This is where his true gifts are on display, this form of emotional intelligence and business acumen, the ability to tap into and exploit other people’s emotions, even those whose response to him is revulsion. This is the art and craft of the demagogue.
You have to see Trump’s statement for what it was: A naked attempt at Willie Horton-izing Mexican immigrants, and thereby the exploiting of the image, substantiated or not, of the brown-bodied predator destroying our country and taking the virtue of our women.
It provides language for people to hide their racism and nativism inside the more honorable shell of civility and chivalry. It allows Trump to tap into anger and call it adulation.
Trump knows how to get a rise out of people, and he’s doing it.
But the Republican Party isn’t innocent here. Trump isn’t imposing a poisonous view of Hispanics; he’s voicing it. And he’s voicing it in precisely the blunt and noxious terms that a sizable portion of the party feels it and in which they want to hear it discussed.
.. There is no need for anyone to have one ounce of sympathy for the G.O.P. Its chicken has come home to roost.
Confederacy Theory
And you thought the Civil War was over… Confederacy Theory presents and unflinching portrait of the cultural war that has erupted around the confederate flag – a century-old symbol that threatens to divide the South like no issue since the Civil Rights movement. Using never-before-seen archival footage and exclusive interviews with politicians, pundits, activists, and scholars, Confederacy Theory traces the history of this symbol and its impact on Southern culture, history, and identity – from the Civil War to the frontlines of a modern-day secession movement.
5 Days That Left a Confederate Flag Wavering, and Likely to Fall
With dizzying speed, opponents of the flag blanketed social media. The kind of mass demonstration that, in the past, might have taken a week to organize in front of the State House had coalesced online in several hours, drowning out the flag’s supporters.
.. Within a day, its host, Moveon.org, a liberal advocacy group, told her that it was receiving 5,000 signatures an hour. “I was floored,” Ms. Hunter said.
.. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic who called for the flag’s removal in a series of searing Twitter posts, said the Black Lives Matter movement had created a rapid-response infrastructure that, soon after it was deployed, forced the entire country to confront the morality of the 154-year-old flag.
.. South Carolina’s corporate titans have long held a simple view of the Confederate flag: It was terrible for business.
.. To many of them, it was a source of embarrassment that the N.C.A.A. would not pick South Carolina to host championship events because of the flag, and in the college-sports-crazy state, coaches said it was an obstacle to recruiting.
.. She had held back a swelling tide of emotion for several days, but it was clear that if nothing happened boycotts and other ugliness could follow. Even the chairman of the Republican National Committee was preparing to issue a statement against the flag, potentially isolating Ms. Haley and the state’s other Republican leaders.
Last Battles
Were the Southerners who erected those monuments concerned primarily about the valor of men, there would be many more dedicated to the former slaves who fought for the Union and risked death or, arguably worse, reënslavement. Were the war mainly about tariffs, we would be left to think that these fugitives fled farms and plantations to join the Union Army because of their abiding belief in trade protectionism.
.. The South is exceptional not primarily because of its literature or its food or its politics but because, as historians have pointed out, it is the only region of the United States that has lived for the majority of its history with the experience of military defeat.
.. He added, in reference to the Confederate soldiers, that “it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.”
.. It may seem odd, decades after the civil-rights movement, to note that for a sitting President to say that the Confederacy fought for the institution of slavery—and that doing so was a moral wrong—is a radical statement. Yet it is ..