Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Reactionaries Are Having a Bad Month
But they’ll be dangerous in the months ahead.
What is Braxton Bragg to Donald Trump, or Trump to Braxton Bragg?
It was always strange (and outrageous) to have U.S. military bases named for traitors — for Confederate generals who rebelled against the Union to defend slavery. And military leaders seem willing to change those bases’ names. But Trump says no. [..]
But Trump evidently can’t bring himself to make even a symbolic show of sympathy. And trying to understand his incapacity helps explain what Trumpism — and, indeed, modern conservatism as a whole — is all about.
Trump himself says that it’s about honoring “a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” Really?
These bases honor men who stood for slavery, the opposite of freedom; and as it happens, two of the biggest bases are named for generals famed not for victories but for defeats. Bragg, whose army suffered an epic rout at Chattanooga, was one of the Civil War’s worst-regarded generals. John Bell Hood squandered his men’s lives in futile attacks at Atlanta and Franklin, then led what was left of his army to annihilation at Nashville.
Trump obviously doesn’t know about any of that. But why should a guy who grew up in Queens care about Confederate tradition in the first place?
The answer is that Trump, and most of his party, are reactionaries. That is, as the political theorist Corey Robin puts it, they are motivated above all by “a desire to resist the liberation of marginal or powerless people.” And Confederate iconography has become a symbol of reaction in America.
Michelle Goldberg: Trump’s Grotesque Tulsa Trip
A racist president trolls his enemies with a rally on Juneteenth.
Most people — or, at any rate, most readers of The New York Times — remember Donald Trump’s response to the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va., as a particularly low point in a presidency full of them. After a rambling, aggrieved news conference in which he defended some of those marching with neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” Trump’s already dismal approval rating hovered below 38 percent. Staffers voiced shame and disgust to journalists (anonymously, of course). Senator Susan Collins was “concerned.” [..]
It’s important to keep Trump’s instinct for escalation in mind when considering his decision to hold his first post-shutdown rally in Tulsa, Okla., next Friday — which is Juneteenth, the holiday that celebrates the end of American slavery. Tulsa was the site, 99 years ago, of a white rampage in the thriving commercial district known as Black Wall Street; with as many as 300 people killed, it was one of the worst incidents of racist violence in American history.
“The president’s speech there on Juneteenth is a message to every black American: more of the same,” tweeted Representative Val Demings, a Florida Democrat reported to be on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist.
As soon as the rally was announced, people started asking a question that Trump often forces: Was the president being stupid or evil? After all, it’s highly unlikely that Trump, who reportedly didn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor when he visited in 2017, is familiar with the Tulsa massacre. But there are people around Trump who are sophisticated enough to understand the message the rally is sending, including Stephen Miller, one of the president’s closest aides and an out-and-out white nationalist.
Eugene Robinson: Trump might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy
He may be losing the “Lost Cause” of white supremacy.
It should have happened 155 years ago, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but maybe — just maybe — the Civil War is finally coming to an end. And perhaps Donald Trump, not Jefferson Davis, will go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy.
Symbols like flags and monuments matter, because what they symbolize is our vision of ourselves as a nation: the heroes, battles, movements, sacrifices and ideals we honor. So when I see multiracial crowds toppling the statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians, when I see respected military leaders arguing that Army posts should no longer bear the names of Confederate generals, when I see NASCAR banning displays of the Confederate battle flag at its races — witnessing all of this, I let hope triumph over experience and allow myself to imagine that this may indeed be a transformational moment. [..]
When it was reported that high-ranking Army officials are open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from military posts such as Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Trump reacted instantly. He tweeted Wednesday that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”
Trump claimed, ridiculously, that the names are somehow part of the nation’s “history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” He may be historically ignorant enough not to know that the generals in question were traitors as famous for the battles they lost as for any of their triumphs; that ultimate victory went to the Union, not the Confederacy; and that the whole point of the rebellion was to deny freedom to African Americans. Or he may know these facts but believe his political base doesn’t.
Catherine Rampell: Trump is so set on harassing immigrants that his immigration agency needs a bailout
The immigration agency admonishing immigrants to pull themselves up by their bootstraps seems to have destroyed its own boots.
For three years, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the federal agency that processes visas, work permits and naturalizations — has lectured immigrants about how they should become more self-sufficient. It has alleged, without evidence, that too many immigrants are on the dole. (Actually, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in federal benefits, and the foreign-born use fewer federal benefits than do their native-born counterparts.)
The agency implemented a broad, and likely illegal, rule allegedly designed to weed out immigrants who might ever be tempted to become a “public charge” and try to benefit from taxpayer largesse.
Well, now USCIS is broke — and is trying to become a “public charge” itself, by begging Congress for a bailout.
The agency is funded almost entirely by user fees, rather than congressional appropriations. But under President Trump’s leadership, it has mismanaged its finances so badly that it has sought an emergency $1.2 billion infusion from taxpayers.
Unless it get a bailout, the agency will furlough three-quarters of its workforce next month, Government Executive reported Thursday.
The agency claims it’s a novel coronavirus victim. No doubt, the covid-19 pandemic has disrupted operations. But USCIS was in financial trouble long before the virus’s outbreak.
Ana Navarro: 19 ways to fight racism
George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers. We all saw it on video. It triggered something in most of us. Maybe it was how long the torture lasted, 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Maybe it was the nonchalant attitude of former officer Derek Chauvin, as he kept his knee on Floyd’s neck, despite the crowd’s pleas that he let him go. Maybe it was George Floyd’s last words. “I can’t breathe.” Words we’ve heard before from Eric Garner, another black man whose death became a hashtag and a rallying cry.
Maybe it was Floyd calling out for his “mama,” who had died three years before. Maybe it was the sequence of hashtags as a result of racism that happened in such a short time: #AhmaudArbery, #BreonnaTaylor, #BirdingWhileBlack. Maybe it was the combination of all of those things and more.
Whatever it was, it led to a collective realization that spread around the country and around the globe that America has a systemic racism problem. We have been carrying it around since our country was born. It is killing us — some of us, literally.
What happens now? What comes beyond the hashtag? Some of my black friends have told me — sometimes with an eye roll and a chuckle — that they’ve been getting random calls and texts from white people they know, asking them how they’re doing, asking what they can do. It borders on the ridiculous for people to be asked how to fix a problem they didn’t create and are instead the victims of.
But still, it’s a question that deserves a serious answer.