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Let’s Be Clear About This
Again, it’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the last eight years.
Donald Trump, his campaign having lost its edge to Kamala Harris, predictably resorts to his well-used playbook of racism, white grievance, and othering. Major national news outlets fumble the coverage, unable or unwilling to call out the racism. The headlines are either too tepid or shift the focus to Harris. We should know by now that racist attacks are not about the victims of those attacks, they’re about the perpetrators. Putting the spotlight on Harris is a form of complicity.
But even well-meaning people stop at the incomplete conclusion that Trump himself is a racist. No doubt he is. But that fails to do justice to the toxicity he brings to the public square. Not since George Wallace has a national candidate exploited racism for personal political gain the way Trump has consistently now for going on a decade. It started with his embrace of Obama birtherism, continued throughout his term in the White House with, among many other things, virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, and is playing out exactly the way you would expect it to now that he’s facing a biracial opponent.
It takes a racist to exploit the kind of divisions that Trump traffics in, but focusing on his personal animosity toward people of color, his own retrograde 1950s attitudes, the darkness of his soul runs the risk of making this a psychological profile or a morality play or another in the long line of old white men stuck in the past. This isn’t your grandpa or your crazy uncle raving in the privacy of your holiday dinner.
It’s the former president of the United States turning his cult and his campaign’s hundreds of millions of dollars against people of color on a public stage in the middle of a presidential campaign. It’s a way of declaring open season on vulnerable minorities. It’s a rallying cry for every white extremist, fringe loner, and KKK wannabe out there looking for an excuse to act out their rage.
We talk a lot about how racism in the form practiced by Trump takes it upon itself to define what is white and what is not, mocks racial and gender distinctions it considers illegitimate, and reserves to itself an imagined gatekeeper role for what is acceptable. All true. But more relevant for our purposes is that the purpose of that kind of racism is to dehumanize people, reduce them to less than, marginalize them – and the net effect is to grant permission to inflict all manner of atrocities and degradations on people deemed less than people.
Just Watch
A lowlight reel of Trump’s NABJ appearance:
It’s Not Just Trump
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) is covering himself in racist glory, too:
A Telling Moment
Among the many indignities of Trump’s NABJ appearance was the moment he whiffed on a question about whether JD Vance will be ready on Day 1 to assume the presidency. The answer Trump gave received considerable attention because he minimized the effect of the veep choice on the outcome of the election, but he totally failed to affirm that Vance is ready for the presidency, the barest litmus test of a vice presidential candidate. That whiff did not go unnoticed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg:
In related news, Trump allies are accusing Kellyanne Conway of badmouthing Vance:
In interviews with The Bulwark, twenty Trump campaign staffers, allies, confidants, and advisers were quick to shoot down any notion that Trump was turning his back on Vance or was displeased with him amid his rocky rollout. But more than a dozen of those sources volunteered without prompting that they believed Conway, who initially opposed the selection of Vance, was undermining him through leaks to the press expressing doubts about his readiness and the campaign’s vetting.
Conway denies the allegation.
2024 Ephemera
- Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D) and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) have each met personally with the team vetting vice presidential contenders for Kamala Harris, Politico’s Playbook reports.
- AZ-08: Blake Masters lost in the GOP House primary to election denier Abraham Hamadeh.
- Maya Rudolph will appear as Kamala Harris On Saturday Night Live for the duration of the campaign.
Quick Reminder
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Big Lie II, The Sequel
Donald Trump is already delegitimizing the outcome of the 2024 election and any election Democrats win, repeatedly lying that Democrats can win only if they cheat:
Trump suggests that the only way Kamala Harris can beat him is by cheating pic.twitter.com/nPIUyP5p9l
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2024
Correcting Trump’s Jan. 6 Revisionism
It’s not just that Trump promises to pardon the Jan. 6 defendants – of which he is one – it’s the web of lies, deceits, and disinformation that he constructs to justify and defend pardons that is the most toxic element of his historical revisionism. My former colleague Ryan Reilly offers a comprehensive corrective to Trump’s comments to the NABJ on potential pardons.
Important Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020
Another Biskupic Excluive
CNN’s Joan Biskupic has another piece pulling the back the curtain on the recently completed Supreme Court term. This one is focused on Justice Samuel Alito losing the majority on not one but two cases he originally was assigned to write. His opinions were so strident that the majority abandoned him both times, exacerbating what she so richly calls Alito’s “air of vexation.”
9/11 Plotters Reach Plea Deal
A plea deal that spares the 9/11 plotters at Guantanamo the death penalty is probably the right thing to do, but the only authentic reaction to this news is immense sadness: about the attack itself, about how America lost its way in the aftermath and resorted to torture, about the use of extrajudicial means in contravention of the rule of law, about the Kafkaesque limbo in which the plotters have been held for more than two decades, and about how it ends with little in the way of real reckoning with ourselves over what we became.
Cornering The Market On Weird
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