WaPo:
Suburban voters angry with Trump threaten GOP’s grip on House
In Illinois’ 6th Congressional District, 62,990 people voted Democratic last week for seven candidates, up from just 8,615 in the 2014 primary. In a district that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, a warning is being sent in letters as big and bold as any that have hung on a Trump building.
If Republicans want to hold onto the House, they will have to compete in communities that had little to do with the working-class regions that sent Trump to the White House in 2016: affluent, white-collar suburbs of Democratic cities. Many of the most competitive House seats this year are in the tony bedroom communities of Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Philadelphia, New York and Washington.
Slate:
It only took a week for Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Costello, a moderate Republican representing suburban Philadelphia, to recognize the headwinds that Donald Trump’s presidency would create for him and members in similar districts.
“After the travel ban,” Costello said in an interview Tuesday. It wasn’t just the overwhelming protests at airports but all the protesters who gathered at his office, too. They were linking him, their Republican member of Congress, with the decisions of the new Republican president. He remembered “the expectation that, somehow, I needed to issue a statement within X number of minutes or somehow I was complicit, or whatever they were trying to accuse me of.”...
He gamely rattled off some of the difficult events from the past year: “Charlottesville. Firing of Comey. Then there’s been a couple of tweets. The Mika Brzezinski tweet was something. Didn’t he say Kirsten Gillibrand would do anything for money?” (He did.)
“Things like that were little bumps in the road,” he said. “It was stormy before there was Stormy.”
I asked him how Republican members in swing districts thread the needle when the president makes one of these remarks.
“There’s no threading the needle,” Costello said. “The more people think you’re trying to thread the needle, the more they’re actually going to be critical.”
Well, yeah. “He’s a monster, and what are you going to do about it, Congressman?”
Daisy Bassen/Media:
In staff lounges and locker rooms, at the nursing station, in our offices. In the parking lot, sitting with our hands on the steering wheel, the key in the ignition, unturned.
We cry when we cannot save the man who stumbled into the ER, holding his belly together with his two hands, calling out “I been shot! I been shot.” When the kid who had been fooling around with a friend is beyond our help, when the veteran with too many memories eradicates them with a bullet. We cry after we sit with the mother whose child killed himself, with the child whose father killed himself, with the wife who’d had no idea she was going to become a widow.
Our eyes fill with tears we don’t let fall in front of you. Our cheeks are wet with the tears that spill, beyond our control.
Sean Trende:
I think people who see Trumpism as something aberrant in the Republican Party haven't though much about the history of the Republican Party. Unless they're NeverTrumpers, in which case they're in a state of denial. 1/
David M. Perry/PS:
HOW WHITE AMERICAN TERRORISTS ARE RADICALIZED
They're reading the same websites, talking to each other, and killing the same targets. The lone wolves are actually a pack.
It's easy to connect the dots after an attack. A radicalized white man commits murders. Investigators dive into his past. The dots emerge in the clarity of hindsight. In the interests of preventing future attacks, though, we need a clear understanding of how white terrorism works in this country. While not organized by some kind of hierarchical conspiracy or secret cabal, these discrete acts of violence are part of a systematic campaign to terrorize and divide Americans. What's worse, it's working.
WaPo:
Her son, facing murder charges, is being called an ‘alt-right killer.’ This mother blames herself.
Her troubled son had been up for two nights straight, inconsolable over a breakup, when she pulled him into her bed to soothe him. She never meant to doze, but woke with a start at 4:26 a.m.
The 17-year-old was gone — and so were the car keys she had hidden under her pillow.
She darted through her Northern Virginia home calling his name, before reaching out to his ex-girlfriend’s mother. The texted reply sent waves of dread through her: “He is here. We are calling police.”
The mother expected to see a single officer as she drove toward the ex-girlfriend’s home. Instead she found dozens of police cruisers, a gurney on the front lawn and an officer yelling at her to get to a nearby hospital.
What happened?
Monkey Cage/WaPo:
Despite porn stars and Playboy models, white evangelicals aren’t rejecting Trump. This is why.
Why are white Christians sticking so closely to President Trump, despite these claims of sexual indiscretions? And why are religious individuals and groups that previously decried sexual impropriety among political leaders suddenly willing to give Trump a “mulligan” on his infidelity?
Our new study points to a different answer than others have offered. Voters’ religious tenets aren’t what is behind Trump support; rather, it’s Christian nationalism — their view of the United States as a fundamentally Christian nation.
Max Boot/WaPo:
Why I changed my mind about John Bolton
Google enables a never-ending game of “Gotcha!” The Internet search engine makes it easy to find past writings that seemingly contradict more recent ones. Case in point: My Post columncritiquing newly appointed national security adviser John Bolton for ideological extremism and poor managerial skills. Trump’s fans predictably dredged up a 2005 Los Angeles Times op-ed I had written supporting Bolton’s nomination for United Nations ambassador. Ben Boychuk, managing editor of the website American Greatness, tweeted: “Gee, I wonder what changed.” James Taranto, the Wall Street Journal op-ed editor, wrote: “I mean, c’mon dude.” With its trademark subtlety, the pro-Trump FrontPage magazine hyperventilated: “Max Boot’s slimy smear of Bolton shows his hypocrisy.”
So if one’s views change over the course of 13 years, that’s evidence of “hypocrisy”? I would say that a lack of change in one’s views over so many years is evidence of a terminally closed mind. I’m in sympathy with the quote commonly attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Jason Sattler/USA Today:
Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump, brought to you by Mike Pence and the religious right
The hypocrisy here is as obvious as Trump’s hundreds of conflicts of interests. American evangelicals, by and large, have decided that they can ignore Trump’s personal morality because they are getting something far more important in return — the chance to impose their personal morality on others.
And their role model for this devil’s deal is the evangelical who made the Trump presidency possible: Mike Pence.
