The presidency of Donald Trump has given white nationalists and other xenophobic and racist groups in the US a sense of validation and suddenly we are hearing of organizations holding rallies openly. What has been less noticed is that these groups are even attracting members from an unlikely demographic: young men of color As Arun Gupta writes:
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Jon Schwarz highlights a Washington Post excerpt from the latest book by Bob Woodward on the Trump administration.
After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called [Defense Secretary James] Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.
Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.
The high school senior whose varied facial expressions while seated behind Donald Trump at a rally in Montana were visible on TV and went viral has given an interview. Tyler Linfesty describes how he and two friends Erik Hovland and Christian Dunlap ended up with choice seats before being asked to vacate them by Trump staffers who noticed their marked lack of constant smiles and enthusiastic applause, which apparently are requirements if you are to be behind Trump.
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The hunt is on the for the author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed piece by someone proudly boasting about how s/he and associate have carried out what is essentially a palace coup against Donald Trump whenever he tries to do anything against extreme conservative/libertarian policies on trade and foreign policy. This despite the fact that Trump has given them pretty much everything they desired, going beyond even their wildest dreams when it comes to policies that hurt women, minorities, people of color, the LGBT community, immigrants, refugees, and the poor.
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Yesterday was the opening day of this year’s football season. Football player Colin Kaepernick has become the initiator of a revival of ‘The Heritage’, the tradition dating back to Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson of successful black athletes using their visibility to make political statements against racial injustice. This proud tradition had been undermined by people like O. J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods who decided that money was the most important thing for them and eschewed any words or actions that might alienate anyone. This sent the Heritage into a long period of dormancy.
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There has, not surprisingly, been a huge reaction to the anonymous New York Times op-ed penned by someone the paper describes as a ‘senior official in the Trump administration’. If the author expected to be treated as some kind of hero, then s/he must be disappointed. There has been condemnation from many sides, the only supporters being those who like to see Trump embarrassed and do not care that the author and associates in this scheme to undercut policies they dislike seem to be doing so because they think he is not conservative enough or not as hardline on foreign policy.
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This going to be a very busy day for me and there are plenty of things I want to write about later, such as the fallout and backlash to the New York Times op-ed about the palace coup against Donald Trump in the White House and the hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. But I want to first flag a really important news item and that is that the Supreme Court of India has, in a unanimous ruling, decriminalized homosexual acts, thus nullifying anti-gay laws that were in section 377 of the penal code, a relic from the days of British colonialism.
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The New York Times today published an op-ed by someone who supports many of the current administration’s policies but thinks that Trump himself is dangerous. What is incredible is that the op-ed is anonymous but written by a senior official working in the administration.
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Yesterday’s Democratic primary elections in Massachusetts saw another shock win by a young woman of color against a long-time incumbent.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. Ayanna Pressley trailed Rep. Joe Capuano by 13 percentage points in the last poll before Tuesday’s Democratic primary to represent Massachusetts’s 7th district in Congress. When Capuano, a 10-term incumbent, conceded an hour after the polls closed, he was trailing Pressley by 18 points. Because there is no Republican running in the district, the 44-year-old Pressley, who in 2009 became Boston’s first female African-American city council member, is now expected to become the first African-American woman from the state to serve in the House of Representatives. The victory is yet a another sign of a demographic sea change taking place within the Democratic party, with constituents opting for fresh, aggressively progressive candidates over establishment mainstays. Appropriately, Pressley’s campaign slogan was #ChangeCantWait.
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The Trump white House is keeping the publishing industry busy with one gossipy book after another. The latest is from Bob Woodward, whose style is to write books based on conversations on ‘deep background’ with high officials, where he can quote people but cannot say who told him what. The presumption seems to be that since they are given anonymity, they will speak freely and frankly without fearing repercussions, even though he says that he actually recorded all the conversations and thus cannot be contradicted too forcefully. The picture he paints is hardly surprising or new. Trump comes across as an ignorant, narcissistic, and vindictive person. Is there anyone who does not know this by now?
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