Jim Vandehei

The big and powerful are getting bigger and more powerful — and the clear and dominant winners are big cities. With wealth, jobs, and power increasingly concentrated in a few large cities, we are witnessing a growing economic and political divide between urban and rural America. As we've previously written, it's part of a larger dynamic favoring "superstar" countries and companies, too — behemoths that appear positioned to dominate the future global economy. This fuels us-versus-them. New cool technologies hit cities first, be it 5G, autonomous transportation or drone delivery.

House Democrats plan to investigate whether President Donald Trump abused White House power by targeting — and trying to punish with "instruments of state power" — the Washington Post and CNN, said incoming-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Rep Schiff said President Trump "was secretly meeting with the postmaster [general] in an effort to browbeat the postmaster [general] into raising postal rates on Amazon." "This appears to be an effort by the president to use the instruments of state power to punish Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post," Rep Schiff said.

President Donald Trump says railing against his enemies in the media helped him win — and that his supporters like him more when he cranks up the "enemy of the people" rhetoric. President Trump said, "I think I'm doing a service [by attacking the press] when people write stories about me that are so wrong." He said, "I know what I do good and what I do bad. I really get it, OK?

In our lifetime, no president has matched Donald Trump’s ability to summon the power of the pulpit, friendly media, and the tweet-by-tweet power of repetition and persuasion to move minds en masse. You see this in the silence of Republican critics; the instant shifts in GOP views of the FBI, Putin and deficits; and the quick, widespread adoption of his branding efforts around “deep state,” “Spygate” and “no collusion.” We hear so much, so often that we become numb to what Trump is doing.