One after another, a parade of the wealthiest and most elite institutions in American life since last November have found themselves confronted by unprecedented demands from President Donald Trump and his team of retribution-seekers.

One after another, these establishment pillars have met these demands with the same response: capitulation and compliance.

President Donald Trump is escalating his multi-front assault on what supporters see as an elite establishment, using raw presidential power to bend the government, law, media, public health, foreign policy, education and even the arts to his will.

Trump left no doubt in last year’s campaign that he’d use executive authority to seek retribution against his political enemies. But his attempt to transform America’s politics and culture is far broader than a personal revenge trip.

What happens when the fantasy of getting everything you want collides with cold, hard reality? Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility attempts to answer that question by plotting the love lives of two young women: the cool-headed, pragmatic Elinor Dashwood, and her feverishly emotional younger sister, Marianne. Together, the pair embody the novel’s titular struggle: of practicality versus passion, decorum versus desire, the head versus the heart (or the hormones).

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”. His formula is justifiably famous, but it’s worth noting that it comes from an autobiographical essay titled “The Crack-Up”, which painfully detailed Fitzgerald’s inability to pass his own test, and resulting descent into alcoholic dysfunction.

Publicly, the global business leaders who gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, haven’t wanted to predict the winner of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. The closest they’ve come? Referring to it as a “geopolitical risk.”

But talk to executives privately, and they’re more explicit: They expect Donald Trump to win and while many are worried about that, they are also resigned to it.

The president of the Heritage Foundation confronted hosts at the World Economic Forum Thursday in Davos, Switzerland, challenging claims that the WEF is protecting democracy and calling so-called elites "part of the problem."

A ghost of elections past in the form of ex-president Donald Trump haunted the annual schmoozefest of the world's political and business elites in Davos.

While the American reality television star-turned-politician was on the other side of the Atlantic, the biggest names in business, finance and politics at the Swiss Alpine resort could not escape him after he stormed to victory on Monday in the Iowa caucuses.

The question of why Donald Trump manages to maintain such a grip on the Republican base, to the point where he can remain a nationally viable candidate despite all of his misdeeds and legal woes, is one of the most important issues in American politics. It’s a subject that has been explored extensively, with the best evidence converging on the same general story: Trump is the avatar of a kind of resentful reactionary politics, one uncomfortable with a changing America, that defines the worldview of a plurality (if not a majority) of the GOP faithful.

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

There is an environmental disaster taking place in East Palestine, Ohio. The small town may never be the same. But there has been a disturbing lack of urgency from the media and, most importantly, the Biden Administration.

It's puzzling that people who claim to care so much about the environment are relatively silent in the face of an actual environmental calamity. It's led me to come to only one conclusion: Elites don't give a damn about Ohio.