The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Dayton Divided
The president arrives in Dayton, Ohio. Plus: a congressman who survived the 2017 shooting at a baseball practice shares his complicated views on gun-control.
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What We’re Following Today
It’s Wednesday, August 7.
‣ Puerto Rico’s new governor is out after the island’s highest court said the law that former Governor Ricardo Rosselló used to appoint his successor was unconstitutional.
Protesters march against white nationalism in New York City. (Joe Penney / Reuters)
Here’s what else we’re watching.
Dayton Divided: “Vote him out!” “God bless Trump!”
“If you support Trump, you’re a racist!” someone else yelled.
“You’re an idiot!” the Trump supporter snapped back.
A fight nearly broke out before President Donald Trump arrived in Ohio today (the White House provided no details in advance about his plans in city). Our White House reporter Peter Nicholas reports from Dayton.
‘There Will Be a Next Time’: Representative Rodney Davis was on the field when a gunman opened fire during a congressional baseball practice in June 2017. After last weekend’s shootings, he said his opinion on gun-control legislation remains complicated, but told Elaina Plott that he would support so-called red-flag laws and would “be on a flight to Washington ‘in three hours’ if Speaker Nancy Pelosi called members back” to the capital.
A Different Kind of Fight: An increasing number of voices are now calling for the federal government to treat the threat from white-nationalist terrorists like the threat from Islamist extremists. But as Mike Giglio reports, the U.S. fight against the Islamic State shows how hard extremist ideologies are to root out. And what if, Giglio writes, “the center of an extremist militant ideology is not in some lawless region of the Middle East or South Asia, but in America itself?”
Snapshot
(Leah Millis / Reuters)
President Donald Trump is greeted by Dayton, Ohio, Mayor Nan Whaley and Senator Sherrod Brown as he arrives at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base before visiting the site of a mass shooting in Dayton.
Ideas from The Atlantic
My Father’s Gun (Caitlin Flanagan)
“My Japanese rifle is the grandson of the musket: a wooden long gun that needs to be loaded by hand. The guns used in the Dayton and El Paso murders are to 18th-century weapons as a jet is to a buggy. There is no conceivable way that the Founders could have imagined weapons of mass death like these guns in the hands of millions of Americans.” → Read on.
I Found the Outer Limits of My Pro-choice Beliefs (Chavi Eve Karkowsky)
“Usually the discussion of abortion is longer and more wandering. At first, the patient may feel unsure of where she stands. As we talk, she may return to the subject and ask more questions. Conducting this conversation requires as much surgical skill as operating on a pregnant uterus. There is no right answer, only one that is less wrong for each patient. This is an almost impossible conversation—and one that doctors like me must have every day.” → Read on.
The Strategy of Violent White Supremacy Is Evolving (J. M. Berger)
“Deplatforming helped reduce the overall reach of white-supremacist propaganda, but users who migrated to less prominent platforms [including 4chan, 8chan, and Gab] quickly created a pressure-cooker environment where radicalization to violence could take place very quickly, with adherents goading one another into ever more extreme views and actions.” → Read on.
An Interview With The New York Times’ Executive Editor on a Controversial Headline Choice (Lizzie O’Leary)
“By the second edition, the Times headline had been changed to ‘Assailing Hate but Not Guns.’ [Dean Baquet] has called the original “a bad headline.” → Read on.
What Else We’re Reading
Where Americans lack running water, mapped (Richard Florida and Claire Tran, CityLab)
The Trump appointee who’s putting white supremacists in jail (Harry Jaffe, The Washington Post Magazine) (🔒Paywall)
Visa denials to poor Mexicans skyrocket under Trump’s State Department (Ted Hesson, Politico)
About us: This newsletter is a daily effort from The Atlantic’s politics writer Elaine Godfrey, with help from Christian Paz. It’s edited by Shan Wang.
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