The President Is a White-Nationalist Mob Boss—and His Base Doesn’t Care

Diehard Trump supporters represent at most a quarter of the electorate, but dominate media discussions of the president’s standing. They shouldn’t... Joan Walsh writes in The Nation.

Most of us try to live our lives following the best advice of Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Most of us voted that way in 2016—against Donald Trump. Since then, sadly, we’ve had to watch as the media, even some on the left, fetishize people who did the opposite, treating Trump voters as folks who have much to teach us, who singularly reveal the dimming of the American dream for a sizable segment of our citizens. Of course, Hillary Clinton won voters who earned less than $50,000 annually, so the “economic anxiety” explanation for Trump’s election never made sense. No, all the best post-election research tells us that Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for those afraid of American diversity and increasingly committed to white nationalism. That makes sense, because he ran his campaign extensively on those themes.

TheNation.com/article/the-president-is-a-white-nationalist-mob-boss-and-his-base-doesnt-care/

What happens if the Blue Wave fails?

First of all, there is every reason to believe that a Republican Congress, freed from the immediate threat of elections, would do what it narrowly failed to do last year, and repeal the Affordable Care Act. This would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance and would in particular hit those with pre-existing conditions. There’s a reason health care, not Trump, is the central theme of Democratic campaigns this year.

But the attack on the social safety net probably wouldn’t stop with a rollback of Obama-era expansion: Longstanding programs, very much including Social Security and Medicare, would also be on the chopping block. Who says so? Republicans themselves.

...

www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/obamacare-medicare-social-security-midterms-republicans.html

Getting out the vote is so important!

Great Climate Crisis Tweets (from Grist)

• Could reporters stop asking if political leaders “believe” in climate change and start asking if they understand it instead?
• Plot ideas: 97% of the world’s scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.
• Public Service Announcement: Earth is not flat; Vaccines work; We’ve been to the moon; Chemtrails aren’t a thing;
  Climate change is real #StandUpForScience
• Global warming isn’t real because I was cold today! Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate.

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