Archive for 2017
A Code
President Trump wanted Mexico’s President to stop saying Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall so he called him but when Pena Nieto came on the line he told Trump the last thing Trump wanted to hear: He said he could never agree for Mexico to pay for the wall. Trump purred, told Pena Nieto he’d…
Read MoreCommon Ground
Yesterday I described how Gary and I met in 1984 (to negotiate the Helms-Hunt debates) and how I didn’t lay eyes on Gary again for eight years – until the morning he walked into the boardroom of a law firm downtown to negotiate a debate between Lauch Faircloth and Terry Sanford, saw me sitting there,…
Read MoreAlt-reality
A TAPster had good advice for Trump in light of yesterday’s news conference: “It should be a basic rule of politics to not say nice things about Nazis.”
Read MoreTake ‘em down
Now that even the morally obtuse Trump has been forced to say white racist terrorism is wrong, we move on to a knottier issue: Should Confederate statues and memorials stay, or should they go? Here’s a case in point. If you drive down Hillsborough Street toward the State Capitol in Raleigh, you come to a…
Read MoreBridging the Divide
The other night Gary and I spoke at Quail Ridge Books about Hillbilly Elegy and as the two of us argued about what diseases shuttered Ohio steel mills, addicted mothers to opioids, split our country into armed camps and left white working-class voters supporting Trump a lady in the back of the room stood up…
Read MoreTrump’s cowardice, GOP’s challenge
It’s not at all surprising that Trump couldn’t bring himself to condemn Nazis, Ku Kluxers and racists bent on terrorism. As with Putin, he’s reluctant to criticize those who got him elected. He was harsher on Jeff Sessions and Mitch McConnell. Trump failed the moral test of leadership. Will the rest of the Republican Party?…
Read MoreFire, Fury and Feuding
Two days ago, I blogged about Trump’s lifeblood: picking fights and starting feuds. It’s like Burr and Hamilton with tweets instead of pistols. Then he started two more feuds. The first is with Kim Jung Un, the only world leader as egotistical and unpredictable as Trump. The second is with Mitch McConnell. The McConnell feud…
Read MoreEmpathy, not policy
Democrats love policy. We dream of being policy advisers and writing policy papers. We just know that those working-class whites who voted for Trump would love us if they got a load of our worker-retraining policy. That’s the impulse behind the “Better Deal” policy agenda that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi rolled out this summer.…
Read MoreWhat Trump does well
We know what he does badly. He lies. He is willfully and woefully ignorant about the world. He lies. He is vain, volatile and thin-skinned. He lies. His leadership style is chaotic, unpredictable and incompetent. He lies. His chumminess with Putin is suspicious. He lies. He has no principles, character or sense of decency. And…
Read MoreTrump, Hillbillies, Politics, Trump…
Carter and I had a good time, a great crowd and a rousing discussion last night at Quail Ridge Books’ “Bridging the Divide” program. If I was Trump, I’d say there were about a thousand people there. And that the bookstore manager called and said it was the biggest crowd they’d ever had. More than…
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