Speaker Nancy Pelosi is accusing the Trump supporters who rioted in the Capitol this week of choosing “their whiteness over democracy,” the AP reports.
Said Pelosi: “It has been an epiphany for the world to see that there are people in our country led by this president, for the moment, who have chosen their whiteness over democracy.”
James Hohmann: “Black voters delivered for Joe Biden. By rallying behind him in South Carolina’s February primary, they catapulted the former vice president to the Democratic nomination. By turning out in huge numbers from Philadelphia to Detroit and Milwaukee in November, they ensured he won the electoral college.”
“By defying expectations in Georgia on Tuesday, and turning out at higher rates than their White counterparts, it appears more likely than not that they have just provided Democrats with control of the Senate for the first time in six years and, with it, the ability for the president-elect to enact key elements of his agenda and confirm his nominees.”
“Following years of protests from fans and Native American groups, the Cleveland Indians have decided to change their team name, moving away from a moniker that has long been criticized as racist,” the New York Times reports.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Meeting online because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the council kept its video camera turned off, meaning that other meeting attendees couldn’t see the members’ faces. Despite repeated requests from the online audience, council members refused to identify who voted for or against the permit, passing it on a voice vote without a roll call. One member on the five-person council could be heard voting no.”
“President Trump is threatening to veto legislation to fund the military as one of his final acts in office unless a widely supported, bipartisan provision to rename military bases honoring Confederate military leaders is removed,” NBC News reports.
“Since the Nov. 3 election, Trump has privately told Republican lawmakers that he won’t back down from his position during the campaign that he would veto the annual National Defense Authorization Act if it includes an amendment to rename the bases.”
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
— Barack Obama, quoted by CNN, from his new memoir, A Promised Land.
Roughly one quarter of non-white voters cast their ballots for Trump, according to an Edison exit poll.
National Review: “If the poll is an accurate reflection of final results, Trump will have won over more non-white voters than any Republican since Richard Nixon, who won 32 percent of the non-white vote in 1960 but lost to John F. Kennedy. Trump will also have improved on his performance in the 2016 election when he won 21 percent of the non-white vote.”
Jared Kushner told Fox & Friends that Black people must “want to be successful” in order for President Trump’s policies to help them.
Said Kushner: “One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about. But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”
“The FBI has failed to produce a legally required report detailing the scope of white supremacist and other domestic terrorism, despite mounting concerns that the upcoming election could spark far-right violence,” the Daily Beast reports.
“According to a key House committee chairman, that leaves the country in the dark about what the FBI concedes is America’s most urgent terrorist threat, as well as the resources the U.S. government is devoting to fight it.”
Gisele Barreto Fetterman, the wife of Pennsylvania’s Lt. Governor John Fetterman (D), tweeted that she had been the victim a racist attack while shopping at her local grocery store and shared a video of a woman calling her a racial slur through the window of her car.
“If you’re a young African American, an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state, you just need to be conservative, not liberal.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by the Washington Post.
“The Department of Homeland Security warned on Tuesday that violent white supremacy was the ‘most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland’ in an annual assessment that a former intelligence chief had accused the agency of withholding in deference to President Trump,” the New York Times reports.
“The threat assessment highlighted white supremacists as the most deadly among domestic terrorists in recent years and Russia as the primary threat to spreading disinformation.”
“The nation’s top federal prosecutors have become less diverse under President Trump than under his three predecessors, leaving white men overwhelmingly in charge at a time of national demonstrations over racial inequality and the fairness of the criminal justice system,” the AP reports.
“Eighty-five percent of his Senate-confirmed U.S attorneys are white men, according to AP’s analysis, compared with 58% in Democratic President Barack Obama’s eight years, 73% during Republican George W. Bush’s two terms and at most 63% under Democrat Bill Clinton.”
President Trump condemned “all White supremacists” Thursday evening after pointedly refusing to do so at Tuesday’s presidential debate and in the days since, CNN reports.
Said Trump: “I condemn the KKK, I condemn all White supremacists, I condemn the Proud Boys. I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) defended his past remarks on white nationalism during a fiery speech on the House floor.
Said King: “I’ll say two years ago when this came down, people didn’t understand what’s happening. But today western civilization is under assault, and I have been 100 percent correct on this. I’ve been more correct on this than I thought I was going to be.”
“I think he misspoke. I think he should correct it. If he doesn’t correct it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.”
— Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), quoted by NBC News, on President Trump’s call out to the Proud Boys.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declined to denounce white supremacy on behalf of President Trump at her press briefing.
President Trump claimed he doesn’t know who the “Proud Boys” are, after saying at the presidential debate last night that the far-right group should “stand back and stand by” in response to a question asking him to condemn white supremacists, Axios reports.
Said Trump: “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are. You’ll have to give me a definition because I really don’t know who they are. I can only say they have to stand down and let law enforcement do their work.”
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.