16 NEWS Talking points
Reuters,
NASATr ump: The ugly spectacle of ‘send her back’
It’s hard to believe the scene that unfolded
at President Trump’s rally in North Caro-
lina last week could happen in the United
States of America, said Andrew Sullivan in
NYMag.com. As Trump whipped the audi-
ence into a frenzy of hatred for Democratic
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee whom
he described as an America-hating terrorist
sympathizer, the packed stadium erupted
into chants of “Send her back! Send her
back!” The crowd was echoing Trump’s own
recent tweets that Omar and three other
Democratic congresswomen of color—who
were born in the U.S.—should “go back” to
their home countries. Then, when a protester dared interrupt, the
mob started howling “USA! USA!” at him as security handcuffed
him and spirited him out of the building. All the while, Trump
looked on in smug satisfaction, jutting out his chin and “inhaling
the fumes of mob fervor like some two-bit Mussolini.” America
has seen racist and nativist demagogues before. “But neofascist
rhetoric in huge stadiums designed to demonize dissent? New.
Targeting specific nonwhite, female political opponents for depor-
tation? Unprecedented.” We now know two things for sure, said
Alex Shephard in NewRepublic.com. “The president is a bigot,”
and “he will undoubtedly run one of the most grotesque re-
election campaigns of the post–civil rights era.”
“Are we really taking this seriously?” asked Andrew McCarthy in
NationalReview.com. Obviously, Trump’s supporters didn’t liter-
ally mean “send her back.” It’s hyperbole. Trump fans are angry
at Omar’s radical socialist positions, her hostility to Israel, and her
history of using anti-Semitic tropes. Besides, for Trump fans, “the
rallies are fun spectacles, like rock concerts or ball games.” You
might scream “kill the umpire” in the heat of the moment. But
nobody actually thinks you’re going to do it. Trump’s “go back”
home tweets were offensive and “politically dumb,” but don’t
exaggerate their significance. The end of the republic, this is not.
Sorry, but “presidential words matter,” said Kevin Williamson,
also in NationalReview.com. It doesn’t matter if Trump’s support-
ers were trying to “troll” liberals. “Ideas have consequences, even
half-formed and half-understood ones.” Trump’s words degrade
one of the foundational ideas of our country. You can move to
China or Poland and live there for years, but never really be Chi-
nese or Polish. But people can come to the U.S. and “become an
American because you can become a citi-
zen.” Omar might be “genuinely awful,”
but the idea that her politics make her less
of a citizen “is fundamentally and literally
un-American.” If only most Republicans
thought that, said Juan Williams in The
Hill.com. Overall, recent polling shows
that 65 percent of Americans thought the
president’s “go back” tweets were racist—
but 57 percent of GOP voters agree with
the president’s language. “It’s time to call
out Trump supporters for what they are—
people willing to excuse the inexcusable.”Long before he ran for president, Trump exploited the country’s
racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions for his own gain, said Peter
Baker and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times. The
Justice Department sued him and his father for refusing to rent
apartments to black tenants in the 1970s. Trump gained fame in
the 1980s by calling for the death penalty for black and Hispanic
teenagers accused of raping a jogger in Central Park—and still
insists on their guilt, even though they were cleared by DNA
evidence. Once Trump even pitched a season of The Apprentice
that would have pitted black contestants against whites—blond
whites, he specified. “It would be the highest-rated show on
television,” he enthused in a radio interview with Howard Stern.
Later, Trump ingratiated himself with Republicans by persistently
championing the conspiracy theory that President Obama was not
born in the U.S., and he launched his own presidential campaign
by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” Still, his defenders insist
he’s not a racist.It’s Trump, not Omar, who is opposed to the “American idea,”
said Adam Serwer in TheAtlantic.com. He claims Omar is unpa-
triotic because of her criticism of the country, but he was the one
who happily profited from a hostile foreign power’s attack on
our democracy. As president, Trump says America’s critics should
leave, but during his own presidential campaign he described the
U.S. as a broken nation that was filled with “carnage” and was
well on its way to becoming “a third-world country”—a place
that was no longer great. Now, by demonizing migrants and mak-
ing a black, Muslim congresswoman “an object of hate for the
political masses,” Trump is openly embracing white nativism as
his primary re-election platform. Will it work? “What Americans
do now, in the face of this, will define us forever.”Having some fun in North CarolinaQThe Trump administration hasn’t built a
single mile of new wall along the Mexi-
can border since taking office. So far, the
government has only built 51 miles of steel
fencing to reinforce or replace existing bar-
riers, a rate of about 1.7 miles per month.
WashingtonExaminer.com
QWealthy, college-educated whites with-
out children are the fastest-growing demo-
graphic group in economically successful,
expensive cities, with families increasingly
unable to afford to live in them. San Fran-
cisco now has the lowest share of children
of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.The population of Washington, D.C., has
boomed by more than 20 percent since
2000, but the number of children under 18
has actually declined.
TheAtlantic.com
QA total of 66 space missions
from various nations have
landed on or crashed into the
moon since the first in 1959.
NASA estimates that those
missions have left behind a
total of 800 objects on the lu-
nar surface, including 71 space-
craft and rovers; boots, cameras,and bags of feces; and two golf balls.
The Wall Street Journal
QThe American pharmaceutical industry
pumped out 76 billion opioid pills from
2006 to 2012, flooding many small
towns and rural areas with the
addictive drugs, according to an
analysis of Drug Enforcement
Administration data. Hundreds
of thousands of people in the
U.S. have died of overdoses
and other opioid-related causes
over the past decade.
The Washington PostNoted