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Opinion
Joe Biden
Joe Biden needs Black voters. So why does he keep insulting us?
Benjamin Dixon
Biden seems to think a mythical ‘special relationship’ with the black community allows him to get away with offensive comments More
First Dog on the Moon
US Postal Service
Even if there was no election the postal service is just the sort of thing Trump would like to destroy
First Dog on the Moon
The raccoons of the resistance express solidarity with the United States Postal Service
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US Postal Service
First Dog on the Moon
US elections 2020
US politics
Donald Trump
Joe Biden
Bernie Sanders
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In mid-June the oil pipeline billionaire Kelcy Warren hosted a fundraising bash at his palatial Dallas, Texas, home that drew the presence of Donald Trump and raised $10m for the US president’s campaign coffers.Warren’s fundraising gusher for Trump occurred after he and his wife had donated a hefty $1.7m since 2019 to Trump Victory, a fundraising vehicle for Trump’s re-election and the Republican National Committee, according to the non-partisan Open Secrets group.All this campaign largesse comes after Warren’s company Energy Transfer notched a major win soon after Trump took office, winning regulatory approval to move ahead with the controversial and legally embattled Dakota Access pipeline.The Dallas billionaire’s ties with Trump were boosted when Trump in 2017 tapped Rick Perry to be energy secretary; a former Texas governor, Perry sat on the board of an Energy Transfer subsidiary before his energy post, and afterwards in early 2020 joined another Energy Transfer board.Warren’s fundraising skills, personal checks and access to top officials, underscore how fossil fuel billionaires and other energy moguls from Texas to New York to Oklahoma, have opened their wallets wide and raised cash to re-elect Trump, after three-plus years of enjoying Trump’s sweeping energy deregulation and tax cuts.Since Trump took office his favorite Super Pac, America First Action, has raked in millions of fossil fuel dollars. The Super Pac has received $1m from the shale oil billionaire Harold Hamm and his company Continental Resources, and another $1m from the coal mogul Robert Murray, who runs the eponymous Murray Energy, according to Open Secrets.The Super Pac has also pulled in $500,000 from the coal billionaire Joe Craft of Alliance Resource Partners, $750,000 from the Texas oilman Syed Javaid Anwar of Midland Energy, and $500,000 from John Catsimatidis, a top investor in United Refining Co, as Open Secrets and news reports show.Moreover, Trump tried to reassure his fossil fuel friends of his support in early April when the pandemic was causing them economic pain. Trump huddled at the White House with a select group of industry moguls including Hamm, Warren and the Texas oilman Jeff Hildebrand to solicit ideas for new federal relief.Afterwards, Trump pledged he would “make funds available to these very important companies”. More
Speaking on a hot, windy afternoon during a visit to the fracking fields of west Texas last month, Donald Trump conjured an ominous vision of suburban America under siege: terrorized by rising crime and threatened by the development of low-income housing in their neighborhoods.“It’s been hell for suburbia,” Trump declared, touting his decision to rescind an Obama-era fair-housing rule to combat racial segregation in the suburbs, as part of his promise to preserve what he called their “Suburban Lifestyle Dream”. To the scattered crowd in attendance, he added: “So, enjoy your life, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy your life.”Nearly 500 miles east, in a diversifying suburb of Houston, Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni is running to represent a congressional district that is worlds apart from the one that exists in Trump’s imagination.Texas’ 22nd congressional district, which is almost as big as the size of Rhode Island and nearly as populous, is so diverse that his campaign is distributing literature in 21 languages. Protests against police brutality and racial discrimination spread throughout the region after the death of George Floyd, a black man who died under the knee of a white Minneapolis police. And Floyd, a native of Houston, was laid to rest in the district.“This is new Texas,” said Kulkarni, a former diplomat who grew up in Houston. “It’s diverse, it’s educated, it’s dynamic.”And it’s not only Texas. From Atlanta to Phoenix, this pattern is part of a longterm political realignment of the suburbs that has been dramatically accelerated by Trump’s presidency.Once cornerstones of the Republican coalition, these densely populated metropolitan suburbs are turning increasingly Democratic. At the same time, the more sparsely populated exurban areas have become even more deeply Republican, countering, for now, Democrats’ gains elsewhere in the suburbs.Until now, Trump has appeared uninterested in persuading these swing voters back, alienating them further with the inflammatory rhetoric and hardline views on race and cultural heritage that excite his base.But mounting backlash among suburban voters to Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his attempts to stoke racial grievance have imperiled the president’s re-election prospects and put his party at risk of being shut out of power in Congress.Trump is promoting a vision of America’s suburbs that no longer existsIn recent weeks, Trump has sought to appeal, with little subtlety, to suburban voters. In one tweet, he vowed to protect “the Suburban Housewives of America” from the threat posed by his Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden.In a play to the perceived racist fears of white suburban voters, he wrote: “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”Demographers and political strategists say Trump is promoting a vision of America’s suburbs with aproned housewives, leafy cul-de-sacs and picket fences that no longer exists. More
Opinion
Donald Trump
Why Donald Trump failed his TV interviews
The president selects his media appearances carefully – but has been skewered twice recently
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‘You can’t do that’: Trump argues with reporter over Covid-19 death figures – video
What is remarkable about an interview with Donald Trump that went viral last week is how much it has been remarked upon, given that – on the face of it – it is so unremarkable. Interviewer sits down with politician and asks questions; politician is evasive and makes baseless assertions, so the reporter, Jonathan Swan from Axios, asks him questions like “What do you mean?”, “What’s your basis for saying that?”, “Why?”.
Isn’t that what we do in interviews?
But it was exceptional because that is not how Trump is normally interviewed.
The American president is highly selective about who he allows himself to be interviewed by (declaration of interest: despite repeated efforts, and coming very close once, he has not done an interview with me – although has answered a lot of my questions at news conferences). I would say that he gives 90%-95% of his interviews to the Murdoch-owned Fox News network – and he always knows his interviewer well.
He knows Swan, too. The charming Australian is fabulously well connected and, though an outsider, has cultivated the White House key players like an insider. Trump thought he knew what he was getting when the two men sat down together. More
Trump to hold press conference this afternoon
‘We’re making it up’: How Trump’s America failed the Covid test
Trumpism has taken over, but what happens if Trump loses?
US sees wave of progressive victories by people of color
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An emergency room doctor in Boston is assembling thousands of voter registration kits for distribution at hospitals and doctor’s offices.Later this month, students at Harvard and Yale’s medical schools are planning a contest to see which of the Ivy League rivals can register the most voters.And a medical student in Rhode Island has launched an effort to get emergency ballots into the hands of patients who find themselves unexpectedly in the hospital around election day.Amid the dual public health crises of Covid-19 and racism, some in the medical community are prescribing a somewhat nontraditional remedy: voting.Hospitals, doctors and healthcare institutions across the country this month are committing to efforts to engage Americans in the election process as part of Civic Health Month, a nationwide campaign that kicked off 1 August.Hospital networks in Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin and elsewhere are among more than 60 institutions participating, along with thousands of individual physicians.Benjamin Ruxin, a Stanford University graduate student who heads the campaign, said the coronavirus pandemic underscores the importance of ensuring everyone can vote and help shape healthcare policy for the challenging times ahead.Voter registration rates are down almost 70% in some states this election cycle because the traditional ways of registering voters have been curtailed by the pandemic, including DMVs and in-person registration drives, he said. Vulnerable patients ‘have to be involved in politics’Alister Martin, an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said he founded VotER to provide medical professionals voter registration resources after years of seeing patients struggling from the health consequences of poverty, drug addiction, homelessness and other social ills.“We’ve been trained to solve these really complex health problems, but not everything we see can be treated with a prescription,” he said. “The healthcare system does not work for vulnerable people – full stop. We have to help them get involved in the political process if we hope to change any of this.”The sheer number of organizations and the range of efforts being proposed during the monthlong campaign shows that the medical community is increasingly shedding its reticence at civic engagement, said Kelly Wong, a medical student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. More
