Attention to the Unseen

Jay Michaelson writes: This is what it’s like working for a madman: Suppose you’re a lawyer at the Department of Justice. You’ve worked there for 16 years, serving Democrats and Republicans alike. And, in a contentious lawsuit about the census, you tell the judge that, following last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision, the government has abandoned its plans to change the census to ask about citizenship and is printing the forms without the question now. Everyone verifies this is true:…

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Politico reports: The National Rifle Association aired an avalanche of TV ads and pushed its 5 million-plus members to the polls for Donald Trump in 2016, propelling him in the Rust Belt states that delivered him the presidency. Now, the gun rights group is in total meltdown — and senior Republicans and Trump 2020 officials are alarmed. In recent weeks, the NRA has seen everything from a failed coup attempt to the departure of its longtime political architect to embarrassing…

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The Associated Press reports: A series of Facebook video ads for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign shows what appears to be a young woman strolling on a beach in Florida, a Hispanic man on a city street in Texas and a bearded hipster in a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., all making glowing, voice-over endorsements of the president. “I could not ask for a better president,” intones the voice during slow-motion footage of the smiling blonde called “Tracey from Florida.”…

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Bloomberg reports: There’s a new whisper on Wall Street — maybe Elizabeth Warren isn’t so bad. The Democratic senator, who rose to national prominence by calling for tough regulation after the financial crisis, is winning respect from a small but growing circle of senior bankers and hedge fund managers. As the presidential candidate from Massachusetts takes aim at the “rich and powerful” with a slew of tax-raising policy proposals, some financial types who fit that description say she’s proven capable…

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Adam Serwer writes: The horrors detailed in the press were hard to believe. Detainees described overcrowding so severe that “it was difficult to move in any direction without jostling and being jostled.” The water provided them was foul, “of a dark color, and an ordinary glass would collect a thick sediment.” The “authorities never removed any filth.” A detainee wrote that the “only shelter from the sun and rain and night dews, was what we could make by stretching over…

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Dahlia Lithwick writes: President Donald Trump is throwing himself a parade this week, complete with a flyover by the Navy’s Blue Angels and Air Force One, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines standing by his side, and tanks that the District of Columbia emphatically does not want, although recent reporting suggests they will be parked and stationary, in an attempt to not destroy the roadways, as was originally planned. While historically, any Fourth of July celebration…

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The New York Times reports: For years, Palestinians in the crowded East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan have complained that the walls of their homes were settling and cracking, disturbed by an underground archaeological dig led by a right-wing Jewish settler group. On Sunday, when that dig was officially unveiled, not with a ribbon-cutting but with the ceremonial smashing of a brick wall, it was President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, who swung the first sledgehammer. The reverberations were…

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Take Your Daughter To Work Day#UnwantedIvanka pic.twitter.com/nnTzm0Pu51 — Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) July 1, 2019 It’s hard to watch the Trump presidency — the definition of a kakistocracy (“government by the worst people”) — without anticipating its denouement, not so much as expectation but more so as wish. What end would be most fitting, even if it might be unlikely? Donald Trump’s message has been consistent: He can get away with anything. He gloats from the throne of his impunity. The…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee on Tuesday said they had raised $105 million in the second quarter of this year, outraising President Barack Obama in the equivalent period during his re-election campaign in 2012 and signaling that Mr. Trump will have vastly more resources than he did in 2016. The campaign and the R.N.C. said they had a combined $100 million in cash on hand, and that they had raised more…

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These are concentration camps. According to concentration camp experts, people begin to die due to overcrowding, neglect, and shortage of resources. We saw all three of those signs on our trip yesterday. Another person died yesterday. And those are the deaths we know about. https://t.co/MhujNAYohJ — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 2, 2019 The New York Times reports: [Representative Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet that Customs and Border Protection “did a lot of ‘cleaning up’ before we arrived.” She said…

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