Donald Trump Does Detroit

Before Trump read his remarks, he said, “I just wrote this the other day knowing that I would be here, and I mean it from the heart.”

That’s the first thing that sounded like a lie. The New York Times reported last week that Trump’s advisers had gotten the questions Trump was supposed to answer during an interview in Detroit and prepared a script for him. What makes us think that they didn’t also write his pandering speech?

.. He told the gathering, “Our nation is too divided,” while not acknowledging that he is a principle source of that division. He said: “We talk past each other, not to each other. Those who seek office do not do enough to step into the community and learn what is going on.”

.. Trump said, “I believe we need a civil rights agenda of our time, one that ensures the rights to a great education and the right to live in safety and in peace and to have a really, really great job, a good-paying job, and one that you love to go to every morning.”

Translation: I want to further weaken public education through more charters and vouchers. I want to flood your neighborhoods with more police because you can’t control yourselves. I want you to stop freeloading, get off welfare, and get a job.

.. Everything about this spectacle was offensive: that a black pastor had invited this money changer into the temple to defile it; that Trump was once again using the objects of his aggression for a last-ditch photo-op;

.. Trump has no real chance in Detroit, and he knows it. During this year’s Michigan primary, Trump got just 1,679 of the total 132,602 votes castin the city of Detroit.

But again, the citizens of Detroit — or black people in general — are not the intended audience for this pageant of perversity. You can’t earnestly court the black vote while at the same time your party is enacting laws in multiple states to suppress the black vote. The whole thing is a logical fallacy.

.. I too would like to close by quoting a passage from 1 John 4: “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

Critics Say North Carolina Is Curbing Black Vote. Again.

“It is equal to voter suppression in its worst way,” said Courtney Patterson, the sole Democrat on the Lenoir County elections board.

He was referring to a proposal by the board’s two Republicans to allow 106.5 hours of early voting before the Nov. 8 election — less than a quarter of the time allowed in the 2012 presidential election — and to limit early balloting to a single polling place in the county seat of a largely rural eastern North Carolina county that sprawls over 403 square miles.

.. In a county where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the election plan limits voting to a single weekend day, and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and do not own cars, make long trips to cast a ballot.

Republicans, who wrote and passed the 2013 law and control all 100 county election boards, deny the rules reflect anything inappropriate.

.. “Does anybody think that Democrats did not select early voting sites and set hours to advantage their voters over Republicans?” Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of North Carolina’s Republican Party, wrote this week, referring to the days when the statehouse was in Democratic hands. “We are just attempting to rebalance the scales.”

.. given North Carolina’s history of racial discrimination in voting, Republicans could not roll back voting rules that benefited African-Americans without compelling reasons.

.. a disproportionate number of African-Americans voted early — especially during the first week of balloting that the law abolished — and that voting after Sunday church services had become an African-American tradition. Reducing the early voting period not only struck directly at black voting habits

Trump Sees a Monster

Though the candidates themselves made efforts to hide any hurt, Trump’s delay in endorsing them had occasioned cries of dismay from Republican stalwarts, who were aghast that Ryan, in particular, after all that he had done for Trump—including serving as the honorary chair of the Party’s Convention—might have to face an opponent without the benefit of Trump voters and Trump rhetoric. Didn’t Donald owe them that?

.. But as Trump’s policy statements remain outrageous, and his behavior makes his comments about Clinton’s “unhinged” temperament look like a study in projection, balancing that equation demands ever more from G.O.P. politicians. To say that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump requires signing on to a picture of her as a criminal madwoman, and of the political process that produced her nomination as irretrievably corrupted and broken. It leads to diatribes about Benghazi. It means believing in conspiracy theories.

.. A particularly baroque Trumpian line this week was the notion that the election might be stolen from him. The occasion for this was the issuing of court decisions overturning overly restrictive voter-I.D. laws. (Jedediah Purdy has more on that.) In Green Bay, Trump said, “What does that mean? You just keep walking in and voting?” (No.) He added, “So you have to be very careful, very vigilant.” And yet this is also a point where he is in unity with the larger Party, which has long supported measures that are supposedly aimed at insidious attempts to destroy the integrity of the ballot but that serve, really, to suppress the turnout of minority and low-income voters.

 .. Trump’s raw material has long been there, in other words—Benghazi, voter fraud, and the perfidy of Clinton were the subjects of fervid nights on Fox News well before this election cycle—but there is less deniability for allegedly respectable Republicans who might want the electoral benefits without the taint.
.. Yet if she wins, by preëmptively questioning the legitimacy of a Clinton Administration they will have made sane governance all the harder.