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Zack Beauchamp/Vox:
I regret to report the economic anxiety theory of Trumpism is back
In David Brooks’s new column, he asks the American elite if they’re the baddies. But he’s actually telling them a comforting fiction.
The question of why Donald Trump manages to maintain such a grip on the Republican base, to the point where he can remain a nationally viable candidate despite all of his misdeeds and legal woes, is one of the most important issues in American politics. It’s a subject that has been explored extensively, with the best evidence converging on the same general story: Trump is the avatar of a kind of resentful reactionary politics, one uncomfortable with a changing America, that defines the worldview of a plurality (if not a majority) of the GOP faithful.
But this answer offers few easy solutions and makes some people uncomfortable, as it feels a bit too much like a judgment of Trump supporters. So we get efforts to reject the evidence, often relying on long-debunked alternative arguments.
Steve Benen/MSNBC:
Trump’s predictions about mass post-indictment protests prove false
Donald Trump expected his indictments to generate mass public protests. We were reminded again this week that this clearly hasn’t happened.
Though it seemed as if Trump envisioned mass groups of red-capped followers taking to the streets, those calls were largely ignored. Some supporters turned out in Manhattan around the time of his first arrest, but the gatherings were, by any fair measure, underwhelming duds.
After his classified documents scandal led to his second indictment, the former president again called on his followers to rally behind him — Trump wrote, “SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!” on his social media platform — but the numbers were again small.
Local law enforcement was prepared for crowds of up to 50,000 people. The actual crowd was closer to 500.
In the nation’s capital yesterday, the precise number of pro-Trump voices is unavailable, but by any fair measure, there were just dozens of people. For a man who cares more about crowd sizes than any human being should, this must’ve been disappointing, especially after his “IT’S TIME!!! … PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!” message.
Another from Steve Benen/MSNBC:
Jobless rate remains near half-century low in new jobs report
The unemployment rate is now down to 3.5% — a level so low that the United States did not reach it at any point throughout the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
With revisions from May and June factored in, we’ve now seen roughly 1.8 million jobs created so far this year — and that’s after just seven months, not the entire calendar year.
What’s more, today’s report pointed to solid wage growth and an unemployment rate that’s been below 4% for a year and a half. In fact, it’s worth emphasizing that the United States did not reach 3.5% unemployment — the current jobless rate — at any point throughout the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
The preliminary total for the month might appear underwhelming, but it appears the job market is starting to return to a pre-pandemic normal amidst steady growth and low unemployment.
Jonathan Chait/New York Magazine:
Are Democrats Tricking Republicans Into Nominating Trump?
Conservative elites driven to madness by DeSantis’s collapse.
A fact that has somehow become even more obvious over the last few months is that Republican voters truly adore Donald Trump. At the beginning of the year, there appeared to be a strong chance the party’s voting base could be weaned off its cult-worship relationship with the 45th president and reattached to a more reliable, coherent, and less criminally implicated presidential nominee like Ron DeSantis. As that prospect has waned, despair has set in especially deep for a specific cohort: the anti-anti-Trumpers — conservative Republicans who desperately wish Trump were not their party’s leader, but if he is, will ultimately devote most of their energy to attacking his critics.
The anti-anti-Trumpers dreamed that their yearslong humiliation of having to run interference for a man they loathed was about to end. Now they must face up to the likelihood of devoting at least the next 15 months, and possibly more than five years, to insisting Trump’s multitudinous crimes are no worse than things done by Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and so on.
David Rothkopf/The Daily Beast:
Trump Losing in Court (or in Another Election) Won’t Be Enough to Save U.S. Democracy
Our system is so broken it will take at least a generation to repair.
Ensuring losses for the Republicans who rally to Trump’s defense, despite overwhelming evidence of his crimes—who minimize his wrongdoing for transparently political reasons, who carry the MAGA torch with promises (as Gov. Ron DeSantis did) that they will replace the FBI director as a form of retribution for the Trump prosecutions—is vitally important. But it will not be enough to save our democracy.
That is because quite apart from the harm done (and still threatened) by Trump and his followers, our system has already sustained such deep damage that it is more than just at risk. It is profoundly broken.
Part of this is the result of a decades-long systematic effort by those on the right to promote minority rule in America and, in particular, to ensure that the interests and power of a small fraction of Americans—primarily rich, white, Christian men—would remain protected. Part of this is due to the fact our system was born deeply flawed and our efforts to fix it were fitful and incomplete. Part of this is simply due to neglect, to failing to do the work of reassessment and reinvention that the Founders themselves anticipated would be a central strength of their legacy.
Alex Burness/Bolts:
Massachusetts Is Set to Make Communications Free for Incarcerated People
The reform would eliminate the exorbitant charges people face to keep in touch with loved ones in jail and prison, removing a heavy financial burden for thousands.
Fifteen months ago, [Annalyse Gosselin] started a relationship with an imprisoned man she’d been corresponding with through a pen pal program that connects incarcerated people with concerned strangers. Now budgeting is even harder: her boyfriend, Syrelle, is held in Norfolk, 30 miles from her home, and keeping in regular touch with him is enormously expensive. It costs about $2.50 to talk with him for 20 minutes on the phone, and twice that if they do a video call. Emails cost 25 cents apiece. The private company the prison system uses to run communications takes a $3 surcharge every time she adds money to her account.
Gosselin says she’s spent about $5,000 just to talk with Syrelle since the start of their relationship, and roughly the same amount on purchases for him at the prison commissary: an extension cord, a small television, chicken, vegetables, medicated protein shakes.
“I go broke, literally. I make my bank account negative,” Gosselin told Bolts. “I don’t do much for myself; I just do for him. My mom and everybody always tells me, ‘You can’t keep making sacrifices for your relationship.’ But who else is going to do it?”
Massachusetts is now poised to ease that financial burden for Gosselin, as well as for the thousands of people held in the state’s prisons and jails, and their loved ones. Lawmakers just approved reforms on Monday that would eliminate charges for communicating with incarcerated people. It would also limit commissary markups in all jails and prisons to 3 percent above an item’s purchase price.
It’s the little things that matter most.
Bolts covers local elections, prison reform, sheriffs, and other things hard to find elsewhere.
Jennifer Rubin/The Washington Post:
The GOP’s race problem goes well beyond DeSantis
Republicans insist they are misunderstood on race. Sure, they extol Confederate generals, abhor affirmative action, feature neo-Nazis on social media, make excuses for slavery and think White people are the real victims of discrimination but, gosh darn it, stop calling them racists! Well, these days, they hardly bother to disguise their real views on race.
In Alabama, we’re back to the massive resistance, the movement in Southern states post-Brown v. Board of Education to delay or outright defy the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate. The court, you’ll recall, in June ordered Alabama to redo its congressional districts to provide a second majority-Black congressional district. The state defied the court’s plain instruction.
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