1. Frida Ghitis: Trump’s racist tweets come straight from the authoritarian playbook

President Trump’s barrage of racist tweets on Sunday ignited precisely the kind of firestorm he wanted. So on Monday he doubled down — and then tripled down, again attacking the four nonwhite Democratic women in Congress he had just urged to “go back” to their countries. He accused them, without a hint of irony, of “racist hatred,” and claimed that they hate America, even that they support al-Qaeda.

As he unfolds his toxic strategy for the general election — an us-vs.-them blueprint relying heavily on social media to inflame supporters and polarize the country — Trump is cementing his position as a leading figure in the current wave of populist authoritarian leaders who have undercut democracy across the globe.

Watch the tactics of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and the growing number of their nationalist imitators, and you will see the pattern now familiar to Americans.

A key tactic for such leaders is leveraging social media to identify and demonize critics, usually people engaged in activities that are normal in a functioning democracy — such as belonging to a different political party, working as a journalist or criticizing the president — and labeling them as a threat to the nation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/16/trumps-racist-tweets-come-straight-authoritarian-playbook/

2. Paul Krugman: Racism Comes Out of the Closet

As everyone knows, on Sunday Donald Trump attacked four progressive members of Congress, saying that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” As it happens, three of the four were born in the U.S., and the fourth is a duly naturalized citizen. All are, however, women of color.

Sorry, there’s no way to both sides this, or claim that Trump didn’t say what he said. This is racism, plain and simple — nothing abstract about it. And Trump obviously isn’t worried that it will backfire.

This should be a moment of truth for anyone who describes Trump as a “populist” or asserts that his support is based on “economic anxiety.” He’s not a populist, he’s a white supremacist. His support rests not on economic anxiety, but on racism.

It’s tempting to say that Republican claims to support racial equality were always hypocritical; it’s even tempting to welcome the move from dog whistles to open racism. But if hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, what we’re seeing now is a party that no longer feels the need to pay that tribute. And that’s deeply frightening. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/opinion/trump-twitter-racist.html

3. Matt Viser: Democrats debate how far left is too far left as they prepare to take on Trump

The past few weeks have put on remarkable display just how far to the left the Democratic Party has moved, with many in the 2020 presidential field now embracing previously untouchable positions on health care and immigration.

Democrats once touted their defense of those with preexisting conditions — a stance supported by the vast majority of Americans — but many leading presidential candidates now support ending the private insurance coverage on which most of the country relies. Democrats used to focus almost exclusively on reuniting migrant children and their families and protecting undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents; now many of the candidates are openly espousing making illegal border crossing a civil offense rather than a criminal one.

The high-profile shifts on issues that voters say they care about most mark a risky gambit by many candidates to tap into new energy in the party’s liberal base, the home of some of its loudest voices in the primary season. But it is triggering new worry that it comes at a cost: confirming Republican arguments that Democrats are far out of the mainstream, a threatening posture when moderate suburban voters have been the linchpin to winning general elections and down-ballot races. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-debate-how-far-left-is-too-far-left/2019/07/14/deb8ce90-9f38-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html

4. Maureen Dowd: Scaling Wokeback Mountain

Corbin Trent, a spokesman for A.O.C. and co-founder of Justice Democrats, the progressive group that helped propel her, told Grim: “The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party,” with the older generation “driven by fear” and “unable to lead.”

Message: Pelosi is past her prime.

Except she’s not.

And then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.

But Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you want.

The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.

Chakrabarti sent shock waves through the Democratic caucus when he posted a tweet about the border bill comparing moderate and Blue Dog Democrats — some of whom are black — to Southern segregationists in the ’40s.

In the age of Trump, there is no more stupid proposition than that Nancy Pelosi is the problem. If A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide that burning down the House is more important than deposing Trump, they will be left with a racist backward president and the emotional satisfaction of their own purity. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/opinion/sunday/scaling-wokeback-mountain.html

5.  Eric Lutz: Sen. Graham Defends Trump’s Racist Attack On Progressive Congresswomen: They’re “A Bunch Of Communists!”

Lindsey Graham on Monday offered a rabid defense of Donald Trump’s most recent racist meltdown, essentially suggesting to Fox & Friends that the president’s ongoing attacks on progressive women in Congress are justified because the women in question had it coming. “We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists,” Graham said. “They hate Israel. They hate our own country. They’re calling the guards along our border, the border patrol agents, concentration camp guards. They accuse people who support Israel of ‘doing it for the Benjamins.’ They’re anti-semitic. They’re anti-America.”

There is perhaps no one who better exemplifies the G.O.P.’s about-face on Trump than Graham, who was once a fierce Trump critic, even suggesting during the 2016 race that he be booted from the GOP. But Graham has since become one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, despite even the president’s ongoing feud with the late Senator John McCain, one of Graham’s best friends in the Senate. Trump’s flailing defense was predictable. (“If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave,” he told reporters Monday, ignoring the fact that the four women in question are US citizens.) Theoretically, though, this offense was egregious enough to earn some pushback from Graham and his fellow Republicans. But evidently, there’s no line they won’t let the president cross. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/lindsey-graham-defends-trumps-racist-attack-on-progressive-congresswomen-a-bunch-of-communists

6. LA Times Editorial: Trump is truly America’s Bigot-in-Chief

Trump’s Twitter feed is a repugnant place, and no one would want the thankless task of having to weed through all his bitter, bigoted ramblings to determine which are the most offensive. But a three-tweet thread early Sunday morning — in which he wrote that the four progressive House Democrats who call themselves “The Squad” should “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came” — certainly has to rank among the most disgusting.

By now everyone in America should realize the threshold problem with what Trump is saying about the lawmakers, all of whom are women of color: Three out of the four — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts — can’t “go back” to the countries he has in mind because they are, in fact, from here. They were born in the United States, just like Trump himself, making them every bit as American as he is. Only the fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, was born elsewhere; she emigrated from Somalia. And as a naturalized citizen of the United States, she too is as American as he is.

But Trump doesn’t care about such niceties. Nuance has never been his thing. And in any case, he is not really trying to inform us or to make a reasoned point about anything or to express a fully formed thought of any sort. He is simply spewing as usual, and in the process fanning the flames of disunity, chaos, prejudice and polarization — all cleverly hidden behind a veneer of rote and thuggish patriotism. He is playing to the lowest, most degraded emotions of his supporters while reveling in the fury of his opponents. This is the definition of demagoguery.

Sadly, it has found a receptive audience. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-trump-aoc-squad-ilhan-bigoted-tweets-20190714-story.html

7. Adam Serwer: Trump Tells America What Kind of Nationalist He Is

On Sunday morning, the president told four members of Congress to “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” The remark, a racist taunt with a historic pedigree, inspired a flurry of fact-checking from mainstream journalists who were quick to note that Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar are American citizens, and that only Omar was born abroad, in Somalia. It was a rather remarkable exercise in missing the point.

When Trump told these women to “go back,” he was not making a factual claim about where they were born. He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American. This is a cornerstone of white nationalism, and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs. It is a moral conviction, not a statement of fact. If these women could all trace their family line back to 1776, it would not make them more American than Trump, a descendant of German immigrants whose ancestors arrived relatively recently, because he is white and they are not.

After telling minority members of Congress to go back to where they “came from,” Trump today accused the women of “foul language & racist hatred.” White nationalists in the United States have always asserted that they are, in fact, the true victims of racial hatred, even as they’ve demanded the exclusion of nonwhites from the polity. When the Confederacy was shattered, its partisans launched a propaganda campaign rewriting the origin of their rebellion as the defense of individual freedom rather than property in man. The Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction with terrorism and violence portrayed themselves as the victims of Negro tyranny, and as the historian Jonathan Sokol has written, when de jure segregation unraveled in the South in the 1960s, white southerners “began to picture the American government as the fascist, and the white southerner as the victim.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/trumps-white-nationalist-attack-four-congresswomen/594019/

8. George Conway: Trump is a racist president

I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him. No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.

But Sunday left no doubt. Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear. Telling four non-white members of Congress — American citizens all, three natural-born — to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from”? That’s racist to the core. It doesn’t matter what these representatives are for or against — and there’s plenty to criticize them for — it’s beyond the bounds of human decency. For anyone, not least a president.

What’s just as bad, though, is the virtual silence from Republican leaders and officeholders. They’re silent not because they agree with Trump. Surely they know better. They’re silent because, knowing that he’s incorrigible, they have inured themselves to his wild statements; because, knowing that he’s a fool, they don’t really take his words seriously and pretend that others shouldn’t, either; because, knowing how damaging Trump’s words are, the Republicans don’t want to give succor to their political enemies; because, knowing how vindictive, stubborn and obtusely self-destructive Trump is, they fear his wrath.

But none of that is good enough. Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he’s the president of the United States. By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-conway-trump-is-a-racist-president/2019/07/15/b13c0bd4-a740-11e9-9214-246e594de5d5_story.html

9. Michael Gerson: Trump never takes a vacation from provocation

The leader of our republic has made his priorities clear. There is a crisis at the border, magnified by the administration’s malice and ineffectiveness. Utter incompetence has led to predictable chaos. But immigration officials are apparently fired, not for lacking skills or accomplishment, but for lacking sufficient cruelty. Officials seem to be advanced, not because of requisite experience, but because they share Trump’s zeal for dehumanization. The result is a dysfunctional system that prefers heartless yes-men.

The problem, however, is not merely a matter of management. The deeper scandal is this: Trump is trying to make desperate, suffering people the villains of our national story. He compares refugees fleeing repression and violence to snakes. He smears them as rapists and invaders . In his warped moral vision, mercy is a form of national weakness. Kindness and respect are crimes against the state. His approach to nationalism involves slander against the voiceless. It demands further oppression of the oppressed. Trump wants to change not just the policy of our government, but also the character of our country, into something hard, and dark, and dishonorable, and pitiless. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-never-takes-a-vacation-from-provocation/2019/07/15/3377696c-a724-11e9-a3a6-ab670962db05_story.html

10. Susan B. Glasser: “Congratulations Again, Mr. President”: Trump and the Co-opting of the G.O.P.

Donald Trump hates criticism but loves to criticize. As President, he’s done more of it than perhaps any of his predecessors. He is a cry baby, a snowflake, a wimp, as he himself might say. Many leaders are thin-skinned, but few are so publicly, transparently, unreservedly so. Along with a brazen disregard for facts and a willingness to flout norms that previous Presidents of both parties have observed, issuing a daily deluge of schoolyard taunts and petty insults may be the most distinguishing characteristic of Trump’s Administration. In other words, Twitter is his perfect medium. He remains dazzled by its power, the instant gratification it affords him, and the ability to say what he wants, when he wants, aimed at whomever he wants.

“It’s true, it’s incredible what it does,” he told a conservative social-media summit convened at the White House, on Thursday afternoon. “If I put it out on social media, it’s like an explosion.” Trump makes policy with his Twitter feed, using it to upend the best-laid plans of his Administration and to take on enemies both real and imagined. Just in the past couple days, he has reminded his millions of followers that the former Vice-President running against him is “Sleepy Joe” Biden, that Elizabeth Warren is “a very nervous and skinny Pocahontas,” and that the “Fake News Media” is doomed to be “driven out of business.” The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, on her way out of office, has been “foolish” and a “disaster” in handling Brexit, and her Ambassador “wacky,” “very stupid,” and “not liked or well thought of.”

In each case, Trump was lashing out at those who have criticized him, most notably and pointedly the British envoy to the United States, Kim Darroch, whose private diplomatic cables were leaked to the London tabloid the Mail on Sunday. The cables, once revealed, constituted the very definition of a Washington gaffe in that they were entirely accurate, filled with sharp but essentially banal observations echoing the past few years’ headlines. Darroch called Trump “insecure” and described his dysfunctional White House as “inept,” “clumsy,” and “riven by knife fights.” The essential truth of the Ambassador’s critique was confirmed by Trump’s hair-trigger response. On Monday, he announced—by tweet, of course—that he would no longer deal with the Ambassador; by Wednesday, Darroch was out, resigning because, he said, he could no longer do his job.

Yet the public spectacle of Presidential name-calling—Trump, while President, has called a former aide who turned on him a “dog” and attacked as a “Horseface” the alleged lover who said he had tried and failed to buy her silence—obscures a highly relevant political truth. Trump may love to hurl insults and quite visibly relishes nothing so much as a public Twitter spat. He is willing, though, to accept and make peace with even his harshest critics, as long as they cease and desist from their public dissent. Trump cares about the appearance of criticism more than the criticism itself. His unheralded genius is not in insulting his critics but in co-opting them—or at least in coming to mutually beneficial truces of the sort that suggests Trump’s social-media histrionics are more calculated than they seem. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/congratulations-again-mr-president-trump-and-the-co-opting-of-the-gop

11. Nate Silver: A Midsummer Overview Of The Democratic Field

Biden, Harris and Warren represent three relatively distinct, but fairly traditional, archetypes for party nominees:

▪ Biden, as a former vice president, is a “next-in-line” candidate who is rather explicitly promising to perpetuate the legacy of President Obama and uphold the party’s current agenda.

▪ Harris is a coalition-builder who would hope to unite the different factions of the party — black, white, left, liberal, moderate, etc. — as a consensus choice.

▪ Warren is offering more red meat (or should it be blue meat?) and would represent more of a leftward transformation from the status quo. But she’s simpatico enough with party elites and has broad enough appeal that she isn’t necessarily a factional candidate in the way that Sanders is. Instead, a better analogy for Warren might be Ronald Reagan; they are not comparable in terms of their backgrounds or their political styles, but they are both candidates who straddle the boundary between the ideological wings of their party and the party establishment.

On an empirical basis, the Biden and Harris strategies have produced more winners than the Warren one, although all three approaches are viable. That doesn’t mean that Biden, Harris and Warren are the only candidates pursuing these strategies. Cory Booker’s coalition could look a lot like Harris’s, for instance, were he ever to gain traction. But they’re the only candidates who are both (a) taking approaches that have worked well in the past and (b) polling reasonably well at the moment. That puts them in the top tier.

Biden and Harris are a fairly clear No. 1 and 2 in endorsements, meanwhile, with Harris having recently picked up a number of endorsements from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, an indicator that coincides with her gaining support among black voters in polls. Warren lags in endorsements, meanwhile. Also, it’s worth noting that whichever candidate wins the plurality of black voters usually wins the Democratic nomination — something that Biden and Harris probably have a better chance of doing than Warren does. For those reasons, I have Biden and Harris a half-step ahead of Warren. That said, I see the dropoff from Biden and Harris to Warren as being considerably smaller than the dropoff from Warren to the rest of the field.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-midsummer-overview-of-the-democratic-field/

12. Carolyn Kormann: The Case for Declaring a National Climate Emergency

While Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s calls for a climate-emergency declaration are not solving any problems, they are providing the language that needs to dominate the national conversation. And that matters. The United Nations recently warned that climate disasters are happening at the rate of one per week. This past June was the hottest on record. At the end of the month, a freak storm buried Guadalajara, Mexico, in hail, and on Thursday morning news outlets reported that freak hailstorms in Greece killed seven people. A month’s worth of rain fell on Washington, D.C., in an hour on Monday (while Trump completely ignored the climate crisis in his speech on the environment), then more flash floods drowned New Orleans, which is now preparing for a tropical storm that could dump another twenty inches of rain and test the city’s levees.

The warming that happens over the next few decades could kill all of the world’s coral reefs, lead to even more severe storms and wildfires, and set off the sorts of tipping points that most concern scientists—specifically, the irreversible dissolution of the Greenland ice sheet, where, in June, a heatwave set off melting across half of its surface. More than seven hundred and forty governments in sixteen countries have now declared some form of climate emergency, according to activists from the Climate Mobilization, who have been helping lead the campaign.

The city government of Darebin, Australia, was the first, in December, 2016. Fierce little Hoboken, New Jersey, was the first in the United States, in November, 2017, and the third in the world. New York City declared a climate emergency on June 26th this year. That month, in interviews with the New York Times and in Presidential debates, several of the Democratic candidates used the phrase “climate emergency,” and others referred to the “climate crisis,” “climate ruin,” and “climate chaos.” (On Thursday, Columbia University, The New Republic, Gizmodo, and a group of environmental organizations announced that they, too, would be hosting a climate summit, in September, for all of the Democratic candidates.)

The alarm bells are working, the wheels are turning. State and city policies won’t get us where we need to be by 2025, but they—along with a new President—could get us closer to where we need to be by 2030. It’s just going to keep getting harder. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-case-for-declaring-a-national-climate-emergency

13. Darlena Cunha: ICE Is Dangerously Inaccurate. Even American citizens are not immune from immigration raids.

Tracy Nuetzi, a Trump voter and resident of Florida, was an American citizen for 60 years, until the country decided she wasn’t.

“I thought, ‘This is a mistake, this must be a mistake,’” she said. Ms. Nuetzi spent nearly a year, from December 2017 to November 2018, trying to prove she was an American, and not liable to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE is not, of course, just a run-of-the-mill government bureaucracy doing necessary work to keep our borders intact. Under President Trump, a wildly invigorated ICE has become an American nightmare, nothing less than the main thrust of an attempt to institutionalize racism against a scapegoated minority — undocumented, nonvoting, mostly voiceless brown people.

ICE is Trump’s main instrument for the dirty work of trying to make America whiter again, without regard for family values, due process, human rights or even plain human decency. The agency has been a problem for decades, but American citizens often ignore it, content in the belief that their citizenship will prevent them from ICE, deportation, detention without representation and all those horrific stories written about other people.

But ICE makes mistakes. American citizens can get caught in its maw — even white Americans. According to the Cato Institute, from 2006 to 2017 ICE wrongfully detained more than 3,500 U.S. citizens in Texas alone. Even in Rhode Island, ICE issued 462 detainers for people listed as U.S. citizens over a 10-year period, according to the A.C.L.U. From 2017 to 2019, A.C.L.U. data showed that law enforcement detained 420 citizens in Ms. Nuetzi’s state of Florida, at ICE’s request. Eighty-three of those requests have been canceled, and the people released. The rest remain in detention, waiting for ICE, according to the A.C.L.U. report. Even though ICE detainers should lapse after 48 hours, local law enforcement often continues to hold people until the agency gets around to checking them. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/ice-raids.html

14. Michelle Goldberg: Acosta Resigned. The Caligula Administration Lives On.

Trump will sometimes jettison men accused of abuse when they become a public relations liability. But his first instinct is empathy, a sentiment he seems otherwise unfamiliar with. In May, he urged Roy Moore, the theocratic Alabama Senate candidate accused of preying on teenage girls, not to run again because he would lose, but added, “I have NOTHING against Roy Moore, and unlike many other Republican leaders, wanted him to win.” The president has expressed no sympathy for victims in the Epstein case, but has said he felt bad for Alexander Acosta, the United States attorney who oversaw a secret, obscenely lenient deal that let Epstein escape federal charges for sex crimes over a decade ago.

Trump seems to understand, at least on a limbic level, that the effect of this cavalcade of scandal isn’t cumulative. Instead, each one eclipses the last, creating a sense of weary cynicism that makes shock impossible to sustain.

It was just three weeks ago that E. Jean Carroll, a well-known writer, accused Trump of what amounted to a violent rape in the mid-1990s, and two friends of hers confirmed that she’d told them about it at the time. In response, Trump essentially said she was too unattractive to rape — “No. 1, she’s not my type” — and claimed that he’d never met her. That was a provable lie; there’s a photograph of them together. It didn’t matter. The story drifted from the headlines within a few days.

Since Epstein’s arrest, many people have wondered how he was able to get away with his alleged crimes for so long, given all that’s publicly known about him. But we also know that the president boasts about sexually assaulting women, that over a dozen have accused him of various sorts of sexual misconduct, and one of them has accused him of rape. We know it, and we know we can’t do anything about it, so we live with it and grow numb. Maybe someday justice will come and a new generation will wonder how we tolerated behavior that was always right out in the open. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/acosta-epstein-trump.html

15. Jonathan Chait: Trump: Paul Ryan Was Bribed to Call Me Stupid

Tim Alberta’s new book, American Carnage, quotes Paul Ryan making several unflattering comments about President Trump. Ryan reveals that Trump complained about the 2018 spending bill but privately promised to sign it if Ryan would allow him to build suspense over Twitter first. “I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan tells Alberta. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government.”

You might be wondering if Trump is taking the insults well. The answer is no, Trump is not taking it well.

In a lengthy rant to reporters at the White House today that was unhinged even by Trumpian standards, the president made several attacks on the former Speaker of the House. Employing his favorite method of turning the insult around on the insulter, Trump claimed it was Ryan who had no knowledge of the government: “Frankly, he was a baby, he didn’t know what he was doing.”

And most strangely of all, Trump insinuated Ryan is only criticizing him because he is accepting secret bribes. “For him to be going out and opening his mouth is pretty incredible. But maybe he gets paid.”

Right, why else would Ryan say Trump knows nothing about government, other than getting bribed to do it by a Politico reporter? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/trump-paul-ryan-was-bribed-to-call-me-stupid.html

16. Eric Lutz: “Just Another Day At The White House”: Trump’s Social Media Summit Was Ugly, Pointless, And Weird

For those thrilled at the prospect of hearing a 73-year-old totter on for more than an hour about his Twitter feed, Donald Trump’s social media summit represented a rare and precious opportunity. On Thursday, very online president rounded up his favorite internet trolls—Diamond and Silk, James O’Keefe, and the like—for a “very big and very important” White House visit wherein they could air their grievances about tech companies’ allegedly unfair and discriminatory treatment.

Democrats, naturally, took issue with some of the most toxic figures on the web milling around the White House. “This has the appearance not of a social media summit but a political rally and call for the right,” Senator Mark Warner told the Washington Post. “The fact that some of the most extreme voices on social media are coming to the White House, and they get a forum to complain about how often they’re retweeted, and that the actual platform companies aren’t even invited, smacks of the absurd.” In practice, however, the event was less a coordinated rallying cry than a disjointed circus, featuring a parade of self-styled provocateur bozos and a near-melee in the Rose Garden.

The event was pretty doomed from the start, boasting the production value of a middle school science fair: the White House printed and displayed on poster board a selection of notable Trump tweets, including the much-memed “covfefe,” and another from 2012 in which the future-president reported that “many are saying I’m the best 140 character writer in the world.” The administration also printed dictionary-style definitions of various words—including a pronunciation guide, in case participants were tripped up by “shadow banning”—that have been thrown out by conservatives to explain Big Tech’s supposed bias against them. Sadly, any scholarly tone staffers had hoped to convey was torpedoed by the predictably aimless Trump address that served as the summit’s centerpiece. It was standard-issue Trump: various superlatives and complaints interspersed with odd strolls down the winding, mossy footpaths of his mind. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/trumps-social-media-summit-was-ugly-pointless-and-weird

17. Marshall Cohen, Kay Guerrero and Arturo Torres: Exclusive: Security reports reveal how Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election meddling

New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy.

The surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command center and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States.

Despite being confined to the embassy while seeking safe passage to Ecuador, Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical moments, frequently for hours at a time. He also acquired powerful new computing and network hardware to facilitate data transfers just weeks before WikiLeaks received hacked materials from Russian operatives.

These stunning details come from hundreds of surveillance reports compiled for the Ecuadorian government by UC Global, a private Spanish security company, and obtained by CNN. They chronicle Assange's movements and provide an unprecedented window into his life at the embassy. They also add a new dimension to the Mueller report, which cataloged how WikiLeaks helped the Russians undermine the US election.

Meanwhile, Assange still has allies in Russia. Within hours of Assange's arrest, senior officials from President Vladimir Putin's government rushed to Assange's defense and slammed the US for infringing his rights, declaring that, "The hand of 'democracy' squeezes the throat of freedom.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/assange-embassy-exclusive-documents/index.html

18. Marc Fisher: Behind Trump’s ‘go back’ demand: A long history of rejecting ‘different’ Americans

The Know-Nothings wanted German and Irish immigrants to get out because they were allegedly subversive and diseased people who were stealing American jobs. White preachers and politicians of the 1820s urged freed blacks to move to West Africa, supposedly for their own good.

From that drive to encourage blacks to go back where they came from to waves of nativist attacks on Catholics, Jews, Asians and Hispanics in nearly every generation that followed, “go home” rhetoric is as American as immigration itself.

President Trump’s raw assertion of nativist language, in attacks Sunday and Monday on four Democratic congresswomen — all of them U.S. citizens, three of them native-born — is consistent not only with his long history of attacks on people he perceives as the other, but also with the nation’s oscillating attitudes toward immigration.

From Calvin Coolidge’s warnings in the 1920s that the country was becoming “a dumping ground” and that “America must remain American” to the “America: Love it or leave it” rhetoric that surrounded Richard Nixon’s presidency, the nation’s leaders have struggled for two centuries with ambivalence about its core identity as a magnet for immigrants. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/behind-trumps-go-back-demand-a-long-history-of-rejecting-different-americans/2019/07/15/aeb4539a-a712-11e9-a3a6-ab670962db05_story.html