We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson’s piece in The Washington Post about Donald Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party:
Donald Trump’s presidency is melting down into a noxious stew of racism, failure and farce. With breathtaking cynicism, the Republican Party pretends not to notice. [...]
“Trump is a racist” does not exactly qualify as breaking news. But the silence from prominent Republicans is staggering — and telling. It amounts to collaboration — perhaps “collusion” is a better word — with the president’s assault on diversity and pluralism. In the coming campaign, you will hear Republican candidates at every level claim to be colorblind and embrace all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity. Do not believe them. Their failure to speak out now tells us everything we need to know about their true feelings.
Paul Krugman also dedicates his column to the fact that racism isn’t limited to the White House:
[T]his isn’t just about Trump; it’s about his whole party.
I don’t just mean the almost complete absence of condemnation of Trump’s racism on the part of prominent Republicans, although this cowardice was utterly predictable. I mean that Trump isn’t alone in deciding that this is a good time to bring raw racism out of the closet.
Last week Bill Lee, the Republican governor of Tennessee, signed a proclamation ordering a day to honor the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom he described as a “recognized military figure.” Indeed, Forrest was a talented military commander. He was also a traitor, a war criminal who massacred African-American prisoners, and a terrorist who helped found the Ku Klux Klan.
If you haven’t yet read George Conway’s piece, the entire thing is a must-read:
[Republicans are] silent not because they agree with Trump. Surely they know better. They’re silent because, knowing that he’s incorrigible, they have inured themselves to his wild statements; because, knowing that he’s a fool, they don’t really take his words seriously and pretend that others shouldn’t, either; because, knowing how damaging Trump’s words are, the Republicans don’t want to give succor to their political enemies; because, knowing how vindictive, stubborn and obtusely self-destructive Trump is, they fear his wrath.
But none of that is good enough. Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he’s the president of the United States. By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul.
Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:
In a country whose founding documents declare that all are created equal, views like those held by the president create cognitive dissonance. How can anyone lay claim to the American creed while excluding people on the basis of race? For Trump and his supporters, the answer is to ignore that dissonance entirely. This is how many of the Founders themselves approached this fundamental contradiction, so it is no surprise that this nationalist’s delusion still retains ideological purchase today.
At USA Today, EJ Montini notes how many in Congress and in our communities are immigrants or descendants of immigrants:
Constitutional failure in chief: Donald Trump and Congress are showing us what constitutional failure looks like
In the current Congress, 13% of voting members are immigrants or children of immigrants, with family links to 37 countries, according to the Pew Research Center.
In fact, if all members of Congress were made to “go back” to the countries from which their families originated, as Trump suggested for the Democratic congresswomen, there would be four members left.
That’s the number of Native Americans currently serving.
Given who we have in the White House, we’d probably all be better off.
On a final note, Michelle Goldberg calls on House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democrats in general to rally around opposing Donald Trump rather than opposing each other:
Donald Trump may have momentarily smoothed over these divisions this weekend, uniting Democrats in condemnation of his racist Twitter rant against the squad. But the fissures remain, and Pelosi needs to heal them, because this fight is alienating and demoralizing people whom the Democratic Party needs.