voice against the president’s ...Read more

How many of you recall the TV image on Jan. 6, 2021, of Officer Daniel Hodges, squashed in a revolving door at the U.S. Capitol, screaming for help as MAGA thugs beat on his head?

"Some called me a traitor, and someone reached under my helmet and tried to gouge out my eye," Hodges recalled last week on CNN, "and all were pardoned by Donald ...Read more

In one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump has moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization, joining only Soviet satellite states in ever attempting to do so, and cut the U.S. share of funding to the international health monitoring agency. It’s a bad prescription and puts at risk the well-being of people all ...Read more

Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden has distinguished himself in the past few weeks with his indiscriminate use of the president’s clemency powers. The nation’s justice system suffers because of it.

Biden left office after commuting the death sentences of dozens of the nation’s worst criminals. He followed up that indignation with pre-...Read more

The Trump administration announced last week that immigration agents have arrested 538 undocumented immigrants and have already deported “hundreds” more. Now, the administration has announced its intention to roll back a 2011 federal guideline that limited immigration enforcement activities at or near schools, childcare centers, churches and...Read more

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Ten steps forward, 50 steps back. That’s what the sum of progress in the U.S. feels like for many who believe in civil and human rights following President Donald Trump’s ...Read more

Donald Trump did not like what he heard. The "Radical Left hard line Trump hater," as the new president described the Episcopal bishop of Washington on Truth Social, "brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way." She was "nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart."

Mariann Budde, preaching the sermon during the ...Read more

That didn’t take long.

In about the time it takes to say “Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday,” President Donald Trump has launched a nuclear attack on everything the civil rights leader ever stood for.

In the days since Trump was inaugurated last week on the national King holiday, he has put a bullseye on migrants, birthright ...Read more

The MAGA Republican triumphalism unleashed by Donald Trump's return to the White House has extended, unsurprisingly, to many of my most antagonistic correspondents. They urge me to bow down to the president and accept his victory as a mandate against all they despise about the progressive left: its insistence that centuries of racial and gender...Read more

It is no secret why President Donald Trump forced out FBI Director Christopher Wray, his first-term pick to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer: Soon after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Wray told Congress that the Capitol siege was an act of "domestic terrorism." And for the next four years, he oversaw the largest criminal investigation in ...Read more