The crime rate in New York dropped in the ’90s, as it did around the country, but not because of stop-and-frisk. Of nearly 4.5 million stops conducted under the policy, only 6 percent resulted in arrests and 6 percent in summonses. In about 83 percent of cases, the person stopped was black or Hispanic.
.. “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected,” Miller told a reporter from The Guardian.
The Lying Game
And if the debate looks anything like the campaign so far, we know what that will mean: a news analysis that devotes at least five times as much space to Mr. Trump’s falsehoods as to Mrs. Clinton’s.
If your reaction is, “Oh, they can’t do that — it would look like partisan bias,” you have just demonstrated the huge problem with news coverage during this election. For I am not calling on the news media to take a side; I’m just calling on it to report what is actually happening, without regard for party. In fact, any reporting that doesn’t accurately reflect the huge honesty gap between the candidates amounts to misleading readers, giving them a distorted picture that favors the biggest liar.
.. One all-too-common response to such attacks involves abdicating responsibility for fact-checking entirely, and replacing it with theater criticism: Never mind whether what the candidate said is true or false, how did it play? How did he or she “come across”? What were the “optics”?
.. news reporting should tell the public what really happened, not be devoted to speculation about how other people might react to what happened.
Why Trump Won’t Save the Rust Belt
Mr. Trump has his reasons for focusing on manufacturing, though. They don’t all have to do with economics. He ignores the fact that many of Michigan’s auto industry jobs were lost to automation, or to foreign manufacturers operating in the right-to-work South, because depicting the Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans as job-stealing alien villains better fits his America First narrative.
.. Mr. Riddle is skeptical of Mr. Trump’s promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States: “If other presidents couldn’t do it, how can he?”
.. He’s also ahead among voters ages 50 to 70, who came of age when a factory job was still a birthright, and share his nostalgia for those years.
.. Reagan Democrats — in 1980, they were 65 percent of the electorate, compared with 36 percent in 2012 — but Mr. Trump has tailored his politically incorrect alpha male persona and his protectionist message specifically to them.
.. As Lansing’s mayor, Virg Bernero, has noted, G.M. can build the same number of cars with 5,000 workers as it did with 25,000 in the 1950s and ’60s.
.. The Trump conundrum is that his campaign is about loss. His appeal is strongest among people who feel their social, economic and political influence slipping away, but he appeals to them specifically because their numbers are dwindling, thus making them less effective as an electoral coalition.
Two Ex-Spies and Donald Trump
But Trump, Gates added, has gone places with Putin no would-be American president should: “Mr. Trump’s expressions of admiration for the man and his authoritarian regime are naïve and irresponsible.”
.. Gates said. As for Trump, he said, “on national security, I believe [he] is beyond repair.
.. Trump the chaos primary candidate became the chaos presidential nominee, and you can bet he’d be a chaos president.
.. Being unpredictable as a leader is fine, if you know where you’re going and it is a tool to get you there by keeping foes off balance. But being unpredictable because you have no discipline; because you think issues like ISIS are just a manhood test; because you have not studied the issues so anything can come out of your mouth; and because you don’t realize that when we tell countries like Japan or South Korea or our NATO allies that we might not protect them from Russia or China, they will go get their own nukes and make the world even less stable — well, that kind of unpredictability is how alliances get broken, messes get made and wars get started.
.. Moreover, Trump has told so many baldfaced lies in the last year, I can’t imagine what would happen if he had to take America into a war. Who would trust that he was telling the truth about anything?
.. Also, because of how Trump has disparaged our NATO allies, it is impossible to envision him leading the alliance — particularly if we have to blunt further Russian expansion. And how exactly is Trump going to enlist Arab Gulf nations against ISIS or to counterbalance Iran, having stated that their Muslim citizens should be banned from entering the U.S.?
.. Who will want to work with him? Trump is constantly saying extreme things and then taking them back or claiming to be misunderstood.
.. Putin knows a mess-maker when he sees one, and the thought of America being led by a man who would be wildly unpopular simultaneously in Europe, Beijing, Mexico, South America and the Muslim world is for Putin a dream come true. The old K.G.B. could never make that happen.
.. Trump is beyond repair and won’t just light your fire — he’ll burn the house down.