… Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by winning over the Tea Party, evangelical, and pro-life blocs, each of them determined to save America from Barack Obama, the first Black president. His enflaming racial resentment gave Trump an unassailable base in his party. But what the general elections reveal […] Read more »
Trump leaves America at its most divided since the Civil War
Donald Trump ends his tumultuous presidency with the nation confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War. The January 6 assault on the US Capitol capped four years in which Trump relentlessly stoked the nation’s divisions and simultaneously provided oxygen for the growth of White nationalist […] Read more »
If the Capitol mob had been Black? Most Americans say the police would have been harsher
By a wide margin, Americans say the police response to the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol would have been harsher if the rioters had been mostly Black rather than mostly white, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds. A 55% majority says law enforcement would have employed harsher tactics […] Read more »
The Trump-fueled riot shocked America. To some, it was a long time coming.
To countless scholars, advocates and political actors, the violent mob that stormed the halls of Congress on Jan. 6 was not exactly surprising. To some, it wasn’t a matter of whether a mob inspired by Donald Trump would kick down the doors of the Capitol, but when. “This situation, in […] Read more »
Some in the GOP parrot far-right talk of a coming civil war
War-like imagery has begun spreading in Republican circles after the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters, with some elected officials and party leaders rejecting pleas to tone down rhetoric calling for a second civil war. … The heightened rhetoric mimics language far-right extremists […] Read more »
Joe Biden’s Looming War on White Supremacy
For four years, Donald Trump downplayed the risk of white-supremacist violence and denied that racial bias is pervasive in law enforcement. In a single, searing day, the assault on the U.S. Capitol exposed the price of both of those choices—and may have provided Joe Biden new political momentum for reversing […] Read more »