Dear Progressive Reader,
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered two notable defeats to Donald Trump this week, ruling first that the 1964 Civil Rights Act did indeed protect lesbian, gay, and transgender people in the workplace, and later in the week that Trump could not dismantle, in a “capricious and arbitrary” way, the Obama-era Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals protections.
Trump’s response was swift and angry. On Twitter he wrote, “These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.” —phrasing that had an odd echo of former-Vice President Dick Cheney’s unfortunate accident where he shot a friend, and fellow Republican, in the face during a hunting trip in 2006. The following day, on Juneteenth, Trump again lashed out, tweeting, “They ‘punted’, much like in a football game (where hopefully they would stand for our great American Flag)”—an unmistakable reference to the 2016 protests by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick against the police killings of African Americans.
Trump is notably flustered by the desertion of his hand-picked (and well-vetted by the Federalist Society) Justice Neil Gorsuch, as well as the normally safe-bet conservative John Roberts. “Only time will tell if the independence Roberts and Gorsuch have recently demonstrated will last,” writes Bill Blum this week. “The court,” he cautions, “has yet to release opinions in pending cases [and] has several opportunities to swing back hard to the right. In the meantime, however, the President’s fulminations have been reduced to little more than the ravings of a weak and corrupt man completely unfit for the office he holds.”
Trump’s re-election campaign is shifting into gear with a series of planned rallies in Oklahoma, Arizona, and elsewhere, in spite of a recent increase in positive cases of the coronavirus in those states. The Oklahoma rally sign-up form even requires attendees to “voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. . . . liable for any illness or injury.” But, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, attendees are likely to be anticipating a certain level of “MAGAmmunity.”
The choice of Tulsa for this event has indeed been controversial, from the tone-deaf selection of its original (now moved) planned date of Juneteenth, to its location in Tulsa, where ninety-nine years ago a huge race riot burned the town’s “Black Wall Street” and took the lives of more than 300 African American citizens. In this time of national consciousness-raising over the role of race and racism in our society, this choice seems nothing other than intentionally inflammatory. As Fiore points out, “The President, who has been playing with fire since he decided to run for office, has now spread smoldering embers across the country.”
We must respond to this moment in a way that creates new positive alternatives for our society. As Yohuru Williams notes this week, it is not enough to keep “merely applying Band-Aids to a deep and festering wound.” Edward Hunt reports, “For the past several decades, the United States has played a key role in confounding a growing movement seeking reparative justice for slavery, colonialism, and persisting structures of racial inequality.” And guidance for positive change is certainly not coming from this White House where, as Ruth Conniff describes, Trump’s Rose Garden speech on Tuesday consisted of “Mind-numbing platitudes [giving] way to white power slogans, which then took flight into pure fantasy.” As she explains, the current occupant of the Oval Office, far from showing forward-looking leadership, continues to stoke “fear and division.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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