Just for members: David Jonas and I have posted the third chapter of Spitball: The New Rules of Our Broken Politics.
If you’re new to the project, you can also find the introduction and previous two chapters at that link.
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Kellyanne Conway escalated attacks on the four congresswomen who have been the subject of President Trump’s racist tweets, telling Fox News that they represent a “dark underbelly” of the country.
Said Conway: “What the president is doing is, we are tired — sick and tired — of many people in this country. Forget these four. They represent a dark underbelly of people in this country of people who are not respecting our troops, are not giving them the resources and the respect that they deserve.”
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said that President Trump could be “turning into” a racist, Politico reports.
Said Scaramucci: “I don’t think the president is a racist. But here’s the thing, if you continue to say and act in that manner, then we all have to look at him and say, OK, well, maybe you weren’t a racist, but now you’re turning into one.”
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“The Rev. Jesse Jackson and his oldest son, former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), have urged President Trump to pardon Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor whose arrest on charges of trying to sell a Senate seat ensnared the younger Mr. Jackson,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Mr. Jackson Jr. was among those considered to fill his Senate seat… Federal investigators turned their attention to Mr. Jackson Jr. after the Blagojevich trial, and in 2013 he pleaded guilty to one count of felony fraud for converting campaign funds to personal use.”
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission notes that immigrants are protected by laws from employment discrimination, including harassment based on national origin:
Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, “Go back to where you came from,” whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.
Mark Sanford (R), the former South Carolina congressman ousted from office after President Trump urged voters to reject him, told Charleston Post & Courier he is considering a run for president.
Sanford confirmed he will take the next month to formulate whether he will mount a potential run against Trump as a way of pushing a national debate about America’s mounting debt, deficit and government spending.
Said Sanford: “Sometimes in life you’ve got to say what you’ve got to say, whether there’s an audience or not for that message.”
President Trump tweeted that he is not a racist despite increasing criticism of his attacks on four minority, Democratic congresswomen.
Said Trump: “Those Tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body! The so-called vote to be taken is a Democrat con game. Republicans should not show ‘weakness’ and fall into their trap. This should be a vote on the filthy language, statements and lies told by the Democrat Congresswomen, who I truly believe, based on their actions, hate our Country.”
He added: “Nancy Pelosi tried to push them away, but now they are forever wedded to the Democrat Party. See you in 2020!”
Wall Street Journal: “The math is simple: Voters 50 and older are expected to make up more than half of Iowa caucus-goers in 2020, and more than three-quarters of the Democratic field is on hand to court them in the first state on the nomination calendar.”
“AARP, the largest advocacy group in the U.S. for people 50 and older, is flexing its muscles by bringing 19 of the Democratic candidates in front of its members for five different forums this week across the Hawkeye State. Several of the candidates are also pushing out policy proposals on health care, drug prices, Medicare and other issues of special importance to older voters, timed to coincide with the gatherings.”
Presidential historian Jon Meacham told MSNBC that President Trump’s attacks against four minority lawmakers placed him with Andrew Johnson as the “most racist president in American history.”
Said Meacham: “What the president’s done here is yet again, because I think he did it after Charlottesville, and I think he did it frankly when he was pushing the birther lie about president Obama, is he has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history.”
Washington Post: “The fight over health care has burst to the forefront of the Democratic presidential race, with defenders of the Affordable Care Act, such as Joe Biden, and advocates of a broader Medicare-for-all system, notably Bernie Sanders, launching more aggressive attacks on each other.”
“The dispute, which has reverberated across the sprawling field, is exemplified by the increasingly hostile dynamic between Biden and Sanders. The former vice president released a proposal Monday to expand the ACA and warned that it would be dangerous to scrap it and enact Medicare-for-all. Sanders and his top aides rebutted those comments, and the senator from Vermont plans to deliver a speech Wednesday confronting critics of his proposal.”
Harry Enten: “We can peg Republican silence (for the most part) on the fact that many Republicans who might be willing to go after Trump on issues related to immigration are no longer in Congress. They either retired, died or were beaten in the 2018 midterm elections.”
“Last year, I looked at a group of 23 of the most pro-immigration House Republicans. These were lawmakers ‘who signed onto a discharge position to force a vote on a bill that would have created a DACA fix,’ after Trump terminated DACA through an executive order and asked Congress to act.”
“Of this group of 23, 14 (61%) are no longer in the House… Of those nine remaining, a number have come out against the President.”
“If President Trump makes of fun of his age or questions his mental state during a debate, Joe Biden has a response at the ready: He’ll challenge him to do push-ups on stage,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Biden: “I’d say, ‘C’mon Donald, c’mon man. How many push-ups do you want to do here, pal?’ I mean, jokingly. . . . C’mon, run with me, man.”
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Steve Benen: “Party officials who believed they’d help set the party’s direction in the Trump era now realize that power is in the hands of one man: a hapless amateur whose rhetoric on race is too often indistinguishable from the angry, racist drunk at the end of the bar.”
“Republicans aware of their party’s demographic challenges – the party is increasingly dependent on older white voters, in a nation that’s becoming increasingly diverse – no doubt realize that Trump is making a risky electoral bet. But instead of pushing for a smarter strategy, most GOP leaders have effectively surrendered and accepted defeat.”
Greg Sargent: “Central to Trump’s racism — and more broadly to Trumpism writ large — is not just the content of the racism itself. It’s also that he’s asserting the right to engage in public displays of racism without it being called out for what it is.”
President Trump tweeted that “petrified” Democrats are afraid to take on four liberal congresswomen, suggesting he’s not easing up his attacks on the lawmakers.
Trump claimed the lawmakers were “spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician” but said they “get a free pass and a big embrace from the Democrat Party.”
The House on Tuesday will vote on a disapproval resolution condemning President Trump’s “racist comments” in which he said that a group of freshmen congresswomen of color should “go back” where “they came” from, NBC News reports.
The resolution twice refers to “racist comments” from Trump but it does not call the president a racist.
Playbook: “Republicans now have to vote on whether they approve of Trump’s comments. Most are likely to stick with Trump, even while they say privately he’s a boor for thinking and voicing these thoughts. It will be very instructive to see whether Republicans like Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-MI), a member of House GOP leadership who has criticized Trump over the tweets, end up voting with Democrats. Monday evening, senior Republicans told us they expected 10 or fewer Republicans would vote to condemn Trump.”
The vote is expected around 7 p.m. ET.
Ron Brownstein: “President Trump’s openly racist and xenophobic attacks on four Democratic House women of color, like his threatened immigration enforcement raids in major cities and the sweeping proposed new restrictions on asylum seekers that he announced Monday, underscores his transformation of the Republican Party into a coalition centered on the voters and places in America most hostile to immigration in particular and demographic change in general.”
“This latest flurry of activity continues the drive by Trump and other Republicans elected mostly from the parts of America least touched by immigration to impose a restrictionist agenda on migration over the nearly undivided opposition of Democrats elected by the areas where most immigrants, both undocumented and legal, actually live. Though greeted without complaint by Republicans in Congress, Trump’s promised raids provoked astoundingly open resistance from the mayors of virtually every large American city, from New York and Los Angeles to Chicago and Houston.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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