Attention to the Unseen

Charles Kaiser writes: One of the most important qualities a good reporter can have is a very low threshold for outrage. Useful, critical coverage of your subject becomes impossible once nonchalance or indifference has inured you to scandal. This has become a huge problem during Donald Trump’s presidency. Inside the souls of far too many Washington reporters, a never-ending wave of scandals, crimes, indictments and assorted obstructions of justice has washed away this essential capacity for indignation – just when…

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The Guardian reports: Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan who was the subject of a rightwing plot to kidnap and possibly kill her over coronavirus lockdown measures, has accused Donald Trump of “inspiring and incentivising domestic terrorism”. Whitmer spoke after Lara Trump, a campaign surrogate for her father-in-law, insisted the president was merely “having fun” when he attacked Whitmer and responded to chants of “Lock her up!” at a rally in Muskegon. “Lock ’em all up,” the president said. On…

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Maeve Reston writes: If President Donald Trump loses his reelection bid in November, it will be in part because of his fundamental misunderstanding of the beliefs of “suburban women,” whom he has tried to win back with a series of bizarre and racist appeals that seem more targeted to a stereotype from the 1950s and 1960s than the American women who actually live in those areas today. Many of the female voters who have abandoned Trump recoil from his divisive…

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Stanley Greenberg writes: Trump built his base in the insurgent anti-government, anti-immigrant movement that, during the last recession, came to prominence as the Tea Party. Then he forged a pact with evangelical Christians, to whom he promised a steady supply of socially conservative federal judges, including on the Supreme Court. He also built a strong alliance with his party’s anti-abortion-rights observant Catholics—a constituency epitomized by Attorney General William Barr. So Trump campaigns unbowed atop a coalition that, by my estimate,…

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The Washington Post reports: Kevin was in his Honda heading west to Indiana as the campaign staff issued a statement on his behalf, titled “A Message from Kevin”: “I am heartbroken to announce that for family and personal reasons, I cannot continue this race for Congress. The next steps in my life are taking me away from Georgia …” And that was the end of 31 days. A week later, Marjorie Taylor Greene was arriving in her Humvee for a…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump painted a rosy picture of his financial condition during a televised town hall on Thursday night, calling his hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due “a peanut” and saying he had borrowed it as a favor to lenders eager to take advantage of his financial strength. In fact, the loans, and the unusual requirement he had to accept to receive them, illustrate the financial challenges he faces and the longstanding reluctance…

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The Daily Beast reports: Rudy Giuliani thinks it’s hilarious. He says the questions mounting around him—including those about whether his efforts to dump Hunter Biden’s documents and photos are part of some foreign election-interference operation—are “a bunch of bullshit.” He’s unconcerned about intelligence assessments that one of his former associates was a Russian agent, a proposition that he gave more or less even odds. In fact, Giuliani said, he has been “laughing my head off” about the whole affair. Instead,…

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The New York Times reports: Kate Rabinovitch doesn’t call herself an activist. A few weeks ago, the 29-year-old real estate agent wrote personalized messages to voters in her home state of Ohio on behalf of Joseph R. Biden Jr. She texts with undecided friends during the debates, arguing for the Democratic nominee. And she is helping to organize voter drives in her suburban Cleveland neighborhood. But a political activist? No way. “It’s just not something that I ever would have…

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The New York Times reports: As July 4 and its barbecues arrived this year, the activist and former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick declared, “We reject your celebration of white supremacy.” The movie star Mark Ruffalo said in February that Hollywood had been swimming for a century in “a homogeneous culture of white supremacy.” The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of New York City’s most prestigious museums, acknowledged this summer that his institution was grounded in white supremacy,…

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The New York Times reports: For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears. But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the…

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Mainer reports: Sen. Susan Collins is financially supporting the state legislative campaigns of two fellow Maine Republicans who fervently believe in QAnon, the perverse conspiracy theory whose adherents are considered a domestic terror threat by the FBI. In recent days, Facebook and YouTube have announced actions to curb the spread of QAnon content due to mounting fears that its followers — who deify President Trump and believe his enemies are a global cabal of pedophilic Satanists — will engage in…

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