President seeks 15 percent corporate tax rate, even if it swells the national debt. Sticking to one of his campaign pledges but shattering another, President Trump instructed advisers to drastically cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent. By doing so — but not committing to measures that would offset the revenue loss — Trump is making clear he is putting a priority on cutting taxes over the national debt. By Damian Paletta and Robert Costa  •  Read more » Trump plan would raise tax deductions, lower corporate and small business rates The proposed increases to standard deductions and the business proposals are among several major changes to the tax code that the White House will begin to roll out Wednesday. Officials say the changes will give Americans and companies more money to spend, expand the economy and create more jobs. But the proposals also could lead to a large loss of government revenue and, without offsets, bloat the federal deficit. By Damian Paletta and Steven Mufson  •  Read more » Trump goes big on tax overhaul plan that would affect most Americans The president's one-page outline for changes to the tax code would reduce the current seven income tax brackets to three, cut the corporate tax rate by more than 50 percent and abolish the alternative-minimum tax and estate tax. Trump administration officials didn’t address how much the plan would reduce federal revenue or grow the debt. By Damian Paletta  •  Read more » In new tax plan, Trump promises to do what Reagan couldn’t The president’s advisers touted the proposed tax cuts as the start of an economic renaissance that would supercharge the U.S. economy and pare the federal debt, but economists were very skeptical that the plan could deliver the level of growth Trump promised. By Max Ehrenfreund  •  Read more »   - The president’s team offered few key details on how he would accomplish the effort. Damian Paletta reports: “The one-page outline pinpointed numerous changes he wants to make – among them, replacing the seven income tax brackets with three new ones, cutting the corporate tax rate by more than 50 percent, abolishing the alternative-minimum tax and estate tax, and creating new incentives to simplify filing returns. But the White House stopped short of answering key questions that could decide the plan’s fate. For example, Trump administration officials didn’t address how much the plan would reduce federal revenue or grow the debt. They also didn’t specify what income levels would trigger inclusion in each of the three new tax brackets. The goal, White House officials said, was to cut taxes so much and so fast that it led to immediate economic growth, creating more jobs and producing trillions of dollars in new revenue and wealth over the next decade… “Despite its brevity … the document marked the most pointed blueprint Trump has presented Congress on any matter. [Now], the plan must navigate a legislative and political gauntlet on Capitol Hill that has killed numerous other efforts to rework the tax code.” And business groups were already squaring off: The National Association of Realtors called the proposal a ‘non-starter,’ alleging that it would remove tax incentives for people to buy homes because of changes it would make to certain tax deductions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, by contrast, issued a statement saying the plan would ‘help drive job creation, investment, and economic growth.’” -- Trump is promising to do what Reagan and both Bushes couldn’t. Max Ehrenfreund analyzes the proposal: “His advisers say that the plan will pay for itself. But in the experience of two other Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, tax cuts produced an uneven record on prompting economic growth. And in both instances, reductions in taxes failed to pay for themselves and, instead, left the nation to deal with increasing federal debt. After his 1981 tax cut, Reagan was forced to raise taxes several times. And Bush’s tax cuts put the nation on vulnerable fiscal footing, depriving the government of revenue as the United States waged two wars and faced a financial crisis. Ultimately, Congress and [Obama], after several standoffs over federal finances, hiked taxes by billions of dollars and imposed strict limits on government spending. [Now], economists fear it will happen again. ‘This is definitely not in pays-for-itself territory,’ Alan Cole, an economist at the conservative Tax Foundation, said of Trump’s plan.” -- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin admitted that Trump “has no intention” of actually releasing his tax returns,despite repeatedly promising the American people he would do so. “The president has released plenty of information, and I think has given more financial disclosure than anybody else,” he told reporters in a news conference Wednesday (this is totally untrue). “I think the American population has plenty of information.” (Philip Rucker) -- Without Trump’s returns, we cannot know exactly how much he’d benefit from his proposal. But there is no doubt that the plan would slash taxes on hundreds of Trump-owned real estate, licensing and other companies, many of which qualify as pass-through businesses. Drew Harwell and Jonathan O'Connell report: “A copy of Trump’s tax return from 2005 suggests that a tax cut similar to the one Trump is proposing could have lowered his tax obligation by potentially tens of millions of dollars in a single year. The White House said it would create rules to prevent wealthy individuals and corporations from taking advantage of the low pass-through rate. But because they did not provide details, it’s difficult to know how those rules would apply to the Trump companies. ‘Trump is the king of pass-throughs,’ said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. ‘He has pass-through businesses everywhere. This is a very large issue.’” -- House Democrats plan to force a floor fight with Republicans today over legislation that would require Trump to disclose information about his personal taxes, business holdings, ethics waivers, and visitors to the White House and his vacation properties. Ed O’Keefe reports: “Responding to the deep opposition to Trump, Democrats for the first time will use the legislative process to try tying congressional Republicans to Trump’s decisions to withhold information about his personal wealth, business dealings with the federal government and visitors to the White House and Mar-a-Lago … During debate and votes on unrelated legislation, aides said Democratic lawmakers plan to use procedural gimmicks to try forcing a vote on a bill by Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.), who represents suburban Boston. Given their control of the chamber, Republicans are likely to step in and either block consideration of the legislation or hold a vote that outright rejects it. Then, Democrats could begin attacking vulnerable GOP incumbents as supportive of Trump … The bill also would force Mnuchin to provide the House Ways and Means Committee with copies of Trump’s tax returns from 2007 through 2016 that would be reviewed in a closed executive session.” -- Most top House Republicans privately say Trump’s tax framework is fundamentally unserious. Many also see it as disruptive to their own process, which they’ve been thinking about and working on for years. "It's not tax reform. Not even close,” a senior GOP aide told CNN last night. “It's really easy to talk about big cuts. We're about solutions. They aren't to that point yet, either on the policy or on the personnel level, and it's both obvious and disruptive to the process." -- During a panel discussion with other experts last week, which aired on C-SPAN 2 but got little pick-up in the mainstream press, one of Ryan’s top aides called the idea of enacting a temporary business tax cut through the reconciliation process a “magic unicorn running around.” "Not only can that not pass Congress, it cannot even begin to move through Congress,” George Callas, Ryan's senior tax counsel, said at the Institute of International Finance event. “A plan of business tax cuts that has no offsets, to use some very esoteric language, is not a thing. It’s not a real thing! And people can come up with whatever plans they want. Not only can that not pass Congress, it cannot even begin to move through Congress. … And there are political reasons for that. Number one, members wouldn’t vote for it. But there are also procedural, statutory and legal reasons why that can’t happen.” Callas spoke candidly about the problems of trying to pass tax reform with only 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to 60 votes. To do permanent reform, under the rules, the measure cannot increase the deficit after a decade. “A corporate rate cut that is sunset after three years will increase the deficit in the second decade. We know this. Not 10 years. Three years. You could not do a straight-up, un-offset, three-year corporate rate cut in reconciliation. The rules prohibit it. You might be able to do two years. A two-year corporate rate cut … would have virtually no economic effect. It would not alter business decisions. It would not cause anyone to build a factory. It would not stop any inversions or acquisitions of U.S. companies by foreign companies. It would just be dropping cash out of helicopters onto corporate headquarters.” Consider one element of the tax reform proposal he rolled out this week. Ending the deduction for state and local taxes, which allows individuals to subtract their home-state levies from their federal taxable income, would disproportionately hurt people who live in blue states and not make much difference for his voters in red states. “That move was a major shift for Mr. Trump, who (as a New Yorker) previously had called for capping deductions but not killing the break,” the Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin reports. “It would shift the tax burden from low-tax states such as Texas and Florida to high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey. … Democrats mobilizing to defend the deduction are in the awkward position of standing up for a tax measure that helps some of the highest-income Americans—the same people they typically say don’t pay enough in taxes.”

In its first 100 days in power, the GOP scrambles to learn how to govern Big results have eluded a splintered party in Congress and an ad hoc president who keeps adding new demands. By Ed O'Keefe, Kelsey Snell and Karen Tumulty  •  Read more » President’s executive orders pack little punch despite hoopla More than half of President Trump’s orders merely call for reviews, reports or recommendations. But he has reveled in the symbolic speed and decisiveness they represent, even if his policy aims may not be realized for quite awhile. By Abby Phillip and John Wagner  •  Read more » Several of Trump’s proposals and promises were sweeping legislative initiatives — laws that would each have be proposed, drafted as a bill, and passed by Congress before Trump could sign them into law. He’s made little process on those kinds of policy goals. Meanwhile, of his signature executive orders, some have proven to be toothless, and others have been blocked by the courts. [New York Times / Josh Keller, Adam Pearce]  Where Trump has been able to make progress, however, is in rolling back regulations and revamping the focus of federal agents. So while some things he targeted (like Obamacare) have become de facto winners of his presidency because they’ve avoided legislative threats, the environment and immigrants are already weathering serious and sustained attack. [Vox / Dylan Matthews]  The self-styled “resistance,” meanwhile, has been mobilized and energized to an extent most presidents don’t inspire at any time, much less at the beginning of their term — which raises the question of how long it will be sustainable. [NPR / Scott Detrow]  Another group that’s flourished even as the administration has labeled them the “enemy of the people” and “the opposition party”? The media. [Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan​]

Half of immigrants arrested in Feb. raids had traffic convictions or no record, data shows Records provided by congressional aides offer the most detailed look yet at the individuals rounded up and targeted for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in raids days after President Trump took office. By Maria Sacchetti and Ed O'Keefe  •  Read more »

Trump’s lies are working brilliantly. This new poll proves it.

GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST

. IT’S ALIVE!

Freedom Caucus Says Yes to Zombie Trumpcare

 Rep. Jim Jordan, vice chair of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus,  ( John Shinkle/POLITICO)

On Wednesday afternoon, the House Freedom Caucus officially announced its support for a revised version of the American Health Care Act, a.k.a. Trumpcare or Ryancare. The announcement comes after weeks of attempts to revive the previously failed Obamacare-repeal legislation in the House and following negotiations that produced a proposed amendment from Rep. Tom MacArthur. The caucus’ declaration of its support means the new incarnation of Zombie Trumpcare now has at least 80 percent of the HFC to a “yes.” The caucus said in a statement that retooled Trumpcare now has its support even though “the revised version still does not fully repeal Obamacare.” It is unclear how many of the more moderate Republican House members the revised text will frighten off or win over—and chances of the revised Trumpcare making it through the Senate as is remain [at zero]. President Donald Trump publicly blamed the Freedom Caucus for the failure of Trumpcare the first time around. (The president had previously tweeted that conservatives should line up to “fight” both Democrats and the hardline-conservative Freedom Caucus.) With the caucus now on board, other House Republicans are in a tough spot: They risk having the blame shifted to them for tanking Trumpcare again or risk receiving blowback for voting for deeply unpopular measures. Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) told a huddle of reporters Wednesday afternoon that the Zombie Trumpcare negotiations and revision have been “an exercise in blame-shifting” among Republican factions.

—Asawin Suebsaeng

Senior House Republican sources said they still didn’t have the votes for passage Wednesday evening. But GOP leaders felt bullish enough about their progress that they began considering a vote as early as this week. Nothing is scheduled. However, Republicans on Wednesday — through an obscure House rule for another piece of legislation — gave themselves same-day authority to fast-track any bill at the last minute, through Saturday.--Politico

The harm caused by immigration restrictions.

Immigration restrictions impose enormous costs, both economic and in terms of lost liberty. And much of the price is paid by American citizens.

By Ilya Somin  •  The Volokh Conspiracy  •  Read more »

“US News and World Report” recently published my new op ed on the harm immigration restrictions inflict on American citizens, as well as potential immigrants. Here’s an excerpt:

As the Trump administration seeks to cut H-1B visas for skilled workers and ramps up arrests of immigrants without legal status, including thousands who do not have a criminal record, it is worth remembering that immigrants are not the only ones harmed by the new administration’s harshly restrictionist immigration policies. Severe restrictions on migration condemn hundreds of thousands of potential immigrants to lives of poverty and oppression in underdeveloped nations, yet such policies… harm American citizens, as well….

Restrictions prevent millions of people from freely seeking employment and other opportunities. Economists estimate that abolishing migration restrictions around the world could potentially double world GDP. No other potential policy change is likely to have anything like the same massive beneficial effects…..

Immigration restrictions also threaten the liberty and property rights of Americans. Most obviously, they curtail American citizens’ freedom to associate with immigrants. Jim Crow segregation laws restricted the freedom of association of whites as well as African-Americans. Similarly, immigration restrictions curtail the freedom of natives as well as immigrants. In both cases, laws that classify people based on conditions of birth dictate where they are allowed to live and work and who they can interact with….

Building Trump’s much-ballyhooed wall across the Mexican border would require using eminent domain to seize the property of thousands of Americans. Numerous homeowners and businesses are likely to suffer….

The deportations advocated by Trump would cost far more. According to the conservative American Action Forum, mass deportations on the scale envisioned by the administration would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, a figure that does not include the cost of losing the goods and services that would have been produced by deported workers….

Washington Post

1. For the first time, drivers killed in crashes are more likely to be high than drunk. 

1. A new report finds that 43 percent of drivers tested in fatal crashes in 2015 had used a legal or illegal drug -- eclipsing the 37 percent who tested above the legal limit for alcohol. The data comes as part of a complicated portrait of drug use, as an opioid epidemic persists and marijuana laws are increasingly relaxed. (Washington Post )

Road Rage Cases With Guns More Than Double in 3 Years, Report Says

An analysis suggests that states with large numbers of concealed-carry permit holders and relaxed gun laws had more cases of road rage with firearms.

By CHRISTOPHER MELE

THE COURTS CHECK TRUMP AGAIN:

-- A federal judge in San Francisco dealt the Trump administration another legal blow last night, temporarily halting the president's threat to withhold unspecified federal funding from cities and towns that refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities. From Maria Sacchetti [Washington Post] :“U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick imposed a nationwide injunction against Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order on what are called ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions and said lawsuits by Santa Clara County and San Francisco challenging the order were likely to succeed. Orrick pointed to discrepancies in the administration’s interpretation of the executive order, which broadly authorized the attorney general to withhold grant money from jurisdictions that do not cooperate with immigration officials on deportations and other enforcement actions. At the same time, the judge said the Justice Department may hold back grant money that is awarded with immigration-related conditions, if those conditions are violated.

(Gertty)

Slow pace of Trump nominations leaves Cabinet agencies ‘stuck’ in staffing limbo.

Lisa Rein has a fascinating story on the front page of the Washington Post about Cabinet secretaries who are growing increasingly exasperated with how slowly the White House is moving to fill top-tier posts. They believe the vacancies in their departments are hobbling efforts to oversee basic government operations and promote Trump’s agenda.

It turns out that one important explanation for the sluggish process is that lots of people inside the White House have veto power over who gets even junior jobs. Trump, who fancies himself a decisive leader, is in many ways governing by committee.

“Prospective nominees … must win approval from competing camps inside the White House," Lisa explains. "Around the table for weekly hiring meetings are chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, representing the populist wing; Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, leading the establishment Republican wing; White House Counsel Don McGahn; Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Josh Peacock; and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, representing a business-oriented faction. ... For economic appointments, Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, also sits in, as does the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, when a hiring decision piques her interest."

With so many people able to nix nominees, it is inevitable that well-qualified people will be knocked out of contention for reasons big and small.

Consider this remarkable statistic: “The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees. That’s less than half the nominees Obama had sent to the Senate by this point in his first term."

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-- The president himself is keenly interested in certain appointments, especially when it comes to choosing the federal prosecutors in his hometown, which also slows the process. From Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Josh Dawsey: “Trump removed almost all of the sitting, Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys in a Friday afternoon purge in March, in a highly unusual move that’s left federal prosecutors’ offices under the supervision of acting U.S. attorneys since then. As with other political appointments, the Trump White House has been slow to fill the vacancies. … None are more important to him than the U.S. attorney posts in Manhattan and Brooklyn … which are known for handling white-collar crime cases … The Manhattan office, which oversees the Southern District of New York, was previously headed by Preet Bharara, who was the only U.S. attorney fired in March, after he refused to resign. He’d visited Trump Tower in November, after the election, and had said that Trump promised him he’d be able to remain in his post. White House officials and outside advisers with a crucial say in the picks, like former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, are still talking to candidates for the two New York jobs.”

-- Daily Beast, “Senate Trump-Russia Probe Has No Full-Time Staff, No Key Witnesses,” from Tim Mak: 

There are just seven part-time staffers working on the Senate inquiry. Not one of them is a trained investigator. And they haven’t interviewed a single player in Trump’s orbit.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s election interference is supposedly the best hope for getting the public credible answers about whether there was any coordination between the Kremlin and Trump Tower. But there are serious reasons to doubt that it can accomplish this task, as currently configured. More than three months after the committee announced that it had agreed on the scope of the investigation, the panel has not begun substantially investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. … The investigation does not have a single staffer dedicated to it full-time, and those staff members working on it part-time do not have significant investigative experience. [And] no interviews have been conducted with key individuals suspected of being in the Trump-Russia orbit.”

800 Workers Had Their Jobs Saved. Over 700 Didn’t.

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ 7:03 PM ET

At an Indiana factory that assembles parts for Carrier, blue-collar workers are being laid off as their jobs move to Mexico. Many say they still support Mr. Trump, even though his intervention didn’t save their jobs.

President’s approval ratings sit at record lows but base stays steady, poll shows

President Trump is nearing the 100-day mark of his administration as the least popular chief executive in modern times. His voters are largely satisfied with his performance, but his base of support hasn’t grown since he took office, according to a Post-ABC News poll.

• By Dan Balz and Scott Clement

• The Fix: 15% of Clinton supporters say they would vote differently if they had a do-over

Working-class whites can’t handle their status as ‘the new minority.’

A dispassionate perspective on what's driving support of President Trump.


WASHINGTON POST

JANESVILLE

NY TIMES



WASHINGTON POST


NEW YORKER

10 Myths About Immigration in the United States

TRUTHDIG

THE TRUMP RESISTANCE: A PROGRESS REPORT

JOHN CASSIDY, NEW YORKER

TRYING TO HOLD OBAMACARE FOR RANSOM. CONGRESS GEARS FOR FIGHT.

Trump’s threat prompts Democrats to play hardball over Obamacare payments


WASHINGTON POST



JONATHAN CHAIT, NEW YORK

Trump’s Attempt to Hold Obamacare Hostage Is Backfiring

NEW YORK (2)

Republicans may not want to end Obamacare payments The GOP — in control of Congress and the White House — is well aware that the public is likely to blame the party for premium increases after it has so far failed to put forth an agreeable health-care replacement plan. By Paige Winfield Cunningham  •  Read more »

The myth of the disillusioned Trump voter.
These voters do exist. They are not anything close to a movement.

WASHINGTON POST

Racism motivated Trump voters. 

By a lot.

By Amber Phillips

Finding of the day: Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism, income inequality A voter casts a ballot in Georgetown, Wis. (Nicki Kohl/Telegraph Herald via AP) Let me be very clear on this one: Just because someone voted for President Trump does not mean they harbor nor tolerate racist attitudes. But political scientists who just finished studying the 2016 electorate as part of the nonpartisan American National Selection Survey found that people who voted for Trump — specifically, white people — were less likely to object to statements like "If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites" than white Hillary Clinton voters. "Since 1988, we’ve never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions,"  wrote Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood, analyzing the survey for The Post's Monkey Cage blog.

The red bubbles and blue bubbles below represent Republican and Democratic voters' reactions, respectively, to the statements in every presidential election since 1988. While Clinton voters significantly backed away from racist sentiments than voters of Democratic presidents in years past, Republicans did not.



The survey found no such trend among voters' preference for authoritarianism nor income inequality, which led Wood to believe that racism motivated Trump voters more than these other factors. Never underestimate the power of racism and bigotry.

Read all the details of this report at   WASHINGTON POST

 ( John Moore/Getty Images)

The message to the country: Racism wins

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In a feature on the racist and anti-immigrant sentiments that fueled support for Trump in the same way they fueled the Brexit decision, Vox’s Zach Beauchamp wrote in January:

Michael Tesler, a professor at the University of California Irvine, took a look at racial resentment scores among Republican primary voters in the past three GOP primaries. In 2008 and 2012, Tesler found, Republican voters who scored higher were less likely to vote for the eventual winner. The more racial bias you harbored, the less likely you were to vote for Mitt Romney or John McCain.

With Trump, the opposite was the case. The more a person saw black people as lazy and undeserving, the more likely they were to vote for the self-proclaimed billionaire. Tesler found similar effects on measures of anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim prejudice.

Photo credit: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

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Multiple other studies have supported Tesler’s findings. An April Pew survey looked at whether Republicans had "warm" or "cold" feelings toward Trump and how they felt about the census projection that the US would be majority nonwhite in 30 years.

It found that 33 percent of Republicans thought this shift would be "bad for the country." These people were also overwhelmingly likely to feel warmly rather than coolly about Trump, by a 63-to-26 margin.

Meanwhile, as  Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox in October, there was no evidence to support the idea that Trump voters were disproportionately poor, and in fact, a major study from Gallup's Jonathan Rothwell showed the opposite: Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people.

If anything, Trump’s win was powered by a not-so-subtle message that these people’s racial resentment was that of the potential president’s too. And all voters had to do to know this was take a look at his track record....Members of fringe groups told the New York Times in the days before his election that he’d emboldened them to work toward their agendas. And when he won, white supremacists predictably delighted in his victory.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

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These huge swaths of white voters were willing to overlook the many ways in which Trump was unqualified, temperamentally unfit, and dangerous and represented a massive threat to American democracy.

The most generous interpretation is that white voters chose him despite his racism, not because of it. But that’s a very difficult case to make, given his massive weaknesses.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It’s no secret that racism and xenophobia have long been powerful forces in American life, and that the election of Barack Obama didn’t represent the end of that. In fact, racial and political polarization increased in response to the first African-American president, and racist conspiracy theories about Obama’s citizenship were Trump’s way into national politics.

The deep and widespread disdain for Obama and the accompanying willingness on the part of many Americans to believe things that were objectively false — that he was a Muslim and wasn’t a citizen — and to embrace policy positions against their own self-interest looked to many like warning signs about the power of racial anxiety to shape political decision-making.

But how can we say that the white vote for Trump represents racism when in previous elections, Obama won their states? Social science has an answer, and it’s that white voters change their views to become more conservative when their fears of nonwhites are stoked. And it’s not hard to stoke them. As Matthews has written, Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos conducted studies concluding that even casual encounters with racial minorities can cause liberal whites to take on more conservative views. In one of Enos’s experiments, these encounters were between white voters and Spanish-speaking Latino men on commuter trains.

"The results were clear," Enos wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes."

Trump’s version of the train encounter was his campaign rhetoric, and its message to would-be voters that immigrants, black people, and Muslims were to be feared. It especially stood in contrast to Obama’s delicate, even-handed treatment of issues related to race and identity. As a result, it’s entirely possible that people whose racism hadn’t shaped their political thinking in previous years suddenly found it activated by Trump’s campaign and guiding their votes.

Photo from "Postcards From America" by Mark Power/Magnum Photos

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As this election fades into the distance, explanations for the outcome will become gentler and more opaque. In a reflexive effort to find ways to be hopeful, we’ll spin a collective fairy tale about how a neglected group of white Americans who themselves were victims simply wanted change and used their votes to demand it, opening our eyes to their perspectives.

There will be a push to “understand” them, and this will be presented as the mature and moral thing to do. In the name of coming together, and in an attempt to avoid finger-pointing that many will warn could further divide the nation, we’ll normalize the way they see the world. We’ll twist history and tweak data and adjust our values to frame their outlook as reasonable.

And when that happens — when the deep bigotry that fueled the result is forgotten or explained away — racism will win yet again.