Joan Quigley is the author of “Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital” and “The Black Woman Who Led the Fight Against Jim Crow – And Why No One Has Ever Heard of Her” featured in TPM’s new longform magazine The Arch. She’ll be stopping by the Hive (sub req) tomorrow to talk more about the topics covered in the piece, from Barack Obama’s inaugural reference in 2009 to his father not being served, Black Lives Matter as a contemporary platform for activist women, and the way that Terrell set a precedent for Rosa Parks.
Joan will be taking questions tomorrow — drop them in now or joing us during the live chat.
Trump allies and advisors now accusing Khizr Khan and also his son of being Muslim Brotherhood secret agents.
We now have a reasonable number of polls out after the Democratic convention to get some sense of a convention bounce. Here’s the trend chart for July, with the dates of the conventions superimposed over the chart. I marked the ‘start’ of each day. So they may little a narrower than they should be. But you get the idea.
For the full national horserace chart and data set click here.
As I said earlier, bounces often fade. But not always. Often they create a new baseline that drives the fall campaign. In any case, we’ll need to wait about a week longer until we have a solid idea where we are as the fall campaign begins.
We’re seeing more and more Republican officeholders saying nice things about the Khans. That’s great. But with a minuscule exception, they all continue to say Donald Trump should be the next President of the United States. As President Obama suggested in his convention speech, we’re at one of those critical moments of choosing as a country. The Ryans and McConnells and Blunts and all the rest amount to a “Yes-But” caucus. Yes, we need to honor and respect the families of those who’ve made the ultimate but we still want Donald Trump to be the next President.
There are smart terrible people and dumb terrible people. While they’re both dangerous in positions of power, the dangers they represent are significantly different. We’ve been watching the now multi-day war between Donald Trump and the Khan family. Trump has managed the amazing feat of finding himself savaging the mother of a dead American soldier who literally had never said a word against him. What is most important about understanding what is happening here, however, is not the callousness or shamelessness of Trump’s behavior. It is that it all could have been so easily avoided – not the damage to the Khan family but the damage to Trump himself. This may seem like a perverse way of looking at what has unfolded. But it’s actually the most instructive for understanding Trump’s actions, how his mind works and the sort of danger he represents.
In his first effort to scuttle the Fall presidential debates Donald Trump has suggested that Hillary Clinton is trying to rig the debates by scheduling them during must-watch NFL games.
Is this true? Not a trick question! Since it’s come up a lot I want to lay out some basic facts about Trump’s latest claim.
In his ABC interview Donald Trump said that he had no debts in Russia or to Russians. That may be true. But he went on to make a much more declaratory statement.
No debts. I have very little debt to anybody. I don’t need debt. You know, it’s very interesting. I’m so liquid, I don’t need debt. And if I need debt, if I want debt, I can get it from banks in New York City very easily.
There are a number of passages worth noting in George Stephanopoulos’s interview today with Donald Trump. But given the attention I’ve given to the issue, I wanted to start by noting the discussion of Trump’s relationship or non-relationship with Vladimir Putin. As I noted in real time during Trump’s press conference earlier this week, Trump flatly contradicted himself on the question on whether he’s met, spoken to or has a relationship with Vladimir Putin. He has repeatedly said that they’d spoken in the past and developed a good rapport. He’s even said it in extremely high profile settings like a live GOP primary debate.
You’ve probably heard about how yesterday Donald Trump harangued the fire marshal at an event in Colorado Springs, first saying the marshal’s refusal to let more people into the venue was an example of why America isn’t great anymore and then accusing the marshal of being a Clinton supporter. Now we learn that just a short time earlier a rescue crew from the Colorado Springs Fire Department had to rescue Trump and members of his entourage from an elevator stuck between the 1st and 2nd floors of The Mining Exchange Hotel. Trump and his entourage were reportedly stuck in the elevator for roughly thirty minutes before the rescue crew was able to lower a ladder down into the car.
Over the course of the day, Donald Trump responded with a mix of disdain and churlishness to the parents of fallen Muslim soldier Humayun Khan. Trump suggested that as an observant Muslim Khan’s mother, Ghazala, may not have been allowed to speak and insisted that he too had made sacrifices for the country. ABCNews contacted the Khans again for an interview in which Khan’s father, livid, responded to Trump. Khizr Khan asked Trump’s children to “tell him to learn to behave, learn to be decent.”