President Donald Trump wanted $5.7 billion to build a border wall. But Congress gave him only $1.4 billion. So on Friday, Trump declared a national emergency. He claimed authority, based on the 1976 National Emergencies Act, to build his wall using money that Congress had assigned to other purposes.
Donald Trump has been formally running for re-election for about a year now, and as with all modern campaigns, the Trump team sends regular emails to its supporters, offering updates on the candidate’s work and soliciting donations. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s emails sound a lot like the man himself. “Chuck & Nancy…forgot about the Hard-Working American a long time ago,” one January message read. “Americans not only want the wall, they DEMAND THE WALL,” read another. So far, so Trumpian. What is more surprising for a well-funded major-party presidential candidate—who happens to be the president of the United States—is the graphic design aesthetic. Which is to say: absolutely hideous.
Last fall, a tipster sent the progressive opposition research firm American Bridge an old video clip of Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Schuette. The 39-second scene opens with a woman off-screen asking a seated Schuette to move closer to a lamp to his right, as they prepare to tape a television interview. “I would be happy to move closer to the lamp,” Schuette tells her, making a kind of heavy eye contact recognizable to any woman. “I will do anything you want. Some things I may not let you run the camera on.” That was pretty much it. He doesn’t touch her, or explicitly proposition her. He’s simply and indisputably creepy.
There is not a lot to add to the collected writings of the brilliant folks who watched Donald Trump’s Rose Garden ramblings on Friday. As Charles Pierce, Dana Milbank Tina Nguyen, Jack Holmes, Bill Maher, and Caitlin MacNeal all expressed, we reach a point when collusion with the fiction that this was a real commander-in-chief giving a serious political speech about a genuine emergency itself becomes improper. This was, even as the standard Trumpian shitshow goes, an extraordinary jaunt into rambling, fact-free, fact-adjacent, fact-inventing mayhem.
The launch of the 2020 presidential contest has triggered yet another round of uniquely American anxiety around the stability of character.
We’re only a few weeks into the nascent primary campaign, and already the public discourse is mired in a debate that seems to be consumed with which of the Democratic candidates is in fact tricking us.
The early days of 2019—which is to say, the early days of the 2020 campaign—have been dominated by the Democratic Party’s left wing. Early big-name entrants Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand were all quick to plant their flags squarely on progressive soil. Most tellingly, all four support Bernie Sanders–style Medicare for all and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, two issues that have emerged as the biggest intraparty litmus tests for the primary season.
The day that began with a media furor around Rep. Ilhan Omar’s recent tweets did not end the way many on the left feared it would. While centrist Democrats and the party’s leadership predictably criticized the first-year congresswoman from Minnesota for her tweets about the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), most of the party’s progressive base rallied behind her. Omar’s tweet about “the Benjamins” may have been ill-advised—many thought it traded, whether intentionally or not, on the anti-Semitic idea that Jewish money controls the government—but by the news cycle’s end it had performed a kind of public service, focusing attention on, and in a way demonstrating, the power the pro-Israel lobby wields in American politics. Articles detailing the way AIPAC marshals its significant resources and extensive influence to shut down criticism of Israel and bolster support for Israeli policies appeared not only in reliably left-wing publications like the Intercept, but also among the gatekeepers of acceptable liberal opinion like Vox. If Omar’s intention was to shift public debate about AIPAC’s role in U.S. politics, she seems to have succeeded.
President Donald Trump is not a fan of the border deal that congressional negotiators struck Monday night, the one that he would need to sign by the end of the week to avoid the year’s second government shutdown. While he said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday that he would have to “study it,” he was “not happy about it. It’s not doing the trick.”
On Monday night, President Donald Trump held a rally in El Paso, Texas. He chose the location based on his claim, delivered in last week’s State of the Union address, that a border wall had rescued the city from rampant crime. By the time Trump arrived, fact-checkers had demolished this lie, pointing out that the wall had no effect. But Trump told his followers to dismiss the numbers and trust him instead. And they did, because this is a measurable fact about Trump supporters: They’re willing to reject all other sources of information—crime statistics, intelligence agencies, even conservative media—when the president tells them to do so.
On Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump called for legislation to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” said Trump. On Thursday, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president renewed his plea. “Every life is sacred,” he declared. “We must build a culture that cherishes the dignity and sanctity of innocent human life.”
With the possible exception of a bizarre rhyming couplet, few words of Tuesday night’s State of the Union address will linger in the public memory past Thursday. The country is used to watching Donald Trump lie. The new and noteworthy statement made this year didn’t come out of Trump’s mouth. It came from Nancy Pelosi’s hands.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam says he never even bought his medical school yearbook. He could not have known, therefore, about the racist photo that appeared on his page—of two figures, one in blackface, one in Ku Klux Klan robes—neither of whom, he says, is him. It’s an engagingly feeble defense. Northam admits its weakness, just as he initially admitted being one of the two men in costume before revising his story. On Friday, he declared an intention to hire a private investigator to get to the bottom of the photo.
In the days since a racist photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook was published, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has resisted calls for resignation from all corners of his party. The Democratic caucuses of both branches of the Virginia state legislature have asked Northam to step down, as have Northam’s predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, and multiple Democrats who’ve announced 2020 presidential runs. Yet Northam has refused to do so, arguing that he shouldn’t have to because he is neither the person in the photo in blackface nor the one in KKK garb. He did, however, improbably volunteer that he wore blackface for a Michael Jackson costume that same year.
Three years ago, when Donald Trump emerged as the Republican presidential front-runner, critics decried his ruthlessness. Since then, they’ve grown numb to it. They think his State of the Union address on Tuesday night was long, trite, and boring. In reality, the speech was laced with authoritarianism. Here’s what Trump said and why it’s dangerous.
The State of the Union address Donald Trump gave on Tuesday night was full of forced, awkward transitions. The weirdest had to do with babies. Trump boasted of being the first president to propose a national paid family leave plan in his budget, “so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child.” Then, speaking of newborns: “There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our nation saw in recent days.”
Donald Trump turned to the most lethal of oratorical tools in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address: the rhyme. To summarize his argument that Democratic investigations into his administration could imperil America’s economic gains, he said: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” And then—copying directly from the prepared text here—the follow-up: “It just doesn’t work that way!”
Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, swears he’s telling the truth. On Friday, Northam confessed to appearing in a racist photo in a 1984 yearbook. On Saturday, after Democrats called on him to resign, he reversed himself and said it was a case of mistaken identity. “I will stand and live by my word,” Northam told reporters at an afternoon press conference. He quoted the honor code of his alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute: “A cadet shall not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
Every few days, a new Democratic presidential candidate joins the race promising a ground-up rebuild of the health care system, a Green New Deal to address climate change, or a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system to represent something more humane. These are ideas that are unlikely to attract meaningful Republican support. And so, unless Democrats can get 60 seats in the Senate, something that certainly won’t happen even in their rosiest 2020 forecast, they would likely need to eliminate the filibuster—the rule that allows 41 senators to block legislation—to achieve most of them.
President Donald Trump says he has a mandate to build a border wall. “I was elected partially on this issue,” he declared at the White House on Thursday. Trump thinks that by claiming to have won the 2016 election based on his pledge to build a wall, he can bully Congress into accepting it. He’s bluffing. A close look at election results in 2016 and 2018 shows that Democrats who reject the wall—even those who represent states Trump won—are standing on firm ground.
Conservative politicians and right-wing activists have targeted a Virginia state legislator this week and in the process reignited a nationwide debate about third-trimester abortions. Delegate Kathy Tran’s bill, which was tabled by a House of Delegates subcommittee this week, would have loosened some restrictions on second- and third-trimester abortions, which are legal in the state under specific circumstances. Though the legislation has been proposed in previous sessions—and though it never made it to the House floor for a vote this go-round—anti-abortion advocates are using it to paint pro-choice Democrats as supporters of, as Sen. Marco Rubio put it in a tweet, “legal infanticide.”
