Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots
A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his “bible,” and the man who wrote it
As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King (“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possible.
The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.
When you’re this horrible, why give it up? It’s who you are. By the way, these days the @GOP is a WH mouth organ.
Emily Guskin/WaPo:
A clear majority of Americans oppose Trump’s emergency declaration
On Friday, President Trump vetoed a measure to block his national emergency declaration. The measure passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support.
Numerous polls suggest Trump’s decision was popular among his Republican base. But his decision to use executive authority to fund a wall along the southern border is opposed by a clear majority of the public.
That is reflected in six polls taken from early January to early March. By roughly a 2-to-1 margin, Americans oppose Trump’s decision to use emergency powers to build a border wall. That’s a wider margin than the Senate resolution to overturn Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, which passed 59 to 41.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
In a rising tide of white nationalism, Trump’s presidency is morally unacceptable
Beyond that, I’ve never seen an incident that managed to combine so many of our modern anxieties -- especially about the role that the internet and popular social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and niche sites like 8Chan increasingly play in spreading both bogus information and ideologies of hate, but also about race and religion, the ubiquity of guns, and a political climate that in too many nations is working to foment intolerance instead of eliminating it.
One of those nations, unfortunately, is the United States.
It’s ironic that -- in a time when the American political debate centers on Trump’s made-up emergency about a border wall -- there ain’t no mountain high enough to keep the most vile, racist propaganda from spreading from Europe to the United States to Australia and echo back again in a matter of nanoseconds, and to keep that bile from inspiring the kind of deadly violence you’d never see from Central American immigrants.
Carlos Lozado/WaPo:
Thinking for Trump
Other presidents had a brain trust. But the intellectuals backing this White House are a bust.
Being a Trump intellectual is an entirely different task. Donald Trump won the White House campaigning against established expertise. He doesn’t like to read beyond a page or so. His brain trust is more “Fox & Friends” than American Enterprise Institute, his influences more Bannon than Buckley. Even so, a clutch of pro-Trump intellectuals has emerged to issue manifestos, launch journals and publish books, attempting to impose a rational framework onto this most impetuous and incurious chief executive. They want to believe that the president embodies worthy objectives beyond his own personal benefit and political survival — that there really is something noble called Trumpism, not just someone crass named Trump.
Yet they struggle to make this case, or perhaps they make the only version they can. In their recent books, Trumpist thinkers spend less time offering specific, persuasive defenses of the president’s tenure than relentlessly attacking his opponents — liberals, establishment Republicans, Never Trumpers and any nonbelievers whose perfidy has rendered Trump not just necessary but inevitable.
The pro-Trump intellectuals claim to embrace Trump for his mind. But they stick with him for his enemies.
WaPo:
Former spa owner and frequent Mar-a-Lago guest sparks concerns about ‘porous’ environment at president’s club
Li “Cindy” Yang, a business owner and Republican donor, was a frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago, turning up at last year’s GOP Lincoln Day Dinner and snapping pictures there last month with actor Jon Voight. She recently attended the annual Super Bowl party at President Trump’s nearby golf club — posing for a selfie alongside the president.
Yang’s activities at Trump’s private clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., have attracted attention in recent days after a spa she once owned was the target of a widely publicized sex-trafficking sting involving the owner of the New England Patriots.
Scrutiny has also centered on a company Yang ran offering foreign visitors access to the president and other top Republican officials. According to an archived version of her company’s Chinese-language website, which became inactive after recent news reports, the company offered VIP access to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, and autographed photos of Trump.
Ilhan Omar/WaPo:
We must apply our universal values to all nations. Only then will we achieve peace.
I believe in an inclusive foreign policy — one that centers on human rights, justice and peace as the pillars of America’s engagement in the world, one that brings our troops home and truly makes military action a last resort. This is a vision that centers on the experiences of the people directly affected by conflict, that takes into account the long-term effects of U.S. engagement in war and that is sincere about our values regardless of short-term political convenience.
This means reorienting our foreign affairs to focus on diplomacy and economic and cultural engagement. At a time when we spend more on our military than the next seven countries combined, our global armed presence is often the most immediate contact people in the developing world have with the United States. National security experts across the political spectrum agree that we don’t need nearly 800 military bases outside the United States to keep our country safe.