“Trump’s a.... racist!!! OMG!! I didn’t know!” said no one, ever.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
The Voters Abandoning Donald Trump
Many things could change between now and November’s election—much less 2020. But these detailed soundings show how the gales of resistance Trump has fueled are reshaping the electoral landscape. Whether by age, gender, race, or education, Trump is deepening almost every social and political division that existed before him—with unpredictable consequences for the parties and for the country itself.
Older white men in the electorate are an enormous problem for America. Voting-wise, everyone else makes up for them, though.
Click to see the pic:
Poynter:
To use s***hole or not? The president takes the media into the dumpster
Jim Schachter, news director of public radio station WNYC and a former longtime New York Times journalist, informed his Twitter followers Thursday night of his primary professional challenge of the moment: "I am rendering judgment on whether we can use the word 'shithole' on the radio."
He mulled this as CNN offered an international audience a discussion among five adults, all framed in a Brady Bunch-like set of five boxes, in which the same word was uttered or displayed incessantly on screen. Don Lemon, the host, called himself a product of shitholers, as did many across multiple platforms nationwide after the president borrowed from the Tony Soprano school of political rhetoric. It became morally charged short-hand for being a child in some way of immigration.
And at the same time that National Public Radio in Washington was tweeting listeners, "We are using s***hole online. Note the third asterisk in keeping with NPR style," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was informing its followers, "Our publisher is requesting us to remove @realDonaldTrump's 'vulgar language' from the lede in our @AP story about his vulgar language." (This morning it remains in the lede but is not in the headline.)
What a concept. But better to say it and let the American people know. Stop treating us like 1950’s children.
Telegraph comment on the US Panamanian Ambassador’s resignation:
"As a junior foreign service officer, I signed an oath to serve faithfully the president and his administration in an apolitical fashion, even when I might not agree with certain policies. My instructors made clear that if I believed I could not do that, I would be honor bound to resign. That time has come," Mr Feeley said, according to an excerpt of his resignation letter read to Reuters.
Thomas Edsall/NY Times:
Robots Can’t Vote, but They Helped Elect Trump
Acemoglu argues that recent technological developments have helped drive voters to the right:
The swing to Republicans between 2008 and 2016 is quite a bit stronger in commuting zones most affected by industrial robots. You don’t see much of the impact of robots in prior presidential elections. So it’s really a post 2008 phenomenon.
it’s an interesting piece. And you thought Russian bots were the problem.
The above is an erudite and compelling summary of his presidency.
Trump: USA is for white people. What part of that do you have trouble with?
Greg Sargent/WaPo makes a point I discussed on Thursday’s Kagro in the Morning about Trump screwing his base (work requirements for Medicaid):
Donald Trump ran for president on a narrative of economic populism — pitched mainly to working-class whites — that was supposed to contrast sharply with decades of conventional GOP economic orthodoxy with its emphasis on the idea that the way to help economically struggling Americans is with tax cuts for job creators and liberation from dependence on the safety net.
Once in office, President Trump has fully embraced policies that rest firmly on that same economic orthodoxy — policies that are ostensibly designed to help economically struggling Americans with tax cuts for job creators and liberation from dependence on the safety net.
Here’s the latest example of this: The Trump administration has just announced that it will allow states to impose work and other requirements on recipients of Medicaid. This is a big change. After the failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, this is meant to begin rewriting the social contract at the core of government-sponsored medical insurance, and especially the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, shifting away from the notion that health coverage should be available to those who cannot afford it as a matter of societal right. As such, it may have a negative impact on untold numbers of Trump voters.
See the robot story above, along with Brownstein’s. As it happens, 90% of Medicaid recipients can’t work. They’re children, the elderly, the disabled. How often can you screw your base but expect their vote? And even if they refuse to desert Trump, what has that got to do with Nov 2018?
So how’s it going so far?
Oh.
What we all need today is a Voxsplainer:
How a day that started with a bipartisan immigration deal ended with a “shithole”
The chaotic past 24 hours in Trump and Congress’s immigration talks, explained
Who is in charge of negotiations?
If not Flake and Graham’s plan, then whose? The answer to that question is complicated — and why negotiations have been so chaotic
WSJ:
Trump Lawyer Arranged $130,000 Payment for Adult-Film Star’s Silence
Agreement just before election required woman to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, people familiar with the matter say
A lawyer for President Donald Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.
Michael Cohen, who spent nearly a decade as a top attorney at the Trump Organization, arranged payment to the woman, Stephanie Clifford, in October 2016 after her lawyer negotiated the nondisclosure agreement with Mr. Cohen, these people said.
Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, has privately alleged the encounter with Mr. Trump took place after they met at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, these people said. Mr. Trump married Melania Trump in 2005.
Stormy Daniels threatened to run against David Vitter back in the day.
LA Times:
'Shithole' and other racist things Trump has said — so far
From the moment he launched his candidacy by attacking Mexican immigrants as criminals, President Trump has returned time and again to language that is racially charged and, to many, insensitive and highly offensive.
Whether it is a calculated strategy to appeal to less-tolerant and broad-minded supporters or simply a filter-free chief executive saying what’s on his mind, the cycle is by now familiar: The president speaks, critics respond with outrage and Trump’s defenders accuse his critics of hysterically overreacting.
The latest instance came Thursday, during a White House meeting with congressional lawmakers on immigration. Trump asked why the United States would accept immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean, rather than people from places like Norway, according to two people briefed on the meeting.
A glimpse at some of the president’s earlier provocations:
He is a racist who says racist things. This is not hard.
Peter Baker/NY Times:
A President Who Fans, Rather Than Douses, the Nation’s Racial Fires
But critics and scholars said Mr. Trump’s remarks reflected a longstanding stereotyping of minorities and immigrants and have given permission to others who once hid such views.
“I’m pretty sure that many of the same people he insults and degrades maintain the buildings, sew the clothes, and are at the backbone of the businesses that he and his family depend on for their wealth,” said Marcia Chatelain, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University. “It’s unfortunate that he is representative of a class of people who rely on the labor of those they seek to destroy.”
The event marking the King holiday that Mr. Trump held on Friday was planned long before the uproar over the president’s latest comments, but it put the situation in stark relief.
Roxane Gay/NY Times:
I am tired of comfortable lies. I have lost patience with the shock supposedly well-meaning people express every time Mr. Trump says or does something terrible but well in character. I don’t have any hope to offer. I am not going to turn this into a teaching moment to justify the existence of millions of Haitian or African or El Salvadoran people because of the gleeful, unchecked racism of a world leader. I am not going to make people feel better about the gilded idea of America that becomes more and more compromised and impoverished with each passing day of the Trump presidency.
This is a painful, uncomfortable moment. Instead of trying to get past this moment, we should sit with it, wrap ourselves in the sorrow, distress and humiliation of it. We need to sit with the discomfort of the president of the United States referring to several countries as “shitholes” during a meeting, a meeting that continued, his comments unchallenged. No one is coming to save us. Before we can figure out how to save ourselves from this travesty, we need to sit with that, too.