Another masterpiece of political rhetoric:

“I want to apologize. Pocahontas, I apologize to you. I apologize to you. To you I apologize,” he said. “To the fake Pocahontas, I won’t apologize.”

He went on to suggest that, should Warren win the Democratic nomination in 2020 and [if] they were to debate, he would toss an ancestry test to her and dare her to take it. In doing so, he made light of the #MeToo movement.

“We’ll take that little kit and say, we have to go it gently because we are in the Me Too generation, and we will very gently take that kit, slowly toss it” to her, Trump said, adding that he would offer $1 million to

Jennifer Rubin points out the obvious fact that Trump is a racist, and then says the good news is that people see it and they don’t like it.

The Quinnipiac poll released this week shows a plurality (49 percent) think he is a racist while 47 percent do not. Among the 47 percent are 86 percent of Republicans, roughly the same percentage that support him. (They simply will not believe the president they voted for is a racist.)

Well, let’s clarify that a little. They simply will not accept that terminology. They will believe that he’s hostile to non-white people in the same way they are, but they will most definitely not accept that we get to call that … Read the rest

Trump loves surprises:

As a meeting last August in the Oval Office to discuss sanctions on Venezuela was concluding, President Trump turned to his top aides and asked an unsettling question: With a fast unraveling Venezuela threatening regional security, why can’t the U.S. just simply invade the troubled country?

Huh? Huh? Why cannit?

The suggestion stunned those present at the meeting, including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom have since left the administration. This account of the previously undisclosed conversation, as reported by The Associated Press, comes from a senior administration official familiar with what was said.

In an exchange that lasted around five minutes, McMaster and others took turns

Speaking of writing ability, he’s been busy today.

Crazy Maxine Waters, said by some to be one of the most corrupt people in politics, is rapidly becoming, together with Nancy Pelosi, the FACE of the Democrat Party. Her ranting and raving, even referring to herself as a wounded animal, will make people flee the Democrats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018

Yep, he rolls out of bed in the morning and calls a black Congresswoman “crazy.” Usually he calls her “very low IQ” instead.

I interviewed 4 very impressive people yesterday. On Monday I will be announcing my decision for Justice of the United States Supreme Court!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018

The economy is

This is the worst outrage of all.

After having written many best selling books, and somewhat priding myself on my ability to write, it should be noted that the Fake News constantly likes to pore over my tweets looking for a mistake. I capitalize certain words only for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018

HE PRIDES HIMSELF (somewhat) ON HIS ABILITY TO WRITE.

That is simply a fucking outrage. It’s as if the screech a table saw makes prided itself on its cello-playing ability. I’m a writer in a small way myself and the sort of thing Donald Trump writes SHOULD NEVER BE A SOURCE OF PRIDE TO ANYONE.

Plus he … Read the rest

Many good conversations with North Korea-it is going well! In the meantime, no Rocket Launches or Nuclear Testing in 8 months. All of Asia is thrilled. Only the Opposition Party, which includes the Fake News, is complaining. If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018

If not for Trump, we would now be at war with North Korea. Why is that exactly? What is the chain of causation there? The Post attempts to figure it out.

President Trump said Tuesday that the United States would be at war with North Korea without his efforts and that conversations with the nation’s leaders are “going well” — an

Charles Blow on Trump’s rage junkies:

Trump is like a drug dealer who has addicted his followers to fear and rage and keeps supplying it in constant doses. His supporters have become rage-junkies for whom he can do no wrong.

Let’s be clear about the demographics of this base: While the overwhelming majority of blacks and Hispanics have an unfavorable view of Trump, just as many white people have a favorable view of him as have an unfavorable view of him, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted last month.

Part of that is undoubtedly due to the increasingly racialized nature of our partisanship, but it is also because Trump has positioned himself as a white power president.

… Read the rest

David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU, on today’s Supreme Court fubar:

The Supreme Court’s approval of President Trump’s travel ban barring entry to some 150 million people from five overwhelmingly Muslim countries is likely to be judged by history as one of the court’s greatest failures — in a league with Dred Scott v. Sandford, which helped bring on the Civil War, and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the wartime detention of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans and noncitizens of Japanese descent.

Gee, what might the common element be? Singling out a particular group – a non-white group – for Special Treatment and thus general social odium? Yes, that’s the one.

Chief Justice

Adam Gopnik on commensality and the culture of eating together and eating together-but-apart and how central to our lives it all is.

On the issue of Sanders being expelled from a restaurant, mixed emotions are the only ones a rational person can have. On the one hand, one of the ritual functions of restaurants is to make a common place for commonplace civilization to proceed. They build social capital from their openness to all kinds. Think of how much the civilization of American cities depends on our being able to grab not just bite but a bit of anonymity—we eat alongside others without the others looking down too sharply upon us. It’s a fundamental liberal value, worth protecting in all

Why this is stupid:

Hi Kumail, Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in a mass genocide. I lost family on both sides in the holocaust. The more you guys compare everyone to Nazis the more you’ll be blind when the real ones show up… https://t.co/ho7OdxRO9Y

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) June 25, 2018

Kumail Nanjiani:

I know there are a bunch of people upset at the Nazi comparisons, but the highlighting-crimes-by-immigrants move is literally what the Nazis did, with Jews instead of immigrants. A sure fire way to stop being compared to Nazis is to stop acting like them.

Dave Rubin:

Hi Kumail, Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in a mass genocide. I lost family on both sides in the holocaust. The

The Supremes (the five reactionary ones) say sure go ahead ban Muslims from the country, we’re good with that.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld President Trump’s ban on travel from mostly-Muslim nations, delivering a robust endorsement of Mr. Trump’s power to control the flow of immigration into America at a time of political upheaval about the treatment of migrants at the Mexican border.

In a 5-to-4 vote, the court’s conservatives said the president’s statutory power over immigration was not undermined by his history of incendiary statements about the dangers he said Muslims pose to Americans.

Great. Flaming hate-mongering racist shit shouts his hate-mongering shit for a year and a half and the 5 Supremes say that’s a perfectly … Read the rest

Michelle Goldberg points out in her Times column that what we have here is not a crisis of civility but a crisis of democracy.

[T]here’s a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants. I don’t blame staff members at the Virginia restaurant, the Red Hen, for not wanting to help Sanders unwind after a hard week of lying to the public about mass child abuse. Particularly when Sanders’s own administration is fighting to let private businesses discriminate against gay people, who, unlike mendacious press secretaries, are a protected class under many civil rights laws.

That “not wanting to help Sanders unwind” is good.

Whether or