This Is Someone's Mayor

Marion Post Wolcott / Library of Congress

The Original Underclass

Alec MacGillis and ProPublica

Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has.

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts—Sarah Palin’s “real America”—who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.

Why Conservatives and Progressives Share an Interest in a Huge Trump Loss

Conor Friedersdorf

If the GOP becomes a party of white identity politics, it would hurt both the principled right and the “Bernie-or-Bust” left.

On Thursday, the candidate challenging Speaker Paul Ryan in a Wisconsin Republican primary, Paul Nehlen, declared in a radio interview that the United States should consider deporting all Muslims. “I'm suggesting we have a discussion about it, that's for sure,” he said. “I am absolutely suggesting we figure out—here's what we should be doing. We should be monitoring every mosque. We should be monitoring social media. We've got about three million Muslims in the United States."

The comments came days after Donald Trump injected energy into his campaign by pointedly complimenting him on social media and refusing to endorse Ryan.

Meanwhile, down in Louisiana, David Duke, the former Klansmen who waged a losing campaign for governor in 1991, announced a return to electoral politics. “It would be hard to overstate how much former KKK leader David Duke has attempted to link his 2016 surprise Senate bid to that of the Republican presidential nominee,” the New York Daily News reports. “He mentioned Trump during a YouTube announcement of his bid and spoke repeatedly during an hour-long news conference about how Trump and the Republicans had embraced his vision of America. References to Trump now compete for attention on Duke's website with anti-Zionist posts like the theory that Jewish conspirators somehow worked passages from a Michelle Obama speech into Melania Trump's convention address.”

The Mind of Donald Trump

Dan P. McAdams

Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency.

In 2006, Donald Trump made plans to purchase the Menie Estate, near Aberdeen, Scotland, aiming to convert the dunes and grassland into a luxury golf resort. He and the estate’s owner, Tom Griffin, sat down to discuss the transaction at the Cock & Bull restaurant. Griffin recalls that Trump was a hard-nosed negotiator, reluctant to give in on even the tiniest details. But, as Michael D’Antonio writes in his recent biography of Trump, Never Enough, Griffin’s most vivid recollection of the evening pertains to the theatrics. It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor playing a part on the London stage.

“It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it.

The Republicans Defecting to Hillary Clinton

Clare Foran

A growing number of conservatives are willing to defy the GOP in the hope of defeating Donald Trump.

When lifelong Republican and former Ronald Reagan aide Doug Elmets publicly declared his support for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, backlash was swift. A longtime mentor called him up to ask: “‘Have you lost your goddamn mind?’” Elmets recalled. There have damaged friendships, even death threats. But there has been an outpouring of enthusiasm as well. “I’ve heard from a lot of Republicans who appreciate that I’m speaking out,” Elmets said. “Many people feel the way I do, that Donald Trump is unhinged and totally unfit to be president.”

A small, but growing, number of Republicans are turning their back on the party’s presidential nominee and rallying around Clinton as the days tick down to the general election. Earlier this week, Representative Richard Hanna of New York broke with his party to become the first sitting Republican member of Congress to announce that he will vote for Clinton over Trump. Republican fundraiser Meg Whitman came forward to say that she too will support Clinton—personally and monetarily—in order to defeat Trump.

What If High School Were More Like Kindergarten?

Ashley Lamb-Sinclair

Students in the U.S. are being taught to focus only on becoming educated.

I have a strange-looking, handmade bust of Yoda sitting atop my desk at school. I made this statue in a high-school art class because the teacher asked us to create a life-like bust of a human face. While molding my sculpture, I was exploring a little and pulled the ears into a point. I laughed to myself because it looked just like Yoda. Suddenly, the task transformed from a school assignment to a fun experiment. When I finished, I proudly presented my art to my teacher, who promptly failed me for not following instructions. As a 17-year-old kid, his response cut me to the bone. I had never failed an assignment before, and I thought I would win points for creativity. My piece stood out from the others, and I had taken a risk. This was art class after all.

A Governor Ordered to Serve as a Public Defender

Matt Ford

Amid a funding crisis, Missouri’s top public defender appointed Governor Jay Nixon to represent a poor client.

This post was updated on Thursday, August 4 at 10:56 p.m.

Missouri’s public-defender system is in crisis. Like many other systems throughout the U.S., it is underfunded, understaffed, and underappreciated. The state spends less than half of the national average in per-capita public-defense spending, placing it in 49th place out of 50, according to the National Legal Aid and Defense Association.

Ensuring that Missouri carries out the Constitution’s command that all criminal defendants receive legal representation is the job of Michael Barrett, the director of the state’s public-defender system. To deal with an extraordinary problem, Barrett hit upon an extraordinary solution: use an obscure Missouri legal provision to order Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a lawyer and former state attorney general, to provide legal aid to the state’s poorest defendants.

Why Trump Supporters Think He'll Win

David Frum

How the election looks to backers of the Republican nominee

Perhaps the hardest thing to do in contemporary American politics is to imagine how the world looks from the other side. I’ve made no secret of why, as a Republican, I oppose Donald Trump and what he stands for. But I’ve also been talking to his supporters and advisors, trying to understand how they see and hear the same things that I do, and draw such very different conclusions. What follows isn’t a transcription—it’s a synthesis of the conversations I’ve had, and the insights I’ve gleaned, presented in the voice of an imagined Trump supporter.

“You people in the Acela corridor aren’t getting it. Again. You think Donald Trump is screwing up because he keeps saying things that you find offensive or off-the-wall. But he’s not talking to you. You’re not his audience, you never were, and you never will be. He’s playing this game in a different way from anybody you’ve ever seen. And he’s winning too, in a different way from anybody you’ve ever seen.

The Supreme Court Isn't a Sufficient Reason to Vote for Trump

David Frum

Republicans won’t get a conservative Supreme Court judge without winning the White House. The party’s nominee knows this and is using it to his advantage.

Donald Trump’s support is collapsing among conservatives. In the latest CBS poll, only 64 percent of self-described conservatives support the Republican nominee. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 82 percent of self-described conservatives. Twenty-one percent say they will vote for Clinton instead, a crossing of ideological and party lines that would have once seemed unimaginable.

Trump must know these lethal numbers. If so, that fact may explain his sudden discovery of the paramount importance of the Supreme Court. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on July 28, Trump warned conservatives: "If you really like Donald Trump, that's great, but if you don't, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges. Have no choice, sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice.”

Famous Headlines, Rewritten For Facebook's New Clickbait Policy

Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer

You’ll never guess what happened when we tried to game the social platform’s algorithm. (What happened was we wrote a bunch of terrible headlines.)

For the second time this summer, Facebook has made a major change to its News Feed guidelines. The company will now reduce the rank and reach of headlines that it considers to be clickbait, because it believes that these deceptive headlines erode the “authentic communication” that happens on the platform.

“These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer,” write two researchers who work for the company. They rattle off some examples:

“When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”
“He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”
“The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.”

Donald Trump Doesn't Need an 'Intervention'

Sacha Zimmerman

The hope of an intervention is that treatment can restore a person to who they really are. But voters already see exactly who Trump really is.

Clearly things have gone off the rails when a presidential nominee needs an intervention. Apparently, “key Republicans close to Donald Trump’s orbit” think that the window for a general-election “pivot” is closing. NBC reported on Wednesday that Newt Gingrich, Reince Priebus, and Rudy Giuliani were plotting to stage an intervention for Trump. They would, I suppose, sit in a circle around the beleaguered candidate and confront him with the harsh realities of general-election politics while Trump breaks into a cold sweat and eyes the door.

Except, of course, that’s not what an intervention is for. And plunking the word “intervention” into this political drama is downright dangerous: It doesn’t take addiction seriously, and it doesn’t take Trump seriously, either.