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.”
Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) told CNN that it was a “huge mistake” for President Trump not to condemn white supremacy during the first presidential debate.
Said Santorum: “But for some reason, he didn’t and I think that was a huge gaffe. And it’s been typical of the president when he gets backed into a corner he doesn’t like to be forced to say something. He made a huge mistake.”
Washington Post: “Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.”
“His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.”
“With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.”
President Trump announced late Tuesday that the White House attempt to halt federal agencies’ anti-racism training would be expanded to block federal contractors from “promoting radical ideologies that divide Americans by race or sex,” Axios reports.
New York Times: “Surveys routinely show that Black Americans are scattered across the ideological spectrum despite overwhelmingly voting for Democrats. … An enduring unity at the ballot box is not confirmation that Black voters hold the same views on every contested issue, but rather that they hold the same view on the one most consequential issue: racial equality.”
“The existence of the Black electoral monolith is evidence of a critical defect not in Black America, but in the American practice of democracy. That defect is the space our two-party system makes for racial intolerance and the appetite our electoral politics has for the exploitation of racial polarization — to which the electoral solidarity of Black voters is an immune response.”
Adam Serwer notes that for the first time, America may have an anti-racist majority.
“Trump was elected president on a promise to restore an idealized past in which America’s traditional aristocracy of race was unquestioned. But rather than restore that aristocracy, four years of catastrophe have—at least for the moment—discredited it. Instead of ushering in a golden age of prosperity and a return to the cultural conservatism of the 1950s, Trump’s presidency has radicalized millions of white Americans who were previously inclined to dismiss systemic racism as a myth, the racial wealth gap as a product of Black cultural pathology, and discriminatory policing as a matter of a few bad apples.”
“Those staples of the American racial discourse became hard to sustain this year, as the country was enveloped by overlapping national crises.”
Michael Cohen was asked in a NBC News interview whether he was a witness to any moments where President Trump was exhibiting racism or used a racial slur.
Said Cohen: “Unfortunately all too many times. We had one where right after Nelson Mandela had passed away — and I talk about this in the book — he asked me if I had known of any country that’s run by a Black that’s not a shithole. And I said, ‘Well, how about America?’ To which he gave me the proverbial F-you.”
Cohen’s book, Disloyal, is out today.
“After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans,” the New York Times reports.
“Not in generations has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America. While Mr. Trump’s campaign sought to temper the culture war messaging at the Republican National Convention last month by showcasing Black and Hispanic supporters who denied that he is a racist, the president himself has increasingly made appeals to the grievances of white supporters a centerpiece of his campaign to win a second term.”
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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