Roseanne Barr out (it’s the racism, stupid), Eric Grietens out (it’s the dark money, stupid). Tuesday was a day that decency won. Come November, you can make decency win even more days. Vote them out.
The Hill:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that racism is still a major problem in American society and politics, according to a new NBC News–SurveyMonkey poll.
Sixty-four percent of those surveyed said racism remains a major problem, while 30 percent said racism exists but is not a major public issue. Three percent said racism once existed but is no longer a problem, and 1 percent said racism has never been a crucial problem.
But then there’s the current WH:
Spencer Ackerman/Daily Beast:
Viktor Orban won reelection as Hungary’s prime minister last month through a blood-and-soil campaign that married antisemitism with Islamophobia. Donald Trump’s secretary of state is about to reverse years of U.S. policy and receive Orban’s chief diplomat at Foggy Bottom.
Current and former State Department officials expressed alarm that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is giving facetime to an envoy for the demagogic and authoritarian Orban, who also happens to be Vladimir Putin’s best European friend.
“I’m fucking disgusted,” said a State Department official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. The official considered Pompeo “cozying up to individuals like Orban” part of a broader pattern of the Trump administration ignoring human-rights abuses and democratic backsliding.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. - Maya Angelou
NPR:
Trump Tests Midterm Message On Immigration, MS-13 'Animals' During Tenn. Rally
President Trump tried out his own midterm playbook Tuesday at a campaign rally in Tennessee by ramping up his rhetoric on illegal immigration and gang-related crimes.
The president's main goal with the Nashville event was to campaign for GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who finds herself in a close Senate contest with former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen that could be pivotal in deciding control of the Senate.
"I've never heard of this guy — who is he?" Trump chided Bredesen. "He's an absolute tool of Chuck Schumer, and of course the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi."
Noah Berlatsky/NBC:
The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism
The research suggests that when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.
The World Values Survey data used is from the period 1995 to 2011 — well before Donald Trump's 2016 run for president. It suggests, though, that Trump's bigotry and his authoritarianism are not separate problems, but are intertwined. When Trump calls Mexicans "rapists," and when he praises authoritarian leaders, he is appealing to the same voters.
Trump is going all -out white nationalist at a rally for a Republican Senatorial candidate. Pompeo is meeting with the anti-Semitic Viktor Orban representative. Listen to Maya Angelou.
California, choose wisely on Tuesday. Everyone else, get out there and work the vote. November is going to be here soon, and the stakes could not be higher. No kidding.
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
Democrats Are Running a Smart, Populist Campaign
Democratic candidates aren’t obsessed with President Trump, and they aren’t giving up on the white working class as irredeemably racist. They are running pocketbook campaigns that blast Republicans for trying to take health insurance from the middle class while bestowing tax cuts on the rich (charges that have the benefit of being true)…
The political scientist Theda Skocpol is among the sharpest observers of modern American politics, having studied the Obama presidency, the Tea Party reaction and now the Trump resistance. Skocpol and her colleagues are tracking Trump-leaning areas in four swing states, and she too has been struck by the Democrats’ relative unity. “Media pundits and even social scientists want to look for some kind of ideological divide,” she told me. “I just don’t see a huge set of divisions in the Democratic Party. They’re all talking about economic issues.”
Doing so is smart, because it helps Democrats send the most powerful message in politics: I’m on your side — and my opponent isn’t. Americans really are divided on abortion, guns, race and other cultural issues, but they’re remarkably progressive on economics. When Democrats talk about health care, education and jobs, they can focus the white working class on the working-class part of its identity rather than the white part. And Democrats can fire up their base at the same time.
AP:
Resistance makes subtle impact even where Trump is popular
But even in Edmond, Oklahoma, Toombs has found her sisters-in-arms. And it’s the reach of anti-Trump forces into red states like Oklahoma that gives Democrats hopes of a national resurgence, though no one suggests that the heartland will change its political allegiance on a dime.
Regardless, the simple act of local liberals emerging from their shells has the potential to subtly change the dynamics in places like Edmond.
“It’s been a revelation,” Toombs said of joining a group of more than 300 Democratic women in Edmond, a place she believed housed only a couple of other members of her political tribe. “We’re excited and also apprehensive thinking of what the fall’s going to be like. I hold my breath, hoping we created enough energy.”
CJR:
Lie? Falsehood? What to call the president’s words
Whatever label journalists choose for the president’s false statements, it’s obvious that Trump doesn’t always tell the truth. After all, the Times Opinion section, which has no compunction about calling them “lies,” kept a running tally of the falsehoodsthrough the fall—it numbers in the hundreds. Whether each is intentional or unintentional, the more important job for the journalist is to provide context and evidence to refute them. Calling a statement a “deliberate falsehood” instead of a “lie” isn’t an attempt to excuse the behavior; it’s an attempt to accurately, if perhaps overcautiously, describe what’s going on.
Below, more on Trump’s tenuous relationship with the truth, and how journalists respond.
Alice Dreger/Guardian:
I am a liberal. But I know Democrats in office are no better than Republicans
There are real policy differences between liberals and conservatives. Voting still matters. But what I’ve come to believe matters much more than my vote is giving people high-quality, non-partisan news. This is news that doesn’t take sides – that requires us to try to rise above our loyalties, to try to cancel out each other’s biases in the collaborative reporting and editing process.
Because if there is any hope of getting citizens to demand accountability, transparency, equal treatment, and ethical behavior from their governments, the way to get there is to show them whenever anyone is behaving in a troubling way. I see far too little of this in journalism today, as the internet economy rewards outraged clicks, not genuinely uncomfortable news – news that makes us doubt our assumptions and loyalties.
That’s why we blog.
On Trey Gowdy and the Russia probe:
On Rosanne:
David Frum/Atlantic:
The Measure of Trump’s Devotion
On Memorial Day, as the nation turned to the president to lead its shared rituals of unity and common purpose, he revealed himself unequal to the office he holds.
Trump’s perfect emptiness of empathy has revealed itself again and again through his presidency, but never as completely and conspicuously as in his self-flattering 2018 Memorial Day tweets. They exceed even the heartless comment in a speech to Congress—in the presence of a grieving widow—that a fallen Navy Seal would be happy that his ovation from Congress had lasted longer than anybody else’s.
It’s not news that there is something missing from Trump where normal human feelings should go. His devouring need for admiration from others is joined to an extreme, even pathological, inability to return any care or concern for those others. But Trump’s version of this disconnect comes most especially to the fore at times of national ritual.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Last week I wrote a piece arguing that we need to stop chasing Trump down the absurd rabbit holes that he digs for us, where we pretend that some ridiculous lie he tosses out is worthy of serious consideration. So I want to tread carefully here, because the question isn’t whether Trump’s specific allegations have any merit. This is worth discussing, however, because it’s part of a broader campaign on the part of the president and his allies to create a fog around the truth of what happened in 2016. It’s plain that he desperately wants us to forget those events, particularly his own actions and those of people around him. ...
So there may have been more aggressive moves Obama could have made, even if any public statements he had offered would have been unlikely to change the outcome of the election. But here’s what’s important now: Whatever you think of Obama’s decision-making, it changes nothing about what Trump and his campaign did.
On history:
Check the comments on this one by clicking the tweet. I hope he’ll be okay. But man, that co-pay is something else...
On millennial men and women: