This morning, I saw this tweet from Judd Legum and I thought it had a good chance of being the tweet of the day:
Trump gathered a diverse group to celebrate lighting the planet on fire pic.twitter.com/2dujNfG9kw
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 28, 2017
Shortly after seeing that tweet, someone retweeted a tweet from President Trump’s official @POTUS account from even earlier than Judd Legum’s tweet:
With the fraternal order of police in the Oval Office – after a great listening session in the Roosevelt Room at the @WhiteHouse. pic.twitter.com/lIBJ5gOVOz
— President Trump (@POTUS) March 28, 2017
Then, later in the day, Jenn Binnis shared a link to a New York Times piece from yesterday that I’d missed. In that piece, Jill Filipovic argues that the all-male photos aren’t a gaffe by a newbie administration, but actually a strategy. It’s worth noting that Filipovic wrote this yesterday, before the two photos above were taken. I tend to think the Trump administration is a bunch of bumbling fools, but I think Filipovic’s argument is well-reasoned. Furthermore, another article I read today, by Nate Cohn in The Upshot of the NYT, points out that poor Democratic turnout wasn’t a determinative factor in the outcome of the presidential election in November. Claims of weak black voter turnout are exaggerated. “Instead,” Cohn offers, “it’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump.”
I’ve long thought that the developments in Ferguson, MO and related stories like the Colin Kaepernick situation in the NFL ultimately played a HUGE part in the election. No one thing is ever determinative, but it’s more clear than ever to me that this election was largely about a country full of white males who had lasted 8 years through the presidency of a black man and who saw a country getting away from them. So, as I’ve said over and over during the last few months, GTFOH with your stories of “economic anxiety.”