jwiener

The white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville use the Confederacy as a symbol of white supremacy, says award-winning historian Eric Foner. Is Donald Trump a neo-Confederate? To call him that suggests he has coherent ideas—which clearly he does not. He does know that these kinds of people are part of his political base—as he made clear on Tuesday in his defense of the white-nationalist demonstrators in Charlottesville.
Also: if you understand golf, you understand Trump. Golf is a game for “successful greedheads and their wannabes,” says legendary sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. It’s a waste of space and water, and it poisons local aquifers with chemicals. And it represents all that is retrograde and exclusionary in American life. Lipsyte asks, Doesn’t that remind you of our president?
Plus: The FBI raid on Paul Manafort’s house shows that Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia has entered a more aggressive phase. Manafort could become a “cooperating witness,” providing testimony against Trump and his family in exchange for immunity. Bob Dreyfuss reports.
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Frank Rich has been “wallowing in Watergate,” as he put it, and found some fascinating stuff about Trump’s situation today and Nixon’s a year before his fall.  Also: the ways Nixon was significantly stronger than Trump in resisting impeachment and resignation.
Also: Joshua Holland has some significant new evidence about Trump voters and why they voted the way they did. He discusses what the evidence tells us about whether those who switched from Obama to Trump can be brought back.
Plus David Cole, legal director of the ACLU and legal correspondent for The Nation, talks about the resistance. He’s found some lessons by looking outside the United States, drawing from other countries facing autocratic leaders to inform our work in the Age of Trump. The book he edited and introduced, Rules for Resistance, is out now.
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We’re six months into the Trump era—and how are you feeling about the world today? Katha Pollitt conducted an unscientific survey. She found anxiety and depression, but also wisdom about working together over the long haul: We will defeat Trump (if he doesn’t defeat himself first).

Also: One good result of the Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace Obamacare is the growing support for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system—not just among the public, where it’s always been popular, but also among Democratic Party leaders. John Nichols comments.

Plus: It seems like the military is becoming everything in the Trump administration. The president just made a general his chief of staff, and has another heading the Defense Department—and yet another as his national-security adviser. That led us to a conversation with Rosa Brooks about “how the military became everything.” Her book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, is out now in paperback.
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David Cole, legal director of the ACLU and The Nation’s legal-affairs correspondent, argues that Trump would only be talking about pardoning himself if he was desperate—because he knows what the special counsel is likely to find—and is thus willing to pay a tremendous political price to avoid impeachment.
Plus: The Senate GOP healthcare bill is confusing—that’s the way they want it, says George Zornick: It’s their only chance of repealing Obamacare. (recorded Tuesday afternoon, before their bill failed).
And Joshua Holland explains why Danes are so much happier than Americans: It’s not just because Donald Trump is not their president.  Josh wrote and narrated the animated video at TheNation.com.
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