In the fall of 1971, Richard Nixon had reason to be optimistic. The long sought China Summit had just been announced, for the following year, to great (and deserved) acclaim. Vietnam, to be sure, remained an issue, but the continuing troop withdrawal had reduced its political drag at home. With his re-election campaign now looming, the polls showed him well out in front of the presumed Democratic front-runners. But all this good news had little effect on Nixon’s deep-rooted obsession with a growing list of real and perceived adversaries at home. And so, even as the war in Vietnam slowly abated, the war at home only escalated and expanded, against liberals, anti-war activists, Jews, East Coast elites – anyone perceived, however remotely, as a threat to his presidency. “Lashing out was Nixon’s nature,” Jack Farrell tells Kurt Andersen. “His actions were reflexive, heedless of the peril” which lay ahead, and which would ultimately drive him from office.

Last Friday afternoon, just as President Joe Biden was boarding Marine One for a weekend at Camp David, a reporter yelled out a question: “On Covid misinformation, what is your message to platforms like Facebook?” Above the din of the helicopter, Biden responded with his quintessential frankness: “They’re killing people.” His comment didn’t come out of nowhere.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded in July 1921 as a small, revolutionary group that hoped to impose a foreign ideology—Marxism-Leninism—on a vast, weak, poor agrarian nation. In July 2021, the CCP hopes to use its 100th anniversary to convince China, and the world, that it is the only organization qualified to lead a powerful, wealthy, ambitious superpower. How Xi Jinping and his propaganda ministries tell the story of the past hundred years, and how that experience be understood, speaks volumes about the CCP’s goals and values as it looks to its future. Please join three of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese propaganda and media—all of whom have recently conducted research as Wilson Fellows—for a detailed analysis of how the CCP sees, and sells, its leadership of China after 100 years.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, called it “highly unusual” for the OMB job to remain unfilled this far into the administration. She noted the Senate has been slower than past administrations in confirming Biden’s nominees, but in the case of OMB the president has yet to put forward another pick since withdrawing Tanden.

"Everybody can be on the stage now. You get a mental picture of the president standing at the bully pulpit on the stage but nobody's in the audience. That's because everybody who was once in the audience is actually on the stage with their own mini-pulpit, and don't want to be persuaded," says Barbara Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.