Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Bid to End DACA

This week has not been a good week for Donald Trump and his racist/Christofascist base. On a number of fronts - especially LGBT rights and today the so-called Dreamers - the Supreme Court has handed Trump and his Department of Justice that reminds one of 1930's Germany major loses.  Frankly, defeat could not happen to more deserving people.  In both rulings, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the so-called liberal Justices to hand Trump defeat - suggesting to me that Roberts cares more about his place in history and the legitimacy of the Court in the eyes of a majority of Americans than her cares about pleasing the ugliest elements of today's Republican Party - including the horrific occupant of the White House. The sad truth is that Trump's actions were motivated by his hatred of non-whites and his desire to pander to the white supremacist/Christofascist base of his support.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at today's ruling.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the program protecting undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, a reprieve for nearly 650,000 recipients known as “dreamers.”

The 5-to-4 decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., stunned President Trump, who said in a tweet that it and a ruling earlier this week that federal law protects LGBTQ workers were “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.”

Roberts was in the majority in both cases, and Thursday’s ruling showed once again the pivotal role he now plays at the center of the court.

His low-key ruling was technical — the administration had not provided proper legal justification, he said, for ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program implemented by President Barack Obama eight years ago. It allows qualified enrollees to work, study and remain in the United States on a renewable permit.

Trump has often suggested the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would protect him against adverse rulings from lower-court judges. But Roberts has at times joined the court’s liberal members — as happened Thursday — to make clear for [Trump] the president that his administration does not make the rules.

Whether this pattern continues over the coming weeks will frame what already has proved to be one of the court’s most controversial terms in years.

Still to come: decisions on Trump’s long-running legal battle to shield his private financial records from Congress and a New York prosecutor; several cases involving the separation of church and state; and the court’s first reexamination of abortion rights since Trump’s nominees, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, ascended to the bench.

Politicians on the other side of the issue were elated, even if they were as stunned as Trump seemed to be.

“I cannot — the Supreme Court, who would’ve thought, would have so many good decisions in one week, who would’ve thought . . . wow,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), seemingly overcome with emotion.

Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, advised the new administration to end it, saying it was illegal.

But lower courts found that directive questionable. At any rate, they said, the Department of Homeland Security did not properly weigh how ending the program would affect those who had come to rely on its protections against deportation, and the ability to work legally. Roberts agreed.

He added: “We address only whether the [Department of Homeland Security] complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.”

“Since 2012, DACA recipients have enrolled in degree programs, embarked on careers, started businesses, purchased homes, and even married and had children, all in reliance” on the DACA program, Roberts wrote, quoting from briefs in the case.

“The consequences of the rescission, [advocates] emphasize, would ‘radiate outward’ to DACA recipients’ families, including their 200,000 U.S.-citizen children, to the schools where DACA recipients study and teach, and to the employers who have invested time and money in training them. . . . In addition, excluding DACA recipients from the lawful labor force may, they tell us, result in the loss of $215 billion in economic activity and an associated $60 billion in federal tax revenue over the next ten years.”

Immigration advocates were euphoric over the court’s actions.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), who led a coalition of 20 states and the District of Columbia in bringing the challenge, said in a statement that ending DACA “would have been cruel to the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who call America home, and it would have been bad for our nation’s health.”

Nearly 800,000 people over the years have taken part in the program. More than 90 percent are employed and 45 percent are in school, according to one government study. Advocates recently told the Supreme Court that nearly 30,000 work in health care and that their work is necessary to fighting the coronavirus.

While the program does not provide a direct path to citizenship, it provides a temporary status that shields them from deportation and allows them to work. The status lasts for two years and can be renewed.

Technically, the Trump administration could restart the process and provide the justification the court’s majority said was required. But the process is long, and there is no evidence Congress would want to pass legislation that would end the program.

In fact, it is quite popular with the public. A Pew Research survey conducted this month found that 74 percent of Americans favored granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came illegally to the United States when they were children, while 24 percent opposed.

Trump is so sick that he may try to restart the process.  Hopefully, Americans will throw him out of office in November and end his reign of hate, bigotry and misogyny.

Don't Be Fooled, It’s Republicans Who Ruined the Country

The other day a local young, privileged, white gay man with no children to support wrote an op-ed in the Virginian Pilot that stated he was proud to be a Republican and then went on to bloviate about the usual supposed merits of the Republican agenda: smaller government, fiscal responsibility, etc., etc.  Things that might once have been true of the GOP more than two decades ago when I was an active Republican. Those days, however, are long gone and Republicans cut from that cloth are as extinct as the dinosaurs in today's party of Trump. The reality is that today's GOP has overseen the rise of wealth disparity not seen since the Gilded Age and the slow death of the middle class. Further, today's GOP's core base consists of religious extremists and white supremacists.  Yet, I am sure that this young Republican views himself as a centrist even though personally I do not understand how one can still claim to be a Republican and not in fact be a racist. A column in the New York Times looks at the problem of so-called political centrists who continue the error of much of the media that gives false equivalency to Republicans and Democrats.  As the column points out, the real extremism is with the GOP despite pretense to the contrary. Until average Americans  (and the media) wake up to this reality, expect damage to the nation by the GOP to continue.  Here are column excerpts:

Why is American politics so dysfunctional? Whatever the deeper roots of our distress, the proximate cause is ideological extremism: Powerful factions are committed to false views of the world, regardless of the evidence.

Notice that I said factions, plural. There’s no question that the most disruptive, dangerous extremists are on the right. But there’s another faction whose obsessions and refusal to face reality have also done a great deal of harm.

But I’m not talking about the left. Radical leftists are virtually nonexistent in American politics; can you think of any prominent figure who wants us to move to the left of, say, Denmark? No, I’m talking about fanatical centrists.

Over the past few days we’ve been treated to the ludicrous yet potentially destructive spectacle of Howard Schultz, the Starbucks billionaire, insisting that he’s the president we need despite his demonstrable policy ignorance. Schultz obviously thinks he knows a lot of things that just aren’t so. Yet his delusions of knowledge aren’t that special. For the most part, they follow conventional centrist doctrine.

Schultz, however, still declares debt our biggest problem. Yet true to centrist form, his deficit concerns are oddly selective. Bowles and Simpson, charged with proposing a solution to deficits, listed as their first principle … reducing tax rates. Sure enough, Schultz is all into cutting Social Security, but opposes any tax hike on the wealthy.  Funny how that works.

In general, centrists are furiously opposed to any proposal that would ease the lives of ordinary Americans. Universal health coverage, says Schultz, would be “free health care for all, which the country cannot afford.”

[S]ingle-payer health care (actually called Medicare!) hasn’t bankrupted Canada. In fact, every advanced country besides America has some form of universal health coverage, and manages to afford it.

The real issue with “Medicare for all” isn’t costs — the taxes needed to pay for it would almost surely be less than what Americans now pay in insurance premiums. The problem instead would be political: It would be tricky persuading people to trade private insurance for a public program. That’s a real concern for Medicare-for-all advocates, but it’s not at all what either Schultz or Bloomberg is saying.

Finally, the hallmark of fanatical centrism is the determination to see America’s left and right as equally extreme, no matter what they actually propose.

[N]ow, with Democrats taking a turn that is more progressive but hardly radical, centrist rhetoric has become downright hysterical. Medicare and Medicaid already cover more than a third of U.S. residents and pay more bills than private insurance.

But Medicare for all, says Schultz, is “not American.” Elizabeth Warren has proposed taxes on the wealthy that are squarely in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt; Bloomberg says that they would turn us into Venezuela.

Where does the fanaticism of the centrists come from? Much of the explanation, I think, is sheer vanity.  Both pundits and plutocrats like to imagine themselves as superior beings, standing above the political fray. They want to think of themselves as standing tall against extremism right and left. Yet the reality of American politics is asymmetric polarization: extremism on the right is a powerful political force, while extremism on the left isn’t. What’s a would-be courageous centrist to do?

The answer, all too often, is to retreat into a fantasy world, almost as hermetic as the right-wing, Fox News bubble. In this fantasy world, social democrats like Harris or Warren are portrayed as the second coming of Hugo Chávez, so that taking what is actually a conservative position can be represented as a brave defense of moderation.

But that’s not what is really happening, and the rest of us have no obligation to indulge centrist delusions.

It is nothing short of delusion to pretend the extreme GOP of today is the same as the party of my youth and young adulthood.  That party is dead and gone and its successor has inflicted real harm on millions of Americans.  It's time to accept that reality.  

Trump's Greatest Blunder

Outwardly Donald Trump has made one blunder after another since January, 2017, but most were not blunders if he is indeed a Russian asset.  Rather, they have all been pieces in the agenda of weakening the USA and the West - e.g., disrupting NATO, trade wars that harm the US economy, and pushing Russian talking points - much to Vladimir Putin's delight.  Some have had the added benefit of thrilling the white supremacists and Christian extremists who now comprise the shrunken base of the  Republican Party.  His game of chicken over his border wall - perhaps he saw it as a monument to himself - and the government shutdown, however, was just plain stupid given the opposition it faced from a strong majority of Americans, 71% of whom viewed the wall as not worth the economic havoc of the shutdown. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Trump's caving happened the same day that air traffic controllers began to cancel flights on the East coast.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the stupidity of Trump's blunder and self-inflicted harm - harm that also extends to the worthless GOP.  Here are excerpts:

There is no way around it: President Trump lost.  He lost his gamble on shutting down the government. And though he will pretend otherwise, he has also lost his grandiose plan to build a border wall that most of the country does not want.

Trump walked away with nothing more than an assurance from congressional Democrats that they will sit down with Republicans for three weeks and try to come up with a border security plan that both parties can agree upon. There’s a reasonable chance they will come up with a solid proposal. But there’s just as much likelihood that Trump’s dream for a wall will die a quiet death there.

Nonetheless, this is the consequence of Trump’s obsession with satisfying the red-hatted, nativist throngs who chanted “build the wall” at so many of his rallies.

Not only do 6 in 10 Americans now disapprove of the job that [Trump] the president is doing, but his party has also lost the 10-point edge it once held over the Democrats on the question of which party to trust on border security, according to a fresh Post-ABC News poll.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has shown that she better than Trump understands the art of the deal in Washington. She is the one who succeeded in building a wall — and Trump ran right into it.

Now, as Trump surveys the shambles that his greatest blunder has made of his presidency, the question is whether he and the Republicans learned anything from the five-week calamity that they caused. Will his party be as willing to follow him the next time he leads them toward the edge of a cliff?

If there is even a thin silver lining to the travesty of the longest-ever government shutdown, it is this: The Republicans’ slander of public servants has been exposed for what it is. . . . By its final day, there was turmoil at airports, slowdowns at the Internal Revenue Service and countless individual stories of federal workers who were forced to find sustenance at food pantries and face agonizing choices between whether to pay for heat or medicine this month.

Republicans have long portrayed them [government employees] as the enemies of reform and efficiency. But Trump targeted them as no one did before. From his earliest months in office, he and his allies have portrayed those who dedicate their lives to serving their country as the corrupt, subversive “deep state” — the bottom-feeders of a swamp in need of draining.

Where a little empathy might have been in order as the shutdown continued, Trump’s team revealed a callousness that would have made Marie Antoinette blush.

So it was noticeable that when Trump made his Rose Garden announcement Friday that the government was opening again, he began it by thanking federal workers who had displayed “extraordinary devotion in the face of this recent hardship. You are fantastic people. You are incredible patriots.” . . . . Which is why they deserve much better than a chief executive who would wager so recklessly with their lives and their livelihoods.

Law Enforcement Has Ignored the Treat of Right Wing Extremists

Over the last two weeks America has seen high visibility attempted bombings and attacks by white wing extremists, the most recent being against a yoga studio which claimed two lives and left more wounded.  While these actions have garnered national media attention, many more such attacks fail to get national attention or get white washed - no pun intended - because the perpetrators are white.    Indeed, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies do not even have accurate numbers on such attacks since they fail to be labeled as hate crimes, that title being focused nearly exclusively on attacks by those of Middle Eastern descent or non-whites.  Why?  Chalk it up to politics where officials - especially Republicans intent on coddling their increasingly extreme base - are reluctant to face the reality that domestic terror by whites is a growing problem.  Indeed, it has exploded under the Trump/Pence regime which has legitimized white rage and perceived loss of white privilege.  Obviously, for the safety of everyday Americans, this failure to face reality needs to cease.  A very lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine looks at the problem.  Here are highlights (read the entire piece - it won't leave you feeling safe):

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a “very challenged young man.”

[A]nother white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow’s apartment doubled as a “homemade explosives laboratory.” There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow’s home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow’s clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn’t mean he was a white supremacist.

[A] report released on Oct. 31 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School . . . . calls out the Justice Department for its “blind spot” when it comes to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein conceded earlier in the week. During a conference on Oct. 29, Rosenstein said that according to the latest F.B.I. crime report, “88 percent of agencies that provide hate-crimes data to the F.B.I. reported zero hate crimes in 2016.” The Justice Department was reviewing the accuracy of the reports, he noted. “Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening.”

In 2016, the latest full year of data available from the F.B.I., more than 6,100 hate-crime incidents were reported, 4,270 of them crimes against people (as opposed to, say, defacing property). And yet only 27 federal hate-crime defendants were prosecuted that year. “The F.B.I. knows how many bank robberies there were last year,” says Michael German, an author of the Brennan Center report and a former F.B.I. agent, “but it doesn’t know how many white supremacists attacked people, how many they injured or killed.”

More concerning to German, though, is that law enforcement seems uninterested in policing the violent far right. During the first year after Donald Trump’s election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar.

During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

Chapman was one of a number of known white supremacists to align with the Proud Boys, a nationalist men’s movement founded in 2016 by the anti-immigrant “Western chauvinist” Gavin McInnes, a founder of Vice Media. There was also the Rise Above Movement (RAM), an alt-right group composed largely of ex-cons, many with ties to Southern California’s racist skinhead movement. Over the past two years, each group engaged in violent confrontations with their ideological enemies — a lengthy list including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, nonwhite immigrants, members of the L.G.B.T. community and the progressive left — and generally escaped punishment.

[A]fter a pressure campaign on social media, the New York Police Department arrested and charged six members of the Proud Boys in connection with an assault after a speech by McInnes at a Republican club in Manhattan on Oct. 12. On his podcast, McInnes noted that he has “a lot of support” in the N.Y.P.D. (The police commissioner denies this.)

“This is what public demonstration looks like in an era when white nationalism isn’t on the fringes, but on the inside of the political mainstream,” says Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who now leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino. During the run-up to some of last year’s major events in places like Charlottesville or Berkeley, he notes, “there was an unending stream of violent themed chatter and an almost choreographed exchange of web threats between antagonists across wide geographic expanses” that earned barely a nod from law enforcement.

The F.B.I. said in a statement: “The F.B.I. does not and cannot police ideologies under the First Amendment.” But looking at prosecutions, German says, “it’s clear that many of the people targeted for investigation for allegedly supporting the Islamic State were initially identified because of something they said online.”

There are serious civil liberties concerns with any broad surveillance of social media, German says. What’s also true, he notes, is that the volume of white-supremacist-related content is overwhelmingly high. “There are relatively few Americans voicing their support for ISIS online. But there are millions of racists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, homophobes and xenophobes who engage in eliminationist rhetoric about the communities of people they fear and hate every day on social media and radio talk shows. Even if the F.B.I. wanted to monitor this hate speech, they wouldn’t have the resources, or any way to distinguish between those who talk and those who act.” 

Levin believes that the Justice Department could be more flexible in pursuing these groups without violating First Amendment concerns. Just as they do with ISIS supporters, law-enforcement agencies would be within their legal rights to monitor, analyze and share any of the publicly available intelligence on white supremacists or hate groups that suggests violent confrontations. “The problem is not that we rightly scrutinize violent Salafist extremism,” Levin says, “but that we do so while materially ignoring domestic white nationalists or those on their fringes who also represent a violent threat.”

In March 2009, Johnson says he and a few colleagues from the F.B.I. briefed Napolitano on their findings, theorizing that heightened stress because of the continuing financial crisis, coupled with the election of the first black president, created a “unique driver” for individual radicalization and antigovernment and white-supremacist recruitment. . . . A few days later, the Department of Homeland Security released its report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” which was distributed across the government and local law-enforcement agencies.

By the next day, news of a “chilling” report from the department was making its way through far-right message boards and the blogosphere, where it was picked apart by conspiracy sites like Infowars, which deemed it evidence of a deep-state plot. More mainstream right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin considered it, in Malkin’s words, an “Obama D.H.S. hit job” on conservatives.

Congressional Republicans, answering to a nascent Tea Party movement and the American Legion, soon took issue with the label “right-wing extremism,” which John Boehner, then minority leader of the House, charged was being used by the Department of Homeland Security “to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.” . . . . Several G.O.P. lawmakers called for Napolitano’s resignation, as well as that of Johnson, who, in their view, equated conservatives with terrorists.

[T]he political firestorm over “right-wing extremism” had caused such an uproar that the Department of Homeland Security ultimately avoided using ideological terminology like “right-wing.” A few weeks after the report was released, Napolitano formally apologized to veterans, and after intense pressure from veterans’ groups, the department withdrew the report.

At the same time, most of the work exclusively focused on domestic extremism stopped at the Department of Homeland Security. “I blame an entire political apparatus led by Republicans that made calling something ‘right-wing extremism’ a political statement,” says Kayyem, who notes the paradox of G.O.P. leaders’ attacking Democrats for refusing to use the phrase “radical Islamic extremism.” “They’d say if you can’t say it, you can’t fight it,” she says. “But it cuts both ways. If you’re not allowed to say that white supremacy is a form of radicalization, then how are you going to stop it?”

In the months following Donald Trump’s inauguration, security analysts noted with increasing alarm what seemed to be a systematic erosion of the Department of Homeland Security’s analytic and operational capabilities with regard to countering violent extremism. It began with the appointment of a new national-security team. Like their counterparts now running immigration policy, the team came from the fringe of conservative politics, some of them with connections to Islamophobic think tanks and organizations like ACT for America or the Center for Security Policy, whose founder, Frank Gaffney, was Washington’s most prominent peddler of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.

A surreal scene, replicated in nearly every department and agency, soon began to play out inside the Department of Homeland Security. George Selim, a longtime national-security expert in both the Bush and Obama administrations who headed the Office of Community Partnerships, which worked with local government and civic groups on C.V.E. efforts, noted that as the months passed, “it was clear that there were fewer and fewer of the career civil servants at the table for critical policy decisions.” Some political appointees seemed to have virtually no experience with the issues they had been tapped to advise on.

“But who’s responsible for keeping track of these alt-right guys in Houston? Nobody. For me the question is, well, how come? If you want to look at these guys as terrorists — which I think it is when they’re firing guns out of cars at protesters,” he noted, “then the question remains: Who or what will prevent him from committing more crimes? And, from my chair, nobody,” Phanco said. “Nobody’s watching it, nobody’s tracking it. And that’s what’s got me scared.”

Trump Injects Lies and Sleaze into Virginia Governor's Race

Sadly, it seems that if Der Trumpenführer's lips are moving (or if he is tweeting), there is an extremely high probability that he is lying.   This certainly holds true with his effort to slander Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam who Trump and a seemingly desperate GOP candidate Ed Gillespie are falsely claiming voted to protect violent gangs.  The effort seems aimed at (i) firing up the racist GOP base, and (ii) confusing undecided independent voters.  When your policies are rightly viewed as toxic and you are losing in the polls, this has become the new standard practice of today's despicable Republican Party.  Stated another way, when all else fails, lie about your opponent - and this from the party that claims to support "Christian values."  LGBT and minority voters (as well as younger voters) need to turn out on election day and send Gillespie down to defeat.  If these voting blocks fail to do this, they will have no one to blame but themselves as they see themselves disenfranchised by GOP efforts and/or subjected to license to discriminate laws.  This election is just as important as last year's presidential election. The Washington Post looks at this shameless lying campaign on the part of Gillespie and Trump.  Here are highlights:

The Virginia gubernatorial race is shaping up as an early test of two pressing political questions: Will Trump’s unique awfulness energize Democrats enough to break their midterm voter dropoff curse? And what sort of continuing political effect or potency will “Trumpism” have, now that Donald Trump is actually in the White House?

Virginia is a particularly intriguing staging ground for this test. That’s because the state’s demographic evolution — it is becoming more diverse, educated and suburban — is both pushing it slowly into the Democratic column and (you’d think) rendering it less and less fertile soil for Trumpist arguments.

Trump himself has now pumped a gusher of Trumpist sleaze into the Virginia contest.  This attack is absurd. Ed Gillespie, the GOP candidate, has been running ads that make the similar claim that Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate, “voted in favor of sanctuary cities that let dangerous illegal immigrants back on the street, increasing the threat of MS-13.” As lieutenant governor, Northam did cast a tiebreaking vote against a bill that would have prevented any locality from restricting the “enforcement of federal immigration laws.” But as FactCheck.org noted in debunking the attack, the vote was procedurally meaningless — the result of a tactical trick by Virginia Republicans that never would have had any impact other than creating fodder for an attack ad. Regardless, Virginia doesn’t have any sanctuary cities in this sense, a fact Gillespie himself has admitted. What’s more, this line questionably conflates undocumented immigrants with violent criminals, something that Trump himself underscored more emphatically by claiming that Northam is “fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs.” So Trump’s version is even sleazier and more dishonest than Gillespie’s rendition is. It appears that Gillespie probably wanted Trump to tweet this to juice up the GOP base. As James Hohmann explained in a good piece, Gillespie is increasingly leaning on culturally charged “Trumpist” issues, because he appears to have a “base problem.” Experts on Virginia politics have argued that all this is directed at the Trump wing of the GOP base in Virginia. 

But, by tweeting on the race, Trump also creates risks for Gillespie. Trump’s approval rating in Virginia among those likely to vote in November is at an abysmal 33-59, and 60 percent say their opinion of him has gotten more negative.

[S]ome Democrats are worried that Gillespie could pull off a surprise win, because Democratic voters are not motivated enough by the race (some have argued that Northam is to blame for this problem). If so, the moral might end up being that Trumpism continues to energize the GOP base bigly, yet Trump’s presidency is in and of itself not motivating Democratic voters enough to overcome their insufficient attention to state-level contests and their tendency to turn out at lower levels in off-year and midterm elections.

Get out and vote on November 7, 2017, and vote for Ralph Northam, Mark Herring and Justin Fairfax!