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In response to:

Trump Believes That He Is Losing Because He Hasn’t Been Racist Enough

By Eric Levitz

Over the past month, Joe Biden has opened up a double-digit lead over Donald Trump in national polls.

That same period witnessed the following milestones in American political life:

• For the first time since the movement’s inception, Black Lives Matter won the support of a large majority of voters — and a slim majority of white ones.

• The percentage of Americans who say that “racial discrimination is a serious problem,” that “police are more likely to use deadly force against Black people,” and that “white people are more likely to get ahead” all hit record highs in various tracking polls.

• For the first time in 55 years of polling the question, Gallup found more support for increasing immigration among the U.S. public than for reducing it.

• A Pew Research survey found that Biden boasts his largest advantage over Trump on two questions: Which candidate voters trust to “effectively handle race relations,” and which one can “bring the country closer together.”

• The Republican government of Mississippi voted to retire the last remaining state flag featuring a Confederate emblem. Five years ago, a white supremacist slaughtering African-American churchgoers at a Bible study wasn’t enough to get the Magnolia State to heed calls for removing a tribute to the slavocracy from its official symbol. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd proved sufficient.

• And Donald Trump concluded that the reason he is losing support to Joe Biden is that he hasn’t been nearly racist enough.

That last bit isn’t mere conjecture. On Wednesday, three Trump confidants told Axios that the president regrets heeding Jared Kushner’s advice to broaden his appeal by embracing milquetoast police and criminal-justice reforms; as one source summarized Trump’s thinking, he wants “no more of Jared’s woke shit.”

This account of Trump’s private reasoning comports with his public actions in recent days. Just this week, the president has:

• Described New York’s plan to paint “Black Lives Matter” down Fifth Avenue as a plot to affix a “symbol of hate” onto the city’s “greatest street.”

• Threatened to end an Obama-era policy that bars local governments from accessing federal housing funds unless they make affirmative efforts to track and reduce racial segregation in their communities. Trump said that he was reviewing this regulation on behalf of the “great Americans who live in the Suburbs,” and lamented that the policy is “not fair to homeowners.”

• Vowed to veto the Defense Authorization Act unless an amendment requiring the renaming of U.S. military bases that presently honor Confederate generals is stripped from the bill. (In announcing this position, Trump made sure to note that the amendment was sponsored by “Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren.”)

If one imagines Trump to be a rational political actor, it is difficult to make sense of these actions. According to Axios, Trump soured on Kushner’s calls for triangulation on criminal justice out of concern that indulging such reforms might be “seen as undercutting police” — as though anti-reform cops and Blue Lives Matter bumper-sticker owners were swing constituencies. George Floyd’s death has created plenty of political challenges for Trump. But one thing it absolutely hasn’t done is jeopardize the Republican Party’s grip on single-issue, “unshackle the police” voters.

In response to:

Democrats Just Flipped A Kentucky State Senate Seat The GOP Held For 25 Years

Travis Waldron, Brooklyn Wayland

HuffPostJune 30, 2020, 2:09 PM EDT

Democrats won a special election to fill a vacant Kentucky state Senate seat this week, flipping a district Republicans held for decades and signaling that the suburban shift that helped create a blue wave in 2018’s midterm elections may continue in 2020.

Dr. Karen Berg defeated Republican candidate Bill Ferko by 14 points to win the race to replace longtime GOP state Sen. Ernie Harris, who retired in April after holding the seat in suburban Louisville for 25 years. Berg narrowly lost to Harris in the 2018 general election, but will now hold the seat until that term expires in 2022. The win marked the first time Kentucky Democrats have flipped a state Senate seat since 2010.

Berg’s victory, which was announced Tuesday after officials finished counting absentee ballots in the June 23 election is the latest sign of trouble for the GOP in the suburbs of Kentucky’s largest city and may foreshadow further problems for the party in November as its suburban base continues to erode under President Donald Trump.

“Nationwide, the Republicans are in great danger of losing the upper-status professionals who used to side with them,” said Stephen Voss, a University of Kentucky political scientist who specializes in voter behavior and election patterns. “If that realignment in those voters becomes permanent, then the Republican Party is in trouble.”

Democratic gains in the suburbs of Louisville, Lexington and Cincinnati have already helped the party maintain a foothold in the Bluegrass State, where suburban swings powered Gov. Andy Beshear’s (D) victory over former GOP Gov. Matt Bevin a year ago. Nationwide, rapid shifts in the suburban electorate helped Democrats win back majority control of Congress and cut into Republican state legislative majorities in 2018, especially as the party turned to first-time candidates like Berg to win over areas that have long favored the GOP.

Berg was drafted into the 2018 race by Emerge Kentucky, a chapter of a national organization that recruits and trains women to run for office. The group has helped elect three dozen women in Kentucky, including seven state legislators who won races in 2018 and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman, a former teacher who ran alongside Beshear last year.

The suburbs have become an ever-larger source of success for Democrats, especially as women have abandoned the GOP during the Trump years. Hillary Clinton carried the inner suburbs of cities nationwide in 2016, even as Trump’s success in rural areas pushed him to victory. In 2018, 38 of the 41 seats Democrats flipped on their way to the House majority were in suburban districts. The party won in places like Orange County, California, and central Oklahoma, where Rep. Kendra Horn shocked observers by winning a House seat the GOP had held for 44 years.

Suburban victories have also powered Democrats at the state legislative level, where they picked up 300 seats in 2018 and last year won control of the Virginia state legislature for the first time in more than two decades.

That success and Berg’s close loss two years ago helped turn Harris’ seat into a Democratic target once the veteran lawmaker retired in April. Berg focused her campaign on her experience as a physician and professor at the University of Louisville’s school of medicine, arguing that “healthcare is a right” and that Kentucky needed to make investments to improve public education, two issues that have taken center stage in recent Kentucky elections....

In response to:

Why the Mueller Investigation Failed

President Trump’s obstructions of justice were broader than those of Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton,
and the special counsel’s investigation proved it. How come the report didn’t say so?

By Jeffrey Tobin

June 29, 2020

Robert Mueller submitted his final report as the special counsel more than a year ago. But even now—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Administration’s tragically bungled response to it, and the mass demonstrations following the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others—President Trump remains obsessed with what he recently called, on Twitter, the “Greatest Political Crime in the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt.” In the past several months, the President has mobilized his Administration and its supporters to prove that, from its inception, the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government was flawed, or worse. Attorney General William Barr has directed John Durham, the United States Attorney in Connecticut, to conduct a criminal investigation into whether F.B.I. officials, or anyone else, engaged in misconduct at the outset. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also convened hearings on the investigation’s origins.

The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.” Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.” According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true. Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report. In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller—he should be thanking him.

The events that led to Mueller’s appointment began shortly after Trump took office, when he met several times with James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. Over dinner at the White House, on January 27, 2017, Trump said that he expected “loyalty” from Comey—specifically, as he would later make clear, he wanted an announcement from the F.B.I. that he was not under suspicion for misconduct with Russia during the campaign. At the time, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, was being investigated for lying to the F.B.I. As Comey later testified, on February 14th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President told everyone else to leave, then asked Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said. “He is a good guy.”

Comey declined either to publicly clear Trump of wrongdoing or to close the investigation of Flynn, and the President resolved to fire him. On May 8, 2017, Trump told Rod Rosenstein, who had recently been confirmed as the Deputy Attorney General, to write a memo describing Comey’s performance as the F.B.I. director, in particular his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail. The following day, Rosenstein submitted the memo and Trump fired Comey. ...