Donald Trump is completely unfit to be president of the United States. Though he’s given us a plethora of evidence in the last seven months to corroborate this fact, the past week alone has served to remove any doubt. In a country which has a history of serious injustice and racial division and with race relations worsening by the day, Trump solidified his fate as Divider-In-Chief when he announced his support for the “very fine” white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville. At this point, all rational-thinking minorities, people of color and human beings in general should want nothing to do with him. Which is why it’s both bizarre and astoundingly tone deaf that the administration thinks that now is the time to have a White House sponsored conference for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). But that’s exactly what they are doing.  A White House official said that a Trump administration-backed conference for historically black colleges and universities will go ahead as planned next month.  In recent days, a Democratic lawmaker and prominent nonprofit donor to the schools recommended to the White House that the National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week Conference be postponed because of concerns “related to recent national events.” [...] Johnny C. Taylor and Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, were among the voices who tried to get the White House to halt the planning. Taylor, the outgoing president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, wrote a letter to [Omarosa Manigault-Newman, assistant to the president and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison] dated Aug. 18, saying that there was a “pretty strong consensus” in the HBCU leadership community that the White House should hold off until good faith measures — such as appointing an executive director and advisory board — showed that the White House had a “commitment to advancing the HBCU agenda.” It’s pretty ridiculous to insist on holding a conference for a group of people that you’ve not only done absolutely nothing for, despite promises to the contrary, but whose livelihood and well-being you actively work against. Nevertheless, the administration persists. 

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Breaking the sound barrier took years of diligent engineering and cost the lives of skilled pilots. But Donald Trump has sailed through the 1,000 documented lies barrier with the ease of … Donald Trump lying, actually. There is nothing easier or more dependable. The Washington Post’s list of Trump’s false and misleading statements now stands at 1,057. That’s an impressive number by any standard. In fact, we are a little late with this update because we have simply been overwhelmed keeping track of the deluge of claims made by the president in the later part of July. Things slowed down during the president’s “working vacation,” so we have finally been able to catch up. Yes, while on his vacation, Trump concentrated his efforts on equating Nazis with people who fight Nazis, giving those tasked with counting his ordinary lies a chance to breathe.  While Trump lies about … everything, there are some topics that get special attention. Trump’s most repeated claim, uttered 50 times, was some variation of the statement that the Affordable Care Act is dying and “essentially dead.” The Congressional Budget Office has said that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. The next biggest category of Trump lie? Claims that he secured new business investments or job increases that either didn’t happen or were planned before the election.

Here we go … again. Republicans are hyper-obsessed with women’s bodies and our reproductive choices and they don’t hesitate to let the whole world know it through asinine statements and backward legislation. Unfortunately, they’ve been somewhat successful at limiting our reproductive rights at local levels. In Texas, with their latest law which bans insurance coverage for abortions with no exceptions, they’ve managed to raise their hatred of women to an art form. Now it looks like the GOP is continuing its assault on family planning with an upcoming rule that would eliminate free birth control through insurance providers.  The Trump administration is preparing to roll back the Obama-era free birth control mandate, a move legal groups say would be unconstitutional and subject to a court challenge. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the rule will be very similar to a draft version leaked in May, which would vastly expand the number and types of businesses eligible for an exemption from Obamacare’s rule requiring all employers to provide insurance coverage of all contraceptive methods without co-pays. If enacted as drafted, it would allow not only religious groups but thousands of non-profits and for-profit businesses to leave birth control out of their employees’ insurance altogether. Why employers are interested in the sex lives and procreation of their employees in the first place is beyond comprehension. If anything, you’d think they welcome covering this kind of medication. If women are not forced to manage unwanted pregnancies, they are happier, healthier, and more productive. This rule is discriminatory against women. And it doesn’t just impact them but also their entire families because it means dealing with lack of access to contraception and also because, under this rule, family members lose their access to contraception, too.

Donald Trump, fresh off the golf course, gave a rare speech to the nation on Monday night to reveal his new plan for Afghanistan. In a half hour teleprompter plod, through text Trump gave every sign of never seeing before, he revealed no troop numbers, no dates, no goals, no … anything. He did say that the troops would be fighting “to win,” because Trump apparently believes that previous administrations told the troops that losing would be peachy. He also spent quite a bit of time saying, without really saying, that he was backing out of all the promises he made previously about pulling troops from the area. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts.” … “I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office.” What the person who nicely wrote this up for Trump really means is that everything he said before was BS without a hint of reason behind it. Oops sorry, America. The entire “strategy” offered up by Trump was that he would stop “nation building” and get down to “terrorist fighting.” Though beyond throwing out these terms he provided not a single detail of what this would mean. Earlier, Trump had said he would leave Afghanistan to the generals, but the plan that they returned to him was clearly not something he liked. President Trump was frustrated and fuming. Again and again, in the windowless Situation Room at the White House, he lashed out at his national security team over the Afghanistan war, and the paucity of appealing options gnawed at him. Trump considered options, including firing the leadership and installing Erik Princes’ mercenary army solution. But in the end, Trump came around to … doing as he was told.

Follow Jen on Twitter at @JenSorensen

Donald Trump has the perfect solution to a series of white supremacist rallies that have generated violence and pointed up his close association with the racist cause. He’s holding another rally in Phoenix where he can scream for a genuine physical wall to keep out immigrants, lead chants against political opponents, and attack anyone who dares protest against racist positions. Still unanswered: Will Trump use this occasion to toss a pardon to racist ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio.  In recent days, speculation has mounted that Trump will follow through on this suggestion at a campaign rally in Phoenix on Tuesday. Should he do so, it will be a unique moment in modern presidential politics. Trump will have given the first pardon of his presidency to someone for what appears to be purely political reasons and he will have done so without going through the normal review process.  Trump is appearing in Phoenix over the express wishes of Mayor Greg Stanton I am disappointed that the President has decided to hold a campaign rally while our nation as our nation is still healing from the tragic events in Charlottesville. If the President is coming to Phoenix to announce a pardon for Sheriff Joe Arpaio, then it will be clear his true intent is to enflame emotions and further divide our nation. It is my hope that more sound judgement prevails and that he delays his visit. It’s an extremely unusual situation when an American city is begging the president not to pay a visit to his city. And even more unusual when those pleas are ignored.

The hypocrisy of Republicans is astounding. There was a time where they were known as the party of morals and values—a title which was clearly self-appointed, but we are long past the days of the GOP as a party that possesses any shred of moral fiber. Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) is a good demonstration of this. After the violent rally in Charlottesville staged by white nationalists, Nazis and the KKK, Issa has asked Congress to investigate white supremacists and other hate groups. It’s noteworthy that it took the death of a white woman to make that happen since blacks, people of color and Jews have been saying this is a problem since forever. But, it’s also important that even though he wants Congress to have hearings on hate groups, apparently Issa is perfectly okay appearing at and speaking at them. In June, he made an appearance at a conference with an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a hate group and a white supremacist organization. In his letter, Issa called the KKK, neo-nazis, and white nationalists “repulsive hate groups” with “hateful, extremist ideologies.” “While Congress cannot legislate respect, decency, or acceptance of others, we have an obligation to use our platform to lead our country forward on these matters,” Issa said in his letter. But in June, Issa gave an interview at a conference put on by Federation for American Immigration Reform. In 1993, FAIR’s founder said, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” FAIR is the organization that advocates for limiting not only undocumented immigration but also legal immigration. They aren’t interested in bringing any more folks to the U.S.—period. In fact, their current president, Dan Stein, said “Americans would be “perfectly fine” if there was not another immigrant for 50 years.” These people are literally the deplorables Hillary Clinton spoke about.

In 2016, the National Academy of Sciences announced that it was going to study the health effects of mountaintop removal mining. An expert team being appointed by the National Academy of Sciences will examine a “growing amount of academic research” that suggests “possible correlations” between increased public health risks for Appalachian residents and living near mountaintop removal coal mining, the Obama administration announced Wednesday. That study ended today, but not because the study had reached a conclusion. It ended because Donald Trump ordered it to stop. Trump administration officials have told the National Academy of Sciences to cease all work on a study of the public health risks for people living near mountaintop removal coal-mining sites in Appalachian, the academy said in a statement late this morning. Mountaintop removal mining is a uniquely destructive form of surface mining. In most areas, surface mines must follow “return to contour” rules, restoring landforms that existed before mining and taking special care with the structure of stream beds. But with MTR, mines permanently decapitate 300 million-year-old mountains, and waste material is disposed of by dumping it into streams and rivers. Hundreds of mountains have been destroyed forever, with 500 feet or more of material being removed and fouling thousands of miles of streams.  The material that goes in streams leaves water acidic, and tainted with heavy metals. Families that live there show a higher incidence of cancer and birth defects. Earlier studies have indicated that the pollution can have significant health effects, but lawyers from coal companies have a different explanation. The study failed to account for consanquinity, one of the most prominent sources of birth defects. “Consanquinity” means kinship. What the coal companies are saying is that health problems are not their fault—because people in Appalachia are inbred hillbillies.

After Donald Trump spent a good portion of last week defending Nazis and white supremacists, his supporters have been working overtime to change the conversation from racism to statues. And oddly enough, they’re attempting this pivot by talking about monuments to racism. Go figure.  But instead of standing up for the people who declared war on the United States of America in defense of slavery, an act that ultimately led to the death of more than 600,000 of its citizens, perhaps Trump and his minions should look back a bit further into history and remember what happened at Bowling Green. No, not the site of the massacre so horrible most Americans have blocked it from their memory, but what happened there in 1776, and what real patriots do to “honor” losers: A gilded lead statue of King George III was erected here in 1770 ... On July 9, 1776, after the first public reading in New York State of the Declaration of Independence, this monument was toppled by angry citizens, dragged up Broadway, sent to Connecticut, melted down, and recast as ammunition. It’s not clear if the ammunition made from the melted-down statue was later used in the Bowling Green Massacre … but to be fair, it’s also not clear if the massacre was in a park in New York City or a small town in Kentucky. So leaving all that aside, let’s stick with the main point here: Donald Trump was defending Nazis and white supremacists and anyone who tries to pretend otherwise and change the subject is defending Nazis and white supremacists. Period. 

After Charlottesville, and Trump’s horrific response to the tragedy of a white supremacist domestic terror attack, the Republican Party must be proud that their claim that the GOP is the Big Tent Party has come true. All racists are welcome!

As Donald Trump ignores pleas from Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton and other local leaders to delay his rally there after his official embrace of white supremacists and Nazis following the terror attack in Charlottesville, the Daily Beast reports the popular vote loser may be readying to pardon the crooked former Sheriff Joe Arpaio for his crimes in a truly unprecedented manner: In recent days, speculation has mounted that Trump will follow through on this suggestion at a campaign rally in Phoenix on Tuesday. Should he do so, it will be a unique moment in modern presidential politics. Trump will have given the first pardon of his presidency to someone for what appears to be purely political reasons and he will have done so without going through the normal review process. Trump has yet to name a new pardon attorney and while the vast majority of people who get presidential pardons wait for at least five years after being sentenced, Arpaio hasn’t even been sentenced yet. Arpaio, convicted of criminal contempt of court for violating a federal judge’s order to stop racially profiling brown drivers in Maricopa County, hasn’t even applied for a presidential pardon yet, which means he will skip the line (you know, the way anti-immigrant nativists like him claim undocumented immigrants do) past the thousands of cases waiting to be considered. How silly of us—don’t we know that the rules are only for the little people, not the criminally-challenged authoritarian buddies of the president?

Steve Bannon was all set to get a graceful boot in the ass back in July as new Chief of Staff John Kelly made Trump’s most special adviser an offer he couldn’t refuse. John F. Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, told Stephen K. Bannon in late July that he needed to go: No need for it to get messy, Mr. Kelly told Mr. Bannon, according to several people with firsthand knowledge of the exchange.  But while Kelly kindly offered to have Bannon escorted off the premises without the use of whips and chains, Donald Trump’s latest dive into overtly supporting white supremacy interfered with the chief’s plan. As Mr. Trump struggled last week to contain a growing public furor over his response to a deadly, race-fueled melee in Virginia, Mr. Bannon clashed with Mr. Kelly over how the president should respond. Give no ground to your critics, Mr. Bannon urged the president, with characteristic truculence. So Steve Bannon hung around the White House to give Donald Trump extra-special stick-with-team-Nazi advice. The Monday appearance in which Trump dutifully—and with obvious reluctance—read from a text that condemns white supremacists, was all Kelly. The Tuesday appearance, where Trump let rip on the shocking fact that people opposed Nazis without a permit and maintained that a torch-wielding mob contained “many fine people,” was bolstered by the keen insight of Steve Bannon. Bannon managed to alienate everyone in the White House, including Trump. But when it came time to deal with the alt-Reich, he was Trump’s most valued asset.

I understand that there are multiple Trump crises in any given week, but I thought that “Crisis of the Week” was punchier than “Crisis of the Last Day and a Half,” or maybe “Crisis of the Last Twelve Hours.”   *  *  * If you missed out on the big Kickstarter compilation last year, IDW has just published an expanded second edition of 25 Years of Tomorrow, featuring every TMW cartoon from the strip’s earliest days through the election of Donald Trump.

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, and David Beard. Leading off ● NV State Senate: Shady GOP antics are afoot in the Silver State. Nevada Republicans are, understandably, less than thrilled about losing what had been a slim 11-10 majority to the Democrats in the 2016 elections. The loss of Senate control coincided with a dramatic power shift towards Democrats in the state Assembly, where Republicans went from a 24-15 majority (plus one Libertarian) to a 17-25 minority overnight last fall. And one senator added insult to the GOP’s new minority-status injury by leaving the Republican caucus a few days after the election, declaring herself an independent and caucusing with Democrats, giving them an effective 12-9 majority in the state Senate. Only GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval stands between Republicans and relative political irrelevance in the state.​ Campaign Action ​Republicans theoretically have a chance for a comeback next year, but their electoral prospects are less than sunny in the upper chamber. In 2018, the half of the state Senate that wasn’t on the ballot last fall is up for election. Unfortunately for the GOP, however, the 10 Senate seats going before voters next year include only three districts currently held by Democrats, all of whom survived the rather difficult 2014 cycle with strong performances. The most viable pickup “opportunity” for Republicans is to replace party-switcher Patricia Farley in a seat where Clinton edged Trump 48-47. But that only matters if they can successfully play defense, because one Republican incumbent on the ballot next fall currently occupies a seat Clinton carried easily (52-43), giving Democrats an opportunity to further expand their majority. So, faced with a tough election cycle, Republicans could attempt to do things like recruit great candidates, raise a ton of money, or resign themselves to working cooperatively with their Democratic colleagues for the next three years to advance policies that move Nevada forward. Instead, Republicans are trying to trigger election do-overs in three districts: two in seats they lost last fall and one in a competitive district they worry they can’t win in a general election. The third senator they’re trying to recall—Farley, who now caucuses with Democrats—isn’t even running for re-election, but Republicans are clearly worried they won’t pick her open seat back up.

NY Times on race, statues and the VA gubernatorial race: Charlottesville and Trump’s Response Reshape Virginia Gubernatorial Race Many in the political middle here fault Mr. Trump for effectively weaponizing the conversation. “We need a rational debate, but I’m afraid the emotion of the moment after what Trump did just destroyed the opportunity for that discussion,” said Mr. Deeds, who did not criticize Mr. Northam but made clear he thinks localities should be free to decide the monument issue. Yet much like the aftermath of the 2015 rampage by a white supremacist in a South Carolina black church, there is an impulse in Virginia to take a tangible step toward healing. “This state is no longer a history lesson suspended in animation,” Mr. Sabato said. “This was a disaster for Virginia, and people want to put a period on it.” xPlainly: historically, anything that looks like street brawls helps fascists consolidate power. "Many sides" is their core tactic. Works. +— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) August 20, 2017 Conservatives are convinced statue and monument discussions are a win for them. Don’t be so sure. Context matters, and as many begin to come down (and many already have), watch the VA Gov. race for a better sense of where we are at. It’s a moment the way the S.C. flag was, and things may be politically possible that weren’t a week ago. There’s a plus and a minus side to anything Trump champions, but remember, the discussion is about Nazis and white supremacists. Not Antifa, not statues. Nazis. And if Nazis love those statues, that tells you what you need to know.

Read this: Me, I’ve been shouting about this crisis from every rooftop I could find for years – talking about how our middle class was squeezed to the breaking point, how chances to move up in this economy were disappearing, and warning that, if we weren’t careful, the very promise of this nation—the commitment to expand opportunities—would be lost. That’s the fight that got me into politics. That’s the fight that brought me to my very first Netroots all those years ago. How about you? By applause: Who got into the fight because they were passionate about economic justice? Who came to fight for reproductive rights? How about clean air and clean water? How about immigration? Civil rights? Human rights? Anti-war? Campaign finance reform? Net neutrality? Any other bankruptcy nerds in the house? That’s one of the things I love about coming to Netroots. We all came to this fight from different experiences. We all get fired up about different issues. But if we’re going to be the people who lead the Democratic Party back from the wilderness and lead our country out of this dark time, then we can’t waste energy arguing about whose issue matters most or who in our alliance should be voted off the island. We need to see each other’s fights as our own. And I believe we can. In the wake of the last election, I’ve heard people say we need to decide whether we’re the party of the white working class or the party of Black Lives Matter. I say we can care about a dad who’s worried that his kid will have to move away from their factory town to find good work – and we can care about a mom who’s worried that her kid will get shot during a traffic stop. The way I see it, those two parents have something deep down in common—the system is rigged against both of them—and against their kids. Those are the words of Elizabeth Warren, delivered at Netroots Nation 2017. They resound so strongly that I hope every Democrat, progressive, Green, socialist—everyone across our left spectrum reads them and thinks about them. They represent the way forward for the Democratic Party, and for progressives.

When I was a child, maybe five or six years old, I drew swastikas on my crayon box. I had no idea what it symbolized. I had seen it on Hogan’s Heroes, which was a TV comedy, and thought nothing of it. My mother, on the other hand, blew a gasket when she saw my crayon box adorned with swastikas. My mom, a child of the Depression who came of age during World War II, would not have her child drawing swastikas. So I got spanked (it was the early ‘70s, and it was permissible then) and then lectured about how evil the Nazis were and what they did to people. I have not drawn a swastika since that day. And then there’s Donald Trump. Our president’s response to the horrific acts committed by the neo-Nazis who descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, has left many of us struggling to come up with the words to describe how we feel (without the words being a long string of profanity). The first thought: stop calling them the “alt-right.” They are fucking Nazis, and not the Illinois Nazis from The Blues Brothers. And there are only two sides to this: one is American, and the other is Nazi asshole. To say it is anything else is a false equivalency. If you say that the left instigated this, or that both sides are responsible, you are supporting Nazis. One of the arguments heard from the right and even from our president is that if antifa, Black Lives Matter, the “alt-left” (which isn’t even a thing), and other left-leaning groups had not shown up to counter-protest Nazis (we repeat, to counter-protest Nazis), there would have been no violence in Charlottesville. That is the equivalent of saying, “Had the Allies not invaded France, there would have been no violence in Europe in 1944.” These were Nazis and Klan members. There is no “both sides” here. You either support Nazis, or you don’t. The sad part of this is that things are going to get worse before they get better.

Recent events in Charlottesville and the stream of deflections and false moral equivalences from the White House accentuate the fact that we are now dealing with a president who only cares about power.  Many of the Trump tactics we are seeing and saw during the presidential election are cribbed from Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial regime, and are quite advanced.  The three tactics we’re seeing the most are toxic cynicism, whataboutism, and attempts at owning all of the narratives across the political spectrum. Here’s what they look like, and some thoughts on how to combat these imported propaganda techniques. 

Barack Obama and Donald Trump are, in moral terms, the exact opposite of one another. This is exemplified by the way the two men have spoken about race when offering their most personal, heartfelt, and in-depth comments on the matter. For Trump, those comments came this past week in reaction to the events that led to the terrorist murder of anti-fascist activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. This isn’t referring to the prepared statement in which he solemnly condemned white supremacists—two days after he decided not to read it and instead equated violent white racists with the heroes who stood up to them. This refers instead to the series of remarks where Trump went off his prepared script and told the American people what he really thinks. In response to those remarks, Andrew Anglin, the editor of the major neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, exulted that Trump “uses our talking points ... This man is doing absolutely everything in his power to back us up and we need to have his back.” Trump’s expression of his true feelings also prompted white supremacist Richard Spencer to triumphantly declare that he was “proud of” Trump, and brought forth this tweet from a one-time Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (and, by the way, a convicted felon): xThank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa https://t.co/tTESdV4LP0— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) August 15, 2017 But enough about hate. Now let’s talk about its opposite: love. Let’s look at how a real president has talked about race in America.