From TPM Reader MG …
You asked, “What Sense Are You Making of the Post-Trump Era?”
Well, there is simply a mixture of relief and apprehension.
The relief is for the obvious things: The relatively smooth deployments of the Covid vaccines, a steady hand at the helm of state, government doing what the federal government should do, no more intentional twitter eruptions and all of that. Considering where we were on January 20th, it is immensely comforting to be where we are right now.
From TPM Reader JE, a rather different take on the question, less political outlook than deeply personal, inter-personal experience …
So, by far the biggest outcome for me from the “Post Trump Era” (and to some extent I need to move the date back to November 2016 to describe this fully) is the realization that a lot of middle class white Americans (I’m in that group) are still racist as hell. Prior to that the racism was couched in careful language, was eased out with a nod and a wink that indicated that maybe someone still wasn’t on board with the modern state of the world.
From TPM Reader KG …
I’ve enjoyed reading the replies to your question, but I have a somewhat different take. As a 79-year old white female I’ve seen remarkable changes in the country. Change being the operative word. My first brush with politics came on a train carrying Harry Truman, who I watched speak while sitting on my father’s shoulders. I’ve been a political junky ever since.
Former President Donald Trump who repeatedly turned racist dog-whistles into bullhorns and feasted on division as a platform for his failed reelection bid last year, suggested that a call for “accountability” by an NBA star in the recent police shooting of an Ohio teen was both “racist” and “divisive.”
One of the many things I do at TPM is occasionally write emails to inspire people to become TPM members, re-up if they’ve lapsed or just thank them for being members already. I wrote one of these this morning and I thought I’d share it. I do so in part because it would be great if you could join up if you’re not currently a member but even more because writing one of these out gives me an opportunity to — forces me to — place TPM in the current moment and say why I think it matters.
Take a look.
The Washington Post reports that junior employees at the centrist think tank No Labels were incensed by the firm’s decision to hire disgraced journalist Mark Halperin, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least a dozen women.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) is throwing support behind the reelection bid of Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (AK) whose seat former President Donald Trump has threatened with a challenger he endorsed.
Continue reading “Manchin Would Back GOP Sen. Murkowski’s Reelection ‘In A Heartbeat’”
Thank you to everyone who’s sent in their reads on making sense of the post-Trump Era. I’ll be publishing more this afternoon. Keep them coming. My interest in soliciting these notes is that we are in a confused and confusing political-historical moment. It’s important to untangle that for anyone who is concerned about the country and civic life. It’s even more pressing for a news organization.
We owe a great deal to the insights and knowledge we gain from the social sciences, with their modeling, systems creation and statistics. But at core humans are a story-telling species. We organize the world around us through storylines, narrative arcs, the actions of individuals, the interplay of actions and reactions through time. This isn’t to embrace a “great man” theory of history. It’s not a comment on how history works. It’s a statement about how our brains apprehend, understand things – how we take the discrete facts we find and put them together into something that tells us something. Nor is it to relativize contending ‘narratives’, something that has long been the province of certain parts of the academic world and through a strange alchemy is now also pervasive on the right. Some narratives are truer than others. Many are deeply false. It is simply that we understand most intuitively through storylines, through the progression of events and the actions of people.
A political operative who was behind robocalls urging Trump supporters to march to the Capitol on the day of the joint session of Congress ratifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory was hired on Thursday by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) — a prominent GOP group that has come under fire for promoting the rally that occurred shortly before the deadly Capitol insurrection. Continue reading “GOP Group That Pushed Pre-Insurrection Rally Hires Operative Behind ‘Stop The Steal’ Robocalls”
A little follow-up from my story earlier this week about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s coordination with We Build the Wall, the private border wall construction campaign whose leaders have since been charged with fraud and money laundering:
