In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House.
Our cold civil w.ar grows hotter by the day. Between now and the election next week, there seems to be no apparent letup of violence in sight. We witnessed the Squirrel Hill massacre, one day after the arrest of accused mail bomber Cesar Sayec, and after two African Americans were shot and killed in Kentucky. The latest tragedy is a deadly school shooting in North Carolina, where the gunman and the deceased were students.
At the same time, Donald Trump appears intent on continuing to shred the social fabric that ties our nation together. Welcome again to the new era where the president as unifier in chief is looking passe. Faced with the dual prospect of Republicans losing the House and expanding their control of the Senate, the president would not skip a beat, falsely claiming that the stock market barely took time off after 9/11, so why should he?Jonathan Swan and Stef W. Knight at Axios:
On Saturday night, hours after nearly a dozen Americans were slaughtered at worship in Pittsburgh, the president instead opted to appear at a campaign rally. After a perfunctory acknowledgement of what went wrong earlier in the day, it was business as usual. As to be expected, those who stood in the way of his message got verbally strafed. Surely the ghost of Avery Brundage, the former International Olympic Committee president who declared that the games “must go on” in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich massacre, must have been smiling. As for Pepe the frog, his spirit marches on. Wash, rinse, dry, and repeat
President Trump plans to sign an executive order that would remove the right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil, he said yesterday in an exclusive interview for "Axios on HBO," a new four-part documentary news series debuting on HBO this Sunday at 6:30 p.m. ET/PT.
Why it matters: This would be the most dramatic move yet in Trump's hardline immigration campaign, this time targeting "anchor babies" and "chain migration." And it will set off another stand-off with the courts, as Trump’s power to do this through executive action is debatable to say the least.
