Ricky L. Jones, Opinion contributor Published 6:49 a.m. ET March 4, 2020

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During the commemoration of the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the ailing Prince of Troy (Alabama), John Lewis, returned to Selma and encouraged those present to keep (their)eyes on the prize.

Of course, at this historical moment, it is perfectly legitimate to ask, what exactly is the prize for black people? Is it simply voting? Is it perennially and unquestioningly joining with Democrats in their ongoing war with the Republicans for political seats? Or is something more at stake?

Undoubtedly, Democrats would argue the prize is defeating Donald Trump. While this would be a desirable outcome for many, truly conscious black people, as were their ancestors, are not singularly obsessed with defeating Donald Trump, but with destroying white supremacy in its myriad manifestations. Any candidate not sharing in this goal should be unacceptable.

To be sure, this struggle is muddied by the deceptive narratives and tired clichs mainstream media, politiciansand their supporters nauseatingly proffer. For example, a current one concerns electability. We hear endless variations of, Democrats must expand the electorate to beat Donald Trump.

Ironically, this argument actually confirms the presence and power of white supremacy in America. Translation: Democrats need to convince as many black and brown people as possible, along with a minority of whites, to support them in stopping the majority of whites from reelecting Donald Trump.

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Remember, about 52% of white women and 63% of white men voted for Trump in 2016. In 2020, they are saying, No matter how malfeasant, mendacious, viciousand racist Donald Trump has proven himself to be, the majority of white Americans still prefer him.

All the obstacles to dismantling white supremacy do not lie outside the race. As Carter G. Woodson warned, a good percentage of the black masses remain miseducated, misled and easily politically exploited. For the most part, the petit black bourgeoisie is not interested in helping, either.

Robert Allen accurately observed inBlack Awakening in Capitalist America, that what many in the black privileged class seek is not an end to oppression, but the transfer of the oppressive apparatus into their own hands in order to advance their own interests.

Suffering people need political revolutions real structural change. But, in the midst of political sleight of hand from both parties, black choices become obfuscated and limited. For instance, while simultaneously begging black voters in South Carolina to save him, gaffe-prone Joe Biden commented, Americans dont want a revolution, they want progress.

It was reminiscent of the accommodationist Booker T. Washingtons 1895 claim to an all-white, segregationist audience in Atlanta, In all things that are purely social, we (blacks and whites) can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Like Washington, who had a nasty tendency to personally advance at the expense of his people, Bidens idea of progress isnt very clear.

Biden isnt alone in his confusing moderation. Inarguably, on the Democratic side, only two candidates are transformative Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Though she is a superior political athlete, Warren has failed to gain traction for whatever reason. This leaves Sanders as the only remaining viable political revolutionary, and the moderates (Translation: politicians who, for all intents and purposes, are supportive of the structural status quo) launched an all-out assault against him prior to Super Tuesday.

More opinion: We need a calming voice on the coronavirus, not Trump's political rants

Racially challenged moderates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar both dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. Klobuchar did so after she was forced to cancel a rally in her home state of Minnesota because black voters vociferously protested her.

Klobuchar wasnt the only target of black resistance. On the same weekend John Lewis returned to Selma, former Republican and black antagonist Mike Bloomberg was there as well lobbying for votes at historic Brown Chapel AME Church. It did not go well. A small group of black parishioners silently rose and turned their backs on him.

Be clear! This should not be read as an endorsement of Republicans. It is not! Most black people know the GOP is cold-heartedly hostile towardthem. That said, we need to ask hard questions of the Democrats. Because candidates need the votes of the partys most loyal constituency, theres a lot of talk about black people right now, but how much of it addresses systemic suffering rooted in race? How long will their attention last? Seriously, how much do they talk to, or about, black people BETWEEN elections?

Also understand this is not a call for black people not to vote. It is, however, a plea to demand a political environment in which choices are not limited to witchy Republicans or devilish Democrats neither of which will seriously challenge a status quo rooted in white supremacy.

Indeed, referencing Americas demonization of Bernie Sanders, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude lamented, I wish some people were as unsettled by white nationalists as they are by democratic socialists. But alas, they arent even though most cant define democratic socialism.

Ricky L. Jones is chair of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. His column appears bi-weekly in The Courier Journal. Follow him on Twitter @DrRickyLJones.

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Opinion: For black people, the real 'prize' is not defeating Donald Trump - Courier Journal

The international health information conference in Orlando that was to feature President Donald Trump as a speaker has been canceled due to concerns over the new coronavirus.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society announced Thursday it is canceling its entire conference, set for March 9-13 in Orlando, out of an abundance of caution because of the risk of COVID-19 Coronavirus.

Trump was to speak at the conference March 9, on a trip that also includes a fundraising stop.

There has been no official word from the White House or Trumps reelection campaign about his trip.

HIMSS is an international organization supporting information management and transfer in the health care industry. Its annual conference typically draws thousands from a worldwide membership. In 2015 Hillary Clinton was a keynote speaker before she ran for president.

The 2020 conference was set for the Orange County Convention Center.

The organization announced on its website that its leadership has been meeting with an external advisory panel of medical professionals to decide what to do.

The advisory panel recognized that industry understanding of the potential reach of the virus has changed significantly in the last 24 hours, which has made it impossible to accurately assess risk, the group stated on its website.

It is now clear that cancellation is unavoidable in order to meet HIMSS obligation to protect the health and safety of the global HIMSS community, employees and local residents, as well as for the healthcare providers tasked with keeping our U.S. and global communities healthy, the group adds.

Originally posted here:

Health conference in Orlando with Donald Trump canceled due to virus - Florida Politics

Donald Trump may be the most erratic and intemperate man ever to occupy the Presidency, but, when it comes to protecting the public health of Americans, his actions have been unfailingly consistent. Since the day he took office, Trump has worked tirelessly to limit funding, dismantle teams of experts, and interrupt nearly any strategic-planning initiative necessary to defend the country against the type of inevitable biological assault that we now face.

Viruses are infinitely more abundant than humans; they have no interest in politics or geography, nor do they have any respect for Trumps assertions of American exceptionalism or his desire to build walls. Sharply limiting our ability to inhibit the spread of organisms that first appeared on earth at least a billion years ago, and that, collectively, have always presented the most persistent threat to humanity, can most generously be described as an act of radical myopia. (Most estimates suggest that smallpox, the only human virus that we have eradicated, killed up to half a billion people in the twentieth century alone.)

The President knows so little about infectious disease that, on Wednesday, during a news conference in which he named Vice-President Mike Pence as his coronavirus czar, Trump acknowledged that he was shocked to learn that influenza kills between roughly thirty to seventy thousand people a year in the United States. Trump said that in public, while standing next to Anthony S. Fauci, who, for decades, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been the governments most prominent and reliable authority on subjects ranging from AIDS to SARS, Ebola, and influenza. Fauci is a discreet man, but the look on his face could not hide his shock at hearing the President, a self-described germaphobe, brag that he knows nothing about the diseases that constantly threaten the people he was elected to lead. (Always a calm but honest spokesman, Fauci was booked to appear this Sunday on all the major television news shows. On Friday, Pences office told him to withdraw from each of them. In response to a question at a press conference on Saturday, Fauci said that he had resubmitted for clearance, and could now go on the shows.)

Neither warnings about future biological threats or evidence of those that we have already faced, such as SARS, MERS, and influenza, have limited the Trump Administrations compulsion to end health programs designed to protect the public. Less than a month ago, and weeks after COVID-19 had been recognized as a virus with pandemic potential, the Administration proposed a budget that called for the Department of Health and Human Services to cut twenty-five million dollars from the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, and also eighteen million dollars from the Hospital Preparedness Program.

Most notably, the Administration is also attempting to cut more than eighty-five million dollars in funding for the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. Zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, SARS, and MERS are caused by viruses that jump from animals to humans. Novel viruses are particularly threatening because we have no antibodies to defend against them. This week, I asked three senior public-health officials about the cuts to these programs. None would speak on the record, for fear of retribution, but each readily agreed that the programs are both essential and already severely underfunded. Even on those occasions when the White House has earmarked small amounts of money for global health security, it has taken those funds from other essential programs. (In 2019, for example, the Administration cut fifty-eight million dollars from the basic U.S. AIDS funding mechanism, the Ryan White program, to add funds for the opioid epidemic.)

Fighting epidemics is not a zero-sum game; you cannot ignore one to defend against another. Such a response is dangerous but, from this Administration, not unusual. In 2018, as Laurie Garrett points out in an informative essay in the current issue of Foreign Policy, the Trump Administration fired the governments entire pandemic-response chain of command, including the White House management staff. In fact, one of John Boltons first acts, upon becoming the national-security adviser, wasto dismissthe National Security Councils global health team, led by Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, a widely respected public-health expert. A new outbreak of Ebola was declared in Congo on May 8, 2018, his last day in office. He has not been replaced.

That same year, the Trump Administration began to tear down a foreign-disease-surveillance program that the Obama Administration had established in response to outbreaks of Ebola in Africa. That program serves as an early-warning system for detecting global pandemic threats, and it helped limit the extent of the 2017 Ebola outbreak in Congo, which, along with China, was one of the countries that the Trump Administration decided its no longer necessary to monitor. As with many public-health programs, preparedness requires policymakers to focus on the future. Naturally, such investments do not generate immediate returns or obvious results. But neither do missile-defense systems. Nonethelessand this does not apply solely to the current Administrationwe are continually caught between our theoretical need to protect against future risks and our very real indifference to things that do not seem to threaten us now.

The Trump Administrations response has been both remarkable and unsurprising. Vice-President Pence, the man now in charge, has a well-documented history of scientific denialism. The public-health action that he is best known for occurred in 2015, when he was the governor of Indiana. Facing the worst H.I.V. outbreak in that states history, which was being spread by intravenous-drug users, Pence rejected federal health officials advice to introduce a clean-needle exchange program. It wasnt until more than two months later, during which time the epidemic became more serious, that he finally authorized a program.

On Friday, in a particularly callous act of political indifference to the epidemic in our midst, the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, characterized the medias reporting on the coronavirus as an attempt to bring down the President. At some point, a member of the Trump Administration will have to acknowledge that scientific factssuch as the number of people infected, sick, or dyingare not the creation of a media cabal. Until then, and as long as Trump and his team continue to lie about our ability to contain a virus that we do not yet even fully understand, the number of people who fall ill and die can only grow.

This piece has been updated to include Faucis comment at a press conference on Saturday.

Originally posted here:

Donald Trumps Anti-Globalist Response to a Global Coronavirus - The New Yorker

Dolan J. Trump is a parody Twitter accounta mashup of the New York Knicks petty, spiteful, and incompetent owner James Dolan, and the 45th President of the United States. For those who enjoy that sort of thing, it does a wonderful job of aping Trumps thunderous, all-caps social media missives, save for the fact that his spittle-flecked rage is aimed at New York basketball beat reporters and not The New York Times. Funny stuff, to be sure.

The humor really hits home on a day like Tuesday, when the team chucked gasoline on a simmering feud with Spike Lee, the Oscar-winning director and possibly the worlds most famous Knicks fan. By the time the dust kicked up by all the accusations and counter-accusations had settled, the director had sworn never to set foot in Madison Square Garden again. (Next season, maybe.) Not after the Knicks had publicly called Lee, a truly devoted Knicks die-hard, a shameless liar trying to gin up drama.

The most exhaustingor endlessly amusing, for non-Knicks fansaspect to this cringeworthy diaper-filling contest? None of it was remotely necessary. In another, slightly less stupid universe, the Knicks had the opportunity to score a much-needed and exceedingly rare public relations win, even, instead of yet another in a series of self-inflicted wounds.

All they had to do was offer a few gracious words, even if Lees outrage was unwarranted and histrionic. But no. No team in all of sports more closely resembles the personality of their owner than the Knicks: paranoid, endlessly resentful, and either unable or unwilling to let any perceived slight slide. Dolan J. Trump account notwithstanding, comparing anyone to Trump is lazy and inevitably fails. (Despite ordering The Rockettes to perform at the inauguration, another reason the comparison doesnt work is that Dolan lacks an army of MAGA chuds whove got his backevery Knicks fan with an operating cerebral cortex realizes hes a delusional twit.) But the gag works because of days like Tuesday, when the Knicks behaved in as Trumpian a manner as anyone not working in the Oval Office.

The idiocy kicked off Monday evening, when a video of Lee shouting at Madison Square Garden personnel began circulating online. Evidently, for years, the 62-year-old filmmaker and season ticket-holder has avoided the inconveniences of entering the arena with the rest of the hoi polloi. Instead, Lee has been allowed to mingle with employees and the credentialed press in a separate entrance. Security personnel told Lee that this privilege would no longer be afforded, and he had to exit and then re-enter MSG. Lee got mad, claiming no one had informed him of the change in policy. No one told me. No one told me, Lee said in the video. If you want to arrest me like Charles Oakley, go the fuck ahead.

Eventually, Lee made his way to his usual courtside seat, and that appeared to be that. Reader, it was not.

According to Lee, while heading home he saw a statement the Knicks PR team put out claiming the issue regarding the entrance had been amicably resolved. Lee grew upset once again, and so on Tuesday morning he unpacked all of his feelings on ESPNs First Take:

At halftime of Monday nights Knicks-Houston Rockets game, Dolan himself approached Lee, presumably to make amends. During their brief confab last night, Lee claims Dolan told him now you know about the change in entrance rules. Therefore, Dolan was harassing him, Lee said. How is it the wrong entrance if Ive been using the same entrance for 28 years! Its Garden spin!

Oh and Lee also confessed that he pays $299,000 for two courtside season tickets, during which time hes suffered through more shitty basketball than any normal human being should be expected to tolerate. Looking back, Lee said it makes him look like a mamaluke, Italian slang for a stupid, foolish person.

All of his remaining tickets have been given away, though he may return next season. Lets pause here for a moment. Imagine you are running the PR shop for a business concern valued at $4.6 billion. How to respond, here? One option might have been to apologize to the superfan and say hes welcome back whenever he so desires. Maybe you think thats a crock of horseshit, and Lee is pitching a hissy fit over what appears by all accounts to be a minor inconvenience? Why not extend an olive branch, and reverse the perception that the team is incredibly thin-skinned? Reader, they did not.

Why not extend an olive branch, and reverse the perception that the team is incredibly thin-skinned? Reader, they did not.

The idea that Spike Lee is a victim because we have repeatedly asked him to not use our employee entrance and instead use a dedicated VIP entrancewhich is used by every other celebrity who enters The Gardenis laughable, the Knicks said in a statement posted to Twitter shortly after Lees ESPN segment aired. Its disappointing that Spike would create this false controversy to perpetuate drama.

Just to hammer the point home: the Knicks seized on a single claim made by Lee on First Take. Namely, that he and Dolan never shook hands. As evidence, they posted a Zapruder-level photo presumably culled from security footage showing Lee and Dolan mid-handshake:

Naturally, by Tuesday afternoon Lee fired back at the Knicks. Whats laughable is how the Knicks are the laughing stock of the league in sports, said Lee. Thats whats fucking laughable. While he confessed to being wrong about that handshake, Lee is sure its all a vast conspiracy:

Lee is clearly milking this for all its worth, and hell, the Knicks may even be in the right regarding the employee entrance. It doesnt matter.

What does matter is they have once again reinforced the perception that any beef will inevitably be escalated and vengeance exacted and that the team is incompetent. Theres a very good reason this perception exists. They sicced security on a fan yelling fire Dolan in November and again in January. Yet another fan was escorted from the arena in May 2019, and Dolan alleged the fan had cleverly set out to ambush him. After Charles Oakley was dragged from the arena in handcuffs, Dolan called him a drunk. (A lawsuit filed by Oakley was recently dismissed.) Fans whove heckled Dolan either via mail or on the street also have substance-abuse issues, per Dolan. And thats just paying customers. When former NBA player Richard Jefferson lobbed a joke about the Knicks, the PR department swung into action, issuing a forceful, strongly worded denial.

But most of Dolans bile has been saved for the local and national press, all of whom have been treated like his sworn enemy going back decades. Of late, hes tried to exact a pound of flesh from New York Daily News reporters and WFAN radio hosts for (rightly) saying and writing true things about his cartoonish, failure-strewn tenure as owner. When the tabloid reported on Dolans involvement with an astroturfed lobbying group, the Knicks official PR Twitter account posted headshots of two obscure Tronc executives, for some bizarre reason.

Professional athletes, including high-priced free agents who might want to ply their trade in New York, pay attention to this sort of thing.

Take Al Harrington, who toiled for the Knicks from 2008 to 2010, and grew up in Orange, New Jersey. Like Lee, he rooted for the team as a kid. Playing at MSG represented a dream come true, he said. Getting embroiled in a flame war with Lee, was, Stupid so stupid. Prior to his stint at MSG, he was confused as to why the team couldnt attract any free agents of note. From his own front-row seat, Harrington came to realize this shit cant get right, said Harrington. The organization, for some reason, just has a funk around it.

Monday marked the first day that ex-CAA agent Leon Rose had been named president of basketball operations. Job one is dispelling the perception held by Harrington, and convincing the rest of the basketball world that hes the one in charge. Tuesdays PR gaffes rendered all that null and void within 24 hours. Whats even more exasperating for Knicks fans (like me) is that if theyd taken the high road, if they engaged in some light bowing and scraping, think of the headlines that would have generated! The press would have marveled at Roses ability to temper Dolans worst instincts, and proclaimed that he clearly had been empowered to fix the Gardens stifling, toxic culture. Those insisting that a culture of fear pervades MSG, as Sports Illustrateds Jonathan Macri tweeted, with employees at all levels of the company terrified of pissing off the boss, might have been forced to reconsider. Not now. Not when Rose has yet to open his mouth about any of this, and Dolan is, by all available evidence, directing their PR efforts.

And anyone still wondering why the worst NBA franchise of the 21st century cant reverse course, this is exhibit A. (Sell, the team, Jim.) Honestly, its exhausting, feeling as if nothing will change, that awful men will continue to spout bile and wreck formerly functional, even beautiful things. Yet the conniption fits and the mindless incompetence will have no impact on the constant stream of profit, and the idea theyd ever face any repercussions is bound to provoke more peals of laughter than anything Dolan J. Trump might post.

Why anyone (like Lee and I) would continue to fork over dollars and emotional currency remains a mystery. Or maybe Lee had it dead right: Were all mamalukes.

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The Donald Trump of the NBA Wages War on Spike Lee, His Team's Biggest Fan - The Daily Beast

The coronavirus crisis is a war against a disease, but its also the most serious battle yet in the war on truth. That much was clear from the start, as China moved to hush up the first outbreak and gag the doctor who had spotted it. It was a classic case of what we might call Chernobyl syndrome: the tendency of authoritarian systems to react to disaster by rushing to downplay or cover up the problem, focusing more on shifting blame than tackling the threat head on. Viewers of last years TV dramatisation of the Chernobyl nuclear accident could recognise the pattern immediately, as the priority of those in charge becomes avoiding embarrassment rather than saving lives.

There was some of that in the Iranian reaction to the virus, as the countrys deputy health minister coughed and sweated his way through a press conference called to reassure citizens, only later for it to be confirmed that he had himself been infected. (There were already suspicions, since Tehrans official numbers didnt add up.) And there was a grim logic to the fact that at the heart of the outbreak in South Korea is a religious sect similarly devoid of transparency.

Usually, the democratic world can contrast itself flatteringly with such closed, controlled societies, proud that its approach to calamity is openness and the free flow of information. Indeed, crises like this one can serve as test cases for the competing merits of free systems v authoritarian ones. True, democracies cannot match Beijings ability to lock down whole cities and build an entire hospital in a week. But when it comes to a global pandemic, its free speech, full disclosure and cross-border scientific cooperation that ultimately save lives.

The World Health Organization is recommending that people take simple precautions to reduce exposure to and transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus, for which there is no specific cure or vaccine.

The UN agencyadvisespeople to:

Despite a surge in sales of face masks in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, experts are divided over whether they can prevent transmission and infection. There is some evidence to suggest that masks can help prevent hand-to-mouth transmissions, given the large number of times people touch their faces. The consensus appears to be that wearing a mask can limit but not eliminate the risks, provided it is used correctly.

Justin McCurry

Except this time, the familiar authoritarian v democratic contrast has become muddled. Thats because the current leader of the worlds most powerful democracy, the US, has the same instincts as the authoritarian rulers he so admires, and those instincts have coloured his response to coronavirus. The result is that what for many must have seemed an abstract concern Donald Trumps assault on facts, experts and science is now a matter of life and death.

So while US medical officials have been at pains to brace Americans for the inevitability of coronavirus a matter of when, not if Trump and his outriders have worked hard to minimise the threat. On Thursday, Trump repeatedly referred to the figure of 15 cases in the US, when the actual figure was 60, and promised that that number would go down rather than up: Its going to disappear. One day its like a miracle, it will disappear.

Trumps chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, breezily assured the US public that the bug had been contained and that the country was sealed pretty close to airtight against the disease, when of course it is not. One of the administrations most influential propagandists for whom Trump paused his state of the union address this month so that his wife, Melania, might garland him with Americas highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling his vast audience that the coronavirus is the common cold, folks, and that it had been overhyped and weaponised to bring down Donald Trump.

Trump has nodded in a similarly conspiracist direction, tweeting that the media are doing all they can to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. That reference to the markets is key. Trump believes his chances of re-election in November hinge on his stewardship of the economy, betting that voters will back him if their pensions linked to the stock market are up. That the Dow Jones suffered the biggest one-day drop in its history on Thursday has him rattled.

And so his first instinct is that of the Manhattan hustler-hotelier loudly assuring guests that the strong smell of burning coming from the ground floor is merely the chef trying out a new barbecue rather than a sign that the building is on fire. Crucial to that effort is talking loudly over the fire marshals, or even gagging them altogether.

You could see that when Trump spoke in the White House briefing room, brazenly contradicting the experts by his side. But its now become formal policy, with Trumps insistence that all federal officials including those with deep scientific expertise are to say nothing that has not first been authorised by the White House.

Note the fate of Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. On Thursday he dared say that we are dealing with a serious virus with a higher mortality rate than regular flu. That was deemed insufficiently upbeat for the great leader. According to the New York Times, Dr Fauci has told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything else without clearance.

The new mantra, it seems, is to be one of Trumps favourite phrases: repeated again on Thursday: Nobody really knows. That could be the motto of post-truthists such as Trump, conveying the hope that voters will become confused, concluding that no truth is ever even possible, and that in the fog of information and rumour its best simply to trust the man in charge. Thats what Trump wants every American to believe, about coronavirus and everything else for that matter: nobody really knows.

Now Trump has put his slavishly deferential vice-president, Mike Pence, in charge of the coronavirus effort. Put aside Pences appalling record as governor of Indiana, when his response to an HIV outbreak was to veto a medically recommended needle exchange programme and to offer his prayers instead.

Focus instead on the fact that Pence has been appointed over the head of the health secretary, Alex Azar, whom Trump deemed too alarmist. In that same spirit, Trump has gutted the very agencies that the US will now desperately rely on. In 2018, he slashed health spending by $15bn, binning the Obama-era programmes and teams established for the express purpose of leading the US response to a pandemic. Among those cut: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now in the frontline against coronavirus which was forced to reduce by 80% its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak. The consequences are clear enough: only eight of the USs 100 public-health labs are now even able to test for Covid-19.

This onslaught against the health agencies is of a piece with Trumps entire approach to data, science and truth. You might remember Sharpiegate, when the president all but got out a black marker pen and amended a map issued by the key US meteorological agency so that it appeared to support his tweeted, and false, claim that Alabama was about to get hit by a hurricane. Trump has installed cronies and business pals at the helm of a raft of agencies previously respected as providers of neutral, factual data, the better to ensure those bodies say only what he wants them to say. He has moved to shrink their budgets whether at the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps or the Census Bureau and allowed experts with deep knowledge to retire and not be replaced.

We cant say we werent warned. On Trumps first full day in office, he telephoned the head of the National Park Service, angered by photographs showing that crowds that had gathered for his inauguration the previous day were smaller than those for Barack Obama. The head of the NPS duly passed on the instruction from the president, and new, more flattering images appeared.

We laughed about it at the time because it was so petty, so vain and so trivial. But the mindset was clear. The US president is a man who does not want the facts or the truth. He wants only what makes him look good. That impulse might not have mattered much in January 2017. But it matters gravely now.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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Donald Trumps war on coronavirus is just his latest war on truth - The Guardian

A recent letter to the editor decried alleged anti-Trump rants by various Burlington County Times readers. The letter writer contends that, three years into the Trump administration, the economy is doing well and things are getting done.

He also contends that these rants dont add anything to the conversation. Assuming this is all true, lets have a conversation that may, hopefully, add to our understanding of what is actually going on.

For starters, while the economy is doing well for the top 1% and those who have 401(k)s, it has essentially left 40% of the population behind economically. Add to this Donald Trumps proposed budget to make substantial cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and you can easily see how the disparity in income will only worsen.

Second, the letter writer is absolutely right: Trump is getting things done. And at the top of his agenda is destroying our democracy and creating a dictatorship. Some of the things he has and is currently doing to achieve this are:

Denigrating our Constitution, referring to it as phony;

Attacking the press as the enemy of the people;

Demanding loyalty to him personally rather than to country;

Characterizing his political opponents as criminals and threatening retaliation;

Encouraging and endorsing violence, tacitly or overtly;

Speculating that he would like to look into libel laws, thus weakening freedom of speech;

Tweeting denigrating comments about anyone who criticizes him;

Alienating our allies and cozying up to and expressing admiration for dictators;

Appointing an attorney general who serves him rather than the American people;

Disparaging our intelligence agencies while allying himself with our enemies, namely Vladimir Putin;

Making a mockery of our system of government; for example, by appointing incompetent and inexperienced advisers.

If any of this seems far-fetched, I refer you to two books: Fascism: A Warning, by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

The daily assaults on our democracy continue, not the least of which are Trumps serial lying and insulting tweets. Our democracy is being destroyed by a thousand cuts. And if and when it finally dies, it will not be because of some coup or uprising. It will be because we have become complacent and refused to heed the warning signs.

Oh, yes, those who are personally benefiting from an alleged solid economy will dismiss this as hyperbole and insist we just need to move on. I advocate a different approach: Wake up, get your head out of the sand, and educate yourself.

Antoinette Auger is a resident of Burlington City.

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Guest Opinion: Some of the things Donald Trump is getting done - Burlington County Times

The environment thats been created now is so hostile to anyone that has a different view. And particularly those of us who have taken principled stands against Donald Trump as conservatives, said Tara Setmayer, a Republican communications director on Capitol Hill in the pre-Trump era.

Setmayer said she attended 15 CPACs, starting when she was a college student in 1993, and stopped after 2015. And in the age of Trump, going now was out of the question. I don't think I would feel safe going to speak, or even walking through CPAC given my position against stuff.

With a speaker lineup stacked with Cabinet members, campaign officials, and Trump progeny not to mention their spouses it was clear that Trump was the center of the conference, keeping everyone in his orbit with the pull of anti-socialism. Even the American Conservative Union, the group that organizes the event every year, was not separate: The wife of the organizer, Mercedes Schlapp, was a White House official until she left last year for the Trump 2020 campaign.

Movement conservatives saw themselves as being separate from the administration, recalled Matt Lewis, a columnist at The Daily Beast who was, at one point, honored as CPACs Blogger of the Year in 2010. Part of our job was to hold them accountable and to cheer them when they did well, boo them when they did bad. And now I think theres a sense that theyre really one and the same. The conservative movement is the Republican party, is CPAC, is Donald Trump.

A former CPAC organizer admitted that this symbiosis with the White House was a likely draw for attendees. I cant imagine that it hasnt garnered attendees that may have attended before and never got to experience a sitting president and First Family, as well as a sitting VP and almost every cabinet secretary representative or cabinet level official, said this organizer.

Admittedly, CPACs exiles now have other options to network with their political ilk. This weekend alone, two other conservative groups are holding events in Washington in direct competition with CPAC. The Summit on Principled Conservatism, held by young Trump critic Heath Mayo and focusing on the meaning of conservatism, its future, and its core principles, set up shop at the National Press Club.

I wanted to be with like-minded people that like good, thoughtful, deep discussion about what future is for conservatism, said University of Virginia doctoral student Alex Welch, who had attended CPAC from 2011 through 2013.

It went the other way as well. Across town at the Omni Shoreham, Infowarss Alex Jones and nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes spoke at the National File Emergency First Amendment Summit on Wednesday, a tiny, far-right conference for Groypers with speakers railing against immigration, and claiming that ACU chairman Matt Schlapp was blunting Trumps New America agenda for the gain of his corporate clients.

But for an event thats nearly 50 years old and has a keystone place in the history of the modern conservative movement Ronald Reagan first spoke of his shining city upon a hill at the very first CPAC in 1974 watching the conference become one and the same with the Trump administration has been nothing short of depressing for Trump critics.

They have ginned up this sentiment where people, because we have a difference of opinion, political opinion, that we're no longer safe or welcome in the same room, said Setmayer. That is hard to fathom, and certainly not conservatism in the traditional sense.

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CPAC exiles grapple with the new devotion to Trump - POLITICO

What would you do if Trump defender andOscar-winning actor Jon Voight called you, mistakenly believingyou were Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and shared his ideas to help President Trump win re-election? Would you let him talk or inform him he hadthe wrong number? How would you react if Rudy Giuliani suddenly texted you, claiming he was being held hostage on an airplane by Robert Mueller, who wouldn't release him until he ratted out Trump? Would you laugh it off or write about it?

These are just a small fraction of the experiences that Daily Beast reporters Asawin "Swin" Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay lay out in their new book about covering Trump World, "Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington."Suebsaeng and I spoke about the book recently on"Salon Talks."

"Sinking in the Swamp"is a no-holds-barred look at the reporters' first-hand experiences of covering all things Trump. As Suebsaeng details, Trump's Washingtonhotel is "swamp central," where administration officials and their dubious allies flockto show their loyalty, while in essence paying tribute to theirleaderby spending lavishly at the hotel he owns.

Suebsaeng and Markay also detail theirhilarious interactions with Trump's best-known defenders in the media some of whom I've had run-ins with as well from Sebastian "Dragon of Budapest" Gorka to Dan "Own the Libs" Bongino.They also reveal who the two biggest liars inTrumpWorld are and that's a stiff competition.

Despite this buffet of hucksters, liarsand all around ethics-free sleazebags,Suebsaeng makesthat the most dangerous person of all is the swamp's proprietor,Donald J. Trump. And if he wins again in November, no one can predict how deep, dark and dangerous thatswamp will become. Watch my "Salon Talks" withAsawin Suebsaeng here, or read a transcriptof our conversation below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

The title of your book is "Sinking in the Swamp," but I know you wanted something else.Tell us about that.

We'd originally pitched the title, "Another S**tstorm in F**ktown: The Donald J. Trump Odyssey." We, or at the very leastI, earnestly wanted that to be the title of the book. In my point of view, it is an appropriate title for a book about the current political era. Now, everybody involved in the decision-making process actually had a sway over thisbook agents or people working for the publisher 100 percent vetoed that title. The compromise was that "Another S**tstorm in F**ktown" is the title of the first chapter of the book. You can't get everything in life, but there's compromises to be had.

I want to get your sense of what "the swamp" is exactly, because what I thought Trump meant by the swamp is clearly not the same as what you mean unless he was being sarcastic when he said he was going to drain it. So when you say "Trump's swamp," what do you mean by that?

When we talk about the swam, it fits a little bit with Trump and his apparatchiks' messaging about "draining the swamp." He has been saying for years that he and his administration are draining the swamp and that his supporters should be very proud of him for that. What he means by that is sort of attacking the legalized and normalized form of corruption that the political class in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere has allowed to fester in this country for years, if not decades or centuries.

Now, it may shock your viewers to hear me say this, but it's just another lie. It's another lie that Trump tells the media and tells his supporters, because there is no swamp-draining whatsoever. All of thatlegalized form of corruption in Washington and influence-peddling and people with well-connected families and well-connected social networks, they're still getting the exact same jobs. When he says he's getting rid of that and draining that, that's just a complete lie. It's bullshit.

The second category is this more in-your-face Trumpian, almost reality-TV form of corruption. Obviously, the pre-eminent example of that that we've seen in recent years was the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

Speaking of Donald Trump's in-your-face corruption, last week he granted clemency to Paul Pogue,a Republican donor who gave $85,000 to the Trump Victory fund and $150,000 the Republican National Committee in the last year. Trump is literally selling clemency to people, yet his base just cheers at the rallies. To them, Trump's promise to clean the swamp means nothing. Or are they in this for other reasons?

Well, obviously there are so many reasons, in terms of cultural grievance and concrete policy, that Trump's base of supporters will never abandoned him. But when it comes to the drain-the-swamp rhetoric, whichis just a complete and total lie, it doesn't really matter. It'sa catchphrase at this point for them. As you pointed out, when it comes to any rational or objective definition of the Washingtonswamp, granting favors for donors or close buddies and sort of maintaining a cliquewhere the rules simply don't apply by any reasonable, objective standard, Donald Trump is the poster boy for that.

But as with so many other calculations that he and his team make, they came to the determination a long time ago that political hypocrisy does not matter, at least not as it pertains to the Republican Party, Republicans on Capitol Hill or his base of supporters. It's just something he has gotten away with lying about and will continue to get away with lying about as long as he's in power. Because the Republican Partyhas decided it does not matter and this is our guy.

I get the sense from your book that the TrumpInternational Hotel in Washingtonis Swamp Central. Is thatwhere the swamp creatures go to hang out, meet and work with each other?

Oh, 100 percent. Trump International Hotel in Washington, which is just a stone's throw away from the Oval Office, it's just as much of a character as any of the human beings we profile in"Sinking in the Swamp." I mean, when Obama was in office, there obviously was not an Obama International Hotel just walking distancefrom the West Wing. But here, it's just completely in your face, available for anybody to witness. The lobby of the Trump International Hotel it'ssort of a clich at this point to describe it asa Star Wars cantina of characters in Trump World, whether they are highly prominent media people or senior administration officials or campaign hands mingling, buying extremely overpriced drinks, going there for fundraisers, going there for various pro-Trump events. Trump himself will show up there routinely to attend some of these events, or mingle with people, or just grab a well-done steak with ketchup on it at the steakhouse in the lobby.

And again, all of this is high-powered people sometimes foreign dignitaries, sometimes senior officials in his own White House who are just putting money directly into Donald J. Trump's pocket and the pocket of his family empire. It's incredibly quiet when he wants to talk about the "corruption" of the Biden family, when this is all happening in broad daylight, just a rock's throw away from the White House.

You write about some of the personal connections you developed talking to well-known Trump people. You have an interesting relationship with actor Jon Voight, who has become the biggest Trump defender in Hollywood. Why did you call Jon Voight? Why did you think he would talk to you?

During the 2016 campaign, part of my function at the Daily Beast was to cover the intersection of Hollywood and politics. At some point, I just happened to come upon his personal phone number and I started calling him to ask him about Donald Trump and what he was doing forthe campaign and what degree of coordination there was. This telephone-tag relationship sort of continued throughout the wild months of the 2016 campaign. One day I just called him to bother him about something, which was a speech he was about to deliver in Washingtonin support of Republicans and in support of Trump.

We had a brief conversation where I annoyed him for, I think, a couple ofminutes. I hung up the phone. I was alone in the Daily Beast office a few hours later. I was working into the early evening, just alonein the office counting down the minutes till I could go home. And then suddenly, my phone starts buzzing, and it's Jon Voight again. Obviously, this makes me curious. As we recount in the book, I pick it up and he starts asking me something to the effect of, "Is this a good time? I hope I'm not bothering you." He's extremely deferential, which is a complete 180 from how he usually is when we talk, which is usually just pissed off that I'm bothering him.

I tell him, "No, go ahead Jon. What do you want to talk about?" "I really hope I'm not bothering you," he saidagain, sort of gingerly. And I'm completely weirded out by this. I ask him, "OK, just get on with it. What do you want to talk to me about?" And he starts saying something to the effect of, "Well, I had some ideas for the upcoming Trump event and if you have a moment, I'd like to go over with you X, Yand Z." And then he cuts himself off, and he asked me, "Wait a minute, is this Steve?Steve Mnuchin?" Who was obviously the former Hollywood executive producerwho at the time was Trump's campaignfinance chair, and who's now treasury secretary of the United States. So journalistic ethics preventedme from lying.

I was extremely curious about what he would have said to me if I were actually Steve Mnuchin, and we were able to talk about details about a fundraiser, or an eventor what have you. So unfortunately I had to break and say, "No, Jon, this is Asawin Suebsaeng, we spoke a couple of hours ago." So he immediately said, "Oh, all right. Sorry lad. Thank you. Bye." And he just hung up the phone. To this day I still wonder what Jon Voight was about to dish to me had he continued to think I was Steve Mnuchin.

You've also spokenwith Rudy Giuliani, but one incident where he's texting you while on a plane is justbizarre. Tell us about that one.

This was in December 2018, shortly before Christmas, I believe. I'm sitting in my in-laws' house in Ohio, just working remote out of the office. It was early evening and I'm counting down the minutes or hours before I can start hanging out with my in-laws and my wifeand stop working. And suddenly, my phone starts dinging and it's text messages from Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani. This is recounted verbatim in the book, but I'm going to lightly paraphrase here.

He starts claiming to me that he's stuck on a tarmac in New York and that he's convinced Robert Mueller has basically taken him hostage, and he's trying to sweat him out to get him to rat on President Trump. He sends a little rat emoji with this ridiculous text message and starts saying, "I'm no rat. Mueller wants me to squeal on these unpaid parking tickets that Trump had in the 1970s when he was parked in front of the Moscow Embassy but he's not going to break me. I'm no snitch. I'm trying to liberate the plane. I try and get him to list my pals and FDNY or the NYPD, to come save us."I have no idea what's going on. I'm thinking through my head, is he drunk? Did he sync his phone with his laptop and he left his laptop open and someone saw this, and is now pretending to be Rudy Giuliani and just fucking with a journalist who happens to be in his contacts?

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on at the time. So I messaged him back, "Is this like a weirdo tweet that you accidentally sent to me?" He says, "No, no, no. This is a secret text, I'm trying to give you the low down on what's going on." I'm convinced he's pranking me or that someone's pranking me. So I try to ignore it and get up from the table where I was sitting and put the phone in my pocket. And then it starts ringing and it says, Rudy Giuliani. So I pick it up and the guy is clearly Rudy Giuliani, it's not somebody else.

He's saying, "Well, Asawin, I've liberated the plane and everything's OKnow. Just wanted to let you know." I'm really confused as to what's going on. At some point, after he senses my utter befuddlement at the scenario, he breaks character, starts laughing and reveals to me that he was just prank-texting me and prank-calling me. This was all a ruse andhe is stuck on a tarmac in New York, but it was for completely mundane reasons and he was bored. So he decided to pull up about 10 contacts or so in his phone and start sending people the exact same messages. Some of them were journalists, he said. Some of them were Trump World associates or friends. He wasjust seeing how people would respond. Part of him was curious, if he would send these messages to a reporter, if thereporter would tweet it out,taking them at face value and basically print fake newssaying, "Rudy Giuliani is going nuts about trying to liberate some plane from Robert Mueller." Or something like that.

We had kind of a good awkward laugh about it, we hung up and I just sort of stared into the mouth of madness for a moment that the president's personal attorney, while defending him in this extremely high stakesMueller-Russia probe, was wasting his time prank-calling and prank-texting a bunch of people, just because.

It was an utterly surreal moment that in a weird way encapsulated my experiences of covering Trump World and the administration. Much later on, after Lev Parnas started supplying information to Capitol Hill investigators and they released some of the private text messages between him and Rudy Giuliani as the impeachment inquiry was getting underway, I realized that one of the people he was sending these exact same text messages and emojis to was Lev Parnas, that same night.

You made Rudy Giuliani's top 10! It makes you wonder about some of the statements Giuliani has made on television, and if that was partly fun for him. You also talk about a sea of professional liars in Washington. There's two people you say youwill never cite as sources because they lack credibility. Who are they?

You basically hear lies from multiple sources, from different angles.These people have different agendas and different biases, and you cross reference those lies. And somewhere, while talking to these administration officials or Trump World sources, you cross-reference enough lies that you find the little kernel of truth and agreement at the center in between. And you take that little kernel of reportable truth and that's what ends up being published. So that's, I think, a healthily cynical way to go about reporting, just to help ensure that you're not getting played bythese people who very frequently are granted anonymity and could be trying to shovel bullshit or spin us their way.

In grappling with that, at some point you encounter fairly prominent people within Trump World who just exhaust all your goodwill and good faith to the point where look, you can make the argument that perhaps everybody within Trump World is a mendacious, prolific liar.

For me as a political reporter, I have to be able to look at myself comfortably in the mirror in the morning while I'm shaving. There are just some things I cannot bring myself to do. And two things I have not been able to bring myself to do for years are to grant anonymity to two specific peoplein particular:Roger Stone and Corey Lewandowski. Obviously, Roger Stone has been in the news quite a bit recently, and the two of them happen to be mortal foes and hate each other's guts.

But as we detail in the book, there came a point early on in the Trump era where we straight up told Corey Lewandowski directly, "OK, if we're talking to you as reporters, we don't go off the record ever and we're not going to grant you anonymity. Everything that we say to each other from this point out is now on the record because we just cannot trust you and you are such a proven, prolific, shameless liar that that's the deal we're making with you right now. And if you don't like it, literally never speak to us ever again because there's just no way we can justify doing it without everything being on the record and usable as quotes attributed directly to Corey Lewandowski, because you're going to lie shamelessly to us. We're not going to let you get away with doing it with the cloak of anonymity."

I think it's very healthy for political reporters, not just covering this presidentbut any American president, to draw lines in the sandwith people who have proven that they don't deserve your good faith as a reporter and that they should not be trusted for a split second.

What'sthe line where you're trying to get access to people, but if you press too hard or you write a hideous story about them,you lose access to them? That's your currency as a White House reporter, the idea of having access to certain people in the administration. Is there a push and pull, a balance that you have to keep?

There's 100 percent a balancing act and it's different in every individual case and for each individual reporter. I'm not going to sit here and judge anybody else in this profession for how they decide to go about their job, but for me, generally the line is that you have conclusively determined that someone has tried to fuck you before you hit publication, before you hit publish on a story. They're clearly trying to ratfuck you or trying to get you to printlies, either for their own agenda, to screw over a colleague or just to mess with you. Then if you've conclusively proved that, get on the phone with themand tell them, "Either the only time we're going to talk is going to becompletely on the record or I'm never calling you again. Good luck and godspeedtrying to do this with any of the scores of other liberal reporters, but you're not going to do it with me."

Again, case by case basis, but there are definitely senior people in the White House right now who I no longer talk to. Not because it was necessarily their decision, but because I determined that there's no use and trying to wring even a kernel of truth out of talking to them, whether on the record, anonymously or off the record.

One last thing: You have interacted for years now with people who were inTrump World, left and now are back, like Hope Hicks. You talk about her in your book a great deal. You've dealt with people like Sebastian Gorka and Giuliani and the like. Are you concerned with the idea that some people in Trump's world would literallydo anything to keep him in power?

I think it's important, not just as a political reporter, but just as a citizen who consumes this stuff on a semi-regular basis, to be extremely vigilant about what's going on right now. I don't think people need to necessarily set their hairon fire or get hysterical about anything, but we are seeing in real time whatlooks like President Trump's active attempts to politicize as much as he can, and wring as much fealty as he can, out of supposedly nonpartisan and independent institutions like, say, the Justice Departmentor the intelligence community.

What is going on in plain sight every day and what we know, and what Trump almost freely admits on a public basis, is that he would prefer these institutions, whether they're the FBI, DOJ, CIA or ODNI, to be unflinchingly loyal to him. Not to the Constitution, not to the country, not even necessarily to a political party, but to Donald J. Trump himself. That is a way scarier prospect what is currently being attempted, however clumsily, by this president than someone like Sebastian Gorka,who is easier to write off more as sort of a bumbling character.

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Asawin Suebsaeng of the Daily Beast on Donald Trump's poisoned swamp - Salon

So its an oppressive politically correct culture and climate on campus and people are just tired of it, and when they see someone like Trump Jr. coming to campus and disrupting that and being a counter force of that, its refreshing and makes people excited.

The emerging dynamics of the 2020 race threaten to escalate the campus culture wars, pitting the young activist left particularly college students energized behind Bernie Sanders and others clamoring for free college and health care against a conservative base railing against the leftist socialist.

The dynamic is already on display at the CPAC 2020 conference in the Washington area, where Kirk spoke Thursday about what activists could do to fight the cartel of colleges.

Stop giving money to your alma mater. Stop it. Cut them off, Kirk said. They do not need your money. These universities are indoctrinating the next generation around ideas of open borders and Marxism. And where Senator Sanders gets his base is a limitless supply of millions and millions of students who are entering our university system, and theyre being turned into activists.

He also called on the packed room to become involved in local school board elections, where they could influence what would be written in textbooks, and to stop sending their children to four-year colleges, especially so-called elite colleges. I would not send anyone that I care about to those schools unless you want to play Russian roulette with their values.

The longstanding grievance that conservative students have against their left-leaning peers has been the subject of most college appearances by Kirk and Don Jr., who is positioning himself as a bridge between his father and young activists on the right in the 2020 cycle and generating speculation about his own political future.

Several students who attended Don Jr. events on college campuses boiled his appeal down to a few factors: his in-person humor, his bluntness and his talents as an internet memelord blasting scathing GIFs and images of his enemies into social media, and writing shocking tweets on the verge of bad taste, all in the name of owning socialist libs and weak cucks.

I think hes hilarious, said Parker Marlow, a University of Georgia student who helped organize his October 2018 visit. One of the reasons why I like to follow him is because he posts memes all the time and theyre hilarious. (Don Jr. has embraced this reputation, with his Instagram bio describing himself as a General in the Meme Wars.)

Whether or not I find everything he says to be funny is one thing, said Kevin Lorusso, a TPUSA campus coordinator who organized Don Jr.s appearance at Colorado State University in October. But I think the way that he tries at least to shed light on some of the more serious, uh, full part of the way the culture has gone. He cited Kevin Harts cancellation as the host of the 2018 Oscars for previous offensive comments as one example.

But even if Don Jr. wasnt Kevin Hart-level funny, Lorusso said Don Jr. had the stature and resources to avoid the boycotts and reputational damage that Hart and his equally-cancelled ilk experienced. You have a world of cancel culture? Well hes someone that cant really be canceled.

And where Don Jr. goes, interest in the culture wars follows.

Anna Kelchner, the president of Liberty Universitys TPUSA chapter, remembered the moment Kirk and Don Jr. mentioned that a new chapter of the group was formed. We were getting messages on Turning Point accounts from over I'm not even exaggerating over 75 students saying I had no idea that was a Turning Point chapter until Charlie announced it today! How do I get involved?"

That response had never happened whenever another conservative political figure came to campus and spoke at the highly conservative Liberty, she added. Though visiting the universitys biweekly convocation has become a virtual requirement for anyone with a rising career on the right, Kelchner said that theyd often come in with the expectation that everyone on Libertys campus were plugged-in activists, talking right over the average students head. People come to our campus and think that we're like Congressmen, at times, she said.

With Don Jr., however, the audience all students forced into mandatory attendance was more amenable, because he went through the trouble of actually explaining political points and his fathers presidency, peppered with jokes about life as a trouble-making college student. He doesn't just talk about it like everybody already knows.

The idea that Don Jr. is bringing a cultural revolution to the youth still generates skepticism among people tracking the space.

Nationwide, conservative students make up about 30 percent of college campuses, while self-identified liberals make up 70 percent, said Nancy Thomas, the director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University.

I'm not seeing any big wave of support for him or even for Donald Trump on college campuses, she said. Certainly on some of the ones that are more conservative or located in more conservative parts of the country, it will happen. But even then, you know, it's 40% Republican, 40% Democrat and 20% somewhere in the middle.

The origin of pro-Trump college fervor, she suggested, came from an amplified sense of grievance that their ideas were not being accepted an assertion she said was false, citing a study she and her colleagues did on college campus free speech before the 2016 election.

Your guide to the permanent campaign weekday mornings, in your inbox.

Thomas said she had observed a rise in watchdog groups, think tanks and other outside forces attempting to weaponize academia in ideological warfare, and that faculty members shed spoken to were now terrified of being candid in classrooms.

They are worried that theyre going to be taped, and that what they say is going to be taken out of context and then blasted out on social media. And it will be brought to the attention of the legislature and the legislature demand that a faculty member be fired.

People close to both Don Jr. and Kirk said it was unlikely that Don would appear at more TPUSA events during the upcoming general election, but should he decide to visit a college campus this cycle, hes got a small but vocal fan base already waiting.

Marlow said that a year later, people still talked about Don Jr.s appearance at UGA. I was actually talking to a guy just about a week ago. He's like, Yeah, I was there. I was there before I knew what Turning Point was."

And even if he doesnt visit a single campus again, his fan base is already focused on the specter of socialism and leftism on campus and beyond.

Lorusso, who once was a self-described Bernie bro, credited the ideas and the people he met through Turning Point with his conversion. Once you realize that the only way that laws that can exist and a government can exist is the threat of violence, you realize, well, I don't really want that. And it was this realization that the hardest socialism is compulsion, is coercion.

Others were less philosophical, conflating socialism with all things left-wing on campus, particularly the protests. A lot of people on the left know these people are effective. So they want to shut it down, said Semanko, citing the protests that Don Jr. and other highly controversial speakers faced when they visited a TPUSA event.

Don Jr. was not coming back to campus, Semanko added, but I bet in this current climate, if he or somebody else were to come back ... you would see extreme backlash from the left.

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Trumps answer to Bernies youth brigade: Don Jr. - POLITICO

President Donald Trump has shown a unique ability to use Twitter as a way to connect directly with his followers.

His tweets show his supporters what he is thinking, directly and unvarnished. Less well appreciated, but apparent in our research based on new polling, is how Trumps anger and its targets are quickly adopted and internalized by large numbers of his followers. What he says, they say. What he believes, they believe.

How is it that Donald Trumps tweets have this kind of power? I contend that much of the explanation is in the power of memes.

Leaping from brain to brain

A meme is an idea, a catchphrase read my lips or even a tune or image that has grown into a cultural phenomenon. Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene called a meme a new kind of replicator which leaps from brain to brain with a speed that we humans have not seen before. Dawkins recognized that in the new millennium, within the nutrient-rich culture of the internet, memes spread virally.

The internet allows all kinds of misinformation to spread. There was, for example, the widely publicized story that a Jewish couple in Pennsylvania had to pull their child from school because they were blamed for the cancellation of the schools holiday play.

Memes are not restricted to liberals or conservatives. But they can, I contend, help us understand the connection between Trump and his supporters. They explain the way falsehoods develop through conservative media, are amplified through his tweets and are replicated in the words and thoughts of his followers.

Intuitively, you may have suspected that this had been happening. But a unique type of poll from Penn States McCourtney Institute for Democracy allowed us to begin tracking the development and transmission of these memes.

How the poll works

Along with Eric Plutzer, the poll director and a professor of political science and sociology, I have been working for many years on the link between public opinion and public policy. The new McCourtney Institutes Mood of the Nation Poll is a scientific internet-based survey conducted for us by YouGov that poses a series of open-ended questions to a representative sample of 1,000 Americans.

Rather than selecting from a predetermined set of answers, half of the sample was asked to tell us in their own words what in politics made them angry or proud. The other half was asked about what in the news made them angry or proud. Answers to both prompts are combined in this analysis. All respondents were also asked what, looking ahead, made them hopeful and worried. Their responses give us a unique opportunity to witness the ways in which the public is imitating Trump.

The most recent poll took place one week after Election Day in November 2016. This was in the immediate aftermath of protests that erupted after the election and which continued for several days at colleges, universities and major cities across the country. In response, just two days after his election, Trump tweeted:

The accusation that protesters were professional in other words, paid was false. As The New York Times reported less than two weeks after Election Day, the charge likely started with a single fake news tweet about protesters being bused into Austin, Texas.

Russia Today, which has been linked to Russian interference in the election, also falsely reported that post-election protesters were paid by Democratic-supporting billionaire George Soros. These reports went viral among conservative websites and were repeated on television by Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Giuliani.

Our poll shows these claims were also picked up by and spontaneously repeated by Trumps supporters.

When we asked Trump supporters to tell us without being prompted what made them angry, one-third mentioned these protests. Another 11 percent mentioned the media. It is possible that the same people mentioned both; each response receives up to three codes.

That means that over 40 percent of Trump supporters were angry about exactly the issues raised in Donald Trumps tweet. And the sources of their anger differs quite dramatically from that of Hillary Clintons supporters, who were overwhelmingly angry at Donald Trump, not at all angry at protesters and in only a very few cases (less than 2 percent) angry at the media.

Another difference is that Trump supporters werent just angry; they were very angry. Seventy-three percent of Trump supporters answering the media said they were extremely angry, as did 58 percent of those who said the protesters made them angry. Indeed, the protests consumed Trump supporters. Another 15 percent gave answers about groups and individuals who sounded an awful lot like those who were protesting, even if the protesters themselves were not explicitly mentioned. For example, a 27-year-old Trump supporter wrote that he was angry about my idiot generation being sore losers.

These voters had a remarkably similar take on these protests, using words that reflect directly on Trumps tweets. Many respondents mimicked the idea that the protests were not spontaneous, but rather the result of professional organizing and a complicit media.

A 33-year-old Pennsylvania Democrat who voted for Trump vented his anger at the The anti Trump protests! This makes me sick because I have seen proof that they are PAID probably by the Clinton admin or Obama. Im sure not all of them but a good amount

Indeed, some of the Trump supporters who were angry at the protesters explicitly blamed financier George Soros. One 71-year-old woman from Texas brought many of these ideas together when she said she was angry at the continual spin about the protesters being afraid. Many of them are PAID agitators from the DNC or SOROS orgs.

It is worth noting that within a day Trump sent out another tweet that was far more magnanimous, praising the protesters for their passion and predicting that we will all come together and be proud.

We looked for evidence that this sentiment too was resonating in Trump supporters, but our poll shows no evidence that any of his supporters picked up on this theme. Perhaps Trump supporters are looking for validation of their anger, and are therefore more likely to incubate and spread memes that do so.

It is early in the Trump administration. We do not know if he will continue to tweet as frequently, nor if his tweets will continue to convey such anger. But if they do, we are confident that his followers are likely to stay angry too. And therefore we are unlikely to see movements toward national unity that were more in evidence after other presidential elections.

Michael Berkman, Professor Political Science and Director of McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

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Donald Trump's Twitter Tantrums Do One Thing Quite Well - The National Interest Online

Thanks to the criticisms theyve leveled in articles, interviews, tweets and letters to the editor, we know that many contemporary authors, from Philip Roth to J.K. Rowling, have a dim view of Donald J. Trump.

But what would leading writers of the past have made of him?

We can only speculate (well, until someone invents a Rowling-like potion capable of bringing long dead writers back to life). But if I could ask one dead writer what he thinks of Trump, it would be Mark Twain, my favorite American author and someone whose travel articles Ive written about in the past. While Twain is best-known for his novels, he was also an opinionated, prolific commentator on the personalities and political issues of his day.

I suspect Twain would have found Trump the showman the pre-2016 version a fascinating figure. He would have been appalled, however, by much about Trump the president.

A champion of irreverence

Read the original article.

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Mark Twain Would Have Hated Donald Trump - Yahoo News

President Donald Trump went after Comcast during a White House meeting on empowering African Americans.

During a meeting in the Cabinet Room with prominent African American media and sports figures, Trump noted that an NBC News reporter had left the room.

She just left from NBC because its owned by Comcast, and theyre the racists, Trump said, as participants in the meeting clapped.

According to the White House, the meeting guest list included Candace Owens, actor Isaiah Washington, Alveda King, Diamond and Silk, David Harris Jr. and Deneen Borelli, among others.

A source said the reporter was Hallie Jackson, who is pregnant and had been standing for 90 minutes. She had told White House officials that she would need to leave to do NBC Nightly News if Trumps remarks ran long, which they did.

Comcast had no comment. Trump did not say why he was criticizing Comcast. He has lately attacked MSNBC as MSDNC, in addition to his frequent criticisms of the media. At a rally in Las Vegas last week, he called Comcast a terrible company, terrible people running that company, before noting that he hosted Celebrity Apprentice for 14 season and they used to come to my office and kiss my ass.

Comcast has long defended its record on diversity, with Lester Holt as the only African American anchor of a broadcast nightly newscast and Kristen Welker among its White House correspondents.

A Supreme Court decision is expected soon in Byron Allens racial discrimination lawsuit against Comcast over the carriage of his companys cable networks. The justices are deciding whether the lawsuit should survive beyond the pleading stage. The Justice Department weighed in on the case siding with Comcast.

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Donald Trump Goes Off On Comcast At Cabinet Room Meeting: Theyre The Racists - Deadline

Here on this website, we ask a lot of questions. Usually theyre questions about people of means and fame and power and the situations they get into. We try to glean from these peoples business some sort of lesson that us non-stars can use. So we ask questions like, why? Also, what for? And how?

But sometimes, we dont have to because others do that work for us. So here now from the Daily Mail, a question: Did he try the goat? Donald Trump ate NOTHING from a vegetarian menu at first stop in Indian visit and was presented with challenging choices at beef-free state dinner.

Yes, did the president try the raan ali-shan on his 36-hour trip to India, where he met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a strict vegetarian, several times, usually over a banquet of food? Trump didnt eat the vegetables, according to the Washington Post. But did he eat the meat? What did he eat and when did he eat it?

Whats the big deal? you, a person who understands boundaries and never logs on except for right now for some reason, asks. The big deal is that this guy has a pretty exclusive relationship with beef. He loves steak and he loves it rock hard, baby. Hamburgers line his guts. Sometimes, he orders the meatloaf. A source close to Trump told CNN prior to this trip, I have never seen him eat a vegetable.

Folks like the presidents son Eric calls the general outcry over whats in daddys mouth a sign of liberal overreach into personal lives. Who cares what the guy eats? Mind your own arteries! To others, Trumps lack of curiosity speaks to a larger lack of curiosity for the world and the people in it. Both arguments are fairly compelling, but there is something undeniably disconcerting about a grown man who wont eat his vegetables no matter how many airplane noises you make on the forks way to his sloppy, wet maw. Plus, one hopes a president would take care of his mind and body, since he works for the people. One hopes, too, that he wouldnt offend by, say, yucking New Delhis yum.

Curiously, for one luncheon, per the menu posted online, the chef changed the traditional samosa to one filled with broccoli. As Jaya Saxena of Eater said, Given that one of the most traditional fillings for samosas is potato, its not like the hotel needed to find a new vegetarian option, especially considering that fried potatoes are in fact a favorite of nonadventurous eaters in the White House and beyond. Clearly, this is a move to ensure the president spends his entire time in the country suffering from cruciferous farts. I suppose the president routed them on this one, though. He did not try it, reportedly.

So the next issue is goat, which is a meat. Trump likes meat but does he like goat? Unfortunately, we dont know. Journalists werent allowed in the state dinner, so there are no well-observed accounts about what he ate like hes some ingenue on the occasion of her first big profile.

So I guess were left with a big blackout. The lights went out at the opportune moment. No one else was in the room where it happened (it being whether or not the president ate a dish). So what now? Whats the lesson we can take from nothing? Maybe in the dearth of the knowable, theres hope for the best. We can dream a dream that he tried every dish and remarked kindly on it with a little self-deprecation, and asked a question or two about it. Then they moved on to discussing, I dont know, arms deals or whatever those two were up to. Also, maybe, the lesson is that it doesnt matter what the president did or didnt do. You can try the goat. Youll probably like it.

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What Did Donald Trump Eat in India, and When Did He Eat It? - Vanity Fair

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In the best-selling Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, David Enrich, the finance editor of The New York Times, shows how greed and unchecked ambition toppled Deutsche Bank from its position as a paragon of European institutional lending.

While its true that just about every bank under the sun has been attached to one or more financial scandals over the years, Deutsche Bank really has been involved in a disproportionate number, Enrich says on this weeks podcast. But to me, the better measure of its destructive capacity is the havoc its wreaked around the world. You can really look in probably almost every continent of the world and see some major and pretty bad scandal that the bank was involved with that caused real harm.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave visits the podcast this week to discuss her first novel for adults, The Mercies, which was inspired by a witch hunt in 17th-century Norway.

There wasnt that much concrete research that I could go to, to fall back on and really give it a solid grounding, Hargrave says. The trials were staggering in their scale, and yet even in Norway, theyre not talked about, theyre not taught in schools. The Salem witch trials are ubiquitous, even here in the U.K., and in Norway their equivalent just isnt discussed. The silence around these trials was very interesting to me.

Also on this weeks episode, Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and John Williams talk about recent reviews. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Timess critics this week:

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Reviews podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Ties That Bind Deutsche Bank and Donald Trump - The New York Times

A week later, Trump said Ratcliffe had withdrawn his name from consideration, with the president citing the congressman being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media as cause for the nomination to be pulled back.

Concerns had been raised about exaggerations and amplifications in Ratcliffes record at the time, which were clarified by staff.

Following Coats departure in August, Joseph Maguire succeeded him as acting director. Grenell replaced Maguire earlier this month, but like Macguire, he would not be able to serve in the position past March 11, unless the White House sends a nomination to the Senate for consideration before then. A formal nomination of Ratcliffe would, in effect, stop the clock.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer urged his colleagues to reject Ratcliffes nomination, saying Trump has shown once again his lack of respect for the rule of law and the intelligence community.

Replacing one highly partisan operative with another does nothing to keep our country safe, the New York Democrat said in a statement. At a time when the Russians are interfering in our elections, we need a nonpartisan leader at the helm of the Intelligence Community who sees the world objectively and speaks truth to power, and unfortunately neither Acting Director Grenell nor Rep. Ratcliffe comes even close to that.

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History repeats itself: Donald Trump tweets that John Ratcliffe will be director of national intelligence, again - Roll Call

By Rev. Alexander Santora

My first presidential election vote went to Democrat George McGovern in 1972. In fact, I was his co-chair, along with Joyce Calefati Booth, a prominent lawyer today, of the McGovern campaign at then-St. Peters College. I was impressed with McGoverns Midwest populism coupled with his deep religiosity. I was too young, ideal and inexperienced to realize that McGovern not only did not represent the majority of the Democratic Party, he did not represent that of the country. In the election he suffered a 61 percent to 37 percent defeat to Richard Nixon at the time, the second biggest landslide in American history, with an Electoral College total of 520 to 17.

He ran at a time of enormous systemic change in the country marked by protests over the Vietnam War, which he opposed, civil rights and womens rights. He tried to harness this rage but most voters did not buy it. What he did achieve was to alienate many blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party for nearly half a century. This allowed Ronald Reagan to venture into Hoboken for the St. Anns Feast campaigning for re-election in 1984. It was monumental that he would show up in the middle of staunchly Democratic Hudson County.

Why am I getting the feeling that the national Democratic Party is ready to make the same mistake by nominating Bernie Sanders to be its standard bearer? For one, I do not see how an Independent who claims to be a Socialist can debate on the same stage as dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, pointed out by Pete Buttigieg in the Nevada debate. Even plutocrat Michael Bloomberg is technically a Republican so ditto.

I think Tom Perez should resign as head of the Democratic National Committee. This nominating process, so old by now, has been going on way too long and mirrors a vanity contest. What chops does Rep. Eric Swalwell have to even stand on the debate stage let alone Tulsi Gabbard. The Democrats allow anyone to run, draining needed campaign funds for the eventual standard bearer. Now the knives come out and instead of savaging Trump, who not only lowered but eliminated any bar for a president, they give Trump ammunition for the general campaign.

Trumps election was a fluke allowed by 77,744 voters in three states. And his ratings show he still does not have the support of most of the American people. Yet, the Democrats will hand him re-election because they fail to read the need for a moderate candidate who can beat Trump. My choice is Joe Biden, who can go toe-to-toe with him. He has vast experience and can hit the ground running. I do not think a Socialist, a gay man or a woman can win this time round. I would vote for the latter two when the time is right as I did for Hillary in 2016. Trumps re-election would precipitate a second Civil War in this country and may permanently fracture our international alliances.

There is still hope if Buttigieg and Klobuchar drop out soon and their followers move to Biden. Warren is passionate but she has fallen too far. Sanders is too arrogant and, like Trump, narcissistic enough to hurt the partys chances by fighting to the bitter end and giving his supporters reason to sit on their hands and stay home Nov. 3.

I predict a brokered convention and the Democrats have one other trick to pull out of the hat. I think the best person to lead the party to victory and put Trump in his place is someone who has not run in primaries or debated but showed her mettle over time and given Trump a dishonor he takes to eternity. She earned the respect of the American people. I think the Dem convention delegates could vote by acclamation for Nancy Pelosi.

Rev. Alexander Santora is pastor of Our Lady of Grace Church in Hoboken. He writes a weekly column on faith for The Jersey Journal.

Submit letters to the editor and guest columns for The Jersey Journal to jjletters@jjournal.com

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Who is the best Dem candidate to face Donald Trump? Heres a thought | Opinion - nj.com

President Donald Trump tosses paper towels into a crowd as he hands out supplies at Calvary Chapel, October 3, 2017, in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. (Evan Vucci / AP Photo)

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This article is adapted from The Climate Beat, the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative committed to more and better climate coverage.Ad Policy

On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News published one of the great headlines of all time: ford to city: drop dead. President Gerald Ford had just announced that the federal government would refuse to bail out New York if the city government went bankrupt. Ford later said that the headline and ensuing popular outrage helped cost him the 1976 presidential election.

Today, Donald Trump is inviting similarly damning headlines for his willingness to let New York flood from climate-driven disasters. Sorry, youll just have to get your mops and buckets ready! the president tweeted on January 18. He was responding to a New York Times article describing a possible plan to build a sea wall to protect the city from floodwaters during fierce storms like Sandy, the 2012 hurricane that killed at least 285 people and displaced thousands more.

The proposed six-mile-long barrier, extending from Queens to New Jersey, was to cost an estimated $119 billion. Now, as Gothamist reported on February 25, the Trump administration has abruptly halted the Army Corps of Engineers study of storm defense options for New York. The administrations elimination of funding for the study is dangerous and unprecedented, Robert Freudenberg of the Regional Plan Association, an urban research and advocacy group, told Gothamist.

The move is only the latest in a series of harsh environmental policy rollbacks from the Trump team. Grist reports that the rollbacks are deeply unpopular among swing voters, but theres a problem: Many dont know anything about them. As we argued in the Climate Beat last week, with the stakes for our planet so high, the climate crisis must be a central focus of 2020 campaign coverage.

As the incumbent president campaigns for another four years in office, his cavalier attitude toward the crisis deserves much more attention and scrutiny by the press. So do the climate platforms of Democratic candidates. (Sadly, the moderators of CBS Newss February 25 debate in South Carolina asked not a single question about climate change, a noticeable contrast to the 16 minutes of climate discussion during NBCs debate in Nevada on February 19.)

With Election Day eight months away, there is still time for national and local news outlets to give the climate crisis the visibility that science demands and opinion polls say voters want. And with the president tweeting about mops and buckets, killer headlines should come easy.

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Donald Trump's Climate Policy: 'Get Your Mops and Buckets Ready' - The Nation

Former National Security Adviser and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger served under the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from 1969 to 1977, and he (controversially) shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for his part in helping to negotiate a ceasefire and a withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.

In the years since then, Kissinger has continued to offer his viewpoints on global affairs through published opinion pieces and interviews, including an appearance on the CBS News program Face the Nation on Dec. 18, 2016.

During that interview, Kissinger ventured some opinions about the recently concluded U.S. presidential election and President-elect Donald Trump:

A few of Kissingers comments about Trump were subsequently replicated in more recent Facebook posts bearing titles such as Henry Kissingers take on Trump and 94 yr old Kissinger takes on Trump, which opened as follows:

Kissinger is now 94 years old.

Recently, Henry Kissinger did an interview and said very amazing things regarding President Trump. He starts with:

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries havent seen before!

The former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gives us a new understanding of President Donald Trumps foreign policy and predicts its success:

Liberals and all those who favor (Hillary) Clinton will never admit it. They will never admit that he is the one true leader. The man is doing changes like never before and does all of it for the sake of this nations people. After eight years of tyranny, we finally see a difference.

Kissinger knows it and he continues with:

Every country now has to consider two things:

One, their perception that the previous president, or the outgoing president, basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessments of their necessities.

And secondly, that there is a new president whos asking a lot of unfamiliar questions. And because of the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it.

As the transcript shows, Kissinger did say Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries havent seen. He also described what foreign countries would have to consider under a Trump presidency:

KISSINGER: Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries havent seen.

So it is a shocking experience to them that he came into office, at the same time, extraordinary opportunity. And I believe he has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president, because every country now has two things to consider, one, their perception that the previous president or the outgoing president basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessment of their necessities, and, secondly, that here is a new president who is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions.

And because of the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it. Im not saying it will. Im saying its an extraordinary opportunity.

However, all the rest of the text of those Facebook posts was a mixture of various political opinions and quotations scraped from other sources and falsely attributed to Kissinger. The former secretary of state didnt call Trump the one true leader or say he puts America and its people first, nor did he maintain that Trump was talking about 13 issues that most Americans are concerned about.

This was a variation of a similar claim we rated False in 2018.

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Did Henry Kissinger Say These Things About Donald Trump? - Snopes.com

Donald Trump, Jr. appeared on 'The View' to promote his new book 'Triggered,' but argued with hosts including Joy Behar and Meghan McCain. USA TODAY

WASHINGTON On the day President Donald Trumpwas acquitted of high crimes and misdemeanors in the Senate impeachment trial, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted more than 80 times, taunting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and calling on the party to expel Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the sole Republican who voted to convict his father.

Lara Trump, the presidents daughter-in-law and another ubiquitous campaign surrogate,posted three tweets. She barely mentioned impeachment.

As Trump's children take on an expanded role in his reelection campaign, they embracedifferent styles and speakto different constituencies.From Trump Jr.s bombastic rally warmups and social media posts to Laras focus on women's issues and Ivanka Trumps composed policy perch inside the White House, Trumps family tailors its messageto different voters.

What would you do if you woke up on Nov. 4 and Bernie Sanders was your president? Trump Jr. asked as he revved up a Phoenix crowd last week before a rally. Guess what, guys: There are no do-overs. You get one chance to get this right.

Trump's stories: Cop to a crying businessman, what Trumps anecdotes reveal

Polling: Poll shows Trump defeatingall 2020 Democratic candidates in Wisconsin

Trump Jr.'s bomb-throwing is especially noticeable in his social media feed. The president's eldest sonis far more likely than his siblings to use Twitter to attack Democrats, according to a USA TODAY analysis of nearly 4,500 tweets from the Trump family. He has referenced Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, for instance,in 8% of the tweets to his 4.4 million followers since Oct. 1. That'sa higher share than all of his siblings combined.

He is more likely to use the word media on Twitter, virtually always in an attack.

Republican observers said Trump Jr.'s red-meat style has made him a rising star among conservative voters within the presidents base.

By contrast, Lara Trump who married Eric Trump in 2014 and who has taken on an increasingly high-profile role in the presidents election is more likely than other family members to use the word woman on social media, according to the analysis. That syncs with her appearances at Women for Trump events in Iowa, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. A senior adviser on the campaign, Lara has been more likely to mention the words employment and job than other surrogates.

"The media tells us women dont support Trump!WRONG!" Lara posted Jan. 17 to her 761,000-plus followers.

The approach has allowed herto reach out to women voters, particularly suburban women. Donald Trump narrowly won white women in 2016, exit polls showed, but that support has slipped.A new USA TODAY/Ipsos poll found that 54% of suburban womenare more likely to say a Democratwould be better for the country.

From left, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany Trump applaud as President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address from the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 4.(Photo: Jarrad Henderson, USA TODAY)

Ivanka Trump, who has been a more sporadic presence on the campaign trail in 2020, has focused heavily on her efforts inside the White House on workforce development, rarely wading into politics on social media. While Trump Jr. shares memes of Romney with a Mom Jeans caption, Ivanka Trump is more likely to post images of her official trips overseas on behalf of the administration, or of her children.

Since 2017, rural areas have had similar or better economic performance than urban areas as measured by GDP growth, housing value appreciation and labor market participation, Ivanka Trump tweeted this month in a message that was similar to others she has posted.

Her husband, Jared Kushner, whose vast portfolio includes building the wall along the U.S.-Mexicanborder and Middle East peace, has never posted a tweet. Both have long been viewed as moderating forces, relatable to centrist Republicans andsome swing voters who crossed from backing President Barack Obama to Trump in 2016.

President Donald Trump's family (from left, Melania, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr.) helps promote the administration's themes in various ways. Trump campaign spokeswomanErin Perrine calls them "valued advisers and an integral part of this campaign."(Photo: Tasos Katopodis/AFP/Getty Images)

Trump campaign officials declined to discuss the strategy behind the use of family surrogates,but spokeswomanErin Perrine described their involvement in the campaign as "key to victory in 2016" and predicted the same would hold true for 2020.

"Who better to speak to voters about President Trump and his record of success than those who know him best?" Perrine said. "Members of the Trump family are valued advisers and an integral part of this campaign."

Lara Trump said her work on behalf of the campaign has brought the Trump family together.

"Nothing can really prepare you for this," Lara Trump told USA TODAY in an interview. "We all became a lot closer because it almost feels like you go through a war with people. And I would say for all of us including my father-in-law were all a lot closer because of it."

Dianne Bystrom, a former director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University, said some of the presidents adult children fulfill a campaign role more typically handled by a first lady. In the 2020 cycle, Melania Trump has been less active on the campaign trail than many of her predecessors, including Michelle Obama and Laura Bush.

It is not unusual for presidential candidates to employ surrogates, including family members, to strategically target the campaign's message with a variety of groups, Bystrom said. I think we see so much more of the Trump children because Melania Trump has not been an effective spousal surrogate.

Few presidential candidates have been able to draw so heavily on their progeny as proxies, and few have been able to put their children so front and center. President George H.W. Bush brought in his family, including George W. Bush, in the 1988 election. Romneys children often appeared on stage during his 2012 campaign.

The difference in Trumps case is that many of his children were well known before he ran for president.

If you want star power, add the Trump name, and you automatically have it, said Jason Miller, who was a senior aide on the presidents 2016 campaign.

In addition to the last name, they bring a sense of passion, a sense of insight into the policies, Miller said. It says something when the people who know President Trump the best are willing to get out there and work so hard for him.

President Trump and President George W. Bush won the electoral vote during the election, but not the popular vote. How does the electoral college work? USA TODAY

The ubiquity of Trumps children on the trail has had another impact: It has raised speculation about their own political ambitions.

Trump Jr., who published a New York Times bestseller last year, is among Republican voters top picks for the nomination in 2024, according to a poll for the news site Axios last month. Ivanka Trump also made the list, along with Vice President Mike Pence.

That interest hasnt been lost on Trumps childrenor the crowds turning out to hear the president speak.

When the president recognized Trump Jr. during a rally in New Hampshire this month, his supporters chanted, 46 as in the 46th president.

WhenTrump Jr. addressed an audience in San Antonio last fall, someone in the audience shouted out 2024. As many in the crowd laughed,Trump Jr.held a dramatic pause before his response.

Lets worry about 2020 first! he said.

Contributing: The Associated Press, Courtney Subramanian

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Speaking for Trump: How Don Jr. and other family members target different voters with different messages - USA TODAY

Presidential administrations famously chafe under media scrutiny. Bush the Second? Hated it. Obama? Not a fan! Too itchy! The media, all of it, is always asking questions and poking around, and these guys dont love it. But what happens when a man whos suffered from a persecution complex since birth takes a job that only ever exists under a microscope? Its fine! Good even. It goes well. Take this latest business with the coronavirus. Trump has been very okay about the medias take on his response to the viruss spread. Bet he hasnt been watching television in days.

Instead its his volunteer P.R. team thats up in arms. Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, for example wrote an op-ed lauding the presidents appointment of Vice President Mike Pence over the outbreak in the U.S. (There are currently 60 confirmed cases here, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that about 82,000 cases of the coronavirus have been clocked worldwide, with about 2,800 deaths.) He said in a follow-up on Fox News that the president could personally suck the virus out of every one of the 60,000 people in the world, and suck it out of their lungs, swim to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out, and he would be accused of pollution for messing up the ocean if he did that.

And you know what? Huckabees absolutely right. If he did that, the media would very much say, That was pretty weird, huh? A little too Dementor-y for my tastes. And the media wouldnt stop there. If Trump used Tweezerman tweezers to pluck up each little bacteria one by one and then placed them in Elon Musks spaceship and shot the disease to Mars, wed probably say, Why did you spend so much money on that billionaires big blastoff, huh? If Trump kissed every person in America with lips covered in antibacterial ointment, wed say, Please, please stop kissing everyone, Mr. President. My God!

If Trump created a bigger and badder disease in a lab and put it in a cup and then pretended to spill it on, like, Jim Acostas head, but then stopped at the last minute and said, Oop! Ha ha. Gotcha!, wed say, This isnt helping to distract us! Its honestly making things a lot worse!

None of these are great plans even though they sound really good and smart because its all secondary to a pretty plain one. Reiterate that Americans shouldnt panic, but they should wash their hands, and perhaps prepare to stay indoors for awhile. Then the media would say, Wow, that guy is acting curiously presidential. Or something!

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

How a teenager uncovered Belgiums royal scandal Oscars 2020: All the best-dressed stars on the red carpet The dangers of flying rich and flying private What this years nominees wore to their first Oscars Harry and Meghan are lying lowbut not for long Can Princess Beatrices wedding solve the royal family crisis? From the Archive: The women of Palm Beach

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.

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Mike Huckabee Invites You to Envision Donald Trump Literally Sucking the Coronavirus Right Out of People - Vanity Fair