America

[This piece has been adapted from Thomas Frank’s new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books).]

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s nuclear policy is totally dangerous for America, its allies and its enemies. It could break up a defense structure that was put together after the second world war to maintain peace and security and stop nuclear arms proliferation after the U.S. detonated two nuclear bombs on Japan to bring that war to an end. The structure although not modern or fair has managed to stop nuclear wars from starting for over seventy years.

Just getting around to Nick Confessore’s piece in yesterday’s NYT, explaining how the GOP elites lost touch with their base. Some excerpts:

I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told the New York Times last weekend. “I like the expression.”

Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.”

Over the course of his campaign, Bernie Sanders has made it clear that criminal justice reform is something he cares quite a lot about.

“I consider reforming our criminal justice system one of the most important things that a president of the United States can do,” the Vermont senator told a Chicago crowd in December. Sanders has called the incarceration rate in America “an international embarrassment,” and earlier this month, he said the following during a debate with Hillary Clinton: