Attention to the Unseen

Jonathan Swan reports: Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios. The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice…

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Brian Klaas writes: I’ve spent the past 12 years studying the breakdown of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism around the world, in places such as Thailand, Tunisia, Belarus, and Zambia. I’ve shaken hands with many of the world’s democracy killers. My studies and experiences have taught me that democracies can die in many ways. In the past, most ended in a quick death. Assassinations can snuff out democracy in a split second, coups in an hour or two, and…

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NPR reports: Former President Donald Trump’s administration spent years trying to add a census citizenship question as part of a secret strategy for altering the population numbers used to divide up seats in Congress and the Electoral College, internal documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee confirm. Long kept from the public, the Trump administration memos and emails were disclosed by lawmakers following a more than two-year legal fight that began after Trump officials refused to turn…

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Ronald Brownstein writes: Once the backbone of the Democratic base, working-class white voters have been migrating toward the Republican Party since the 1960s, largely out of alienation from the Democrats’ liberal stands on cultural and racial issues. Half a century later, those working-class white voters—usually defined as having less than a four-year college education—have become the indisputable foundation of the Republican coalition, especially in the era of Donald Trump. Now a chorus of centrist and right-leaning political analysts are claiming…

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Josh Rogin writes: President Biden’s trip to the Middle East last week showed that his administration has abandoned any pretense of U.S. leadership on addressing the crisis in Syria. That policy of neglect undermines U.S. and regional interests — and threatens to leave the region’s security in the hands of Russia and Iran. Biden never mentioned Syria publicly during his four-day trip, which was billed as a demonstration of U.S. engagement in a region where powers such as Russia and…

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