Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can't make them vote that way.
— Joy Reid
We are not, in some fundamental ways, a single country. The map of that vast red swatch of states and rural counties that voted for Trump, and the blue coastal edges and scattered urban centers where Clinton won, are a pictograph of mutual contempt.
Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn't be counted on to deliver, and recoiled in fear at their exercise of raw federal power. That uneasy trust; the combination of need and dread, is the lot that FBI agents live with day to day.
No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots).
The goal of the eight Benghazi committees, one of which produced and nurtured 'emailgate,' has been clear from the start: to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States.
Even without the euphoria of 'yes we can,' Hillary Clinton is to white women what Barack Obama was to African-Americans. She represents the opportunity to see a like image in the Oval Office for the first time.
What stalwart Republican would stop Trump from profiteering for his businesses from the White House the way he's gamed his companies and the tax code for decades, or prevent him from letting his adult children milk their father's position to benefit his supposed 'blind trust?'
To be sure, police do a dangerous job and take tremendous personal risks to safeguard the public. Most officers just want to do their jobs and go home alive.
If you've never feared the police - if you don't get a dull ache in the pit of your stomach when you see red and blue flashing lights, even when you know you're not doing anything wrong - consider yourself lucky.
If I had to reduce 'Black Panther' to a single word, it would be 'glorious.'
The evidence of our divided racial self was all over the Obama presidency from the beginning: from the shouts of 'you lie' from the well of Congress as he spoke to a joint session, to the unprecedented spectacle of American conservatives rooting against their own country being awarded the Olympic Games.
When he ran for president in 2008, Mr. Obama was the candidate of the young and the demographically ascendant. He eventually attracted strong majorities among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and voters under 30.
I multitask and always have the TV on in the background. If I need to focus, I generally have to turn off the TV.
The reversion of American society to a nation of the superrich and the rest... is straining the country in ways that go way beyond economics.
The work of anti-racism can only take place inside each individual soul, where we all try to grow into better people. There is no national tonic or instant cure.
When I was 15 years old, my sister and I went on a trip to Europe. We went on scholarship because my mother didn't have the money to pay the full fare for the two of us, which ran into the thousands of dollars.
If you are Black or Brown, or a liberal or immigrant or Democrat, or a woman unwilling to quietly submit, then Ailes was the ultimate villain. You were the object of mockery and scorn - sometimes overt, often subtle. You were the thing to be gawked at, pawed at, jeered at, propositioned or feared.
Whether on guns, race, culture or feminism, there really are two Americas.
Trump is reviled around the world.
In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.
Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.
Republicans have relentlessly pursued investigations of Hillary Clinton, going back to her time as secretary of state (to say nothing of the 30-year project to take down both Clintons by right-wing outside groups).
Trump's real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).
Who in the GOP would complain if Trump federalizes 'stop and frisk' or encourages its proliferation in states using the power of the Justice Department purse?
Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.
There is a twinge of abandonment that comes with being a member of the African Diaspora. But 'Black Panther' fearlessly introduces and then complicates this and other deeply held albeit rarely expressed emotions; that indeed is what makes this film so profoundly innovative.
The America that clings to Confederate statues and flags, and that jealously guards the social privileges white Americans have long enjoyed, form the stalwarts of Trump's base.
President Barack Obama read to a certain portion of white America as an unending attack on white Christian identity, centrality and cultural relevance. In their minds, he was seeking to end their right to bear arms and the right of conservatives to speak freely.
In fundamental ways, the 2016 Democratic primary has been a litigation of the Obama years, and of whether the president's 2008 campaign vow of 'change we can believe in' succeeded or failed.
I think social media tools are helpful, so long as you pick your social media wisely.
Trumpists want a return to a white, Christian America.
To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.
As a media consultant to Republican presidents, Ailes proved a deft manipulator of racial fear. But it was in building Fox News that he found his calling.
If you are a certain kind of white conservative, especially a white male conservative, then Roger Ailes was a hero. He constructed a world in which your core beliefs and your gut instincts were, and still are, constantly validated.
The sharp differences between the way city dwellers and rural, suburban and exurban residents vote, think and live cannot be papered over by federal laws, federal rules or, clearly, by a president.
Trump is beset by clear and alarming conflicts between his international business concerns and the national interest.
Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices.
The abuse of congressional power for pure partisan gain has become a specialty of the GOP.
The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.
Trump's more outre economic ideas, like repealing trade bills and implementing a massive surcharge on imports, would seem like non-starters in a Republican-led House and Senate, except when you consider a second point as a kind of syllogism: Republicans fear their angry, white electorate. Their angry, white electorate chose Donald Trump.
If a novel were written about Florida's administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: 'Don't get sick, and God help you if you do.'
For millions of Americans who happen to be black or brown, that core bond of trust with the government that governs closest to you, is too often broken.
Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.
What White America and Black America wanted and expected from Obama were fundamentally different and opposite things.
Of all the liberal resentments during the Obama years, one of the sharpest has been the failure to secure a public insurance option as part of the Affordable Care Act.
I always want to be doing something - going somewhere, doing a project, teaching a class, writing an article. I try to use up my day. You have a limited time on this planet - try to use as much of it as you can for productive purposes.
Technology has made it a lot easier to be productive. It's incredibly helpful to be able to get little bits of information quickly.
Trump channeled ethno-populist rage as naturally and charismatically as George Wallace had during the 1960s, while seating a billionaire cabinet.
To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.
Ailes built a Kingdom of Yes. That was his genius. He understood the id of many white conservatives - their sense of constant persecution and victimization; and their existential fears of an America whose racial makeup, sexual mores and gender roles were careening in the opposite direction of the country of their childhood.
