Rick Perlstein

There were 25 ‘swing’ districts. By gerrymandering, Republicans could win every one of them for at least the next 10 years.

The attorney general is the true white nationalist messiah and the wheelhouse of the Trump Revolution.

At demos and online, Trump’s extreme supporters come armed and ready for violence.

The White House blocks The New York Times, CNN and Politico but lets in Breitbart.

Bannon directed the movie "Occupy Unmasked," an homage to Leni Riefenstahl.

Trump boasts of immunity from prosecution for using the White House for personal gain.

The more Trumpism fails, the more scapegoats will be blamed.

Clinton could lose the best chance in a generation to turn the Republican Party into pariahs.

Ryan might be forced to work with Hillary if the GOP is devastated. But defeat has to come up and down the ticket.

No smoke-filled chaos, no fisticuffs over obscure procedural fights, no riots: We'll miss the high drama at the GOP Convention in Cleveland.

Cut Donald Trump to his essence, and laws, norms and constitutional constraints, taken together, are what he finds the most objectionable in human history.

The conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is how we can understand the rise of Trump.

Why did lower-working-class Americans know Trump? Because he had been a regular visitor to their living rooms, while the D.C. elite had ignored them.

Asked why he was wearing a pistol, Reagan replied, “In case you guys can’t do the job, I can help out.”

His attempt to maximize the number of Americans who vote soon fell foul of those crying “electoral fraud!”

What began as a protest against the Vietnam War became a symbol of deceit and hatred.

“Being the also-ran idiot younger brother, tutored in lobbing spitballs by a childhood of resentful rage, is good training for Fox.”

There is an utter failure to inform voters about presidential nomination contests.

Conservatives are stuck not saying what they believe for fear of people understanding their bitter prejudices.

Obama starts the second half of his term with a set of obstacles similar to those that bedeviled Ronald Reagan. On Reagan’s centennial, the president is looking to the past for inspiration.

Run afoul of the conservative commentator, and feel the wrath of his avid Army

Why the GOP is falling out of love with gun-toting, churchgoing, working-class whites.

Our pundits worry that a populist rage is loose in the land—pitchforks everywhere! My first reaction upon hearing that was to dismiss the word "populist" as a distraction, an epithet meant to recall episodes in which mass rage made sound policy deliberation impossible. Think of dispossessed 19th-century farmers letting their righteous rage at bankers tumble easily into free-floating anger at "Jewish bankers" and then simply at Jews; of 1970s white South Boston parents stabbing busing advocates with American flags. My second reaction was to dismiss the word as inaccurate. What makes this rage "populist"? This is ordinary rage, rational and focused. The lead pitchfork bearers, after all, are people like New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, who wrote that AIG's Financial Practices Group was guilty of a "scam" at which "we should be furious." You might more accurately call that common sense.Casting my eye over the broader sweep of history, though, I no longer fear populism. The...

On an overnight bus from Chicago to D.C. to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Beyond the juicy tape excerpts, there are riches in the 90,000 newly released pages of Nixon papers.

We've been on the verge of what seemed like permanent ideological transformation before. For liberals, the most dramatic such moment came with Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in 1964. "These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem," Johnson declared while lighting the White House Christmas tree that year. He had already passed a landmark bill outlawing Southern segregation and had launched his War on Poverty. He was about to pass the first federal aid to education, Medicare, the National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, pioneering environmental legislation and the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The nation's racial ordeal apparently all but surpassed, one of Martin Luther King's deputies proclaimed, "There is no more civil-rights movement. President Johnson signed it out of existence."The rioting in Watts began five nights later. On Aug. 11, 1965, 103rd Street would become known to the world as "Charcoal Alley." A scuffle with police some 15 blocks...