The construction of the pool reflected a national ambition to build something unifying and enduring. The rushed renovation and political fallout of 2026 reveal how much that civic vision has changed.
Articles on Abraham Lincoln
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President Donald Trump’s capital redesign follows centuries of debate and discussion about how Washington should look to the world.
More than 10,000 attorneys who worked for the US government have left their jobs during the second Trump administration; a former federal judge analyzes the impact of that exodus.
In President Donald Trump’s public language, Congress rarely appears as a coequal branch of government. It appears as an obstacle, an audience, a pressure point, a rubber stamp or an afterthought.
Democracy cannot thrive, or even survive, when its leaders see themselves as godlike and divide citizens into believers and heretics, a scholar writes.
When officials lie time and again, people don’t know what to trust. And when this happens, citizens cannot deliberate, approve or dissent coherently, because a shared world no longer exists.
The experiences of Donald Trump’s predecessors remind us of the dangers inherent in the inevitable human frailty of the very powerful.
Americans have looked to the Declaration of Independence when they sought to remedy contemporary problems and create new visions for the country’s future.
In a polarized environment, the elevation of a figure into a saint does more than honor the individual. It turns a political struggle into a sacred one.
According to myth, the ghost of George Washington cursed anyone serving more than four years. But a nonconsecutive second term is different – as is Donald Trump.
As one critic asked, has Juneteenth devolved ‘into an exploitative and profit-driven enterprise for companies that disregard the true significance of this day to the Black community?’
Does Donald Trump have the power to suspend a foundational legal right to challenge a person’s arrest and detention? Americans have long debated whether the president or Congress can do this.
It’s not yet clear whether Trump’s pardons will herald a period of national harmony – as past presidents hoped for – or more incidents of violence, as actually resulted.
Legal experts are concerned that President Donald Trump is expanding executive powers beyond the law – creating what they call a constitutional crisis.
Donald Trump claims that Article 2 of the Constitution gives him the right ‘to do whatever I want as President.’ A constitutional law scholar says ‘Not so.’
The mechanics of upending American democracy would entail surmounting a thick tangle of constitutional, bureaucratic, legal and political obstacles.
For more than two centuries, U.S. presidential politics and presidential lives have found various pathways through and beyond despair, affecting Americans of all political stripes.
The lame-duck period in the US is longer than in other Western democracies, which tend to make the transition over a period of just days.
The most politically divided time in US democracy coincided with a boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers and widespread disinformation. It wasn’t 2024.
While 4 presidents have been killed, many others have been victims of plots to end their lives − sometimes because of political anger, but many other times for incomprehensible reasons.
Top contributors
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Emeritus Professor of History, University of Toronto
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Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington
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Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State
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Professor of History, Wesleyan University
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Honorary Professor of International Relations, University of the Witwatersrand
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Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin is a Friend of The Conversation.
Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs, Boise State University
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Professor of History, Binghamton University, State University of New York
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Professor of History and Provost Emeritus, Binghamton University, State University of New York
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Professor of History, Arizona State University
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Associate Professor of Public Policy, University of Connecticut
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Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
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Professor of History, Emory University
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Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Florida
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Visiting Assistant Professor of History, University of Richmond
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Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University