At 6:10 PM this evening President Trump began a meeting with top military leaders and gave a short prepared statement to pool reporters at the White House. It was quite an aggressive statement but not terribly different from other things we’ve heard from the President. The White House then announced that press appearances were done for the day. Then roughly an hour later, a pool reporter was again called in for another by the President and the military leaders. As the pool reporter put it, “White House staff hastily assembled the pool to cover a photo spray with military leaders and their spouses before a dinner with POTUS and FLOTUS.”
Here’s the key passage, with ominous and cryptic statements from the President.
We’re familiar with the still substantial number of Republican politicians from the Deep South who have various ties to ‘Neo-Confederate’ political groups. Trent Lott, who got booted from the Senate leadership fifteen years ago, was the iconic recent example. In the aftermath of Charleston and Charlottesville, the GOP has been trying to get at least visual distance from these types even as Trump and the MAGA crowd has often tried to bear hug them more aggressively. But Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore is in a very different category. He not only has all the Trent Lott style connections. His longtime backer and top financial supporter is a white supremacist who is pushing for the South to secede AGAIN and form a white, Christian Republic. Again, this isn’t just nostalgia for the first secession and Jim Crow. His group wants to secede again. Cam Joseph brings us the whole story.
You might have thought ex-Rep. Michael Grimm’s political career was over or had at least hit a serious setback after he did time in federal prison for tax fraud. But Grimm, who has threatened reporters with physical violence, is pointing to his rap sheet as a selling point for the Trump Era as he campaigns to win back his old house seat. “In Washington, nice guys finish last” he’s been telling supporters. Meet certified member of the criminal element, former No. 83479-53 Michael Grimm.
A bit more background on our particular interest in Roy Moore and Neo-Confederacy.
My post yesterday on data journalism and gun control touched off quite a stir and storm. I think there was some legitimate criticism of my broad brush criticism of data journalism, or at least the way my headline could be read that way. There’s a lot of great data journalism out there. My former colleague Al Shaw flagged just one example here.
It’s not all data journalism – which I stated explicitly. The problems I noted are not intrinsic to data journalism. But they are what I would call a natural and not uncommon shortcoming: When you have a hammer, everything seems to be a nail. This is as much a problem with more conventional narrative journalistic methods as with data journalism. When you have extreme confidence in the power of (and success with) data to clarify questions and reveal patterns, you can lose track of or give too little attention to whether the questions you’re asking are even the right ones to ask. Read More
One of the things I like about the kind of writing I do hear is that it is iterative rather than definitive. Points I was trying to make in one post, which remained fuzzy or tentative in my own mind, get sharped or reconsidered by things I read in your emails or by articles I read in other publications. On this latter front, I want to return to David Frum’s article I referenced yesterday. Read More
Matt Talhelm, a reporter at the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville, reported on twitter about a half hour ago that Richard Spencer and roughly three dozen supporters had returned with their torches to the Lee statute in Emancipation Park with chants of “We will be back.” They apparently left the park after a short protest and speech.
White nationalists now chanting – “We will be back”. About 3 dozen supporters in Emancipation Park. Plenty of police on standby in park. pic.twitter.com/LuJEsAgxQy
— Matt Talhelm (@MattTalhelm) October 7, 2017
It seems there’s no end to the public debate we can have about the relative weight of racism and authoritarianism that go into driving Donald Trump vs mere ego and narcissism, a grinding maw of appetite and self-gratification. Of course, we don’t really have to decide. It’s both. But today’s stunt does give us some reminder of the true pecking order. Read More