The post An opportunity for Trump to heal racial divisions at Tulsa campaign rally appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>ANALYSIS/OPINION:
President Trump on Tuesday unveiled a plan to make reforms in police departments and acknowledged for the first time the existence of “systemic racism.” He also promised to meet with some African-American families whose relatives have been killed by police officers.
That is one step toward healing our deep racial divisions.
The next opportunity comes Saturday as the president is scheduled to break his rally “fast” in Tulsa. The Trump campaign claims they have received 800,000 ticket requests. Though not all will get into the 20,000-seat venue, the Trump re-election effort will have mined additional names for its digital campaign.
The president should not just use the speech to fire up his base. He should propose something substantive that might provide, if not a solution to racial tensions, then at least begin to solve the underlying problem, something Democrats have only talked about for 50 years.
Here are my suggestions for what the president might say:
There is only one race — the human race. We are one seamless coat of many colors, one “body” with many parts, each with an important function that contributes to the whole. We call ourselves the UNITED States of America for a reason. No other country exemplifies such unity. Though we have our disagreements and even sometimes divisions, our oneness is our greatest strength.
There is no “pure” or “master” race. No race is superior to another. To hate someone because of the color of their skin is to hate one’s self because we all share the same origin story, the same human DNA. This is all part of God’s doing in His ultimate creative and most beautiful work — humanity. We are created in His image.
Historically, many of our churches have not always been on the right side when it comes to race. Many churches oppose civil rights for African-Americans and wrongly quote Scripture to justify their positions. As Abraham Lincoln said during our most divisive war: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. … The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
I am today proposing a new alliance between white evangelical churches and their African-American brethren. At bottom, racism and the many horrors that have flowed from it are matters of the heart. Who better to address heart matters than our evangelical churches, which preach a gospel of redemption and changed lives?
This should not be an obligation, but a duty, a privilege and blessing. Both Old and New Testaments speak of our obligation to the poor and excluded. Addressing racism and poverty are conservative issues. We conservatives, as the late HUD Secretary and Congressman Jack Kemp observed, “… define compassion not by the number of people who receive some kind of government aid, but rather by the number of people who no longer need it.”
Our goal is to get as many people as possible who desire a better life to get on their feet and live independently of government with the dignity and honor that goes with a job and a stable family. Our churches are uniquely equipped to provide such help. A changed life creates optimism and self-respect, while it earns the respect of others.
I can think of no better person to lead this effort than current HUD Secretary Ben Carson, whose own story of overcoming poverty and crime when growing up in Detroit is an inspiration to us all. On Tuesday, the president and Mr. Carson plan to convene a closed-door meeting with 900 evangelical and social conservative leaders to work out a plan to begin the redemption and reunification of our great country.
With God’s help and guidance, I know we can do this.
America needs a speech like this, Mr. President. Will you deliver it?
• Cal Thomas, a nationally syndicated columnist, is the author of “America’s Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires, Superpowers and the United States” (HarperCollins/Zondervan, January 2020).
The post An opportunity for Trump to heal racial divisions at Tulsa campaign rally appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post ‘They had a huge opportunity’: People of color on Trump’s team reckon with a backlash appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>
President Donald Trump. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
It’s another Charlottesville moment for some aides inside the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump’s handling of the nationwide anti-racism protests and the response to George Floyd’s killing are prompting a private reckoning, spurring sadness or soul-searching among some people of color who continue to serve in the administration after three and a half years, say several current and former aides.
These Republican aides — people of color appointed by the Trump team — say they are mystified as to why the president can so forcefully call for law and order amid ongoing protests, yet he cannot speak with the same conviction about racism in America, or offer words to soothe a divided and scared nation as it faces social unrest alongside a pandemic and an economic downturn.
“They had a huge opportunity, and they botched it,” said one senior administration official, among several people of color who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their jobs at risk. “They could have gotten out ahead of it by having the president say something or go to Minnesota, where he’s been many times. I don’t know what led to the botching. Maybe he needs more advisers who have a better sense of what is going on in the real world.”
More than two weeks since Floyd’s death, Trump has not given a major address on race, unity or race relations in the U.S. — even as some aides and advisers have urged him to do so. Instead, the president has vacillated between playing up his support and credentials with law enforcement, ramping up his own reelection campaign and trying to appease black voters with strange tributes to Floyd. He’s plotting his own executive action on the issue while Congress weighs larger moves.
Trump’s own advisers keep offering different advice on the best way he can help the nation move forward, while the president relies on his own instincts to guide him as he usually does — leaving people of color and their allies feeling largely unheard.
For many White House aides, Trump’s handling of these protests takes them back to another pivotal moment in his presidency: His response to the August 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Va. Trump at the time would not quickly condemn white supremacists after the murder of a young woman by a man who drove through a crowd. After 48 hours, Trump delivered a line that continues to haunt his presidency: “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Both then and now, Trump aides wrestled with their boss’ equivocation.
“Trump is not sharing any sense of empathy at all, because that is not who he is. You cannot ask him to magically turn it on because it is not there,” one former senior administration official and person of color said.
“America, in 2016, elected a barroom brawler. Does America need in its president what it needed in 2016? Times have changed,” the same former official added. “My vote is open. I am a Republican and I worked in this administration, but who I vote for in November will depend on what America needs in five months. If the country is still burning like this, it will be an issue.”
To make up for Trump’s relatively muted response to the anti-racism protests, administration aides are finalizing an executive order on police reform. Trump previewed it at an event in Texas on Thursday when he said the order would encourage police departments to meet the same standards for use of force.
“You probably always could have done better with the benefit of hindsight, but I just don’t get involved in that sort of Monday morning quarterbacking,” said Ken Blackwell, the former mayor of Cincinnati, former Ohio secretary of state and a longtime conservative leader and Trump supporter. “I look at what the playbook is going forward.”
Blackwell cited Trump’s offer of support to governors and mayors as one example of his handling of protests over the past few weeks, as well as the work his aides have done with House and Senate leadership to develop policy ideas for police reform.
“The president’s style is very East Coast, New Yorkish. He sees chaos and disruption and looters, and his instinct is to try to fix it,” Blackwell added. “He corralled that instinct and he understood that he would be at the ready if governors or mayors thought that federal involvement was needed. To me, that was responsible.”
At the same time, Trump, his top aides and his campaign have made statements or planned events that struck critics as tone-deaf and racially insensitive.
The president’s first rally in roughly three months will fall on June 19 in Tulsa, Okla. That coincides with Juneteenth — a holiday marking the end of slavery in the U.S. — in a city that featured one of America’s worst incidences of racial violence in 1921, when a white mob attacked and killed black residents and burned black-owned businesses and homes.
On Thursday, the Trump campaign started selling a baby outfit that co-opted the design of the Black Lives Matter slogan and instead said: “Baby Lives Matter.”
National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow also said this week he did not believe there was systemic racism in the U.S. — going even further than Trump and many of his top officials, who say there’s no systemic racism in U.S. law enforcement.
“Our police have been letting us live in peace,” Trump said this week. “We want to make sure we don’t have any bad actors in there. And sometimes you’ll see some horrible things like we witnessed recently. But 99 — I say 99.9, but let’s go with 99 percent of them — are great, great people. And they’ve done jobs that are record setting. Record setting.”
Privately, some people of color in the administration groaned at these moves while trying to stay focused on their own jobs.
The White House, in a statement, defended the president’s record and said he has expressed support for the anti-racism protesters during his speeches at the SpaceX launch and in the Rose Garden.
“President Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere said. “At every challenge and tragedy, this president has provided hope and optimism and brought people together for bold solutions, and he’s doing so again following the horrible, senseless death of George Floyd.”
The president’s approach to the moment — veering between expressing sympathy for Floyd’s death, taking a hard-line stance against protests and then trying to find policy solutions on the fly — does not surprise current and former officials.
“Much of what you see with the president is him trying to figure out where is his voice on this, and how can he differentiate himself from the violence with the protesters,” said another former senior administration official and person of color.
But that motivation, the same official said, got lost in translation and instead made the president come across as insensitive even if the official still plans to support Trump in 2020.
“My philosophy still comes down on the Republican side and its policies rather than the leader,” the former official added. “Quite frankly, I do not know if [Joe] Biden processes things any differently.”
The post ‘They had a huge opportunity’: People of color on Trump’s team reckon with a backlash appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Trump Saw an Opportunity to Appeal to Black Voters, Then He Tweeted appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Seeing an opportunity to chip away at a crucial voting bloc for Democrats, President Donald Trump’s campaign pounced on a remark his rival Joe Biden made last week about black voters.
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” Biden quipped near the end of an interview with Charlamagne tha God in an episode of The Breakfast Club, a popular nationally-syndicated radio show.
So Team Trump launched a website—YouAintBlack.com—with a video of Biden making the remark, adding a “racist” label across his forehead. The campaign began selling #YouAintBlack t-shirts for $30 apiece. And some of Trump’s top black campaign surrogates, including U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, made the rounds on national television to condemn Biden’s remarks while praising Trump for efforts like criminal justice reform, African American employment growth and support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
“Race-baiting in the 21st century is an ineffective tool to attract one of the most intelligent voting blocs in the nation,” Scott told reporters on a call organized by the Trump campaign last week.
That remark opened a window into a base that Trump has struggled to attract as the 2020 election looms.
But then Trump made a controversial remark of his own that raised concerns in the campaign, one source connected to the campaign told Newsweek who was not named because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
On Thursday, Trump fired off a racially charged tweet about the demonstrations taking place after a black man was killed during an arrest, sparking a swift backlash.
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen … Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he wrote, invoking a phrase used demeaningly against black people during the 1960s Civil Rights movement.
Twitter slapped a disclaimer on the tweet noting that it violated rules “about glorifying violence” and blocked users from being able to reply directly to the tweet or retweet it.
Without naming Trump, Biden remarked it was “no time for incendiary tweets, no time to incite violence” during a live broadcast from his home in Delaware Friday, and several other prominent Democrats blasted Trump’s comments.
The backlash sent the president and his campaign into defense mode through Friday afternoon, starting with a pair of carefully worded follow-up tweets from Trump.
“I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means. It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement. It’s very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media. Honor the memory of George Floyd!” he wrote Friday, shortly before a news conference on new China policies.
Trump didn’t mention Floyd’s death and the demonstrations or respond to shouted questions from reporters following the news conference.
Around the same time, Trump’s campaign released a blistering statement that took aim at Democrats and the media for how Trump’s initial “looting” tweet was received.
“The facts show that the President expressed horror over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ordered the Department of Justice to get involved,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in the statement. “When riots erupted in that city and elsewhere, he warned on Twitter that looting could quickly turn into violence. The media, Joe Biden and the Democrats pounced, purposefully misrepresenting what the President had said, and showing once again that they are incapable of resisting their base impulse of dividing Americans, solely for the purpose of political gain, ratings and cable news profit.”
Biden’s campaign didn’t respond to Newsweek‘s request for comment on Parscale’s assertion.
About an hour after the campaign statement was sent Friday afternoon, Trump opened a meeting with business leaders on efforts to rebuild the economy from the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic with remarks to reporters that struck a different tone from his initial tweets. He said that he offered “our nation’s deepest condolences and most heartfelt sympathies to the family of George Floyd.”
Trump told reporters he had spoken to Floyd’s family but didn’t reveal when the call took place.
“That was a horrible thing to witness and to watch and it would certainly look like there was no excuse for it,” he said.
And he said demonstrators shouldn’t be judged as a whole.
“Certainly there were a lot of different people. There were good people too,” he said. “They were protesting for the right reason in honor of a man, George Floyd, where something happened that shouldn’t have happened.”
“He was in tremendous pain obviously and couldn’t breathe,” he added.
But Trump, who has repeatedly criticized NFL players who have kneeled during the National Anthem in protest of police violence against black people, didn’t directly answer a question about whether Floyd’s death has prompted him to rethink his support for that kind of peaceful protest.
“I think in memory it should be peaceful. It’s terrible,” Trump said, soon cutting off questions.
The post Trump Saw an Opportunity to Appeal to Black Voters, Then He Tweeted appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Dem lawmakers eye ‘opportunity’ for historic expansion of government amid coronavirus crisis appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. Sign up here.
Former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said during the 2008 financial crisis that lawmakers should “never let a crisis go to waste,” and many Democratic lawmakers appear to be heeding that advice — using the coronavirus pandemic as a jumping-off point to renew calls for a historic expansion of government.
Emanuel repeated his mantra again last month, this time in connection with the new crisis. “Start planning for the future. This has to be the last pandemic that creates an economic depression. We’re going to have more pandemics, but this has to be the last economic depression,” he said.
CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE
The view that the crisis should be an axis for deep, long-lasting change was on display during negotiations over the $2 trillion stimulus package, in which House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn reportedly said that the package was “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
That remark brought criticism from Republicans, when Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said of Clyburn’s comments: “When we see a rising body count, they see a political opportunity. Shame on them.”
But Clyburn’s sentiment was reflected at the time in an ultimately unsuccessful House Democratic stimulus proposal that included environmental regulations on airplanes, diversity demands for the boards of companies receiving bailouts, as well as other wish list items.
The idea that the coronavirus crisis could spur a new progressive revolution is shared by California Gov. Gavin Newsom who recently said: “Absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.” The remark came near the end of a long answer to a question about whether he saw “the potential” in the crisis for “a new progressive era” in state and national politics.
The renewed push comes as ideas normally advanced only by progressives — such as expanded unemployment benefits and direct cash payments to every American — have been adopted by Republicans as part of a short-term response to an unprecedented national emergency. The over $2 trillion stimulus package that passed included both measures, and more remains under discussion.
AOC CITES NEED TO ‘PLAY HARDBALL’ ON CORONAVIRUS RELIEF PACKAGES, IN PUSH FOR $2,000 PER MONTH PAYMENTS
But while Republicans and conservatives say that such measures are appropriate only in limited circumstances, Democratic politicians see the door as now having been opened to an enormous expansion of government. It’s an expansion that would also have no clear off-ramp.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the de facto leader of the party’s left-wing faction in the House, has called for measures including “extending Medicare/Medicaid coverage to all, Eviction freezes, No-strings UBI [universal basic income] program, eliminating work requirements for SNAP & other assistance and humanitarian provisions in prisons & decarceral policies.”
She’s previously called for COVID-19 relief to be “drafted with a lens of reparations.”
All of those ideas track closely with ideas the left-wing freshman congresswoman has been promoting since coming to Washington, D.C.
Those ideas were on display on Monday, when the congresswoman said in a press call that the $1,200 stimulus payment to most Americans was not enough, and called for regular recurring payments of almost double that. She said she foresaw a fourth round of stimulus — known as Phase 4 — including expanded health care and $2,000 in monthly reoccurring payments to all families, regardless of immigration status, and $1,000 per child.
She was joined by Progressive Caucus leaders and fellow Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, and “squad members” Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and activists in demanding an even costlier version of the economic stimulus.
The progressive caucus already outlined its priorities — including direct payments, a federal paycheck guarantee program for employers, essential worker protections, expanded health care and a vote-by-mail requirement for the 2020 federal elections. Other members touted their priorities, including Omar’s legislation to cancel rent and mortgage payments during the pandemic and Pressley’s call for student debt cancellations.
Bigger and more regular stimulus payments had been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., when he was running for the Democratic presidential nod, as well as former 2020 hopeful Andrew Yang, who promoted the idea of a $1,000-a-month universal basic income long before the pandemic.
“They should be monthly and should go to EVERY American regardless of circumstance,” Yang said of the $1,200 payments this month.
Sanders, meanwhile, used the crisis to repeat previous calls that free health care be provided to illegal immigrants as well.
“We are all in this together and must demand that government economic and health care assistance is available to all, regardless of immigration status,” he tweeted on Tuesday. “A human being is a human being.”
Pushing for items that line up with one’s pre-existing political agenda is not exclusive to Democrats, however. President Trump, who campaigned on stricter border and immigration controls, this week announced an immigration moratorium on top of a host of other restrictionist policies such as turning away illegal immigrants and asylum seekers at the border.
The push for bigger, broader government programs is something that Republicans are likely to be wary of, even if they are backing the expansion in the short term. The free-market economist Milton Friedman once quipped that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.
ILHAN OMAR INTRODUCES BILL TO CANCEL RENT, MORTGAGE PAYMENTS DURING CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
Should the government get into expanding on a short-term basis, politicians could find themselves in a politically difficult position when it comes to rolling back popular giveaways — especially if the economy doesn’t snap back as quickly as optimists are hoping.
Additionally, left-wing Democrats are likely to fight any return to a pre-COVID situation tooth and nail, and have already indicated as much.
“We just have to reject any calls for a return to normal,” Rep. Pressley said Monday. “Because that normal is one that was slowly killing people.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP
Sanders, in a New York Times op-ed, went so far as to see a “silver lining” in the crisis.
“If there is any silver lining in the horrible pandemic and economic collapse we’re experiencing,” he said, “it is that many in our country are now beginning to rethink the basic assumptions underlying the American value system.”
Fox News’ Marisa Schultz contributed to this report.
The post Dem lawmakers eye ‘opportunity’ for historic expansion of government amid coronavirus crisis appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>