Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful new essay, “The First White President,” offers up an indictment of white America — and white punditry — that is more sweeping than it first appears. Coates’ argument is not just that Donald Trump’s ascent was fueled by the racism of much of his white electorate. It’s also that Trump’s candidacy, election, and presidency, coming in the first election following two terms of the nation’s first black president, represent nothing less than an effort to eradicate the very fact that America elected a black president in the first place.
Coates argues that we must forthrightly confront the wretched reality that Trump won because he framed his candidacy, overtly, as a “negation” of the first black presidency — as a promise to cancel it as a kind of historical accident. Trump launched his rise with the “birther” charge that Barack Obama’s presidency was illegitimate. and vowed to erase the Obama legacy, i.e., to obliterate all historical evidence of the first black president’s successes. Thus, Coates argues, Trump’s ascension constitutes at its core a reassertion of white supremacy as the rightful American order.
There is another claim embedded in that one that I want to try to say something about. Coates extensively challenges a noxious strain of punditry about Trump’s victory, and about how we should respond to it. And he deals it devastating blow.
…
The force and value of Coates’ broader case is undeniable.
Still, in accounting for what is happening in American politics right now, we should all say more about what the deep resistance to all of this means. Not to do so creates an opening for variations on the bad arguments that Coates destroyed to reenter through the back door.
A reminder if you missed it that the Coates essay is extraordinary.
Matt Lewis/Daily Beast:
It Sure Looks Like Steve Bannon Wants the Democrats to Retake Congress
The alt-right agent provocateur’s plan to find candidates to primary GOP incumbents stands to reason, from his point of view. He must first destroy the GOP, then save it.
Michael Gerson/WaPo:
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) promised Obamacare repeal, funding for the wall and tax reform, all by the end of August. For the GOP, it is now September, both literally and metaphorically.
In the spring of their hopes, Republican leaders placed a bet — which seemed reasonable at the time — that they could contain President Trump and pass legislation despite him. This required looking away from the uglier aspects of Trump’s appeal — his Twitter transgressions, his appallingly frenzied rallies, his rule by ridicule. All this was worth swallowing because Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would pass their conservative agenda.
The wager was large and lost. The attempt to revive a health-care alternative in the Senate seems halfhearted and doomed by the same ideological dynamics that killed the legislation the first time. Republican enthusiasm for the Mexican border wall is limited by the fact that it is among the most wasteful, impractical and useless ideas ever spouted by an American president. And ambitious tax reform has been tabled in favor of a few tax cuts that are likely to reaffirm public impressions that the “P” in GOP stands for “plutocracy.”
Reminder from Monkey Cage Blog/WaPo, February:
We can’t find any evidence of voting fraud in New Hampshire.
As with our first analysis of voter fraud in the 2016 election, we find no evidence to support the assertions of large-scale voter fraud that have been forthcoming from the Trump administration.
Steve Benen/MSNBC:
Which leads us to the question of motive. The obvious reason to push a bogus narrative like this one is to create a framework for policymakers: voter-suppression advocates need a rationale to approve new restrictions, and Kobach appears a little too eager to provide them with one.
Sham commission. Use actual experts next time.
Seth Masket/Pacific Standard, political scientist:
THE SILENCING OF HILLARY CLINTON
Disclosure: I haven't read it. (Honestly, I don't find many candidate narratives of their own campaigns all that interesting.) Nor have many of those who are currently criticizing her for writing it.
But the main criticisms seem to be:
- Clinton shouldn't be criticizing Bernie Sanders right now because that's just causing Democratic divisions at a time when the party need unity.
- She lost to a vulnerable candidate and thus must be an even worse candidate herself.
- Her general election loss means it's time for her to go away and stop "consuming oxygen."
I'd like to address each of these in turn. ...
Does her book add fuel to intra-party fights? Undoubtedly. And there's a great time for a party to try to squelch dissent within its ranks. That's in the few months leading up to a general election. We're nowhere near there. We're more than a year from the congressional mid-term elections and more than three years from the next presidential general election. Now is precisely when a party argues over its differences. If you don't think now is the time for Democrats to debate how their party runs and what it should stand for, then you basically think there's never such a time.
Don’t miss this story, from McClatchy last week (Trump promised not to work with foreign entities. His company just did) and amplified by CNBC (Trump's Dubai resort project has hired a Chinese state-owned firm) and The Hill (Trump company hires Chinese government-owned firm despite promise: report). It isn’t just reneging on a pledge, which may or may not have loopholes. Keep in mind that Chinese state owned companies have China’s interest in mind, not that of America’s. They, their subsidiaries and other Chinese government owned companies have worked for Chinese interests in Africa, Greece, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Panama, Peru, Dubai, Southeast Asia among other nations. But of course, Trump’s in it for the money, not the strategic concerns. See below, as well.
Eliot A. Cohen/Atlantic:
How Trump Is Ending the American Era
For all the visible damage the president has done to the nation’s global standing, things are much worse below the surface.
These circumstances would have caused severe headaches for a competent and sophisticated successor. Instead, the United States got a president who had unnervingly promised a wall on the southern border (paid for by Mexico), the dismantlement of long-standing trade deals with both competitors and partners, a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin, and a ban on Muslims coming into the United States.
Some of these and Trump’s other wild pronouncements were quietly walked back or put on hold after his inauguration; one defense of Trump is that his deeds are less alarming than his words. But diplomacy is about words, and many of Trump’s words are profoundly toxic….
Foreign governments have adapted. They flatter Trump outrageously. Their emissaries stay at his hotels and offer the Trump Organization abundant concessions (39 trademarks approved by China alone since Trump took office, including one for an escort service). They take him to military parades; they talk tough-guy-to-tough-guy; they show him the kind of deference that only someone without a center can crave. And so he flip-flops: Paris was no longer “so, so out of control, so dangerous” once he’d had dinner in the Eiffel Tower; Xi Jinping, during an April visit to Mar-a-Lago, went from being the leader of a parasitic country intent on ripping off American workers to being “a gentleman” who “wants to do the right thing.” (By July, Trump was back to bashing China, for doing “NOTHING” to help us.)
This is an official AAP tweet:
Politico:
‘Everybody Needs to Stand Up’
Texas Rep. Will Hurd loves bipartisan deals, wants President Trump to call out racists and urges him to save the Dreamers. This is what it’s like to be one of the most vulnerable Republicans of 2018.