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Harold Meyerson

Harold Meyerson is the executive editor of The American Prospect. His email is hmeyerson@prospect.org.

Recent Articles

Boos for Cruz

Harold MeyersonJul 21, 2016
(Sipa via AP Images)
(Sipa via AP Images) Delegates react as Ted Cruz speaks on day three of the Republican National Convention. D ay Three of Donald Trump’s convention has come and gone, and we have already seen two unplanned disruptions the likes of which hadn’t visited the GOP since its uproarious Goldwater Convention of 1964. On Monday afternoon, Ted Cruz’s delegates booed and shouted so loudly after they lost their fight to change the convention rules that the party chairman left the stage and the proceedings ground to a halt. Last night, as it became clear that Cruz would not conclude his speech to the delegates with a Trump endorsement, Trump’s delegates all but booed him off the stage. Maybe this is what happens when Republicans abruptly shift course, as they did in ’64 and as they’re doing today. When the GOP takes a radically new direction, all hell breaks loose. In ’64, a party that had been dominated by moderate Eastern elites, friendly to civil rights and even resigned to living with unions,...

Citizen Trump

Harold MeyersonJul 20, 2016
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
AP Photo/Evan Vucci Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. T he theme of Night Two of the Republican Convention was “Make America Work Again,” but the jobs that the delegates plainly wished to create were jailers’ –the guys who would “Lock her up.” The “her,” if you’ve been orbiting Jupiter and have missed the reduction of the Republican Party to a communal hate-fest, was Hillary Clinton. “Lock her up” was the delegates’ shouted refrain in response to New Jersey Governor’s Chris Christie’s “indictment” of Clinton for crimes against America (crimes so horrible, in fact, that they actually didn’t happen). This is, so far, the “Lock Her Up” convention. Republicans have spent more time vilifying, defaming, and demonizing Clinton (literally demonizing—Ben Carson twice linked her to Lucifer) than they have extolling Donald Trump. Any articulation of a Republican program, meanwhile, has been almost entirely...

The Trump Show is Trapped in Time

Republicans have launched their convention with dire warnings that no longer ring true, and with empty-headed attacks on a more diverse, cosmopolitan and liberal nation.

Harold MeyersonJul 19, 2016
Sputnik via AP
Sputnik via AP Donald Trump speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. gop_convention_icon.jpg W hat time is it? What year is it? The first night of Donald Trump’s convention suggested we were back in an earlier age, when crime was rampant, fear stalked the cities, and good people hunkered down in their homes and prayed the storm would pass. “The vast majority of Americans do not feel safe,” Rudy Giuliani grimly announced, before proclaiming that Trump would restore order in America as he, Rudy (thumping his chest to make sure you understood he meant himself), had in New York. Never mind that serious crime has fallen by a quarter since 2006, and had been halved in the decade preceding. Dangers lurk everywhere. To prove the point, Trump’s handlers produced three parents of sons killed by undocumented immigrants. Two were killed in auto accidents, however, and with more than 30,000 Americans killed in such accidents every year, it’s hard to argue on the basis of two...

Convention: A City on Edge

Harold MeyersonJul 18, 2016
(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar) Barriers divide 9th Street in Cleveland as Republicans prepare to open their convention. gop_convention_icon.jpg T he passengers on the streetcar inching along in downtown Cleveland, the waitress in the corner lunchroom, the riders on the train to the city’s far suburbs—they’re all nervous. The waitress, who served some colleagues and me as the news broke of the murder of three Baton Rouge policemen, was visibly upset and all but trembling about the coming four days. The passengers on the streetcar, one of whom worked a few blocks from the Quicken Loans Arena, site of this week’s Republican convention, segued from what they feared would be the near impossibility of getting around town, or just to work, during the convention to the general apprehension of what hell might break loose. The riders on the train to the ‘burbs alternated between excitement and presentiment. Cleveland is not an armed camp—at least not visibly, at least not yet. Despite laws...

Bernie, Hillary, and the Ghost of Ernst Thalmann

Harold MeyersonJul 13, 2016
(Photo: AP/Andrew Harnik)
(Photo: AP/Andrew Harnik) Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on July 12, where he endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. B ernie Sanders is no longer campaigning against Hillary Clinton. He’s campaigning against Donald Trump and the ghost of Ernst Thälmann. Ernst who? Thälmann was the leader of the German Communist Party from the late 1920s until the Nazis arrested him a few months after they took power in 1933. But to the degree that anyone remembers Thälmann today, it’s for the absurd and calamitous party line—handed down by Joseph Stalin, but which Thälmann ensured that all German communists would echo—that he and his comrades advocated during Hitler’s ascent to power. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, the real menace to Germany, Thälmann argued, wasn’t the Nazis but the Communists’ center-left, and more successful, rival for the backing of German workers: the Social Democrats. The SDs, he said, were actually “social...

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