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Adele M. Stan

Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American Prospect. She is research director of People for the American Way, and a winner of the Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism.

Recent Articles

Bannon’s Breitbart Exit Changes Nothing

Adele M. StanJan 10, 2018
(Flickr/Gage Skidmore)
(Gage Skidmore/Flickr) Steve Bannon Y ou’d hardly be human if you didn’t feel a twinge of glee at the fall of Steve Bannon. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, you might say. Bannon’s resignation from Breitbart News might even restore your faith in the resilience of democracy—but it shouldn’t. However delicious the ignominious fate of the man who painted himself as Svengali to the dummy in the Oval, Bannon’s fast descent from savior to pariah illustrates structural rot in the machinery of the republic, wrought by a Supreme Court whose majority acts in the favor of aspiring oligarchs. Sure, Bannon set his fate in motion through his own hubris. But ultimately his crash stemmed from the whims of a single donor family, as did his rise. Without Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, Bannon would never have secured his top spot on the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. Without Mercer, Bannon might never have been granted his role as the guiding force of...

A Hostile Foreign Power and the End of the Republic

Adele M. StanJan 03, 2018
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Donald Trump and Melania Trump arrive for a New Year's Eve party at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 31, 2017. W hen the history of America’s final days as a republic is written, it may be fairly said that a hostile foreign power helped elect an authoritarian president with no agenda other than plunder, that the majority of America’s white people took the plunderer’s racist, misogynist bait—and that the Congress of the United States helped him loot the public commons and cover up his likely crimes. And that’s just the CliffsNotes version. As the president sets about destroying the nation’s public institutions, Congress is launching investigations of the president’s investigators: the FBI, career Justice Department employees, and the special counsel appointed to investigate the president’s ties to Russian government agents during the 2016 presidential election. The Republican Congress, it seems, would rather investigate the president’s electoral...

On the Road to Kleptocracy

Adele M. StanDec 20, 2017
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin House Speaker Paul Ryan leaves the House Chamber after voting on the Republican tax bill W ith the passage of the Republican tax bill, there’s no longer room for doubt: The big heist is on. The looting of the national commons is well underway, and now those behind it feel no need to hide it. Let’s face it—this is why they allowed President Donald J. Trump to happen. He may not have been the first pick of GOP leaders, who would have preferred a more subtle approach, something that looked more like the invisible hand of the market than outright pillage. But once Trump had the nomination locked up, they fell in line. However ugly things might get, a bonanza awaited the crowd that carried Trump across the White House threshold. You’ve likely heard by now that 83 percent of the gains to taxpayers in the bill go to the top 1 percent, ranked by income. How the tax cuts for middle-income earners are modest and temporary, while the cuts for corporations are robust and...

How Doug Jones’s Alabama Surprise Could Change Everything

Adele M. StanDec 13, 2017
(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images) Supporters of Doug Jones celebrate at the Sheraton in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 12, 2017. H ell hath no fury like a predator scorned. And so it was that Roy Moore, the far-right Republican U.S. Senate candidate who Tuesday night lost a special election in Alabama to Democrat Doug Jones, refused to concede to his rival that evening, even after all the major news outlets called the outcome. On the same day, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to insult a high-profile woman senator with sexual innuendo. As Paul Waldman noted , Trump all but shouted, “Whore!” Moore and Trump, on the surface, have little in common, Trump being an areligious, foul-mouthed New Yorker, and Moore being a performatively pious Southerner. But they are bonded by an experience they share: a chorus of female voices aimed at them, the voices of women with credible stories of having been groped, forcibly kissed, stalked, and more. In Moore’s case, the women...

Trent Franks, Al Franken, and The Handmaid’s Tale

Adele M. StanDec 08, 2017
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster Representative Trent Franks takes his seat before the start of a House Judiciary hearing on Capitol Hill C all me Roy Rogers; for the last year and a half I’ve been riding a horse named Trigger . I’m hardly what you’d call a snowflake. I’ve been around this block a few times, by virtue of being female and on the earth for a while. But the torrent of revelations of sexual assault and harassment by men in high places has led countless women like me—women who have experienced one or both of those transgressions—into a prolonged state of hypervigilance, as the world learned of a range of techniques and degrees for the sexual subjugation of women in the workplace, be it an ass-grab, a masturbation display, or an all-out assault. If you’ve been subjected to anything like this yourself, you’re now reliving it every damn day. But here’s one I hadn’t counted on: the boss asking his employee if she’d like to have his baby. That’s what Representative Trent Franks, who...

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