The holidays have arrived once again. You know, that annual festival of goodwill, compulsory spending and the dawning realization that Santa and Satan are anagrams.

Even in the best of years, Americans stagger through this season feeling financially woozy. This year, however, the picture is bleaker. And a growing number of Americans are feeling...Read more

WASHINGTON — Jeffrey Rosenberg is still trying to understand why President Donald Trump would free the man who defrauded him out of a quarter of a million dollars.

Rosenberg, a retired wholesale produce distributor living in Nevada, has supported Trump since he entered politics, but the president's decision in November to commute the sentence...Read more

Republicans in the 1st Congressional District are vying for President Donald Trump’s endorsement, but he left his speech in Rocky Mount on Friday night without offering one, or acknowledging the candidates.

Candidate filing ended at noon Friday, and five Republicans are hoping to defeat Rep. Don Davis, a Democrat from Snow Hill.

The 1st ...Read more

President Donald Trump began a rally Friday night in North Carolina talking about crime and then highlighted his efforts to combat economic uncertainty — while also steering clear of addressing new disclosures involving the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In front of hundreds of people at Rocky Mount Event Center in eastern North ...Read more

BOISE, Idaho — Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador on Friday raised “concerns” about President Donald Trump’s Thursday executive order calling for the downgrade of marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug. The administration called for the change to increase access to marijuana for medical uses, the order said.

“The ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik announced Friday she was ending her campaign for New York governor and would retire from the House at the end of her current term.

Stefanik was challenging Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul but had to contend with a primary opponent, with Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman entering the race ...Read more

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced deals with nine pharmaceutical companies on Friday, the latest in a series of pacts designed to lower drug prices for some Americans in exchange for a three-year reprieve from threatened tariffs.

The most recent pledges mean 14 of the 17 drugmakers targeted by Trump this summer have agreed to ...Read more

CHICAGO — The Chicago Transit Authority’s plan to boost the number of police officers and K-9 guards on the city’s mass transit system is “materially deficient,” President Donald Trump’s administration said Friday as it threatened to cut the system off from up to $50 million in federal funding.

Trump’s Federal Transit ...Read more

WASHINGTON — An unusually large group of onlookers in the Senate gallery caught Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s attention. She turned toward the group, sitting in an area of the gallery normally reserved for friends and family of her colleagues.

More than 80 members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina were in the balcony staring down at ...Read more

President Trump's media company is merging with a nuclear fusion energy firm in a $6 billion deal aimed at generating more power amid growing demand from power-hungry artificial intelligence data centers.

The merger between Trump Media & Technology and TAE Technologies could lead to one of the world's first publicly traded fusion energy ...Read more

WASHINGTON — The Senate followed the House in leaving for the Christmas break on Thursday, clearing another batch of President Donald Trump’s nominations but kicking to January the fate of the next handful of spending bills.

The Senate confirmed, 53-43, an en bloc package of 97 nominations. Senators also by unanimous consent confirmed the ...Read more

It’s time to ask the question plainly: Has President Donald Trump finally, fully lost it?

The latest indication that Trump is no longer just instinctively belligerent and cruel, but perhaps is experiencing something even more psychologically alarming, came Monday, in the form of (what else?) a social media post.

“Rob Reiner, a tortured and...Read more

My wife and I are once again rewatching “Mad Men,” a show that has, for better or worse, lodged itself deep within my personality. I can’t remember the password to my bank account, or which of my kid’s “Spirit Days” is next Tuesday, but I can endlessly quote “Mad Men.”

We just finished season one, which ends with “The Wheel.�...Read more

Twenty-five years ago this month, the words of one good man uneasily brought us all together.

Al Gore did not have to concede Florida and with it, the 2000 presidential election and America’s future. With just 537 Florida votes separating him and George W. Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to the recount of thousands of Florida ...Read more

WASHINGTON — For months, there were signs that appropriators were not on board with a Trump administration plan to wipe out funding for a decades-old Justice Department program tasked with coordinating major drug-trafficking and transnational-crime investigations.

Republican-led spending proposals rejected the idea. A Senate report said ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers hoping to ban congressional stock trading are seeing fractures in their alliance as they try to bring the issue to the House floor next year before attention turns to the midterm elections.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., accused Democratic leaders of trying to derail consensus legislation hammered out by a bipartisan ...Read more

ATLANTA — As Georgia lawmakers gathered in Athens for a legislative training session five years ago, there was a hubbub inside the Classic Center conference room that served as then-House Speaker David Ralston’s headquarters.

It was Dec. 7, 2020, and President Donald Trump was on the warpath — furious at Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump broke with past presidents with Wednesday night’s end-of-year address to the nation in which he raised his voice repeatedly and cast wide blame for a stubborn economy that has frustrated many Americans.

Former officials and analysts called the speech an unprecedented attempt to upend the State of the Union ...Read more

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday fast-tracking a push to ease some restrictions on marijuana in one of the most significant shifts in federal drug policy in decades.

The move aims to reclassify marijuana as a less-dangerous drug within a few months and opens new avenues for medical research, inching closer to the moves ...Read more

The Republican Congress headed home for the holidays Thursday without doing anything about health insurance costs set to skyrocket for more than 20 million Americans when Affordable Care Act tax credits expire on Jan. 1.

Despite an eleventh-hour squabble over dueling proposals and with President Donald Trump mostly silent, GOP House Speaker ...Read more