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a library corner with a book

Under This Bully, Not Even Libraries Are Safe

There’s no escaping Donald Trump. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. Let’s face it, everyone needs an escape now and then — from work, kids, chores. And we all find that peace in different ways and different spaces: walking in nature, listening to music, snuggling up in a library corner with a book.

Even those who feel kindly toward our president must occasionally find him and his gift of being in your face 24/7 exhausting and relish a chance to recharge. I’m certain that Americans who aren’t in his fan club crave a rest, if only to find the energy to fight another day.

No safe space is free from the grip of the Trump administration, which is gobbling up more territory with each passing day.

The attack on libraries hits especially hard for a book nerd let loose with a library card at the age of 3. Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library was certainly my happy space and a needed escape when a large family in a modest rowhouse provided a little too much stimulation. And, oh, the surprises I found there: lectures, films and books I stumbled on that sated my curiosity on every topic, from science to politics.

What a quaint notion today, as some parents, with the support of an administration more interested in surveillance than freedom, snatch the very books that might excite a young imagination off shelves, the better to control the uncontrollable — a thirst for knowledge about people and places that don’t end at a neighborhood boundary.

My parents never put limits on what I read. If I was able to read it, I had their blessing. We would discuss complex notions and unfamiliar themes, with all of us learning things about the world and ourselves. It was so thrilling that I followed their example as best as I could with my own son, and he has a houseful of books to show for it.

This administration’s effort to silence those who would extol their wonders has hit communities and our nation’s military academies. Search the library shelves at the Naval Academy for a book that will transport you to someplace you’ve only dreamed about? Unless that book is on an approved list (Maya Angelou out, Mein Kampf in), you’d better buy your own, and fast, before publishing houses feel the wrath of Trump.

It has even hit the Library of Congress in Washington, a point of pride for the nation since it was founded in 1800. Its collection, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts, is the largest in the world.

It’s not a lending library in the usual sense but rather a resource and a repository of rare and important items in our nation’s history. It’s the main research arm of Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

When Dr. Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th librarian of Congress in 2016, she brought a wealth of acclaim and experience to the position, including years as CEO of my beloved Enoch Pratt Free Library. Those on both sides of the aisle praised the innovation and modernization that Hayden brought to the Library of Congress and the ways she made it more accessible for all Americans.

She was fired by the Trump administration in an email in which the esteemed Hayden, a woman and an African American, was called “Carla.” The disrespect might have been the point for an administration that denigrates Black Americans of distinction.

But it will take more than petty retaliation to defeat books.

A few years ago, I brought a class I was teaching to the Library of Congress, where the teens were in awe of the beauty of the main reading room in the Thomas Jefferson Building and excited when they learned how they could obtain their own library cards.

They instinctively knew the truth of what author Percival Everett said, that “the most subversive thing any of us can do is read.” When he expressed his displeasure with book bans, I found myself nodding along with an auditorium full of fellow book nerds.

Yes, it’s still my escape. Members of my book club, Zora’s Daughters, had taken a road trip May 15 to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to hear Everett discuss his life, career and Pulitzer Prize-winning book James, with a central character inspired by but far from the enslaved “Jim” of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

No doubt it would be on Trump’s list of banned books since it depicts a Black man as a flesh-and-blood human being whose life, along with the lives of family and friends, depends on his intelligence and empathy.

“It used to be we all wanted our children to be more educated than we are,” said Everett.

I realized he was talking about people like my parents, and I felt grateful.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Pope Francis

Francis And Trump: A Tale Of Two Leaders

The blue suit and blue tie amid a sea of mostly black-garbed mourners did stand out, not that President Donald Trump ever blends into the background or wants to. But the man being laid to rest in the simple wooden coffin was the leader whose legacy loomed largest. The hundreds of thousands who made their way to the Vatican to pay respects to Pope Francis proved that.

A world with a short attention span and more than a few folks who loved the movie Conclave is already guessing who will next occupy the chair of St. Peter. Before the betting starts, however, it might be useful to reflect on how leaders can exert influence over those who look to them for guidance — for good and for ill.

Character counts.

It’s not as though the doctrine of the Catholic Church changed under Pope Francis. Its rules against abortion remain. The church will not perform marriages for same-sex couples, and if you notice the lack of women among the College of Cardinals, that is no coincidence.

Yet few would deny that this Pope changed perceptions of Catholicism, even to those who, unlike me, were not raised in the faith.

It’s just as true that how people view America has shifted under this president. And, what’s sadder, how we view ourselves and our fellow Americans has changed. It’s a place where you can turn in neighbors you suspect are undocumented or teachers you believe are too “woke,” a term few can accurately define but many don’t hesitate to weaponize.

Social media more than ever is a toxic stew of insults rationalized by the senders because, well, the president does it. Just review his Michigan speech this week, marking his first 100 days in office. Trump mocked the appearance of his predecessor, Joe Biden, rather than show concern for the challenges Americans are facing.

It wasn’t exactly following the advice of Pope Francis, who urged priests to be “shepherds with the ‘smell of the sheep,’” close to their flock.

Pope Francis elevated those society often shuns: the poor, migrants, prisoners, people with disabilities — especially, it seemed, children. He spoke about issues such as climate change and immigration, ones that most affect the dispossessed. He welcomed LBGTQ Catholics and clarified Catholic teachings on the death penalty, making opposition to it an absolute. Those moves reflected the consistency I have admired in a church I also criticize for its failings.

In contrast, the billionaires with a front-row seat to Trump’s inauguration reveal his priorities. Trump himself, in a recent interview in The Atlantic reveled in how he has brought the high-powered to heel. “It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said.

President Trump has embraced power and the powerful — and many Americans have followed his lead. It makes perfect sense that Elon Musk, the president’s right-hand man and heedless slayer of government programs, believes, as he said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

A quote in that same Atlantic interview shows how intoxicating that power is to the man who bragged about retribution in preelection campaign speeches: “I run the country and the world.”

We, meaning, apparently, every person on earth, are subject to his will and whims.

What a long list of those left to suffer, from students punished for speech to young U.S. citizens sent out of the country, including one, according to reports, being treated for cancer.

While Pope Francis saw the world as his parish, Trump shrinks America’s global leadership, dooming the sick and hungry with his decapitation of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A program to counter AIDS, one started by another Republican president, George W. Bush, has saved millions of lives. But it was orphaned by the Trump administration with nary a peep from congressional Republicans whose mission is pleasing this president.

The world’s richest country is being seen as poor in goodwill and generosity — the qualities that made America great in the eyes of longtime allies who are deserting it and many weaker countries now looking to trade their essential goods and minerals with more reliable partners, ones who at least pretend to care.

This “America First” administration has turned on its own, with cuts to AmeriCorps being fought by attorneys general across the country. Snatching back already approved funds from the agency for volunteer service has halted projects in states and cities, including Hurricane Helene recovery efforts in western North Carolina.

The surprise in recent polls that grade Trump’s first 100 days isn’t that his numbers are so low but that the majority of Republicans still cosign such a careless and cruel agenda.

As evidence that the president truly cares about the least of these, his administration and some of his staunchest supporters, white evangelicals, might point to his order “establishing a task force to eradicate anti-Christian bias.”

But not only does that order ignore other faiths and the Constitution, which promises freedom of and from religion, it also leaves out Christians who don’t worship him. Why else would law enforcement surround and arrest a pastor in the Capitol Rotunda as he and others prayed to protest drastic cuts to social safety net programs in a proposed GOP-led budget bill? This White House has not been shy about highlighting the celebrations of his own Christian followers in buildings that belong to all Americans.

Pardoned criminals, even violent ones, got better treatment than the Rev. William Barber on Monday.

Yet, in a statement by Barber and Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove after both were released, they did not express anger or promise retribution. In fact, they said they appreciated the Capitol Police and had prayed “with them and for them” as they dealt with the trauma of January 6, 2021.

“We thank them for their service and have reassured them that our objection is not to them doing their job.”

But the statement left no doubt about why they were there or that they would return.

“As Christian preachers, we are also public theologians. When someone dies from poverty and a lack of healthcare, we cannot lie and say, ‘God called them home.’ We have to tell the truth. They died because we live in a society that has chosen not to care for them.”

Both a lesson and rebuke Pope Francis would recognize.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Does 'Hands Off' Mean Americans Have Started To Pay Attention?

Does 'Hands Off' Mean Americans Have Started To Pay Attention?

I’m not optimistic enough to call it the death of indifference, but recent events prove there may be signs of life in the democratic republic Americans call exceptional but too often take for granted.

Last weekend’s “Hands Off!” rallies have come and gone. And while it’s not known if they signal the start of a lasting movement, it’s hard to discount the crowds that gathered in big cities and small towns across the country, with protesters in countries such as Austria, Mexico, Canada and the Netherlands joining in solidarity.

While more than 100,000 protesters showed up in Washington, D.C., according to organizers, and close to that number in Boston, the hundreds in smaller cities such as Rock Hill, S.C., were just as impressive, considering how red and Republican that state reliably has been in recent elections.

Having lived in Arizona for a few years, I know the pride the people place in being unique individuals, and how much they hate anyone telling them what to do or how to live. So, I expected the state to have a particularly good showing. And it did.

According to Elon Musk, not a popular figure in weekend rallies, they, along with the rest, were paid “puppets.”

All of them?

In my current swing-state home of North Carolina, I saw signs to match every cause in a Charlotte protest that despite humid, 88-degree weather drew thousands: “Protect Our Votes,” “No Kings” and “How can I be expected to send silly little emails during a hostile takeover by FASCIST NAZI OLIGARCHS,” which pretty much captured the sentiment of the day.

It’s true the city is a blue splotch in a purplish-red state, but thousands showed up and were plenty fed up.

That attitude extends to the state’s attorney general, Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, who is joining state officials across the country to sue the Trump administration over the federal government’s decision to cut more than $11 billion in health care funding.

That’s money states use to fund things like mental health services, addiction treatment and tracking the spread of infectious diseases, particularly bad timing when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is providing uncertain leadership and confusing messages during a measles outbreak.

Did some of Saturday’s discontented perhaps choose to sit it out last November or vote for Donald Trump because the Democratic brand had become “toxic”? Possibly. But it was golf-playing, tariff-imposing Donald Trump and his sidekick, the job-killing, chainsaw-waving Elon Musk and his DOGE boys put in the hot seat by a wide cross section of Americans.

About that “toxic” label: Chief among those sharing that message and not providing much pushback to podcast guests Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon and those following their election-denying, race-baiting lead has been California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose political instincts seem to have abandoned him.

In Newsom’s quest for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, something he hasn’t owned up to, at least not yet, he is surrendering when the party base, according to polls, wants fighters, like Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Booker’s recent attention-grabbing Senate speech was denigrated by Republicans as a stunt. Well, sure it was. But as he stood and talked about issues like health care and read letters from concerned voters, it was also a sign of life and resistance — with the added bonus of taking down the Senate’s former reigning champion talker, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, whose segregationist stand held the record for far too long.

As Trump’s disapproval numbers are rising almost as fast as the stock market is sinking, it’s clear that at least some Trump voters who may not be big fans of tariffs and the resulting high prices now declare that this is not what they voted for.

But wasn’t it candidate Trump who talked more about retribution than anything he would do to help voters’ lives? As president, as expected, it has taken him little time to return to the chaos of his first term, with guardrails off and loyalists in.

It’s all about the vengeance, even against Harriet Tubman, whose role as the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad was downplayed on a recently changed National Park Service webpage. Apparently, the abolitionist and American hero’s prominence helping enslaved men, women and children escape bondage and travel north into freedom fit some twisted definition of DEI.

But the pushback that greeted the news, mostly from citizens who respect the truth and believe Americans can handle it, forced a restoration of respect for an icon.

Like many, I expected the Trump administration’s moves on immigration, the economy, national security, diversity programs — the list goes on; he had telegraphed each and every one. But the quickness of execution, the sometimes gleeful, sometimes fearful compliance by those who know better and the resignation of opponents who seemed to lack the energy or the will — that was surprising.

Maybe his actions finally came too close to home. But isn’t that often what it takes?

Americans are paying attention, and remembering that the only thing that stops a bully is someone, or a lot of people, standing up.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Shrinking American Culture To Fit Those Small MAGA Minds

Shrinking American Culture To Fit Those Small MAGA Minds

So much of the American character is in peril, including the cultural touchstones I often reference, probably more often than my column editors would like. But I believe most Americans’ lives are enriched by the TV shows and music, theater and films that make skeptics and even hate-watchers tune in for the Academy Awards or Super Bowl halftime show.

I long ago embraced the fact that the arts (high and low) bring joy, knowledge and — often, just in time — an escape. But to Donald Trump they have become yet another part of American life he can control.

His administration is eviscerating the division that preserves and maintains more than 26,000 art pieces across the country, including renowned paintings and sculptures, owned by the government.

Under Trump’s influence, museums are canceling exhibits that feature diverse artists, films are stripping out characters that represent the underrepresented, and internships and scholarships that expose all communities to the arts are ending.

In just one example, the young musicians who auditioned for and won a coveted learning experience with the U.S. Marine Band were disappointed when an executive order canceled their workshop and “Equity Arc Wind Symphony.” This time, military band veterans stepped up, and the story and tuneful results were seen by the millions who watched and listened on “60 Minutes” on CBS.

However, not every Trump-induced nightmare has a fairy tale ending.

In Washington, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, under the new Trump-appointed management and a board that shockingly elected him chair, intends to narrow the kinds of work it will present in the future, a scary thought even if you adore the Trump-favored musical “Cats.” How many times can a person hear “Memory”?

Isn’t the beauty of culture choice? With diverse offerings available, there is bound to be something that’s appealing to every individual taste.

The president gave away the game when he admitted that in all his years in Washington, he had not been a fan of the Kennedy Center. “I didn’t go,” he said when asked. “There was nothing I wanted to see.”

Nothing piqued the president’s curiosity? Nothing that might inspire, surprise or simply entertain?

Maybe that’s why Trump never laughs, or hardly smiles, unless it’s that weird smirk that spreads across his face when he thinks his sophomoric insults are somehow witty. A hint: Just because sycophants guffaw, it doesn’t mean you’ll be the next recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded from that Kennedy Center stage.

Oh, wait a minute.

So, exactly what “woke” shows did the president reject, sight unseen? Perusing the programming when he was in office, I wondered. Was it touring productions of The Book of Mormon or Hello, Dolly! ? Maybe On Your Feet! the story of Cuban American musicians Emilio and Gloria Estefan? Didn’t Cuban Americans turn out for him in Florida?

Considering Trump’s coziness with Vladimir Putin, you’d have thought Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, performed in conjunction with the English company of Cheek by Jowl and the Pushkin Theatre Moscow, would have caught his eye.

But, no. With all those varied shows on the schedule, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, the uninterested Trump mostly decided to pass.

In 2017, he did attend a Fourth of July concert at the Kennedy Center hosted by First Baptist Church Dallas, reported NPR. But when the main event is a performance by the choir and orchestra of a song that includes the lyrics “Make America Great Again” and Trump squeezes in a slam on the “fake media,” I’m not sure that counts.

Now, he wants to deny everyone else, dictating what Americans will see and hear, starting but I fear not ending at the Kennedy Center.

The insistence on seeing art and culture through Trumpian eyes means Kennedy Center audiences will miss the MacArthur “genius” and Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, who has canceled her show in response.

Having seen Giddens with the Carolina Chocolate Drops delightfully play an eclectic brand of roots music, which elevates the contributions of African Americans, I can say missing a Giddens performance is Trump’s loss.

Giddens has the rare gift of entertaining while teaching you something — in her case, something about America.

I count myself lucky to have had parents who found every free concert, lecture or film at the library. Community programs offering dance and music lessons are disappearing, I fear. Theater and opera tickets didn’t put too much strain on the purse — if you were willing to sit up in the nosebleed section.

My young life included arts and culture, things that I loved and hated and had questions about, that were interesting and fun, that enhanced rather than distracted from the reading, writing and arithmetic many of our leaders would like to solely revert to in public schools.

Though lacking the wealth of the Trump family, my parents realized the importance of a complete education.

I’m certain the president would not have approved of the last show I saw at the Kennedy Center,A Soldier’s Play, Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, set on a segregated Army base in the South during World War II. It’s grounded in the history Trump and his followers are trying to erase.

Yet, a packed audience was thrilled, a difference in opinion on what is and is not proper art that should be allowed in anyone’s America, even Trump’s.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call


We're All Living In Donald Trump's Real-Life Twilight Zone

We're All Living In Donald Trump's Real-Life Twilight Zone

In a well-known episode of The Twilight Zone, titled “It’s a Good Life,” life isn’t at all good for those who dare anger six-year-old Anthony, who has the power to punish those who would contradict his wishes, no matter how nonsensical or cruel. Show creator Rod Serling, in his still chilling introduction, calls Anthony Fremont a “monster,” albeit one “with a cute, little boy face and blue guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you better start thinking happy thoughts.”

Are we in the Twilight Zone?

America’s 78-year-old leader may not exile opponents to a “cornfield,” the name used for oblivion in that episode, or turn them into a grotesque jack-in-the-box, the fate of poor Dan Hollis when he lost his temper with little Anthony.

But Donald Trump can be just as destructive if you fail to show due deference or, worse yet, cross him. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discovered, Trump may suspend aid to your country until you accept the lie that Ukraine was the aggressor villain in its war with Russia.

You and your job could be “on the bubble,” the president’s words, if you refuse to obey unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s orders to justify your usefulness by listing five accomplishments that pass muster with 19-year-old tech bros drunk on power.

Trump’s Department of Justice, under orders from yet another unqualified white man, could fire or demote you for doing your job, that job being the hard work of investigating and successfully prosecuting January 6 rioters and criminals. Acting U.S. attorney in Washington Ed Martin may not have any previous experience as a federal prosecutor, but the “Stop the Steal” movement veteran is great at revenge.

And, by the way, isn’t it the American people’s Department of Justice?

At Tuesday night’s speech to Congress, watching reactions from those present, you had to keep reminding yourself that members represent the people. Republican elected officials holding recent town halls in their home districts have seemed surprised when being asked substantive questions by voters expecting answers.

Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina has a solution: Stop having in-person interactions. Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, recommended a virtual or Facebook Live option instead, according to reporting from The New York Times, perhaps fearing the images of heated interactions will reverberate come election time.

Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana agreed, blaming mostly “Democrat activists who don’t live in the district” for the ruckus. I’m sure some bona fide Republicans have questions about cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the wisdom of Musk running around with a chainsaw ready to slash everything except his own companies’ ties to agencies he’s regulating.

But here’s my question for Johnson: Even if those with questions happen to be Democrats, don’t they also have a voice in American politics, or does GOP control mean everyone else needs to sit down, shut up, and take their medicine?

Trump’s speech stretched to an hour and 40 minutes, resembling one of Fidel Castro’s legendary marathons, full of self-serving bluster and superlatives labeling everything the best that ever was.

At the speech, it was a Democrat, Rep. Al Green of Texas, who stood up in loud protest as Trump falsely claimed a mandate for his drastic actions. For getting into what the late Democratic Rep. John Lewis — who once led a sit-in on the House floor — might call “good trouble,” Speaker Johnson has threatened Green with “censure.”

Compliant congressional Republicans are mighty afraid of being banished to the “cornfield,” or in their case, being primaried, thus possibly losing power and their own federal paychecks. They were quick to leap to their feet at nearly every utterance of Trump at his speech, a few looking both terrified and embarrassed.

Apparently, turning your back on the idea of a multiracial and inclusive democracy, where different kinds of people with different gifts and opinions can thrive, is no problem, especially if you never bought into that ideal in the first place.

Trump, wearing that smirk he favors, especially when he’s bullying a perceived enemy, may seldom make sense; but he revels in the power. Sometimes, I think he gets a special thrill when he forces Republican officials to change their minds on an issue once held dear.

As Washington political denizens venture back home, if they dare, constituents’ angry pleas won’t be able to compete with the specter of the president’s disapproving gaze.

“When those eyes look at you, you better start thinking happy thoughts.”

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Harry Stewart Jr.

The Lost Boys Of Trump And Musk Shrink Next To Real Patriots

When, after his stellar World War II service, Harry Stewart Jr. applied for a job as a Pan American pilot, he was clearly overqualified.

The Tuskegee Airman had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic actions, which included, on one mission, downing three German fighter planes, one after the other. His four-man team earned a “top gun” first-place trophy in a competition that Tom Cruise could only make movies about. His experience far exceeded the few hundred hours of flying time the ad said the job required.

Yet he couldn’t get an interview. “Just imagine what passengers would think if during a flight they saw a Negro step out of the cockpit and walk down the aisle in a pilot’s uniform?” the personnel manager told him, as recounted in his biography and reported in a New York Times obituary after his recent death at the age of 100.

Sounds a lot like the uninformed President Donald Trump and the minions who repeat his every utterance, who, reflexively and without evidence, blame diversity for the country’s every ill, including plane crashes.

Against roadblocks placed by those who believed African Americans lacked the mental fitness to be pilots, Civil Rights activism and the perseverance of the would-be pilots themselves pushed military leaders into initiating what would be a DEI program of its day, one that made Stewart’s exploits possible.

Stewart went on to a distinguished corporate career after years of night school earned him an engineering degree. But he never got that coveted job flying for a commercial airline. It would take a 1963 Supreme Court decision to make airlines stop discriminating against the ridiculously talented Black pilots who gave white flyers competition they had never had and support in the sky.

Eventually, the courts and, yes, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts forced airlines and a lot of other companies, sometimes kicking and screaming, to recognize and reward talent they were deliberately overlooking, to look beyond the white men who automatically had — and still have — the advantage in America.

DEI doesn’t discriminate. It’s one tool that fights discrimination.

How Republicans, with a straight face no less, can say eliminating these programs is about returning to a meritocracy is beyond me, not with the crew Donald Trump is appointing to important government posts.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promises to rid his department of the DEI boogeyman of the GOP’s fevered dreams, perhaps forgetting that he barely made it through the confirmation process. According to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hegseth promised to stop drinking if confirmed.

Imagine if you or I or most anyone, in a job interview, tried to convince the manager with a pledge to stop drinking if hired. I’m pretty sure that position as assistant manager at McDonald’s would be out of reach, though since the fast-food chain rolled back some DEI programs, the road to the grill might be cleared for Hegseth’s sort, the ones who might otherwise be laughed out of the personnel office.

Hegseth, whose own background was once scrutinized, has downplayed the influence of extremist groups on members of the military and portrayed the January 6 rioters as patriots. As part of the Pentagon’s DEI purge, military organizations backed out of recruiting at an engineering, science, and technology conference this month, one that traditionally attracts a large and diverse crowd and has served as a way to identify the best and the brightest.

And this is supposed to make the country safer?

The ascendance of mediocrity mixed with cruelty starts at the top, and yes, I mean the reality-show commander-in-chief and his unelected buddy Elon Musk, who have proven their lack of judgment and empathy just a few weeks in.

How far have standards fallen, now that opportunities for those once excluded, judged the wrong color, gender, age, faith or just not the “right” fit, are disappearing?

Well, rather than being a deal breaker, the new résumé booster is racism, the kind that squashed the dreams of American pilot and patriot Harry Stewart. Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer, part of the Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency team working inside the Treasury Department, resigned after the Wall Street Journal surfaced racist posts he made last year.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” is just a sampling.

Vice President JD Vance came to the defense of the Musk bro, writing on X: “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” leading Musk himself to post that he intended to rehire him: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Taking responsibility is for other people, I suppose, not these white men who get to be Peter Pan, “kids” at 25. How comforting it must be for these “lost boys” to retreat into a fantasy world where you and those of like minds rule, not because the game is rigged in your favor but because it’s the way it’s supposed to be.

It would be sad if it wasn’t so destructive.

Their power pushed the U.S. Air Force, spooked by orders to erase anything touched by DEI, to remove training materials depicting the history of the Tuskegee Airmen and the World War II-era Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), until cooler heads, and backlash, prevailed.

For now, at least, new recruits will see the exploits of the airmen who overcame every obstacle thrown their way, and learn how small those in charge look when they try to stand in Harry Stewart Jr.’s shadow.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Allison Riggs

In North Carolina, Political Power Grab Thwarts Voters

Some people just won’t take no for an answer.

Put in that category the Republican candidate for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Jefferson Griffin lost that race to incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs by just 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast, which has to hurt. Ask Democrat Cheri Beasley, who in 2020 lost her North Carolina chief justice race to Republican Paul Newby by about 400 votes from almost 5.4 million ballots cast.

Since two recounts have confirmed the Riggs win, you might think Griffin would have conceded by now, as Beasley did after two recounts.

You would be wrong.

Without pointing to one illegal or fraudulent vote, Griffin is trying to have 60,000 votes thrown out — including the votes of Riggs’ parents — mostly because either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number were not attached to those voters’ registrations.

There may be good reasons for that, as many registered before those items were required, or the “missing” information was not attached because of bureaucratic error. Last year, a federal judge, a Trump appointee, dismissed part of a suit brought by the Republican Party that sought to purge 225,000 voters from the rolls.

Because of North Carolina law, everyone who voted in November had to show an accepted form of ID — for many, a driver’s license. They walked out of their polling places satisfied they had performed their civic duty.

If Griffin and state Republicans have their way, many of their votes may not count.

It’s no coincidence that analysis has shown that voters the GOP point to as suspect are disproportionately young, non-white or less likely to vote for Republicans.

Griffin, who hasn’t tried to defend his reasoning out loud, is only questioning results in his race, knowing the doubt and confusion it would cause in other, already certified state races. State and federal courts, and even some right-wing, so-called voter integrity groups have in the past rejected the arguments Griffin makes.

It’s easy yet dangerous to dismiss it as the usual GOP tactic of sowing doubt about any election a Republican loses, crying “wolf” or “rigged,” while declaring an election free and fair if it goes the other way; it gradually causes Americans to reject the integrity of any election.

And it is a tactic overwhelmingly used by one party.

The difference between the two major parties on how they handle wins and losses is why the transfer of power in January 2025 — with Vice President Kamala Harris honorably certifying an electoral count she lost — looked nothing like the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, when losing candidate Donald Trump incited followers to resist instead of choosing democracy.

Now, Griffin’s case is getting national attention because the GOP-dominated, seven-member North Carolina Supreme Court is giving it oxygen, offering national Republicans a blueprint. Four of the five GOP justices voted to temporarily put the brakes on the certification. Riggs understandably recused herself, and Justice Anita Earls, the only other Democrat on the court, voted to let the state Board of Elections decision, and the Riggs win, stand.

Showing some independence as well as common sense, Republican Justice Richard Dietz joined Earls in rejecting the post-election maneuvering, and wrote in dissent: “Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief.”

A challenge to the state Supreme Court action has already come in the form of a recent filing from the Democratic National Committee. On a press call earlier this week, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, outgoing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and state party chair Anderson Clayton talked about what the case means beyond North Carolina.

“The eyes of the entire country are on this race because the implications of having free and fair elections that are being questioned and potentially overturned are devastating,” said Cooper. “If they are successful in this scheme,” he said, “there will be copycat lawsuits across this country for races where they don’t like the result.”

“This time it’s 60,000 ballots, next time it’s 100,000 ballots, and then it’s 250,000 ballots until no ballots get counted,” said Clayton, whose national profile rose during the swing state attention North Carolina received in the last election cycle. “This playbook is not new to our state, but it is one that Republicans will take and make a national playbook if they’re able to succeed here.”

“As a party, our responsibility is to the voters — not a politician,” said Harrison. He admitted the result at the top of the ticket was not what Democrats worked for or wanted, but noted how well his party did downballot in North Carolina, including capturing the offices of governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, and breaking, by one seat, the GOP supermajority in the state legislature.

The move to reject ballots to put Griffin on the court is a Republican reaction to those wins, Harrison said, a “temper tantrum” to try to change the rules, something GOP state legislators already did when they passed, while they still held that supermajority, last-minute laws to diminish incoming Gov. Josh Stein’s already limited powers.

Harrison, a South Carolinian, recalled a time in the South when not all Americans, including his own grandparents, had the right to vote.

Maybe Griffin and his enablers have forgotten that all-too-recent history, when brave patriots fought and died expanding that precious franchise so all Americans’ voices could be heard and respected.

Or maybe a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court is more important.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

My Mom The Black Republican Wouldn't Recognize Her Party Today

My Mom The Black Republican Wouldn't Recognize Her Party Today

If my mother were alive, she would be disappointed at what her Republican Party has become. But not surprised. She had witnessed the GOP inching its way toward scapegoating some Americans to score political points with others in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and thought the tactic, while canny and often effective, betrayed longtime African-American Lincoln Republicans like herself.

During the holiday season, I think about my mom, who kept our sprawling, raucous clan together. No matter what was going on with all of our lives, we made our way to the old homestead — squeezing into the Baltimore row house as our families grew — and minded our manners at the dinner table.

After the meal and a few drinks, all bets were off. But looking back, it was usually unresolved personality frictions, not politics, that triggered the occasional tiff.

As a very young girl, because of my mother’s work supervising precincts on Election Day, I was pretty aware of how our democracy was supposed to work, so was as vocal about the news of the day as my elders at our gatherings. Our political differences were minor, especially when compared to reports of the testy exchanges of today, with families and the country at large contributing to Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year: “polarization.”

One reason, I believe, was the diversity of views within the Democratic and Republican parties.

The Democrats’ tent was large enough to cover Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, whose speech as a young Minneapolis mayor at the 1948 Democratic National Convention was pivotal in the party’s decision to add a civil rights plank to its platform; President Lyndon Johnson, who signed landmark rights laws in the 1960s; and the Southern senators who opposed and filibustered those bills.

The Republicans my mother admired were those who favored progress, such as Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, an African American senator who stood up to his party when he felt his duty demanded it, as when early on he called on President Richard Nixon to resign. In our state of Maryland, Republican Sen. Charles “Mac” Mathias carried on the tradition of moderate so-called Rockefeller Republicans, criticizing President Ronald Reagan’s rightward shifts.

My mother agreed. How could she go along, she told me, when during the 1980 campaign against President Jimmy Carter, Reagan laid bare the Southern Strategy employed by Nixon and others before him, invoking harmful racial stereotypes of “welfare queens” and a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. He opposed civil rights bills and a federal holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., before he signed it, with an insult.

It was ironic that as Reagan turned her off, he attracted so many of the Reagan Democrats who helped hand him victories. In Baltimore, we knew some of them well, the working-class white voters, some union members, who inhabited row houses similar to ours in neighborhoods we knew not to venture into.

Though many were Catholic just like us, when Lawrence Cardinal Shehan implored them and all citizens to support a proposed open-housing law that would forbid housing segregation in the city, he was booed and heckled, and received death threats.

My mother was practical enough to know that to a politician, a vote is a vote. But where did that leave her, she wondered, someone upstanding, who worked hard, including for her party, yet didn’t hear its candidates speaking to those like her, instead repeating hoary lies that made the lives of her loved ones more difficult?

This was a mother who packed her three oldest children off with love and anxiety when they marched for civil rights, who believed in their causes and took pride in the lessons she taught them about character and doing the right thing that inspired them.

She knew there were people like Donald Trump in the world and in her party. But I know she would have been appalled as his acolytes stomped through the U.S. Capitol with Confederate flags, breaking the law not in the name of justice but to thwart it, and received so little rebuke from Republicans driven by fear of one man.

As someone who would accept no excuses from any of her five children, she would just shake her head as Republican senators today fall in line, making excuses for the rogue’s gallery of Trump Cabinet hopefuls, making the rounds trailing pardons, sexual misconduct accusations and NDAs.

By 2024, dissenting voices in the party had disappeared, many choosing not to run for seats they could not possibly win. Trump demands loyalty, and party members comply, repeating the talking points he has dictated. They defend the unqualified crew the president-elect is foisting upon the American people, most of whom didn’t vote for him, after calling those with experience, education and a stacked resume DEI hires if they happen to be Black and a Democrat.

That’s what you get when the ever-present loudest voice in the room is a South African émigré who seems nostalgic for apartheid, and only too eager to replicate it in the U.S.

Mom was smart enough to have known what members of her own party would think of her, a Black election worker with integrity who chose truth over fealty every time.

I’ve written about the belief among many African Americans that the Democratic Party has taken its most loyal voting base for granted. It’s also true, and I’m sure mom would agree, that the GOP, counting on resentment and fear of the other, has run campaigns that view Republicans like my parents as collateral damage.

She wouldn’t be surprised, nor angry, since she was the sweetest person you’d ever want to know.

But saddened, for sure.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Why That Same Old Pundit Is Wrong About Democrats' 2024 Defeat

Why That Same Old Pundit Is Wrong About Democrats' 2024 Defeat

When the primary for the 2020 presidential contest was just beginning, an acquaintance — an intelligent, wealthy, white Democrat — shared her sure-fire prediction as we shared dinner. “It’s going to be Michael Bloomberg,” she said. “He’s the logical choice” to be the party’s nominee for president. She seemed shocked when I told her, “It will never happen.”

My explanation was a simple one, and it had not crossed her mind because, I realized, it had never affected that particular New Yorker nor any member of her family. The most loyal base of the Democratic Party had for some time been Black voters, and for many of them, the former New York City mayor would always be associated with three words: “Stop and frisk.” Stopping mostly Black and brown young men as a means to reduce crime was, after all, his signature.

When the tactic was questioned, when data showed minorities frisked by police were no more likely to possess guns, Bloomberg did not budge, and said: “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” He vetoed city council bills that curbed the practice and railed against a federal judge who ruled it unconstitutional.

For any person of color, especially one with a family member stopped more than once, that was a pretty insulting stand from your mayor — and the feeling never faded away, even after potential candidate Bloomberg embarked on an apology tour in front of Black audiences.

Though it was Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s debate takedown that is credited with the demise of Bloomberg’s presidential hopes, in truth, he had turned off the party’s base long before.

To see all the hot takes, the recriminations, the second-guessing pouring in after the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris at the hands of Donald Trump, is a little infuriating.

Those who would lead the Democratic Party out of the wilderness still don’t get it, not completely, anyway. You’ve seen the pundits across cable TV and the blogosphere, familiar faces — mostly white and male and stuck in the past.

It’s not that Democrats should turn away from trying to woo the white voters of every age and income bracket who would all but guarantee victory, or get better at the messaging game the GOP has mastered, or figure out a way to connect popular and successful policies with their party. But the party also has to be clear-eyed about the complicated reasons those voters have turned away, instead of turning to solutions that lecture Black voters and dismiss their concerns, figuring they have no place else to go.

A majority of white voters in the U.S. have not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee — white or Black, win or lose — since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, at a time when President Johnson was both praised and reviled for his signature on landmark civil rights legislation.

To study that 1964 campaign is to note familiar themes, with the GOP conjuring visions of violent Black Americans breaking laws and stealing “white” jobs. It makes sense, despite progress, that racial unease and fear of change can still be used as a hammer in 2024.

But instead, many are placing blame where it doesn’t belong. There’s the “identity politics” excuse, the opinion that the Democratic Party erred by leaning too much into considerations of minorities, despite the fact that Vice President Harris did not. In fact, she avoided mentioning race or gender, even her own.

Her proposed policies — and yes, she had plenty — were focused on all Americans on issues from health care to housing, ones critics insisted she ignored.

Could the campaign have done a better job of countering a tsunami of misinformation and misleading ads? Of course. Would it have solved that problem if the Harris team had thrown diverse members of the party’s coalition under the bus? Probably not.

So, why this particular attack against Harris, who talked about pride in her country and values like patriotism? Apparently being a woman of color was enough to get many opponents, and some who were supposed to be on her side, to use her identity to define her.

It was Trump who used identity politics with gusto. He actually talked about his “white, beautiful white skin” at a Michigan campaign rally and raised fear in speeches and ads about criminal Black and brown immigrants and pet-eating Haitians.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are not fair to whites, according to the wealthy son of wealth, though loyalty, not qualifications, marks many of his Cabinet picks so far.

Yet, in America, where white is the default, the identity politics label did not stick to him.

Many Democrats, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont leading the choir, fault the party for forgetting the working class, though he seems to always forget that Black Americans make up a big chunk of that constituency. The economic concerns cited by Americans historically have hit them harder than most. Yet a majority of African Americans who voted did not see Donald Trump as their savior.

When narratives of what went wrong for Democrats in 2024 overlook the constituency that has stuck with it, it’s not hard to understand why many don’t see the use of voting at all. Getting them off the couch and into the voting booth, enthusiastically, won’t happen if the Democratic Party’s only move is to pine after voters who deserted them long ago.

I shook my head when I heard former Democratic consultant David Axelrod and others float the name Rahm Emanuel as the perfect choice to chair the Democratic National Committee. Thankfully, Emanuel seemed to remove himself from the mix, though in a recent interview, he didn’t rule out a future run for office.

My mind immediately went back to that Bloomberg conversation with my clueless friend.

Former Chicago mayor Emanuel, who closed schools in mostly minority areas and withheld information about the police killing of Black teen Laquan McDonald, is exactly the wrong person to convince skeptical Black voters that the Democratic Party cares about them. In fact, there was resentment when he slid into a gig as ambassador to Japan in the Biden administration.

The enthusiasm in some quarters for Emanuel to head the DNC did prove one thing — that too many Democratic leaders still have a lot to learn about motivating the voters they have taken for granted, voters who have started to have their doubts.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

In Battleground North Carolina, Harris Brings A Sense Of Joy -- And Urgency

In Battleground North Carolina, Harris Brings A Sense Of Joy -- And Urgency

One rule for politicians and politically inclined citizens: Stay away from Hitler references. They have a “boy who cried wolf” quality and usually end up backfiring, making you appear more extreme than the opponent you’re trying to label.

However, as everyone knows, every rule has an exception. And 93-year-old Ruth Hecht has more than earned hers.

Like most in the boisterous crowd that filled the arena at Kamala Harris’ rally during her Charlotte stop last week, Hecht was inspired by the Democratic candidate for president, especially by her debate with Donald Trump a few days earlier.

“I’m so proud of her,” she said of Harris. “She’s dynamic, educated and so poised.”

But Hecht, a retired registered nurse who now lives in a senior facility in Matthews, North Carolina brought a warning born of her own World War II experience, when she was shuttled to Belgium from Austria, eventually making it to safety in the United States. Fellow Jews in wartime Europe were not so lucky. She herself had a close call, something she is reminded of every time she brushes her hand across her beautiful face and feels scars from surgery to repair damage inflicted by fragments of a German bomb.

She held my own hand and looked into my eyes, as she issued a warning: “You want to know why I’m here? I want democracy to continue.” She heard echoes, she said, in Trump’s demonization of minorities and immigrants, his pledge to prosecute and jail political opponents and refusal to accept election results unless he wins. The people around Trump scare her.

“I learned the hard way, and I don’t want this country to go through that.”

While her journey might have set her apart from most who stood in line for hours, and then waited a few more, there was a sense of urgency and anxiety that tainted the upbeat mood.

Can you blame them when Trump and running mate JD Vance (who once wondered if Trump could be “America’s Hitler”) tell Democrats to end any criticism in the wake of a gunman seen near Trump’s golf course, but refuse to end heated, baseless and racist rumors about Haitians legally residing and working in the city of Springfield in Ohio. It’s the state Vance is supposed to represent, though if you asked if he considers those particular residents his constituents, I’m not sure he would understand the question.

Their words, amplified on conservative, conspiracy-minded sites, are stoking chaos and unrest, with extremists, no doubt feeling a kinship, joining in.

In contrast, Harris, in a conversation with National Association of Black Journalists’ reporters this week, said that while she and her family felt protected, she worried for other Americans. “Not everybody has Secret Service, and there are far too many people in our country right now who are not feeling safe,” she said.

Those might include some constituents of Ohio Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who is urging folks to write down the addresses of homes with Harris signs in the yard. He would certainly seem more at home in a time when the government was there to intimidate and bully rather than serve and protect everyone.

Zuchowski is just following the lead of Trump, who is placing blame for the country’s ills on immigrants, the Black and brown ones, that is. Two of the former president’s three wives — both immigrants — escape his opprobrium.

I wonder why.

When Donald Trump Jr. suggests that Haitian immigrants are less intelligent as a group, with low IQs, he is dipping into dangerous and debunked race science that has been used as justification for heinous acts throughout history.

It’s no wonder many Harris supporters share Ruth Hecht’s fears.

Her son Martin Hecht, 62, who had traveled from the Portland, Oregon, area to help his mom celebrate her birthday, said he was very excited that Harris could be the first female president of the United States. But he realistically knows and is worried that a second Trump administration is possible. “I can’t imagine why so many people are supporting Trump,” he said.

The phrase “this is the most important election of our lifetime” has been repeated so often, it’s become cliché. Yet everyone I spoke with at the Charlotte rally believed it this time. Most also thought North Carolina, the state that has tantalized Democratic presidential candidates since Barack Obama narrowly won here in 2008, was winnable for Harris in 2024.

From Harris at the top of the ticket to down-ballot Democratic candidates (many of whom shared a few words before the vice president’s speech), there was optimism, but also the hard truth that success will take work, campaigning and increased voter turnout, often quite sketchy when it comes to Democrats in the state.

No DJ blasting Frankie Beverly and Maze or mini-set from Charlotte native and Grammy winner Anthony Hamilton could quite make the crowd forget that a lot can happen before November, despite polls that show Harris with a slight, within-the-margin-of-error lead in North Carolina.

Republicans are worried, which may be one reason they are trying things like an Republican National Committee lawsuit to prevent University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill students from using digital ID to vote or an effort to purge voter rolls of more than 200,000 names.

Even someone who carries the name that’s the vibe of the Harris-Walz ticket’s “New Way Forward” said she is cautious. Joy Del Gaizo of New London, N.C., said she felt a “responsibility to the future of my kids and grandkids.” She has four of each.

Del Gaizo, a retired information technology consultant, recalled how she cried after Trump was elected in 2016, and vowed to do everything — from calling prospective voters to going door-to-door in her Republican-leaning neighborhood — this election season.

“I would not want to live in a country that is a dictatorship,” she said, remembering Trump’s promise he won’t be a dictator, “except for day one.”

And when Harris took the stage, the crowd chanted “not going back,” fueled by a desire to elect the Harris-Walz ticket, and to make sure the Trump exposed at the debate and over the past nine years never gets another chance to return rage and retribution to the White House, and take millions of voters down the same path.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

There Is No Bipartisan 'Unity' Now -- But There Are Critical Differences

There Is No Bipartisan 'Unity' Now -- But There Are Critical Differences

Stop. Reflect. Promise to do better, as individuals and as a country.

That would be a thoughtful reaction to an attempted assassination at a Pennsylvania rally for former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump. And that was the immediate reaction from many leaders.

But in a place where the 2012 murders of children in a Connecticut elementary school became fodder for warped conspiracies that linger, painfully, especially for grieving parents, and the 2022 beating of the then-82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer inspired jokes from the same politicians now calling for civility, America could be too far gone for common sense and compassion — at least for more than a few hours.

Maybe it was foolish to expect more than cursory words to cover a widening divide. But you can’t fault Americans on edge for seeking a truce.

What happened Saturday in Pennsylvania was serious, the attempted assassination of Trump and the killing of firefighter Corey Comperatore, with others injured and attendees experiencing trauma they will no doubt relive many times. Although it happened in an open-carry state, if the pattern holds, America will save discussions about the proliferation of guns for another day.

Comperatore’s widow told theNew York Post that when President Joe Biden wanted to express his condolences, she refused to take the call. “My husband was a devout Republican and he would not have wanted me to talk to him,” Helen Comperatore said, which says more about an America divided than I ever could.

It didn’t take long for terms such as “false flag” to be tossed around, speculating that the photo of a bloodied Trump with raised fist just had to be staged, and, at the other end of the political spectrum, some ascribing all sorts of political motives to a 20-year-old whose life is still being scrutinized by law enforcement.

Our country has a long history of violence toward its leaders. Perpetrators have had political motives and personal obsessions, and some just wanted to be famous. We don’t know what we don’t know about the Pennsylvania shooter, and he can’t tell us what made him do it.

Yet, if you cast the investigators as corrupt members of a “deep state” with their own secret agendas, how could you ever trust any findings by the FBI or DOJ?

Then there were the Trump-supporting voters and GOP leaders who gave the Almighty a major role in the candidate’s narrow escape, with God in the spotlight in the first days of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott may not have won the VP prize, but he sure shook the rafters Monday with his fire-and-brimstone sermon, one that blamed the devil and credited divine intervention.

If that is your belief, God bless, truly. No one would begrudge a whispered prayer in the aftermath of something so shocking. However, that sentiment strikes me as a bit insensitive to the men, women and children who weren’t so lucky, not only on Saturday but also in countless shootings: in schools and businesses and places of worship, like the Tree of Life synagogue, where 11 people lost their lives in 2018, not all that far from the site of the Trump rally.

And it dangerously leads to apocalyptic language, the kind that validates holy wars, from folks like Brett Galaszewski, the vice chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party. The election is “more than just right versus left,” he said. “This is good versus evil.”

When you put it that way, it’s clear that unity, on anything, is easier said than done. In politics? Forget it. Is it even desirable if it’s a way to force people with opposing views to just shut up?

“Disagreement is inevitable in American democracy. It’s part of human nature,” Biden said in a rare Oval Office address.

Americans shouldn’t have to shy away from very real differences in policies and politics. What would be the use when supposedly conciliatory calls for unity inevitably strike a partisan tone?

Trump reported that his call from the current president went well; he also wrote that his conditions for bringing the country together include dismissing “the January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C.” and what he labels the “witch hunts.”

Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, candidate Trump’s pick to fill the vice president slot on the GOP ticket, was rewarded rather than punished for his rush to judgment. Immediately after the shooting, Vance, the onetime Trump critic who now supports the man with the fervor of a convert who has seen the light, posted: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

At least the politician who once wondered whether Trump was “America’s Hitler” is bold in his hypocrisy.

It made sense for North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Trump ally and acolyte, to speak Monday in Milwaukee. But since the GOP gubernatorial nominee is most known for his incendiary rhetoric — about women, the LGBTQ community and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — a peacemaker he will never be. Lately, Robinson has been trying to explain how his words, in a church speech, that “some folks need killing,” were taken out of context.

He does that a lot.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson probably had the best excuse for why his convention speech condemned Democratic Party policies as a “clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people.” The teleprompter loaded an early version of his remarks, he said, not his revised words that stressed reconciliation.

With West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s bulldog Babydog getting so much attention, Tuesday’s convention watchers might have missed his prediction that “we become totally unhinged if Donald Trump is not elected in November.”

With a Tuesday agenda featuring mayhem, particularly in “Democrat” cities — presumably including the one where the Republican Party is meeting, one Trump reportedly called “horrible” — it was clear that to the GOP, it is only Democrats who should play nice.

Knowing their timidity, they probably will. I guess we’ll see when the party meets in Chicago next month.

Back in Milwaukee, Arizona Senate hopeful and former media star Kari Lake started Tuesday’s lineup with attacks on the “fake news,” a target for Democrats and Republicans alike this election cycle.

At last, a hint of unity.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Byron Donalds

For Republicans, Turning History Upside Down Is The Point

It turns out Nikki Haley stumbling over the cause of the Civil War was not a one-off.

The topsy-turvy twisting of American history, as it applies to Black Americans — their resilience and contributions despite injustice — is a tactic, a well-planned cynical one. And recent perpetrators don’t even have the decency to make a half-hearted attempt at backtracking, as Haley eventually and reluctantly managed to do after being called out on her amnesia about slavery.

Now politicians are standing proudly as they try to co-opt the language and history of the Civil Rights movement, which fought for equal rights for all and forced America to take a step toward living up to its ideals.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is a master, presenting himself as a billionaire victim and inviting his supporters to follow. But dishonest is too mild a word for politicians when they do everything but break into a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” to sideline the legacy of Americans who truly had to.

In the Florida of Gov. Ron DeSantis, it was not a surprise when the state’s Transportation Department told cities that if they chose to light up their bridges at night, the only acceptable colors would be red, white and blue. The prohibition, set to last between Memorial Day and Labor Day, was widely seen as using an aura of patriotism to preempt the tradition of displaying rainbow colors during June for Pride Month.

But did DeSantis have to label it a part of the state’s “Freedom Summer,” a name that powerfully resonates in American history?

Freedom Summer, also known as the Mississippi Summer Project, was a 1964 voter registration drive — the brainchild of Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — that brought hundreds of white volunteers to join with African Americans to register Black voters in the state. The intimidation and violence they faced led to international attention, outrage and the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

For DeSantis — who has gerrymandered Black voters out of representation, thwarted voters’ efforts to restore voting rights to former felons and fought against having just such history taught in Florida schools — his version of “Freedom Summer” was no doubt intentional.

Staying in Florida, Republican U.S. House member Byron Donalds has been making the rounds defending statements he made at a Philadelphia event designed to attract Black voters to the GOP.

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” he said, as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rather than explain away his comments, Donalds should travel to Mims, Fla., for a lesson in Jim Crow’s effect on Black families in his own state. A cultural center tells of Harry T. and Harriette Moore, teachers whose Civil Rights activism cost them first their jobs, and then their lives, when a bomb exploded under their bedroom. It was Christmas night 1951 and the couple’s 25th anniversary.

When their daughter Evangeline Moore died in 2015 at the age of 85, her Washington Post obituary recounted a last message. “My mother told me from her deathbed that she never wanted me to ever think about hating white people — or anybody else,” Ms. Moore told the Orlando Sentinel in 2009, “because it would make me ugly, and she didn’t want me to be an ugly woman.”

That Donalds is a Black man doesn’t excuse his message. Considering that he owes the possibility of his rise to activists like the Moores, it might make it worse.

Then there’s a North Carolina GOP congressman’s rush to the bottom. Rep. Dan Bishop is making a bid to be his state’s attorney general, running against Jeff Jackson, a Democratic congressman gerrymandered out of any chance to be reelected to his own House seat.

Though he aspires to be the state’s top legal adviser, Bishop has joined fellow Republicans’ disdain for the country’s justice system after it held Donald Trump to account in a New York courtroom, with a jury convicting the former president on 34 felony counts.

Bishop did not stop there, though. “When I say it’s rigged, they don’t go into it as a fair fight,” he said in an interview on Charlotte radio station WBT. “They go into a place where they know the fight is unfair. It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950 if a person happened to be Black in order to get justice. That’s what they did in New York,” he said.

Bishop actually compared a man with a high-priced defense who helped pick a jury in the jurisdiction in which the crimes were charged to a Black man in Alabama in 1950.

There was not much justice for the victim or perpetrator in Alabama in 1950 for Hilliard Brooks Jr.,a 22-year-old Black man murdered on Aug. 13 of that year in Montgomery, after he was accused by a white bus driver of “creating a disturbance” for refusing to enter through the back door. He was shot by a white police officer, though no one was ever charged, and left behind a wife and two children.

His story and thousands of others are told at the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, a museum and memorial complex that’s an essential visit for any American, particularly one who would ask the diverse citizens of a Southern state to trust him to interpret and enforce the law fairly.

Now, laws that prohibit the teaching of African American history make sense. It’s so much easier to sell lies if the next generations don’t know the truth.

Bishop and Donalds, DeSantis and Trump know what they’re doing, as do all the politicians who would erase and replace in their bid to divide and conquer. In fact, Bishop was defiant, saying “the people who attack me for saying so can attack all they want.”

Sadly, those attacks he knew were coming might actually help him ingratiate himself, not only with his party’s leader but also with voters who find comfort in playing victim, too.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Lara Trump

The RNC's Impending Coronation Of Trump Reveals Its Degeneracy

Donald Trump does not have to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

No, the man who has been found guilty of 34 felonies in New York state, a twice-impeached former president, liable for a multimillion-dollar judgment for sexually assaulting and defaming a woman, who has placed retribution at the top of his agenda for a second term and promises to be a dictator on Day 1, doesn’t have to be a lock for the top spot as the GOP tries to recapture the White House.

But he is.

There is no suspense, even though there is more than a month before the Republican convention begins July 15 — just days after the world hears Trump’s sentence on July 11 for those felonies, and not long after a June 27 debate in which Trump, based on past performance, will spend a fair amount of time insisting without evidence that he won in 2020.

But his fans are loud and proud of their guy, no matter what 12 ordinary Americans and anyone else have decided. Heck, do they even consider Manhattanites American?

Donald Trump and the person Trump chooses for the second spot — someone who has debased himself or herself the most in the humiliating veepstakes now underway — will take the stage at that Milwaukee convention to thunderous applause.

On that, I will bet the house. That’s because the Republican Party has already made its choice — a man instead of a country.

The traditions Americans profess to hold dear, including respect for the rule of law, apparently mean nothing if they stand in the way of him taking control. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden can head straight to jail, no trial needed.

One incident embodies the party’s transformation.

In the not-that-long-ago past, a statement from former Maryland governor and current GOP Senate nominee Larry Hogan would have been the template for anyone from any party. Before the verdict in Trump’s New York state trial was announced, Hogan posted on X: “Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process. … We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”

The answer from Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign: “You just ended your campaign.” Lara Trump, Republican National Committee co-chair, Trump daughter-in-law and someone with some control over RNC purse strings, added her own comments on CNN: Hogan “doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point and, quite frankly, anybody in America, if that’s the way you feel.”

With others in his party denouncing the U.S. justice system and repeating every Trump lie about how he wasn’t allowed to testify in his trial and more, Hogan’s hardly incendiary words did indeed register as an outlier.

That Trump acolytes left someone who could swing party Senate control hanging out to dry is telling. That some of the former president’s supporters are already making threats against the jurors, the judge and district attorney is dangerous.

It didn’t have to be this way.

All those Republicans who made a case against the president, who tried to take the lead and perhaps lead the party away from someone who elevates strongmen in North Korea and Hungary as role models, did not have to just give up.

Where did they all go — Nikki Haley, who was getting votes in primary races long after she dropped out, or Sens. Tim Scott and Ted Cruz, former Trump opponents who once promoted a different way forward? Back to Trump, of course. Risking the support of a base that goes along with whatever Trump plans to do became a step too far for anyone who wants a future in that Republican Party.

I wonder what those veterans traveling this week to Normandy to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing think of a U.S. contemplating giving up on allies, as Trump and several congressional Republicans repeating his bad-mouthing of NATO threaten to do. The right to criticize is one thing they fought for — but abandonment?

One of them, D-Day veteran Harold Terens, told NBC, “I believe that freedom and democracy are definitely under threat.” Now, why do I think that at 100 years old, he would be a more reliable defender of democracy than someone who has disparaged military veterans with nary a peep from party members?

What won’t we hear at the July convention?

Congressional Republicans won’t be able to crow about bills passed, since committee meetings to bark accusations at Attorney General Merrick Garland or Dr. Anthony Fauci are the only agenda items that matter. Eleven senators have signed a letter promising to obstruct bipartisan progress because of the New York state case against their leader. And Speaker Mike Johnson is leading calls for the Republican House majority to investigate Trump’s investigators.

Nothing new there.

What we haven’t heard many people say is that he didn’t do it — whatever he is accused of doing. It’s usually just excuses that whatever it was, it wasn’t that bad, or someone else did worse.

In his post-trial press conference, the one where he did not take questions but ranted about being a victim, Trump gave a preview of what is to come. That alone should have triggered some self-reflection: Is this the guy we want to represent us? Is this the America we want to see?

Will Democrats ask themselves similar questions at their own Chicago gathering in August before their inevitable nomination of the incumbent, with some having doubts? Of course. But neither President Biden nor any candidate from any party has ever made denying the result of an election or attacking the U.S. justice system a litmus test.

This summer, one convention will more closely resemble a coronation in a country that overthrew its king, with party members who hedge when asked if they will accept the results in November, for whom the Constitution is a mere suggestion.

Who knew “Mad” King George III would get the last laugh?

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

A Shameful Tradition: Republicans Erect New Hurdles To Voting

A Shameful Tradition: Republicans Erect New Hurdles To Voting

After the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution — abolishing enslavement, awarding citizenship to Black Americans and guaranteeing their right to vote (Black men, anyway) — it was a time of progress and celebration.

African Americans were elevated to positions in cities, states and at the federal level, including American heroes such as Robert Smalls of South Carolina, first elected in 1874, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was well known by then, though. His sailing skills were crucial in a dramatic escape from enslavement that saw him hijack a Confederate ship he would turn over to the U.S. Navy.

But not everyone viewed the success of Smalls and so many like him as triumphs, proof of the “all men are created equal” doctrine in the Declaration of Independence. For some whites, steeped in the tangled myth of white supremacy and superiority and shocked by the rise of those they considered beneath them, the only answer was repression and violence, often meted out at polling places and the ballot box.

It didn’t matter that these newly elected legislators, when given power, promoted policies that benefited everyone, such as universal public schooling.

In incidents throughout the South, the White League and the Klan killed Black men who had the audacity to exercise their right to vote, intimidating and silencing those who considered doing the same. In the Colfax Massacre in April 1873, an armed group set fire to the Colfax, Louisiana, courthouse, where Republicans and freed people had gathered; between 70 and 150 African Americans were killed by gunfire or in the flames. In Wilmington, North Carolina., white vigilantes intimidated Black voters at the polls, and in 1898, in a bloody coup, overthrew the duly elected, biracial “Fusion” government.

Reconstruction gave way to “Redemption,” couching a return to white domination in the pious language of religion, not the first or last time God was used so shamelessly as cover.

The perpetrators then were Democrats, allied against Lincoln’s Republican Party.

Today, it’s most often Republicans — afraid they can’t convince a majority with ideas alone — who engage in tactics to shrink the electorate to one more amenable to a “Make America Great Again” promise, one that harks back to a time that was not so great for everyone.

It’s not a coincidence that those most amenable to the leader of that movement are white Christian nationalists, eager to align a flawed messenger with a higher power, in order to gain more power on earth.

But the tools are subtle in 2024.

In Republican-led states, with like-minded legislatures, a proliferation of laws has erected hurdles to voting, ones that opponents say disproportionately hit minorities, the poor and the elderly. This week, a federal court in North Carolina is hearing a case brought by the NAACP that is fighting voter ID requirements that Republicans in the state say are not tough enough.

Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have announced an effort to recruit 100,000 poll watchers in battleground states. You don’t have to be a mind reader to imagine where they could be stationed — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee — the places where minority voters are concentrated and where Trump insists fraud is going on.

From the 1980s until a few years ago, the RNC was hampered by a consent decree after complaints that posting armed, off-duty law enforcement officers at polls in minority neighborhoods just might intimidate voters. You have to wonder if they’ve learned anything.

America has seen it all before.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, laws that simply sought to balance the scales, right wrongs and achieve some semblance of justice, were all greeted with pushback that the government was going too far, too fast — that whites were losing something when minorities gained long-denied rights.

Some in the crowd in America’s 21st-century attempted coup, on Jan, 6, 2021, toted Confederate flags and signs demanding a violent take back of a country they don’t recognize and don’t want to accept.

Trump in Time magazine echoes the grievances that have never faded away, as he lays out his plans if elected in November. He promises policies to address what he calls a “definite anti-white feeling” in America.

“If you look at the Biden administration, they’re sort of against anybody depending on certain views,” Trump told Time. “They’re against Catholics. They’re against a lot of different people. … I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.”

No proof, of course, that Mass-attending President Joe Biden is anti-Catholic, or that African Americans, with disproportionate outcomes on everything from maternal health to housing, are cruising along. But division and victimhood are all Trump knows. He supports his followers’ views, all FBI evidence to the contrary, that discrimination and hate crimes against whites are bigger problems than discrimination and violence against African Americans.

Trump and Republicans have already succeeded in states across the country, outlawing the teaching of basic history like the facts at the top of this column, for fear the truth about hard-fought gains, often accompanied by bloody sacrifice, might hurt someone’s feelings or perhaps provoke empathy and understanding for the “other.”

Ignorance of history makes it much easier to sell the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and that byzantine rules and poll watchers are needed to prevent the same in 2024.

Trump’s antics in a Manhattan courtroom have drawn all the attention, understandable with headlines about adult film stars, tabloids and the like. Trump won, in part, in 2016 because he knew how to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

But it’s important to pay attention to the words and actions of those who only love an America that excludes rather than includes the voices and votes of all its citizens, those who look back and like the view.

We’ve seen that America — throughout history and as recently as January 2021. It wasn’t pretty.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Will Voters Blame Trump For Loss Of Abortion Rights?

Will Voters Blame Trump For Loss Of Abortion Rights?

A long-promised Donald Trump statement on abortion has finally been released. As expected, it was vague and pleased few. The former president both bragged about his appointment of three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, and stopped short of endorsing a national abortion ban, instead pledging to leave the decision up to the states.

While it may anger the faction of his party endorsing a national ban, the statement proves the almost certain Republican Party presidential nominee, as transactional and self-serving as ever, can read the polls and the political winds.

Remember, this is the man with a history of declaring himself “pro-choice,” “pro-life” and in favor of punishing women who seek abortions. I’m not sure what he truly believes, but it’s clear from his dancing around the issue that he knows he could pay a price for the GOP’s anti-abortion rights stance in November.

But maybe dealing in contradictions won’t hurt him and his party as much as Trump believes and Democrats hope.

It may not make perfect sense, but a certain voting pattern has been happening lately. Citizens in red states surprise observers when they lean blue on the issue of reproductive and abortion rights, yet continue to reelect the politicians who support those bans.

Ohio has proven that two things could be true at once: Democrat Tim Ryan, Ohioan through and through, could experience defeat in a 2022 Senate race at the hands of Donald Trump-endorsed Republican J.D. Vance, who just a few years ago was tagged as an elitist leaving behind background and family with his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” This was after calling Trump an “idiot” in 2016.

And those same voters could troop to the ballot box in November 2023 to make sure a right to abortion is enshrined in the state’s constitution — after earlier rejecting a state GOP attempt to make it more difficult to win that right.

Vance was shaken by that result last year, writing “we need to understand why we lost this battle so we can win the war.”

But in spite of the surprise Ohio voters handed Republicans, incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is still facing a tough reelection race in the fall. That’s despite his working-class credibility across the state, a record of accomplishments that have benefited Ohio and endorsements from groups such as the 100,000-member Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council. Brown criticizes free-trade agreements, even those coming from his own party, when he says they hurt his constituents.

His GOP opponent, wealthy businessman Bernie Moreno, may have no experience and a background many voters are still filling in, but he has something much more important — a Donald Trump endorsement.

In a state that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 by a comfortable margin, that may be more than enough. The fact that Ohio voters have proven to be on board with a Democrat’s record and his party’s stand on the issue of reproductive rights is fighting a growing partisan divide that sees a lot less ticket-splitting.

Inside Elections rates both Brown’s race and that of established Montana Sen. Jon Tester, another Democratic incumbent in a red state, as Toss-ups.

Democrats see abortion rights giving them a fighting chance in states they’ve recently seen as lost causes. It wasn’t that long ago (2008 and 2012, in fact) that the party won both Ohio and even, yes, Florida. With an abortion rights initiative on the Sunshine State’s ballot in November, Democrats have even been dreaming of a resurgence in the land of Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.

It will take more than dreams in a time when party is also identity.

I admit I was surprised the first time I saw someone at a Trump rally years ago wearing a T-shirtthat read: “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” But today, with Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, siding with the strongman against U.S. generals and NATO allies, is it so surprising that traditional hawkish, national security views have been upended by the strongman who is the head of the GOP?

Does it work the other way around? We’re about to see in my home state of Maryland, where the very popular Republican former governor in that usually Democratic state, Larry Hogan, is looking strong as he runs for the U.S. Senate. Democrats haven’t even chosen his opponent yet. But will voters in a state that soundly rejected Trump vote for a politician they may like but may not trust once he gets to D.C. on issues such as abortion?

This dynamic may be tested most in states that, unlike Ohio or Maryland, are not so branded with one party in its political representation. Following the slew of red-state laws limiting abortion, will voting reveal more ambivalence on the issue than state legislatures believed?

One that could be a test case is Arizona, which President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, and was looking tight in early 2024 polls. With the state’s Republican, very conservative high court this week upholding an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, the upcoming U.S. Senate race, likely between Republican Kari Lake and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, has gotten especially interesting.

Lake has followed the lead of her favorite politician, running away from a law she once praised. Arizona organizers say they already have enough signatures for a ballot measure to enshrine abortion in the state’s constitution.

Whether abortion rights will be the issue to cause voters to question party loyalty up and down the ballot is a question the fall elections could answer.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

January 6 riot

America's Two-Tiered Justice System -- And Why Trump Is Not Its Victim

It may come as a surprise to hear that I actually agree with Donald Trump on something: America does have a two-tiered system of justice. In fact, you could say I beat him to it since I reached that conclusion long before the former president adopted it as his mantra.

I was not even in grade school when my older brother was arrested. While I didn’t know much about the world, I always thought that you had to do something terrible for law enforcement to haul you away. I also knew my brother Tony. And, though he teased me in the annoying way big brothers do, I valued him not only as a brother and friend, but as a pretty cool dude. So, I knew he couldn’t be the bad guy.

I still remember that night.

My mom and dad, fresh off the joy of a church dance, were confronted with the crisis when they hit the front door, and they scrambled to find the deed to the house in case they needed it to bail their son out (because if my father had anything to say about it, Tony was not going to spend a night in jail).

I was more confused when I discovered his “crime,” sitting down in a diner and ordering a burger.

That was it?

It really was the “system,” I realized, not my brother. Maryland law, at a time not that long ago, allowed business owners to bar Black people from their establishments. What the state did was technically legal — but wrong. I was sure of it.

An unjust law allowed the police whose salary my parents paid with their taxes to handcuff, fingerprint and jail my big brother because people who looked like my family were not included in an oath to “protect and serve.”

It was definitely a two-tiered system of justice, one that folks like my three eldest siblings and civil rights lawyer Juanita Jackson Mitchell — whose expertise brought my brother home — worked to correct with activism and courage, an adjective that definitely does not apply to Trump’s January 6 army of lawbreakers.

That the activists’ job is not done is clear when poor folks and minorities, often represented by overworked public defenders, languish in jails when they haven’t been tried or convicted of anything.

It’s why my solidarity with Trump ends when you dive into the actual details.

No matter how much he tries to align himself with civil rights martyrs or find common cause with Black voters whom he insists feel his pain, the current GOP presidential candidate’s actions and promises reveal a different truth.

Staring down charges in federal and state court, Trump has not spent time in handcuffs or a cell, he has a high-powered team of lawyers to delay and defend, and he has the luxury of raising money for a presidential campaign while complaining about his misfortune, even running on it.

The man who has no problem repeating the word “illegals,” with a heavy dose of dangerous dehumanization — calling those who cross our borders “animals” — reveres and elevates felons who bought into his stolen-election lies and decided to act.

Trump refuses to say “criminals” when referring to the thugs who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while trying to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election.

On the campaign trail, he is saying that, if elected in November, he will pardon and let loose a bunch of people I surely don’t want running around the streets of my neighborhood or anywhere in this country. Most of their sentences are already below what prosecutors recommended.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, as of January of this year, “Approximately 452 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 123 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.” About 140 police officers were assaulted. And 718 of those charged have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, including four to federal charges of seditious conspiracy.

One man, sentenced to six years and six months, blindsided a police officer — an Army veteran who had served in Iraq — knocking him off a five-foot ledge. Another was charged this month with firing a gun into the air that day.

Yet, Trump was cheered as he made a mockery of America’s national anthem in an Ohio speech over the weekend, offering a twisted rendition to honor those who did his bidding, calling them “unbelievable patriots.” The man who never served in the military and disparaged those who did finally found an occasion to salute.

Hypocrisy is too mild a word to describe Trump, his adoring crowd and the members of a Republican Party campaigning on “law and order” while agreeing with the boss’ autocratic agenda — or staying silent and looking the other way.

Trump’s supporters, many of them lawmakers who cowered in fear that January day, have gained amnesia and lost a spine since then.

They should be ashamed.

It does make perfect sense that Trump has a soft spot for the criminals who broke down doors and smashed windows, assaulted police and relieved themselves in the pristine halls of my House and yours — they were breaking the law not in the name of an ideal, but on behalf of a man unwilling to loosen his grip on raw power, even after a majority of Americans said “no.”

The societal changes they were fighting for were far from noble, far different than the ideals that drove my brother, who has been vindicated by the moral arc of history.

It’s been a lot of years since my young eyes were opened to the gulf between what America promises and what it delivers. I lost innocence I will never recover when I saw my usually bubbly mother, in party dress and high heels, crying on the night of her son’s first arrest — yes, there was another diner and another arrest before his activist days were done.

I see a system of mass incarceration that outpaces other countries, still tainted by racism and inequities.

Then why am I less cynical and more hopeful about what justice should mean in America than those who have always enjoyed the privileges of resting on that top tier, yet are still outraged, screaming about the unfairness of it all?

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Mark Robinson

If Mark Robinson Is Your Standard-Bearer, It's Time To Check Your Standards

A lot of people now know about Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina. Some national and international outsiders looking in were shocked at his Super Tuesday win. But I always thought the Donald Trump-endorsed Robinson was a shoo-in. That’s the red-versus-blue country we live in, when many times the “D” or “R” label means more than the person wearing it.

Yet, I find myself glancing side to side at my fellow North Carolinians, realizing that with Robinson’s win, they either don’t know much about the man other than his party affiliation, or they know him and approve of what he says and how he says it.

And as loud as he screams his repugnant views, there’s no excuse for anyone within state lines pretending he’s an unknown quantity. I swear you can hear him roar from the beach to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

His voters won’t be able to hide now, though, since national newspapers and cable networks are all doing their “Mark Robinson” stories in the same way gawkers slow down for a better look at a car crash on the side of the road.

So, what exactly has Robinson said to make national media finally notice? Take your pick, since the list of racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic comments and personal insults is long.

The civil rights movement that provided the path for Robinson, a Black man, to rise to his current post of lieutenant governor? He has said it was “crap,” called the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an “ersatz pastor” and a “communist,” and disavowed being any part of the African American community. “Why would I want to be part of a ‘community’ that sucks from the putrid tit of the government and then complains about getting sour milk?” he wrote, employing every offensive stereotype that would be right at home at a white supremacist get-together.

Women? Robinson’s message to a North Carolina church was that Christians were “called to be led by men,” that God sent Moses to lead the Israelites. “Not Momma Moses,” he said. “Daddy Moses.”

Robinson reserves especially toxic rhetoric for members of the LGBTQ community, unapologetically, and often in sermons. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Robinson preached in one of them.

And though Robinson has tried to clean up his record with a trip to Israel, the Hitler-quoting candidate wrote in 2018 on Facebook: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

There is plenty more, but you get the idea.

His party is embracing him, from the Republican Governors Association to party leader Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” I don’t remember King screaming hateful diatribes or conspiracy theories, and Robinson himself probably would recoil at any comparison to a man he has so little respect for.

You can see why Trump sees a kindred spirit in Robinson. After all, the man at the top of the GOP ticket, a spot clinched by this week’s primary results, isn’t known for his decorum. Both leave no personal insult unsaid. An example? Each somehow found humor in the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and it goes downhill from there, with Robinson finding any opportunity to spew potshots at everyone from Beyoncé to former first lady Michelle Obama, as well as at the Black Panther film.

While it’s no surprise those two are besties, it’s telling that GOP voters are similarly enamored, picking these two men to lead them.North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, Robinson’s Democratic opponent in November, is — like current Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a former attorney general – pretty low key, preferring to do just the job.

Either candidate would make history, as North Carolina’s first Black or Jewish governor.

Expect bombast, headlines and cash in a match made in news junkie heaven, with two candidates who could not be more different in policy and demeanor. And that’s even though Republicans in the state legislature have stripped the governor’s office of as much power as they could get away with — and with a supermajority, they could get away with a lot.

In the tradition of many extreme candidates facing a general election, Robinson has already begun the big pivot, blaming the media for misleading voters about him and his views. That’s not a great strategy when everything is on tape, video or in social media posts.

He will still try, though, especially since he really hates the media. He once told a Christian gathering, a conference sponsored by the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition, that he could “smell” members of the media in the dark and “they stink to high heaven” — to applause.

But I wonder if Robinson really needs to change a thing.

In the past, North Carolinians most often have chosen hard workers over firebrands — and Democrats over Republicans — for governor, while narrowly sticking to the GOP in federal elections.

But will the old rules hold?

It’s not as though conservative Republicans in North Carolina didn’t have a choice. In fact, using electability as one argument, his primary opponents attacked Robinson’s statements as hard as any Democrat would, spending plenty on televised ads to get the word — his words — out.

One of them, attorney and businessman Bill Graham, had the support of one of the state’s U.S. senators, Thom Tillis, a Republican, which may have worked against him at a time when even a slightly moderate view is rejected by base voters as part of an inauthentic “establishment.”

Robinson smoked them all, winning nearly two-thirds of the vote.

A warning to Democrats: Don’t celebrate. Getting the candidate you wish for doesn’t always work out in November. Ask Hillary Clinton.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis "podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call