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

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in late August 2005, it took Congress just a few days to approve $10.5 billion in federal disaster aid at President George W. Bush’s request. Lawmakers cleared another $51.8 billion less than two weeks later.

There certainly were questions about what the state of Louisiana had — or hadn’t — ...Read more

Donald Trump had barely finished his inauguration speech when the first lawsuit challenging the new administration was filed in court.

Expect legal efforts to thwart the Trump agenda to be a common occurrence.

The maiden lawsuit took aim at the administration’s high-profile effort to take an endoscope to the national bureaucracy in the name ...Read more

The Trump administration has pressed the pause button on the U.S.’s vital biomedical research engine, the National Institutes for Health. Grant reviews, travel and hiring appear to be on indefinite hold.

Without any concrete guidance about the reasoning or length of the freeze, America’s best scientific minds are left to figure out the ...Read more

We strongly agree with Gov. Hochul’s goal to prevent students in grades K-12 from using smartphones in schools. “Every student will be required to disconnect from their devices during school hours, bell to bell,” quoth the governor, adding: “Our kids will finally be freed from the endless disruptions of social media and all the mental ...Read more

The Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Public Schools have been battling over a new collective bargaining agreement for nine months, a spectacle that has taken the focus off what actually happens in schools every day and placed the spotlight on the adults haggling over money.

Lost in this conversation is the plight of parents and kids, many of...Read more

As the protests that broke out against mass killings in Gaza last year were met with brutal police repression, our team at Women for Weapons Trade Transparency took notice.

Our work — which focuses on open records requests and investigative journalism of the police, military and weapons industry — once again began to take on a deeply ...Read more

TikTok went dark in the United States for a little while, but is now back online here thanks to a stay of execution from President Donald Trump. The newly inaugurated president seems to be working toward some sort of a deal to help TikTok comply with federal rules prohibiting foreign agents from owning and controlling social media platforms in ...Read more