curated citations to news sources
NY Times: How Trump Treats Black History Differently Than Other Parts of America’s Past
On the occasion of Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the end of slavery, President Trump took a moment to complain that the national holiday even exists.
“Too many non-working holidays in America,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, just hours after his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made a point of noting that White House staff had shown up to work.
The president’s decision to snub Juneteenth — a day that has been cherished by generations of Black Americans before it was named a federal holiday in 2021 — is part of a pattern of words and actions by Mr. Trump that minimize, ignore or even erase some of the experiences and history of Black people in the United States. Since taking office in January, he has tried to reframe the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history or at times denying that it happened.
Government websites have been scrubbed of hundreds of words, including “injustice” and “oppression.” Federal agencies eliminated or obscured the contributions of Black heroes, from the Tuskegee Airmen who fought in the military, to Harriet Tubman, who guided enslaved people along the Underground Railroad. School libraries were purged of writings by pre-eminent Black authors like Maya Angelou. Mr. Trump has assailed the Smithsonian Institution for what he characterized as “divisive, race-centered ideology” in its exhibits on race. He ordered the renaming of monuments to honor Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve slavery.
(NY Times more…)
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Daily Beast: CNN Data Guru Breaks Down How Trump ‘Lost’ on His Best Issue
TABLES TURNED
Americans are not happy with the president’s handling of the Los Angeles protests, Harry Enten explained.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 20, 2025
Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. …
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The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.…
But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former vice president Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden’s son Hunter had worked.
Trump didn’t want an actual investigation; he wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched. He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration’s deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the “Biden Crime Family” although there was never a Biden family business, their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization—a family business—openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent.
Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this Big Lie, and courts dismissed the many cases brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists’ support.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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ABC7: Columbia protester Mahmoud Khalil freed from immigration detention
Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by ICE agents in New York City in March.
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Atlantic: ICE Agent or Just Some Person?
(Atlantic more…)
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Public Notice: “Neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party”
(Public Notice more…)
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Mary Geddry: The Rose Garden Is Dead
As Trump paves democracy for profit, foreign wars burn, ICE cashes in, data gets rigged, and one Senate rule keeper quietly holds the line.
(Mary Geddry more…)
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emptywheel: What WSJ Said about Stephen Miller at 9PM on a Friday
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John Pavlovitz: Don’t Be Who The Bullies Want You to Be
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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