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Adele M. Stan

Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American Prospect, and AlterNet's Washington editor. 

Recent Articles

Why Evangelicals Heart Donald Trump

Adele M. StanJan 21, 2016
AP Photo/Steve Helber
AP Photo/Steve Helber Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Monday, January 18, 2016. W hen Donald J. Trump, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, took the stage at Liberty University on Monday, he ascended the podium in a wake of fundamentalist fairy dust strewn by Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the man who once was the face of the religious right, and who helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Not only did Falwell compare Trump favorably to the late Reverend Jerry Falwell Sr.—a comparison Trump deemed “an honor”—but also to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Never mind the cognitive dissonance there: Where King battled to break down the walls of Jim Crow, the elder Falwell made his mark as a segregationist. Oh, and don’t forget Jesus. The younger Falwell compared Trump to him, too. Which actually makes a bit more sense than the King comparison, if you consider that, as Sarah Posner has...

Can Nikki Haley Save Her Party?

Adele M. StanJan 13, 2016
(Photo: AP/Chase Stevens)
(Photo: AP/Chase Stevens) South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley speaks during a panel discussion at the Republican Governors Association conference on November 18, 2015. Haley gave the GOP response to Obama's State of the Union address on January 12. O rdinarily, the opposition party’s official response to a State of the Union address is offered as a rebuttal to the president’s speech. This, however, is clearly no ordinary time. Overshadowing any criticism of President Barack Obama in the rejoinder delivered by Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina Tuesday night was the targeting of the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Though his name was never mentioned, the text of Haley’s remarks left no doubt that her target was none other than Donald J. Trump. “Today, we live in a time of threats like few others in recent memory,” Haley said. “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation. No one who...

The Many Ways Bernie Sanders Is not Like Donald Trump

Adele M. StanJan 06, 2016
(Photo: AP/Mary Schwalm)
(Photo: AP/Mary Schwalm) Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a campaign stop in New Hampshire on on January 4, 2016. A mong the many unfortunate conventions of modern punditry is that of the false equivalency. If one novel thing occurs in a given scenario, you can rest assured that a second novel thing will either be deemed to be just like it, or its apposite. So it is that a new assertion is suddenly everywhere: that presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are two sides of the same coin. As Trump is to the right, the pundits assert, Sanders is to the left. After all, look at the many ways in which they are alike! They both yell! They both have New York accents! Both have ugly hair! To be fair to our equivilating pundits, there is one thing that the two have in common: They each express the frustrations of their constituencies. But that’s pretty much where the parallels begin and end. Trump is a billionaire self-financing his campaign...

2016: The Year of the Billionaire

Adele M. StanDec 30, 2015
AP Photo/The Wichita Eagle, Travis Heying
AP Photo/The Wichita Eagle, Travis Heying This photo taken June 11, 2014 shows David Koch, the executive vice president of Wichita's Koch Industries in New York City. I n general, it can be said that billionaires in America almost always have pretty good years, by at least one important measure: They have more than a billion dollars. They’ve made it into a club composed of 536 people , in a nation with a population of 321 million . Over the past 40 years, their fortunes have soared, and according to new report in The New York Times , they pay precious little tax on them. That’s because they’ve bought the Congress that writes the tax code, paid the lobbyists who strong-arm the legislators, and funded the think tanks that crafted the policy strong-armed on the bought-and-paid-for legislators. OK; that may be a bit of an oversimplification—not every member of Congress is in the pocket of the 0.01 percent—but not by much. More and more, the billionaires’ influence is conducted out of...

Trump Love and the Schlonging of American Women

Adele M. StanDec 23, 2015
AP Photo/Carlos Osorio
AP Photo/Carlos Osorio Republican presidential candidate, businessman Donald Trump addresses supporters at a campaign rally, Monday, December 21, 2015, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I n a Quinnipiac poll conducted between December 16-20, half of those surveyed said they would be embarrassed to have Donald Trump as their president. That means the other half did not indicate embarrassment as their reaction to a Trump presidency. Some 44 percent of Republicans, a plurality, said they would be “proud” to have Trump as the leader of the free world. If past responses to Trump’s expressions of hostility to anyone who is not a white, able-bodied man are predictive, there are likely more Republicans today who are proud of their frontrunner. The Quinnipiac survey was taken before Trump said, on Monday night, that Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination because she was “schlonged” by Barack Obama. And speaking of the December 19 Democratic presidential debate, Trump called...

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