THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 8/31/17

HOUSTON: Obviously, the horrific disaster in Houston and the surrounding areas in Texas cannot (and should not) be reduced to my usual snark. We are just at the beginning of the recovery process, and we still have no real idea as of now exactly the scope of the catastrophe. But I wanted to bring it up to encourage everyone to donate where they can. The New York Times has a list of good local places to donate to, including food banks and diaper services. I would encourage you to look elsewhere than the Red Cross; Slate has a pretty damning article about their lack of effectiveness in recent large-scale disasters, and ProPublica tweeted out its own summary of the Red Cross’s failures. As far as understanding Houston as a city, I highly recommend this Jia Tolentino piece from the New Yorker. She vividly describes her hometown, and I learned a lot. (For example: Houston “currently resettles twenty-five of every thousand refugees that the United Nations resettles anywhere—that’s more than any other city in America, and more than most countries.”) Also, you should read Charles Pierce on the chemical plant that exploded today. He noted that under Texas law, the owners of the plant have no duty to tell anyone what chemicals, exactly, are actually in there (and thus what went into the air when it exploded), and how Texas’s freedom-enhancing laws allow chemical corporations to have the run of the place, safety be damned -- to the extent that local officials do not even know what and where hazardous materials are being stored all over the region. Pierce: “This is no accident. This is a political philosophy put into action, and a triumphant one at that.” Finally, this the best the White House could come up with to show Trump witnessing the hurricane devastation “first hand.” Pathetic.

UPDATE ON RUSSIA INVESTIGATION: There was a bunch of reporting this week that was a bit confusing but, taken together, present some pretty big news. Josh Marshall summarizes: “But for the first six months of his presidential campaign he was actively trying to secure a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and in early 2016 a top Trump business executive solicited the assistance of one of Vladimir Putin’s top aides in making the deal happen. This of course was happening while Trump was singing Putin’s praises on the campaign trail.” The Times reported that longtime Trump associate and all-around scumbag Felix Sater wrote a bunch of emails to Trump’s chief dealmaker, Michael Cohen, in 2015 promising to help build Trump Tower in Moscow and to get Russia on board for Trump’s campaign, writing: “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” In another email, he wrote, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” And then in early January 2016 -- well into the middle of the presidential campaign -- Cohen emailed Putin’s personal spokesman to ask for help on the Trump Tower deal, which had stalled. Commenting on the Don Jr. email and the Sater email, Chris Hayes noted the “incredible irony that not a single Clinton/Podesta email was as incriminating as the *two* Trump campaign emails we've seen.” As Chait remarks, this story reveals a third channel for potential collaboration between the Trump world and the Russian government, with the other two being the Don Jr./Kushner/Manafort meeting in Trump Tower with Russian agents and the attempt by a Republican operative to obtain Clinton’s emails through Russian hackers.

That was just the beginning of the Russia news this week. We also got more indications that investigators are turning up the heat on Paul Manafort. On Tuesday, it was leaked that Mueller had issued subpoenas to Manafort’s former lawyer and his current spokesman.  Wednesday night, Politico reported that “Mueller’s team is working with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on its investigation into Paul Manafort and his financial transactions.” This is significant for a few reasons. One, it demonstrates how aggressively Mueller is pursuing this investigation; as Chait puts it, Mueller is “handling his investigating like the prosecution of a mob boss, pressuring underlings to flip on the boss.” Second, it destroys Trump’s only leverage: his pardon power, which he demonstrated last week he would use baselessly and to excuse contempt of court. Trump can’t pardon anyone for state crimes. So if Schneiderman is the one doing the charging, Trump has no way to protect his underlings. Things are getting continue to be interesting! P.S. Here’s a good thread from Journalist Seth Abramson, pulling together the top-line basics of what we already know to show there’s a pretty open and shut case that Trump and his buddies have committed crimes with respect to all of this.

PEOPLE ARE (MAYBE?) WAKING UP: On Wednesday night, Fox News (yes, Fox News) released a poll finding that 56% of Americans believe Trump is tearing the country apart, 64% are not happy with the way things in the country are going, and “a record 55 percent disapprove of the job [Trump’s] doing as president, while 41 percent approve. That’s a net negative by 14 points and his worst score to-date.” And look who he’s lost the most ground with since Fox’s earlier poll in April: conservatives (down 7 points), Republican men (-9 points), and whites without a college degree (-9 points) -- in other words, his base is slowly starting to turn on him. (Oh, and 56% say Trump doesn’t respect racial minorities.)

GOOD NEWS OF THE WEEK: We have two stories this week, for a change. First, Illinois passed a law automatically registering eligible voters to vote, which could add 1 million people to the voting rolls. “Eligible voters will automatically be registered through an electronic process when they apply for a driver’s license or state ID at the DMV or interact with other government agencies, unless they opt out.” Second, “[a] federal district judge on Wednesday ruled against the state of Texas and halted a controversial state-based immigration enforcement law just days before it was scheduled to go into effect.” Among other things, this law would allow the state to punish cities that refuse to hold undocumented immigrants who are arrested for petty crimes (so-called “sanctuary cities”).

MORE STELLAR PERSONNEL CHOICES: This week, a former executive of for-profit Devry University was appointed to lead the Department of Education’s “Student Aid Enforcement Unit, which was established by the Obama administration to more aggressively combat fraud and deceptive practices at colleges and universities.” What’s that? Oh, right: Last year, Devry was forced to pay $100 million to settle fraud claims for misleading students about its graduation rates. Awesome. Then we have William Bradford, who until this evening ran the Energy Department's Office of Indian Energy. He resigned tonight after CNN’s KFile reported this week that, in September 2016, he appears to have commented on an online article by calling Obama’s mother “a fourth-rate p&*n actress and w@!re” (spelling in the original); he also claimed that Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent. In June, the Washington Post reported that Bradford had “tweeted a slew of disparaging remarks about the real and imagined ethnic, religious and gender identities of former president Barack Obama, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, TV news host Megyn Kelly and Japanese Americans during World War II.” Just last December, he referred to Obama as a “Kenyan creampuff” who received “his mission in Tehran.” In February 2016, he tweeted that the internment of Japanese Americans was “necessary.” Real stand-up guy. Anyway, after this latest reporting this week, he claimed that his online accounts had been hacked, but then resigned tonight. These people.

TAX PLAN: Yes, Trump went to Missouri this week to give a speech on taxes in which he offered 0 details and 0 specifics except for lowering corporate taxes (obviously the most important thing). I don’t have much to say on this obviously inane and stupid idea. As Chait points out, Trump’s script is all populism and “stick it to the man” aphorisms, while the policy (such as it exists) is a straight giveaway to the GOP’s donor class. We’ll see how this plays out.

Endorsements:

• This Slate interview with Mark Lilla, in which the hollowness of his ideas and the inspidity of his thesis become painfully clear the moment he is confronted with even the most mild questioning.
• Lawfare: Time for the House to thoughtfully and deliberately consider impeachment.
• This Chait piece on the basic corruption at the heart of Trump’s administration. Kicker: “The spectacular and telegenic failures of the Trump administration are obscuring the highly effective policies under way. Trump has transformed the government into an apparatus for protecting and enriching incumbent wealth. His chaos and incompetence are tolerable to his party because Trump is fashioning an American oligarchy.”
• This very sweet (and catchy!) video to his incoming 4th graders by new teacher Mr. Reed.
• This incredibly lengthy compilation of all the times Republicans, White House staffers, or other Trump insiders have described the president as a toddler.
• This short video on Confederate monuments.
• Charlie Pierce’s righteous indignation about the criminal enterprise that is Wells Fargo.
• Yes it’s cheesy, but this GMA segment on “Mattress Mack” and his unbelievable generosity in Houston is incredible and heartwarming and all the other adjectives.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 8/24/17

Note: I have been a little under the weather and also a little underwhelmed by the Takes out there, so this edition of TWIPN is rather skimpy. Enjoy anyway!

(ANOTHER) TRUMP MELTDOWN: I just can’t, this week, with Trump’s gonzo rally in Phoenix on Tuesday. I just can’t. You all saw it, or read about it. It is too disgusting and pathetic and absurd and frightening for me to take on at the moment. I hereby outsource my “take,” as the Internet Kidz say, to Charlie Pierce, who does a far better job than I ever could. Read the whole thing, for lines like these (addressed to the adoring Trump fans in the Phoenix arena): “[Y]ou can't even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, something that everybody who can see past the veil of their emotions can see as plain as a church by daylight, to borrow a phrase from that Willie Shakespeare fella. The problem, of course, is that you, in your pathetic desire to be loved by a guy who wouldn't have 15 seconds for you on the street, are dragging the rest of us toward that end, too.” And this one: “I don't care for anybody's interpretation of why you voted for this abomination of a politician, and why you cheer him now, because any explanation not rooted in the nastier bits of basic human spleen is worthless.”

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: The Executive Branch continues to be filled with super stellar, top-notch sorts of people who will surely make us all proud. This week, CNN investigative reporter Andrew Kaczynski digs into Sam Clovis, Trump’s choice to be the chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture. During his time as a right-wing radio host and blogger between 2012-2014 (yes, this is the man chosen to be the chief scientist of a major federal agency), Clovis argued that homosexuality was a choice and that legally recognizing it could lead to that always-terrifying slippery slope: “If we protect LGBT behavior, what other behaviors are we going to protect? Are we going to protect pedophilia?” But guys, it’s cool, because this same guy who also wrote that “minorities have been enslaved by government operatives,” that Obama was a “Maoist,” and that progressives were “race traitors.” Seems like a great choice to me! Also this week, New York Magazine and Pro Publica go deep on HUD under Ben Carson: “HUD has emerged as the perfect distillation of the right’s antipathy to governing. If the great radical-conservative dream was, in Grover Norquist’s famous words, to ‘drown government in a bathtub,’ then this was what the final gasps of one department might look like.” Go read the whole thing! Oh, and then we have the Real Housewife of the Treasury Department, aka, Steven Mnuchin’s wife Louise Linton. On Monday, she posted on Instagram a windswept photo of herself and her husband (again, the Treasury Secretary) stepping off a government plane, tagging it with the various designer #brands she was sporting. When a woman dared to point out that this seemed inappropriate for a government trip, Linton let loose on this woman. “In a few aggrieved sentences, Linton managed to frame her husband’s three-hundred-million-dollar net worth as a burden, her six months in Washington as harrowing public servitude, and an ordinary American as a contemptible member of the economic underclass,” Jia Tolentino explained. “She punctuated this bit with two emoji, a flexed bicep and a kissy face, which were meant to convey nonchalance but instead communicated a type of strained, hierarchical female fury that I have not witnessed in person since cheerleading camp, in 2005.” Now CREW has filed a FOIA request for information about this one-day jaunt down to Kentucky -- wondering if it is perhaps more than coincidence that the Mnuchin duo’s trip took them directly into the path of totality in time for Monday’s eclipse.

A MAJOR WIN IN TEXAS: Marking the 9th judicial ruling since 2011 finding that Texas had engaged in voting discrimination, a federal judge this week ruled that Texas’s voter suppression/voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause. Crucially, the court found that the law was passed with discriminatory intent, a finding that could serve as basis for placing Texas back under the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement; the court will decide that issue in the coming months. Eliminating the law “ ‘root and branch’ is required,” the judge wrote, “as the law has no legitimacy.” Ari Berman points out that this is the third court ruling in just eight days to find that Texas acted in a discriminatory manner to violate voters’ rights: “On August 15, a three-judge federal court in San Antonio ruled that Texas’ 2013 congressional redistricting maps were enacted with ‘racially discriminatory intent’ against Latino and African American voters. On August 17, the Fifth District Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’ restrictions on assistance to non-English-speaking voters violated the Voting Rights Act.” Hooray for good news! (Let’s ignore the fact that, midway through the litigation of this case, the DOJ switched sides: Where the Obama DOJ had fought against the discriminatory ID law, the Trump DOJ switched to defending it, and will support an appeal. Because nothing is ever good anymore.)

iF TRUMP PARDONS ARPAIO: Apparently, Donald Trump is seriously considering or on the verge of pardoning former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a racist asshole who was convicted of criminal contempt of court for flagrantly and repeatedly violating court orders to stop his racist policing. Let’s remember who, exactly, Arpaio is: He was a hardline and extremely vocal birther, leading the conspiracy charge for years (and was still talking about as late as last December). He gained fame for torturing prisoners at the Phoenix jail (where, remember, most detainees have not been convicted of any crimes). Starting in the early 2000s, he decided his office’s entire focus would be hunting down undocumented immigrants, leaving other violent crimes uninvestigated. In 2011, the DOJ concluded that Arpaio engaged in systemic racial profiling of Latinos, excoriating his office’s “systematic disregard for basic constitutional protections” and its “penchant for retaliation against individuals who speak out.” His criminal contempt conviction stems from a civil lawsuit against him and the city for for racial profiling. (“Maricopa County taxpayers are on the hook for nearly $70 million, specifically relating to this racial-profiling case. Even if Trump pardons Arpaio, taxpayers would still foot the bill.”) Dahlia Lithwick argues that Arpaio is just Trump Version 1.0, and thus the perfect recipient of Trump’s beneficience: “Arpaio’s career and conviction stand as yet one more example of his complete disregard of judicial orders and binding court authority. That makes him another Donald Trump. Make no mistake about it: The fact that Arpaio is quite literally convicted of being in criminal contempt of the courts is a big selling point for a president who has evinced nothing but contempt for the judicial branch since before he took office.”

(Skimpy) Endorsements:

• This Media Matters compilation comparing Fox & Friends’ take on kneeling during the national anthem and white supremacy. See if you can spot the difference!
• Charles Pierce on a nun’s confrontation of Paul Ryan during a town hall this week.
• This story about a supremely fucked-up ATF practice of paying informants to pretend to be someone’s boyfriend in order to lure them into illegal drug activity, for which ATF then arrests them. Seriously.
• This is what it looks like to win the internet.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 8/16/17

The KKK Comes to Town Edition

Before we start, please take 22 minutes and watch this Vice report from the weekend’s rally. Watch while you make dinner or fold the laundry; you have 22 spare minutes, and you really, really need to see this to understand the ideology behind what happened, and the way it is being framed. And you also need to see it to experience, at a deeply empathetic and visceral level, the terror and horror that was inflicted upon the very brave Charlottesville residents and counter-protesters from all over. Please watch it.

I am at a loss for sufficient words to talk about what happened. So I will link/excerpt some of the best writing I have seen on the subject below, and talk about the political fallout. . But first, a bit about Confederate statues, a sort of hobby horse of mine.

A WORD ON STATUES: The rally was planned for Charlottesville ostensibly in reaction to the City’s decision to remove a big statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. The Right argues that these statues are about “history.” Trump, in his first statement about the rally, declared that we must “cherish our history.” (Not sure whose history exactly he’s claiming is represented by a violent rebellion waged over chattel slavery and cost 600,000 lives.) But of course, these statues have nothing to do with “history” or even really with the Civil War. They were erected in the early part of the 20th century, when the second iteration of the KKK was flourishing (Version 1.0, led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged guerilla campaigns in the years following the surrender at Appomattox). The Lee statue in Charlottesville was commissioned in 1917 and erected in 1924, the same era that Confederate monuments were sprouting all over the South (see this interesting timeline here), as part of the Lost Cause narrative that used the “glory” of the Confederacy to justify Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy. (Here’s Yale historian David Blight: “At the heart of the Lost Cause was the claim that white Southerners never fought for slavery, but only for their home, hearth, and ‘liberty.’ The Lost Cause was a set of beliefs, painful experiences, and sheer grief in search of a past. It evolved into a deep mythic story of loss in search of justification. And it provided a foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”) The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum had a very good piece on this this week: “The myth of reunion was built around this understanding, that the nation should treat both sides in a war that killed three-quarters of a million Americans as equal, or at least not inquire too closely into the merits of each cause. And that unity would come not from honestly grappling with events, but from studiously ignoring injustice, and condemning those who oppose it as hateful.”

So these statues are not just about “history.” If they were, there would be statues to Ulysses S. Grant, to Abe Lincoln, to, you know, slavery. They are about telling a specific story about history, and they reflect a specific historical moment during which it was imperative to cement that story. The hand-wringing about erasing history, or having no place to “draw the line,” as Trump put it, is repulsively dismissive of this history and of the lived experience of those people who have to walk underneath these statues every single day. There is a specific reason the South chose to glorify these men in the early-to-mid 20th century: It was to send a message to black residents that they are and will always be Less Than. (As Kevin Drum writes, these statues were built “to physically symbolise white terror against blacks.”) There is a specific reason that progressives have sought to move these statues to museums in recent years. And there is a specific reason that these statues have proved to be rallying grounds for contemporary fascists, racists, and literal Nazis. So let’s remember that.

OUR DESPICABLE PRESIDENT: First, if you haven’t seen it, here’s Trump’s full, angry, aggressive, unhinged press conference from Tuesday afternoon, explicitly defending the Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville. You should watch all 17 minutes of this horror show. He literally called them “fine people” who, for example, were “protesting very quietly” on Friday night -- when in fact they were marching with lit torches through UVA screaming, among other things, “Jews will not replace us.” (Video at the Vice report.) He also spent minutes proclaiming that he didn’t want to “rush into” making a statement because he really wanted to get the facts right. This, from the man who railed about a terrorist attack in Sweden that never actually happened. He declared repeatedly that the “alt-left” “came charging” at the alt-right with “clubs” and declared they were “very, very violent.” He said that race relations “have been frayed for a long time, and you can ask President Obama about that because he’d make speeches about that.” WTF? “I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it and you don’t have any doubt about it either, and if you reported it accurately, you would say it.” He defended the protest of removing the statue, explaining, “You’re changing history and you’re changing cultures.” It should be beyond clear at this point that Trump is not just cozying up to racists for his political support; he is not simply trying to appease his base. He genuinely believes in a vision of white supremacy. Shall we tick through (just some of) the evidence? His first major foray into politics was to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of the Central Park 5, five young black teens who were wrongfully convicted of rape in 1989. And then when asked about it just weeks before the election last year, he insisted -- despite their exoneration and release from prison -- that the five men were guilty. He rose to modern political prominence by leading, for years, the conspiratorial charge that Barack Obama was an African-born usurper. Declaring his candidacy for president, he called Mexicans “rapists.” He declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a case involving him because “he’s Mexican.” He retweeted a racist, anti-Semitic meme and refused to apologize. When asked about African American voters throughout the campaign, Trump repeatedly (and exclusively) talked about “the inner city.” He refused to disavow the support of David Duke. He called for a ban on Muslims, and then implemented it upon entering office. And then this week he declared that there were “fine people” among the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis who stormed Charlottesville. As Maya Angelou says, “When people show you who they are, believe them.” (If only someone had warned us about this.) What is Trump showing us? “[T]he president told close aides that he felt liberated by his news conference. Aides said he seemed to bask afterward in his remarks, and viewed them as the latest retort to the political establishment that he sees as trying to tame his impulses.”

And five days after her murder at the hands of a white supremacist terrorist, Trump has still not said Heather Heyer’s name--and he hasn’t even called her family. (Also, he apparently has not even called the Mayor of Charlottsville.)

THE ONLY SLIGHTLY LESS DESPICABLE GOP/OTHER ENABLERS: Nearly every week, I find myself saying, “Well this is surely a turning point!” But this week, it felt/feels like it might actually maybe be some sort of turning point. After Trump’s Saturday statement, in which he ad-libbed his denunciation of “many sides” responsible for violence and bigotry, and especially after his Tuesday double-down crazy-train press conference, Republicans started speaking out far more openly than I had seen before. On Saturday, Colorado’s Cory Gardner explicitly called on Trump to denounce white supremacists: “Mr. President – we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism.” CNN pulled together some other examples: Jeff Flake put out a statement saying, “We cannot accept excuses for white supremacy and acts of domestic terrorism. We must condemn them. Period.” McCain tweeted, “There's no moral equivalency between racists & Americans standing up to defy hate& bigotry. The President of the United States should say so.” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, tweeted: "Blaming ‘both sides’ for #Charlottesville?! No. Back to relativism when dealing with KKK, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists? Just no.” Even spineless Marco Rubio tweeted that the far-right planners of the rally were “100% to blame” for what he called the “terrorist attack” in Charlottesville.

In the business world, multiple CEOs stepped down from various presidential advisory councils in response to Trump’s statements on Charlottesville, starting with the CEOs of Merck, Intel, and Under Armour on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the leaders of America’s biggest companies and banks had decided to dismantle Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum -- but they were beat to the punch by Trump, who essentially dumped them before they could dump him. (To be clear, though, they had collectively made the decision to walk away before Trump’s move.) And, as the Times notes, even military leaders sought to put clear distance between themselves and Trump’s position -- a remarkable breach of the chain of command.

And yet, and yet: No one has resigned from Trump’s White House or his cabinet, despite lots of reports about how “dismayed” they feel or whatever. There are basically no black people around Trump, but there are a number of Jews, and they appear to be standing by the man who excused a group that literally terrorized a synagogue in Charlottesville (read that account; it’s truly chilling) and chanted “Jews will not replace us” and that old Nazi favorite, “Blood and soil.” Jamelle Bouie points out polling showing that nearly half of GOP voters sympathize with the white supremacist marchers. “[T]hat is the product of a Republican Party that, for decades, has either tolerated racism or stoked white resentment for its own electoral gain—a Republican Party that wouldn’t push back when its base adopted birtherism and that doesn’t challenge the racist fearmongering from its interlocutors in conservative media.” While their rhetoric may be turning in the right direction, they continue to push for actual policies that dramatically disadvantage nonwhites in the real world.

A FEW GOOD READS:

• On Sunday, Charles Pierce published searing reflections on the weekend’s events and how we got here and it’s really worth reading. We all saw this coming, he writes: “Every Trump rally came with an implied promise of some kind of violence. Sometimes, the promise was fulfilled. Sometimes it wasn't. But it was the dark energy behind that whole campaign.” He notes that multiple GOP legislatures across the U.S. had, in the wake of anti-Trump protests, passed laws authorizing motorists to hit protesters with their cars without legal penalty. And he argues that we should expect Trump to marshal these paramilitary forces to his side if and when Americans/the GOP/Mueller/etc try to push him out of power.
• One of the best things I read was this twitter thread posted by @JuliusGoat (no idea who that is) on Friday night, after the torch-lit Neo-Nazy rally. It is really, really good. Read it!
• Jelani Cobb explores the South’s historical and continuing power over American culture and politics: “[O]nly by the most specific, immediate definition can we consider the Confederacy to have lost the Civil War, and its legacy has defined a great deal of our history since then.”
• Jamelle Bouie discusses how the weekend was a show of strength for the white pride movement: “Yes, the proximate reason for Unite the Right was to defend the city’s Confederate memorials, but the actual reason was for the marchers to show their strength as a movement.” After killing a woman and getting the support of the president, Bouie argues, they clearly succeeded.
• Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explore the interplay between the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment, asking whether there is really a right to speak freely if the speaker has to stare down the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle in the hands of his opponents.
• Dahlia also assembles tesitmony from faith leaders and others on the ground to ask what the “alt-left,” as Trump calls them (sometimes referred to as “antifa” and/or anarchists), were actually doing on Saturday. Note: “Antifa” means antifacist; here’s a basic explanation of who they are.

There were many, many other articles and reflections that were powerful and true. What did you read that you liked? Send them my way.

A FEW NON-CVILLE STORIES:

• There is a very good chance that radical right-winger Roy Moore will be the next Senator from Alabama. Here he is this week telling Vox that “there’s Sharia law, as I understand it, in Illinois, Indiana — up there.”    
• Steve Bannon pulled a Scaramucci: He called a reporter and, on the record, trashed Trump’s North Korea policy, cast himself as the primary mover and shaker of foreign policy in the White House, and castigated his White House colleagues by name. If he still has a job within a week, we’ll know that he truly is running the show.
• Trump’s private lawyer John Dowd, thought to be a relatively mainstream Republican, “forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter ‘has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.’” This email was written personally to him by Jerome Almon, who “runs several websites alleging government conspiracies and arguing that the F.B.I. has been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists.” Among other insane things the email said -- that Dowd took the time to send on to dozens of other human beings, including government officials -- the email declared that “there literally is no difference” between George Washington and Robert E. Lee, stating, for example, that “both saved America.”

Endorsements:

• I am re-endorsing Adam Serwer’s truly superb article on Robert E. Lee. If you didn’t read it the last time around, you really should now.
• The Economist imagines what a letter from Google’s Larry Page to now-right-wing-hero James Damore (who was fired after circulating a memo saying, in effect, that his female colleagues were less qualified for their jobs and biologically unsuited to coding) should have said. It’s a very, very good read, a thorough and comprehensive take-down of Damore’s ideas and the pushback to his firing.
• This relatively hopeful take on the Trump era, arguing that the dysfunction/rapid turnover in the White House is a sign of the strength and resilience of America’s civic society. “In weaker democracies, the rise of strongman rule with a legislative majority would have overwhelmed the institutions. Once Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Viktor Orban in Hungary achieved control over their legislatures, they had no trouble taking over other political institutions. Democratic backsliding ensued. By contrast, so far in the United States, it is the administration that has floundered. This is a sign of the resilience of our democratic institutions and values.”
• Right-winger Charles Krauthammer went off on Trump’s Tuesday statements on Fox News, and derides fellow Foxer Laura Ingraham for her cop-out response. Impressive. More outspoken anger on Fox here; today, in a remarkable segment, two Fox contributors broke down in tears as they discussed the events of the weekend. (Then again, Tucker Carlson used his show on Tuesday to explain slavery as no biggie, because lots of people throughout human history had slaves, and it was totes cool until, like, 150 years ago and how were we supposed to know any better? Also, he is explicitly wrong when he says that, before the Civil War, “slavery was the rule, rather than the exception around the world. In fact, Britain had banned slavery decades earlier, in 1833; Russia had abolished serfdom in 1861. Even the U.S. had banned the slave trade as early as 1807. Yes, slavery still existed in parts of Latin America, but by 1860, “approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.” That’s why his examples are all from far earlier in history: Aztecs, Plato, Mohammed (!))
• I highly recommend this episode of Pod Save the People, in which host Deray McKesson speaks with three incredibly impressive UVA students about what they experienced on Friday and Saturday. They are extremely eloquent and their perspective and experience needs to be heard.