Timothy Noah
Timothy Noah is a staff writer at The New Republic whose politics coverage centers on Donald Trump’s corruption, the architecture of economic inequality, and the ways power is exercised through public policy and regulation. He is the author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It and writes the Backbencher newsletter, extending his analysis of wealth, power, and governance beyond the magazine. His work takes the form of analytical columns and thought experiments rather than straight news, using detailed examples to show how political decisions translate into money, status, and impunity.
Trump’s kleptocracy and political scandal
Noah’s defining preoccupation on the politics beat is Donald Trump as a case study in kleptocracy and self-dealing in office. In “Kleptocracy Is Trump’s Most Lucrative Business Venture,” he quantifies Trump’s post-presidential income, highlighting billions in earnings, especially from crypto, to show how holding power becomes a revenue stream. He characterizes Trump as “America’s first rentier president,” framing the presidency itself as an asset to be exploited, and uses that lens to explain how official decisions and reputational leverage are turned into cash. In “The Five Trump Scandals That Deserve Thorough Investigation,” he organizes Trump’s controversies into a clear set of probes he argues should be pursued, underscoring a focus on accountability and the practical mechanics of investigation rather than spectacle.
His Trump coverage extends beyond discrete scandals to questions of durability and consequence.
In “Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency,” he examines vulnerabilities in Trump’s hold on power, weighing institutional, legal, and political pressures that could cut short a term. “Why Trump’s White House Reporter Ban Matters So Little” treats a flashpoint over press access as a marginal event compared to the larger structural threats posed by Trump’s behavior, illustrating his tendency to distinguish between symbolic fights and those with real governance stakes.
In “Donald Trump, Poet Extraordinaire,” he dissects Trump’s language itself, treating rhetoric as evidence of worldview and method rather than merely performance. In “Trump’s New Bank Is His Most Naked Scandal Yet,” he presents Trump’s bank venture as a concentrated expression of the same pattern, using a single institution to show how personal enrichment and political power merge.
Economic inequality, plutocracy, and the rich
Noah’s long-running concern with income inequality shapes much of his politics writing. His book The Great Divergence and earlier series work on inequality inform a perspective that treats distributional questions - who gains, who pays - as central to political analysis rather than ancillary.
This background is visible in columns that use current events to test whether the rich can be moved toward greater civic responsibility. In “Will the Bond Market Mayhem Make Rich People Want to Pay More Taxes?”, labeled a “THOUGHT EXPERIMENT,” he uses market turbulence as a narrative device to examine whether financial elites could reconsider their resistance to taxation when instability threatens their interests.
The piece blends macroeconomic context with political psychology, asking how fear, self-preservation, and public finance interact for wealthy actors.
He also takes on intellectual defenses of plutocracy directly. “A Ridiculous New Book Says We Don’t Love the Rich Enough” reviews a pro-rich argument not primarily as a literary artifact but as a political intervention, scrutinizing how its claims about admiration and resentment function in debates over redistribution. Across these pieces, Noah treats books, markets, and tax debates as parts of the same system: the stories society tells about wealth, the rules that govern it, and the feelings that drive those rules.
The through-line is a conviction that politics cannot be understood without looking closely at how policy choices, and the narratives that justify them, entrench or challenge inequality.
Regulation, technology, and capture of the state
Noah uses emerging technology debates to explore how regulation can be bent toward private interests. In “There’s a Right Way to Regulate AI - and a Very Wrong Way,” categorized under “REGULATORY CAPTURE,” he lays out competing approaches to governing artificial intelligence, contrasting frameworks that emphasize public safety and democratic oversight with those that insulate dominant firms from scrutiny. The column treats AI not as an isolated technical issue but as another arena where corporate power can shape the rules, showing how lobbyists, industry alliances, and lax oversight can turn nominal safeguards into tools for entrenching incumbents.
His focus on capture emphasizes process - who writes the rules, who enforces them, and where conflicts of interest sit - over abstractions about innovation.
This concern with regulation links back to his work on Trump and inequality, tying together questions of enforcement, tax policy, and market structure.
When he examines Trump’s ability to monetize public office or the bond market’s reaction to fiscal shocks, the regulatory context - what is permitted, what is tolerated, what is punished - sits close to the center of the analysis. The same is true in his AI writing, where he grounds the technology story in institutional design and the possibility of rules that either resist or facilitate capture.
Across these domains, Noah’s politics coverage frames regulation as a contested terrain where democratic interests and concentrated wealth collide.
Media language and the narratives of power
Noah also writes about how other media outlets and cultural framings shape public understanding of politics. “Is There Any End to The Atlantic’s ‘End-ism’ Fetish?” critiques a pattern of declaring various phenomena to be over, using that magazine’s headlines as an example of how sweeping narrative devices can oversimplify complex realities.
He treats editorial framing as part of the political ecosystem, showing how repeated “end of” stories can distort perceptions of continuity and change. In “Donald Trump, Poet Extraordinaire,” he approaches Trump’s speech as a form of verse, unpacking metaphors, repetitions, and cadences to reveal how language constructs the persona that underwrites his political appeal.
The piece uses close reading to connect style and substance, treating phrasing as evidence of priorities and fears rather than mere surface.
Together, these media and rhetoric columns round out his politics beat by examining not just what happens but how it is told. Noah’s work for The New Republic and his Backbencher newsletter is marked by an analytic, essayistic style that combines detailed data, institutional knowledge, and attention to language. He writes with an emphasis on accountability - of presidents, regulators, and storytellers - and returns repeatedly to the question of how power, money, and narrative reinforce one another in contemporary American politics.
4 more politics journalists.
A.D. Quig
A.D. Quig follows money and power through Chicago and Cook County government, showing how political decisions, taxes and public spending affect residents and businesses. At the Chicago Tribune, she covers city and county politics, municipal finance, tax policy, budgets and the structures shaping mayoral and council authority. She joined the Tribune in 2022 after covering politics for Crain’s Chicago Business and The Daily Line. Her work examines council power, ethics rules, police leadership, tax incentives, public agencies and pandemic aid. She has reported on data center tax breaks, property tax errors, federal relief spending and the fiscal effects of major development proposals. Quig combines insider government reporting with public accountability journalism. She uses public records, data and budget documents, follows committees and staff negotiations, and explains complex decisions in plain language with precise numbers and a direct link to everyday consequences.
Adam Daly
Adam Daly covers politics for amNewYork with a focus on the inner workings of city and state government and the low-profile forums where power is exercised and negotiated. He reports on commissions and panels that shape how New York is governed, treating charter reform and government efficiency as central political terrain. His coverage of moves to replace an Adams-era charter commission with a new government efficiency panel foregrounds mandate, authority, and what “efficiency” means in practice for agencies and services. He tracks who gains and loses influence when one commission supplants another and which constituencies are being answered to. Daly explains dense procedural questions in clear, reader-facing terms, using specific institutional details and occasional wordplay to connect jargon-heavy reforms to public spending, service delivery, and mayoral power.
Adam Pack
Adam Pack covers Capitol Hill through power struggles, investigations and ideological fights, focusing on how Congress intersects with Donald Trump’s agenda. He is a politics writer on Fox News Digital’s Capitol Hill team, covering Congress, federal elections, legislative battles, election rules, war powers, primaries and intraparty fights. He previously wrote for the Daily Caller News Foundation. His reporting examines deadlines, vote counts, bill language, campaign spending, court rulings, oversight reports, culture clashes and emerging issues such as AI-backed political groups. He has covered FISA reauthorization, defense spending, the SAVE America Act, housing policy, redistricting, candidate absences, primary spending and disputes over sex, gender, religion and race-based caucuses. He reports primarily through news features and investigative-style pieces built around documents, committee reports, court records, unearthed video and specific legislative details. He often co-writes complex Capitol Hill stories and publishes “FIRST ON FOX” exclusives.
Adam Sullivan
Adam Sullivan is a veteran politics reporter for WCAX who connects elections and party disputes to everyday life. He covers statewide races, party primaries, federal representation, political rhetoric, extremism, and accountability across the Upper Valley and neighboring states. His reporting includes Becca Balint’s victory over Molly Gray in the Democratic U.S. House primary to replace Congressman Peter Welch. He also reports when political controversies affect public safety, political culture, towns, and institutions, including a New Hampshire Libertarian Party post endorsing violence against elected Democrats. Sullivan follows cultural stories with civic consequences, such as Noah Kahan’s appeal to fans to stop stealing a Strafford road sign linked to his music. He writes straight news centered on concrete events, official reactions, political context, community impact, and what comes next.