“Nikolas Cruz, the alleged gunman who killed 17 people at a Florida high school on Wednesday, trained with a white-supremacist group,” its leader told the Daily Beast.
Said Jordan Jereb, captain of the Republic of Florida: “He probably used that training to do what he did yesterday. Nobody I know told him to do that, he just freaked out.”
Washington Examiner: “In just three days, the short video of reporters yelling questions to President Trump about whether he is a racist has become C-SPAN’s most-watched clip on YouTube involving the Trump White House.”
David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick: “The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump’s comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive. And Trump himself has claimed that he is “the least racist person.” But here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.”
“Here, we have attempted to compile a definitive list of his racist comments – or at least the publicly known ones.”
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“No, no, I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. That I can tell you.”
— President Trump, quoted by Politico.
“We now know that we have in the White House someone who could lead the KKK in the United States of America.”
— Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), in an interview on MSNBC.
Kansas state Rep. Jim Alford (R) used racist logic to explain why he believes marijuana should remain illegal, the Garden City Telegram reports.
Said Alford: “Marijuana is an entry drug into the higher drugs. What you really need to do is go back in the ’30s, when they outlawed all types of drugs in Kansas, across the United States. What was the reason why they did that?… I hate to say it, was that the African Americans, they were basically users and they basically responded the worst off to those drugs just because of their character makeup, their genetics and that.”
James Hohmann: “A Manchurian Candidate who was secretly trying to alienate Hispanics would be hard pressed to do as much damage to the Republican brand as President Trump.”
“The administration announced Monday that it will terminate the provisional residency permits of about 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the United States since at least 2001, leaving them to face deportation. Trump previously ended what is known as Temporary Protected Status for Nicaraguans and Haitians, and he’s expected to cut off Hondurans later this year.”
“This is part of a strategic, full-court press to make America less hospitable to immigrants, both legal and illegal.”
Key takeaway: “Trump’s nativism may cost Republicans Senate seats this year in Arizona and Nevada, as well as several House seats across the Sunbelt.”
A new Pew Research poll finds that 60% of Americans say President Trump’s election has led to worse race relations in the United States.
Just 8% say Trump’s election has led to better race relations, while 30% say it has not made a difference.
New York Times: “Last year’s contentious presidential election gave oxygen to hate. An analysis of F.B.I. crime data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found a 26 percent increase in bias incidents in the last quarter of 2016 — the heart of the election season — compared with the same period the previous year. The trend has continued into 2017, with the latest partial data for the nation’s five most populous cities showing a 12 percent increase.”
“Peppered among these incidents is a phenomenon distinct from the routine racism so familiar in this country: the provocative use of ‘Trump,’ after the man whose comments about Mexicans, Muslims and undocumented immigrants — coupled with his muted responses to white nationalist activity — have proved so inflammatory.”
“For the first time in American politics, anonymous ‘dark money’ political donations could become tax-deductible. That’s if a provision currently being debated between House and Senate negotiators makes it into the final tax bill,” CNN reports.
“The issue at hand started with the ‘Johnson Amendment,’ named after then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s 1954 measure that prohibits nonprofit groups who maintain tax-exempt status, including churches and charities, from directly participating in politics.”
“But efforts to repeal the Johnson Amendment have resulted in language that would ease political speech rules for all nonprofits. The results, critics say, could effectively let people deduct de-facto political donations and further hide those donations and spending from the public.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Twitter:
Diversity is not our strength. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, “Mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one.”
A new Winthrop University poll finds that nearly half of white Americans living in the South feel like they’re under attack.
“Forty-six percent of white Southerners said they agree or strongly agree that white people are under attack in the U.S. More than three-fourths of black respondents said they believe racial minorities are under attack. And 30 percent of all respondents in the poll agreed when asked if America needs to protect and preserve its white European heritage.”
“I’ve known Ed Gillespie for a long time. I’ve liked Ed Gillespie for a very long time… Smart guy, has always been an honorable guy. I’ll speak for myself, I’m embarrassed for him, and I’m ashamed for the Republican Party that he’s turned to Confederate monuments to try to win this thing in the end. I don’t know if it works for him or not.”
— Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, about the Virginia governor’s race.
David Drucker: “The current debate over Confederate symbols cuts to the central, existential question hanging over the G.O.P. The Republican Party today is an amalgam of upscale white suburbanites who are moderate on social issues but conservative on fiscal and national-security issues, and exurban and rural populist working-class whites, who are quasi-liberal on economic matters and foreign policy, but conservative on politically charged social issues.”
“But the key demographic in this coalition is ‘white.'”
“The Republicans becoming the guardians of the Confederacy is a function of the G.O.P. becoming so predominantly white, and yes, the predominant party in the South. The Republican project to take over the South was completed in 2010, when the red wave that swept Republicans into power in Congress and state capitals across the country ejected the last remnants of white Democratic authority. So by the time Trump responded to Charlottesville with vows to protect ‘our culture’ and ‘our history,’ and protect Confederate monuments from being relegated to some museum’s dusty storeroom, there were few sympathetic voters left in the Democratic Party to cheer him on. But there were plenty of Republicans.”
A new NPR poll finds majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people’s daily lives.
Most interesting: 55% of white Americans are among those who feel their group is discriminated against.
Reuters: “Recently available government data on the ethnic and gender make-up of the broader Trump administration shows that with over 1,000 mid-level political jobs filled by mid-year the appointees look much like the top leadership: mostly white and male. OPM numbers analyzed by Reuters show that 88% of such appointees were non-Hispanic white and 62% were men.”
“By comparison, in the final year of Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, non-Hispanic whites made up 67% of that group and men accounted for 47% – closer to what the U.S. population looks like.”
To Kill a Mockingbird is being removed from a junior-high reading list in a Mississippi school district, the AP reports.
According to the Biloxi Sun Herald, school administrators pulled the novel from the 8th-grade curriculum because of complaints that some of the book’s language “makes people uncomfortable.”
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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