Brian Cahn/ZUMA

Kamala Harris made history on Tuesday, becoming the first Black woman to be the vice presidential pick on a major party ticket. But she makes history in other ways, too. Her addition to Team Biden will focus a new spotlight on an issue Harris has championed in the Senate: addressing the racism of environmental pollution.

While climate change has grown in importance to Democratic voters in recent years, so has drawing the connection to racial injustices. We’re only now starting to reckon with a long history of white environmentalists and leaders chronically overlooking this crisis. And the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown Americans, is making the stakes clearer than ever—and makes addressing the pollution in these communities all the more urgent.

The past few years have been something of an evolution for the junior senator from California; when Harris entered the presidential race last year, she didn’t have as robust an environmental record as many of her opponents. Still, she campaigned to the left of Biden on climate change, calling for a nationwide ban on fracking when Biden has not gone so far, and firmly embracing the Green New Deal, a moonshot left plank of investment to bring down climate pollution (even calling for eliminating the filibuster to do so). 

Perhaps most notably, last year Harris partnered with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to propose a draft bill, the Climate Equity Act, that would require an equity score to assess any environmental project’s impact on frontline communities, much in the same way the Congressional Budget Office scores the economic costs and impacts of bills. The proposal requires an extra level of scrutiny for White House executive actions on low-income communities and people of color, as well as feedback from those affected communities, and it creates a new Climate and Environmental Justice office to coordinate all the impact assessment efforts. Amid the veep speculation, Harris made headlines again this summer by officially introducing the act.

One of her last moves before the VP announcement was to partner with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) on a bill to reverse a 2001 Supreme Court decision that made it harder for Black Americans to sue under the Civil Rights Act for the disproportionate pollution in their communities. The Environmental Justice for All Act would also require the Environmental Protection Agency to consider the historical, cumulative pollution in a community before it could approve a permit for a new factory or highway. 

Another key plank of Harris’ environmental agenda has been an aggressive stance on the federal government’s role investigating fossil fuel companies for fostering climate change denial—a position that has highlighted her record as an attorney general in California. As my colleague Jamilah King explains, Harris’ “entire career could be defined by taking the ‘inside track’—trying to effect change within a broken system.” Last year, when I interviewed Harris in her final weeks on the presidential campaign trail, meeting at a frequently flooded site in Dubuque, Iowa, she was eager to talk about holding these actors responsible; she promised “that we’re going to put pressure on the big companies to do what is required and what is responsible.” She added, “let’s get them not only in the pocket book, but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.”

It’s already clear that this positioning is having an impact: Joe Biden recently released his own platform focused on environmental justice, directing 40 percent of the federal government’s spending on clean energy to go to disadvantaged communities. In it, he also drew from policies that Harris herself has pushed, specifically including accountability for fossil fuel companies in Department of Justice investigations.

Many of these promises would fall flat if a president doesn’t appoint officials with a strong commitment to climate action to carry them out. Harris said as much in the interview last year, noting the importance of appointing climate leaders throughout the government’s ranks. Maybe she’ll be that voice.

“The president of the United States gets to appoint her cabinet,” she told me at the time. “And for me this issue of the climate crisis relates to every aspect of what we do.” 

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Former Vice President Joe Biden has officially selected Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as his running mate, and in doing so has made history, as Harris will be the first Black woman on a major party’s presidential ticket. Harris was long rumored to be a top choice for the slot, and now she’s tasked with energizing a Democratic electorate that’s torn between a moderate forebearer at the top and an increasingly large proportion of voters who want to see dramatic change during a summer marked by a broad uprising over deep-seated racial injustice and a pandemic that’s killed more than 160,000 Americans. 

In Harris, Biden has chosen a Democratic favorite who toiled long and hard in California politics before breaking through on the national stage in the Senate and in running for president last year. She’s also a plainly strategic pick for the moment; Biden clearly thinks that choosing a Black woman—and this Black woman specifically—will help him overcome the lukewarm response he’s gotten from more liberal voters and criminal justice activists who still cite his baggage, like the 1994 crime bill and his praise of segregationist senators. Just this summer, prison abolitionist and academic Angela Davis said she was voting for Biden but admitted, “Biden is very problematic in many ways, not only in terms of his past and the role that he played in pushing toward mass incarceration, but he has indicated that he is opposed to disbanding the police, and this is definitely what we need.” She added later on Democracy Now, “The election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don’t think there’s a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold.”

But it’s still unclear if Harris can bridge this specific gap.  

In a profile I wrote of the senator back in 2018, I argued that her entire career could be defined by taking the “inside track”—trying to effect change within a broken system. She started her career in public service as district attorney of San Francisco and then served as attorney general of California, where her track record was mixed and the biggest knock against her came from progressives who chided her for being too cautious and too deferential to law enforcement. It’s where she developed the “Kamala Is a Cop” reputation that has followed her (and weighed her down) for years.

But while the “inside track” is what she’s done, it’s also informed who she is as a politician. At the end of last year, I revisited that profile and wrote: “I should’ve looked closer not necessarily at what she did, but at who she is. Harris represents a particular strain of Black American political thought: moderation. It’s the idea that change doesn’t come suddenly but slowly, piece by hard-fought piece, and is led by people who work to gain access to power. She was always going to be an uneasy fit in this political moment.”

When she announced her run for president in January of 2019, she did so in her hometown of Oakland, triumphant in front of a crowd of 20,000 supporters. And as I wrote in February of last year, some in the campaign were hopeful that by installing Harris’ sister and close confidante, Maya, an attorney with well-respected racial justice credentials, at the top of the campaign, she could help make inroads with skeptical Black activists. But the strategy only sort of worked, as I argued when she dropped out of the race last year. Harris’ career in law enforcement was subjected to real scrutiny in the primary, and younger voters of color by and large ended up preferring Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Ultimately, despite a few standout moments on the debate stage, the Harris campaign largely failed to adequately make the case for what elevated the California senator from the rest of the pack. (Ironically, the most memorable moment of her campaign happened in a debate confrontation with Biden, when she dredged up his 1970s opposition to school busing with a personal story of being bused to elementary school in Berkeley, California—a moment that reportedly irked Biden and those closest to him. As my colleague Pema Levy wrote, that moment now seems to be the basis for sexist attacks on Harris’ “ambition” by nameless sources who tried to block her from the VP slot.) 

Since then, the political landscape has changed dramatically. Following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer this spring, in the middle of a pandemic that’s disproportionately taking the lives of people of color, a broad swath of criminal justice reformers and even some mainstream Democrats have been shouting loudly about the once-radical idea of the abolition of the police altogether.

While Harris had mostly stayed out of the spotlight since suspending her campaign, she joined protests outside of the White House in June amid outrage over Floyd’s death. She took a leading role in helping Democrats craft and pass in the House a broad police reform measure (which included a proposal Harris has pushed that would make lynching a federal crime). More recently, she came out in support of a police use-of-force reform proposal in California that she’d previously declined to support. She even debated what it meant to defund the police with Meghan McCain on The View, carefully suggesting that the conversation was about reimagining “how we are achieving public safety.” 

Is all this enough to bring along—and turn out—once-skeptical activists as well as the Black voters who sat out in 2016?

Harris offers that rare combination of relative youth (she’s 55) and real experience in public office. And it’s this experience—once a liability—that makes her uniquely positioned to speak with authority on how and why law enforcement has been at odds with Black communities. There’s also one more reality that can’t be discounted: She’s a Black woman of Jamaican and Indian descent, once deemed “the female Barack Obama.” In these times of hyperpartisan bickering and a ratcheting up of the culture wars by Trump, identity and representation matter. Don’t forget it’s also this life experience that she’ll bring to the position—one that should, and will, inform policy. 

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris Alex Wong/Getty Images

Update: We know who he picked! It’s Kamala. 

Reading Kate Manne’s new book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, during a particularly insipid conversation about woman-as-vice-president gives this feminist philosopher’s clear-eyed analysis of misogyny an element of timeliness that translates to something of a gut punch.  

The book, out today, is smart and insightful, but it’s hard to walk away from it feeling anything but anger and frustration and discouragement—particularly in light of the who-will-he-pick speculation regarding Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s running mate that has drawn inevitable yet cringey Bachelor metaphors. It’s not just the water cooler talk that’s infuriating though, it’s also the way Biden himself has talked about the veepstakes. (Perhaps this will finally replace his “I-championed-the-Violence-Against-Women-Act” bit, which usually ends with him looking expectantly for someone to hand him a cookie.) Will it be Kamala Harris, who ran against him in the Democratic primaries, or is she “too ambitious”? Could we stomach Elizabeth Warren, her endless stash of plans that might overshadow Biden’s competency, and all that “anger” of hers? Could it be Susan Rice, who served as the national security adviser in the Obama administration? She gets points because he “knows exactly what he’s getting with Susan.” Maybe it will be a lesser-known politico, like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or California Rep. Karen Bass, who have been held up as somewhat less imposing options. The point is, on that day in March when Biden pledged he would pick “a woman”—any woman!—as his veep, we women should have been downright grateful for the scraps thrown our way. Right?

Wrong! Kate Manne says so, and so say I.

“It’s just amazing that the qualities that we positively embrace in male leaders become somehow moralized and the same traits are labeled in a pejorative way when a woman instantiates them,” Manne told me last week. “Suddenly, it’s not that she’s prepared to lead and she’s someone who has a vision, it’s that she’s ‘ambitious’  in a tone that all but entails that she is the worst for having ambition, when of course that’s the main reason someone would want to be vice president.”

But to make any progress, to stop getting the scraps, we need to dismantle the power structures that inherently favor those who are male and white. The first step here is to understand how these structures operate, which Manne explores in a chapter toward the end of Entitled called “Unelectable—On the Entitlement to Power.” Here, Manne cites a 2004 study that essentially demonstrated a reluctance to consider a woman can be as competent in leadership as a man unless she demonstrated certain “communal” traits: acting as a team player, being supportive of her colleagues, and, you know, kinda cheerleader-y. Maybe the sort of woman who would put “proud wife + mom” in her Twitter bio. Someone non-threatening, who still defines her identity and power at least partly in relation to the men around her. Someone who will not chafe at all the emotional labor she will be expected to perform. 

Still, a woman as VP is something, and after more than four years of listening to President Donald Trump freely spout his misogynistic views with little to no consequence, I almost feel guilty for criticizing Biden in this way. And to be clear, having a woman as vice president is not an inherently bad thing—in fact, it is worth celebrating. It’s just not enough. “I do think it’s a step in the right direction, but it’s a very small step,” Manne says. “And I actually think that it’s in danger of reinforcing certain biases.” She adds, “A real cost is that it reinforces this notion that women can have power, as long as that’s in service of a patriarchal figure, and as long as it’s by being communal in some way, whether that’s by being nice and warm and maternal and all those things, or in this case, by being someone who’s directly underneath and expected to be loyal and deferential, and in service of a white male president.” 

I guess we’ll give it another go in four years, then.

But let’s not limit this discussion to the veep. While that feels like so much of what we can currently think about and talk about and tweet about, Entitled does not actually focus primarily on the gender dynamic in politics. Reading the book is in fact a bit like taking a sweeping tour, a la It’s a Wonderful Life, of one’s history experiencing misogyny, except Manne is a sharper, more astute Clarence. 

It’s not so much that Manne ushers the reader through their own significant life events; it’s more about the way she frames the egregious examples of misogyny in the striking-yet-oh-so-familiar terms of male entitlement. For the duration of the book, I found myself flashing back to all the times men felt entitled to my body or my mind, all the times I earned the ire of a man simply by taking up space that he felt entitled to. But there’s something cathartic about seeing all of that on the page; it’s a bit like pouring cold water on a fire that was gaslit. It’s not just us, we are not imagining it, this is absurd and unfair. Manne uses mainstream examples: Brett Kavanaugh’s hissy fit during a confirmation hearing to the highest court in the land, Elliot Rodgers’s violent rampage that was fueled by his entitlement to a certain ideal of female beauty, the well-documented dismissal of female pain in medical spaces (which gets much worse if you are female but not white). 

So much of the power of this book can be found in the crystallization of what “misogyny” means. So many people are afraid to call it by its name, Manne notes, and too often that translates to gender-based violence or discrimination being explained away as something more innocuous. We’ve all heard the excuses: “Oh, he’s just grouchy like that sometimes, don’t let it get to you,” or, “Well, he’s really been working on that.” Sure he is; sure he has. 

Manne’s “entitlement” framing is a useful one, and it dispels the oversimplified notion that if women would simply act more entitled, we could gain more power and agency. It’s not, she argues, about women acting as entitled as men. It’s about burning down the structures that are in place now. “For that, we need to just keep pushing in a collective organized way as feminists have for the duration of the movement toward the change that we all need,” Manne says. “And that’s going to be a long, brutally piecemeal process.”

In the meantime, the timer until the big reveal clicks on and on, and, I guess that at least there are plenty of guys like Joe Biden to throw us a bone every now and again. Right?

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 23, 2016.

Just the sight of Donald Trump can calm the violent streets of New York, apparently.

At least that was reportedly the case in November 1991, when Trump was on his way to a Paula Abdul concert in his limo and saw a man being pummeled on an unidentified Manhattan street. “The man was getting beaten with a baseball bat, but no one did a thing until the limo drove up and Super Donald leaped out,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

That was all it took to stop the assailant in his tracks. “The guy with the bat looked at me, and I said, ‘Look, you’ve gotta stop this. Put down the bat,'” Trump told the New York Daily News. “I guess he recognized me because he said, ‘Mr. Trump, I didn’t do anything wrong.’ I said, ‘How could you not do anything wrong when you’re whacking a guy with a bat?’ Then he ran away.” (Witnesses at the scene gave the newspaper conflicting reports on what happened, with one saying Trump “just looked around and went back into his limo.” Police said the attack wasn’t reported.)

Surely not wanting to miss the concert, Trump left the victim in the care of “a man who appeared to be a doctor” and headed off. “I’m not looking to play this thing up,” he told the Daily News when they came asking about the heroic deed. “I’m surprised you found out about it.”

Mother Jones Illustration; Shuttershock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 7, 2016.

“I’d often say, loud enough…for anyone standing in the hall outside my office to hear me, ‘My life is shit,'” wrote Donald in Surviving at the Top, his 1990 book. It was understandable. At the time, he was fighting to keep his businesses from falling apart under huge debts. But that wasn’t the calamity that was making Trump’s life pure hell. It was having to attend high-society social events.

“My nine-to-five day fascinated and energized me,” Trump wrote of his burdens. “But then, late in the afternoon, I’d often get a call from Ivana, reminding me of that night’s engagement. ‘You’ll be sitting next to Lord Somebody-or-Other at such-and-such an event,’ she’d say—and I’d suddenly feel like a low-level employee who’d just been handed some meaningless, mind-numbing assignment.”

The pair would fight and Trump would usually cave, he wrote, “because I didn’t want to disappoint or embarrass her.” Then Donald would hang up the phone and proclaim his life shit for all his staff to hear. Eventually, being forced to go out at night helped convince Trump that the marriage wasn’t working: “You have only one life, and that’s simply not how I wanted to live mine,” he wrote.

Motortion/iStock/Getty

On Saturday, Fox News’ Peter Doocy announced a big campaign scoop: presumptive Democratic nominee confirmed to him that he had finally chosen a running mate. Although it’s not historically late for such a revelation—Biden himself wasn’t unveiled as President Barack Obama’s running mate until late August in 2008—the primary ended so early, and the campaign itself has been so quiet for so long that it does sort of feel like we’ve been waiting forever. Time to check out the tape of the interview and see who Biden….oh. Aha. Hahahaha. What?

Here is the video… https://t.co/aFv10lufrb pic.twitter.com/1jHIsF9vPi

— Johnny Verhovek (@JTHVerhovek) August 8, 2020

If you watch the clip, you’ll see it’s technically true that Biden told Fox News he had selected a running mate, but considering that Biden also told Fox News that his running mate is Fox News‘ Peter Doocy perhaps he has, you know, not.

The Biden campaign itself has said it would likely be unveiling Biden’s pick the week of August 10th—next week. Perhaps the real news here is that a 77-year-old man is biking around without a helmet. As someone once said, “c’mon, man!”

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on October 25, 2016. 

Even the death of a child couldn’t keep Donald Trump from talking about hitting on the boy’s mother.

In January 2009, Kelly Preston and John Travolta’s son Jett passed away at the age of 16 after suffering a seizure while on a family vacation. Four days later, Trump wrote a blog post dedicated to Preston on the website of the now-defunct Trump University, which has been sued by the state of New York and former students over claims of fraud.

The mogul expressed his condolences to Preston for her loss, but not before he mentioned the time he tried to sleep with her. According to Trump, the attempt failed.

“A long time ago, before I was married, I met Kelly Preston at a club and worked like hell to try and pick her up,” he wrote on the Trump University website. “She was beautiful, personable, and definitely had allure. At the time I had no idea she was married to John Travolta.”

He continued, “In any event, my track record on this subject has always been outstanding, but Kelly wouldn’t give me the time of day. She was very nice, very elegant, but I didn’t have a chance with her, and that was that.”

Trump ended his blog post by saying his thoughts were with Preston and her family.

Cori BushMatt Winkelmeyer/Getty

In a stunning upset, Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush has defeated 10-term incumbent Rep. Lacy Clay in the Democratic primary for Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, according to the Associated Press. Bush, a minister and registered nurse, has been heavily involved in protests against police violence since the 2014 Ferguson protests. Mother Jones‘ Kara Voght wrote about the race last week:

For 400 days in 2014 and 2015, protesters gathered in Ferguson, Missouri, to register their outrage over the police killing of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown. For most of those days, Bush joined them—at first, in her capacity as a registered nurse to tend to protesters’ injuries, and later as a community organizer on the front lines. She went out again in 2017 to organize after another white police officer was acquitted of murder in the 2011 shooting death of a Black man during a car chase in north St. Louis. This year, as Americans across the country protested Floyd’s killing, a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant—Bush’s hometown—ran over a Black man with his unmarked SUV before getting out of the car to repeatedly kick him. And so Bush and her fellow Ferguson activists organized yet another demonstration against police brutality. During a June gathering, she tweeted that she had been pepper-sprayed in the eyes by the cops.

[…]

The race features two Black leaders with very different ideas about how to create change. Clay is a consummate insider who has spent decades building political power, which he has used to secure tangible, if incremental, progress on issues including police abuse. Bush, who is also an ordained minister, has little patience for incremental measures. She believes the district that helped turn Black Lives Matter into a national movement should have an activist in its congressional seat, someone who stands unwaveringly with BLM’s demands.

[…]

Bush has also slammed Clay’s coziness with corporate interests. Three-quarters of the nearly $750,000 Clay raised through June of this year came from political action committees, nearly 80 percent of which are backed by big business. His top campaign contributor is Quicken Loans, a mortgage giant that Clay is charged with overseeing from his perch on the Financial Services Committee. In 2015, the Justice Department sued Quicken for originating hundreds of home loans for borrowers who weren’t eligible for them. (The company agreed to pay $32.5 million to settle the case without admitting wrongdoing.)

Clay maintains that his fundraising has no bearing on how he votes. But Fight Corporate Monopolies, a progressive group, placed a six-figure television ad buy to revisit an episode in which Clay sided with financial services companies to fight against a rule that would force investment advisers to act in their clients’ best interests.

You can read the full story here.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 23, 2016.

Donald Trump knows that a mere insult sometimes isn’t enough for a journalist he doesn’t like. So when CBS’ Connie Chung savaged Trump in an April 1990 interview on her show, Face to Face With Connie Chung, Donald concocted his Trumpiest revenge plot.

“You might just consider our next story to be a unique artifact of the ’80s, The Donald before the fall,” Chung said in the introduction. “It’s a conversation with Donald Trump literally just hours, we believe, before he told his wife, Ivana, that their marriage was over…What did Donald Trump know as he bravely strutted through our interview?”

Whatever he knew, Chung was clearly prepared to deflate the tycoon at what seemed like the height of his power. She spent much of the interview mocking Trump’s pretension about his buildings (“They aren’t that great. Come on.”), his claims that he didn’t like publicity, his constant talk of having renovated a skating rink in Central Park, and other Trump foibles.

CBS re-aired the interview that August, and Trump ripped Chung during an interview on the Joan Rivers Show a month after the rebroadcast. “This woman has less talent than anybody I know of,” he said. He called her a “disaster” and said she interviewed “like a little child.” Then he described his big revenge move.

“She sent me roses afterward, and I won’t tell you what I did with the roses,” Trump coyly told Rivers. When she prompted him for the big reveal, he caved. “I cut ’em up and sent ’em back,” Trump said. “I sent her back the stems. Actually, I did.”

Actually, Chung said, he didn’t. The Toronto Star reported that Chung was still “waiting for the stems” when it contacted her for comment.

/Star Max/IPx

It’s the political party whose members openly mock masks, lambast the nation’s top infectious disease expert as a partisan hack for simply doing his job, and protect a president whose chief response to a pandemic has been to deny, deny, deny. But when it comes to re-anointing Donald Trump as the Republican Party standard-bearer, coronavirus safety suddenly matters. When Donald Trump is renominated for president later this month in Charlotte, North Carolina, it will be a private affair, according to a Republican National Convention spokesperson on Saturday. No press allowed.

According to the Associated Press:

While Trump called off the public components of the convention in Florida last month, citing spiking cases of the virus across the country, 336 delegates are scheduled to gather in Charlotte, North Carolina, on 24 August to formally vote to make Trump the GOP standard-bearer once more.

Nominating conventions are traditionally meant to be media bonanzas, as political parties seek to leverage the attention the events draw to spread their message to as many voters as possible. If the GOP decision stands, it will mark the first party nominating convention in modern history to be closed to reporters.

“Given the health restrictions and limitations in place within the state of North Carolina, we are planning for the Charlotte activities to be closed [to] press Friday, August 21–Monday, August 24,” a convention spokeswoman said.

That might change, the spokesperson admitted. We’ll see. In the meantime, there’ll be no shortage of press-packed events featuring Trump gorging on free airtime, lavishly flouting safety concerns and sickening his staff, while blaming everyone but himself.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on July 18, 2016.

Donald Trump, oil tycoon? That’s what it sounded like in 1985, when Trump announced he had struck oil on a sprawling vacant lot he owned on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

”Isn’t it amazing?” Mr. Trump told the New York Times. “It’s a classic major oil find in Manhattan.”

Not quite. The oil wasn’t from an ancient crude deposit hiding beneath the city. It was actually spilled and leaked leftovers. The property used to be a rail yard. “The bulk of the find is No. 2 diesel oil for locomotives,” the Times pointed out.

New York environmental officials estimated there were perhaps 100,000 gallons of oil on the property. That’s enough for 2,380 barrels—about 0.0003 percent of what the United States now produces in a day. But that didn’t seem to dampen Donald’s enthusiasm. He claimed he was already getting calls from Texan oil barons about his huge find. “We could be pumping here for years,” he insisted.

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 9, 2016.

Whether it’s giving to charities or young school kids, generosity doesn’t always come naturally for Donald Trump. But sometimes he’s capable of acts of genuine kindness, such as the good deed he performed for one Georgia widow in 1986.

That year, 66-year-old Annabel Hill was fighting to keep her farm in Waynesboro, Georgia. The farm, which was $300,000 in debt, had nearly been auctioned off that February. To save it, Hill’s husband killed himself, believing his life insurance policy would wipe out the debt. But he didn’t realize most insurance companies, including his own, wouldn’t pay out policies in the event of suicide, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Hills raised some money to pay down the debt, but they still owed $187,000 by the fall of 1986, and the farm was in danger of being sold again.

That’s when Trump stepped in. Atlanta businessman Frank Argenbright Jr. held a press conference for the Hills in September that earned national attention, including from Trump. “Trump heard about Mrs. Hill’s plight in September and worked with Argenbright to raise the remaining $187,000,” the Associated Press reported. “Donations of all sizes materialized—New York disc jockey Don Imus raised $15,000—but the debt remained at $78,000.” Trump agreed to pay half of the final $78,000 himself, and Tom McKamy, a wealthy Texas farmer, pitched in the rest.

“I’m just so grateful to these men,” Hill told United Press International. “It’s really hard with the main person in your family gone. This kind of eases the ache a little bit.” Hill’s daughter Besty told the Journal-Constitution that her family “saw a whole different side of [Trump] that was kindhearted, to reach out to us, to help us.”

There was still one Trumpian touch to the story. Two days before Christmas, Trump held a “burn the mortgage” party for the Hills in the atrium of Trump Tower. Trump flew the family up to New York on his own dime and set up a meticulously planned, TV-ready ceremony. “Trump ordered the waterfalls in his towers turned off, to make it easier for the TV sound technicians,” the Journal-Constitution reported. “He made sure that at least three tested cigarette lighters were on hand to spark the fire. The mortgage papers were fake, but Trump ordered an assistant to light one up to make sure they would burn quickly and dramatically.”

“I love burning mortgages,” Trump said. “There’s nothing that gives me a greater kick.”

The family was so eager to get back to work at the farm that Annabel’s son Leonard, named after his father, had remained in Georgia with his pregnant wife and spent the day before the party preparing to plant wheat, his mother told the AP. He still lives and works on the farm today.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 22, 2016.

The dad jeans. The extra-mullet-like hair. The goofy fall. There’s not much to say here—just watch Donald perform the world’s least sexy reenactment of the Top Gun volleyball scene.

No one seems to know when this feat of athleticism actually happened, but the Huffington Post pointed out that the clip was used as The Daily Show’s Moment of Zen in 1999.

Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event in New Castle, Delaware, on July 21, 2020.Andrew Harnik/AP

The Federal Reserve has a huge role to play in racial equality, but it has long perpetuated the income and wealth gaps between Black and white Americans. Joe Biden wants to change that.

Biden’s proposal, unveiled as part of his racial equity economic recovery plan, calls for the Federal Reserve to “aggressively enhance” the way it both measures and targets the racial job, wage, and wealth gaps, something the network of Federal Reserve banks have done only sporadically and without any formal mandate. Biden also wants the Fed to report on “data and trends in racial economic gaps” and the steps it is taking to close them, a move that would require an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act.

As the nation’s bank, the Federal Reserve’s key mandate is to influence the country’s money and credit supply in order to promote stable prices and employment. That role gets kicked into overdrive during recessions, and this pandemic-induced one we’re living in is no exception: The Federal Reserve has lately been buying up billions of dollars of corporate stocks and bonds to try to keep money flowing into the markets.

But how the Fed chooses to pump money into the economy has a tremendous effect on who benefits from it. The Fed’s policies are race-blind, but that’s part of the problem, leading to unequal outcomes across racial groups. Instead of buying up bonds from corporations, for example, the Fed could purchase them from distressed majority-minority communities, explains Mehrsa Baradaran, a wealth inequality expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine. The current practice, Baradaran tells me, enriches some people at the expense of others. “This is not neutral monetary policy, and you have that recognition from the Biden campaign,” she says.

Liberal economists and scholars have argued that the Fed needs metrics for racial inequality since the Great Recession, but politicians didn’t acknowledgment that issue until recently—spurred in no small part by the wave of civil unrest that followed the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. During a Senate Banking Committee hearing in June, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) asked Fed Chair Jerome Powell to commit to studying how Fed policy contributes to systemic racism. Powell only was willing to say he would “take that away and think about it.”

Biden’s racial equity-focused recovery plan, released Tuesday morning as the fourth pillar of his “Build Back Better” platform for rebuilding the economy in the wake of the pandemic, is largely a repackaging of campaign promises Biden has made since the former vice president ascended to the top of the ticket. It includes an immediate $10,000 cancellation in student loan debt during the coronavirus pandemic—a burden that disproportionately weighs on borrowers of color—as well as a $15,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and billions in funding for entrepreneurs of color. All of these initiatives take aim at the racial wealth gap: As of 2016, the net worth of a typical white family was 10 times that of the typical Black family.

So far, the campaign has resisted the bolder plans that Biden’s vanquished Democratic primary rivals put forward to address the racial wealth gap. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) all supported “baby bonds,” a proposal from economists William Darity and Darrick Hamilton that would give most Americans government-backed savings accounts at birth. A senior Biden aide said they “haven’t taken it off the table” and are currently evaluating pilot programs to see if the idea delivers on its promise. 

Biden has also not committed to reparations for descendants of formerly enslaved African Americans. A senior Biden aide told reporters that the former vice president “doesn’t have a problem with the study” for the need for reparations proposed by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Tex.), “but he believes there are things we can do right now that we don’t have to wait on a study to tell us that will change the lives of Black and brown people in America.”

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 30, 2016.

The Art of the Comeback, Donald Trump’s 1997 book, featured a chapter detailing a recent week in Trump’s life so readers could learn from his scheduling secrets. In that chapter, the tycoon recounted a pleasant Thursday at P.S. 70, a public elementary school in the Bronx where he was named “Principal for a Day.” Trump had “a wonderful time” and “talked strongly about working hard and incentives” with the students—and came armed with incentives of his own.

That year, the school’s chess team was scraping together money to go to the national championship. It still needed several thousand dollars at the time of Trump’s visit, according to the New York Daily News. But Trump focused on something else. He held a drawing in which 15 lucky students could win coupons for Nike sneakers—but there was something of a catch. The shoes had to be picked up at the Niketown store at Trump Tower. “He said we were going to have to go on a bus to get them,” Eugenio Tavares Jr., a P.S. 70 student, told the Daily News.

The Nike lottery caused “frenzied excitement” among the students, the New York Times reported, but one kid questioned Trump about it. “Why did you offer us sneakers if you could give us scholarships?” asked Andres Rodriguez, a fifth-grader whose father had died and whose mother couldn’t work because of a bad leg, according to the Times.

“I asked because school is more important than sneakers, but he didn’t really answer,” Rodriguez told the Daily News.

Trump’s generosity didn’t end with the 15 pairs of sneakers. He decided he could hand out additional sneaker coupons to disappointed kids who didn’t win the drawing, and he distributed what the Times called “beautiful, psychedelic Trump Tower hats for every child.” As he departed the school, he donated a fake $1 million at the bake sale raising money for the chess team. He also contributed 200 real dollars, and reports of his visit did prompt others to call up and donate the thousands more needed for the chess-playing students.

All in all, it was an easy day of work for Trump. “The honorary position should really be called ‘principal for a half day,’ because I was finished by about twelve-thirty,'” he wrote.

The little boy from Queens was finally set to take the mound. And not just any mound! The mound at Yankee Stadium! Generations of boys like him had only dreamed of being under the bright lights in the House that Ruth Built (an earlier version of)! But this would be his day, not theirs; his moment, not theirs. The media and the fake news always doubted him, but this little boy didn’t have any fear. Little Donnie Trump would show them all! He felt the excitement pulsing past the blockages and buildups in his veins. He was penciled in to throw the ceremonial first pitch on August 15. It would be his first presidential ceremonial pitch. The countdown clock in the West Wing was set to 22 days. It was training time. 

Sadly, today, the clock stopped counting down; stuck on 20 days to go.

“I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the Yankees on August 15th,” the little slugger tweeted. “We will make it later in the season!”

Why did the little boy have to delay his dream? It’s possible he’s afraid of the fake fans booing him, but it’s more likely that it has to do with the fact that the little boy, in this case, is a racist old man who is widely loathed in his hometown, and, despite his pleas, he’d probably have to watch the real players kneel during the national anthem in protest of him and his racist policies. Instead of just saying, “I’m a total racist but I don’t want to be called out for it on national television,” he made up an excuse.

Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15th. We will make it later in the season!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020

Setting aside the racism of the “China virus” stuff, Trump is saying he is so focused on coronavirus and the economy that he can’t make this event. This would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that he sent this tweet from his golf course in New Jersey, where he spent the last day and a half playing golf! 

Brett LOVES Wisconsin, Mississippi and Minnesota. A good golfer – hits it LONG! https://t.co/JcBJJEWI0X

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020

One of the sensations that I will remember most about this era is a sporadic but arresting worry that I’ve gone mad. I must have gone mad. Because I just don’t understand how his supporters fall for shit like this. How do you read this tweets and think “Good, yes, this is the man I want to be president. Yes, the lazy disinterested liar who is going out of his way to tell me things that I know aren’t true? He’s the one I want to be the most powerful person on Earth”? It makes no sense!

The Yankees are probably going to lose to the Dodgers in October and Trump is probably going to lose to Biden in November, and then, on the seventh day, God will probably rest. 

President Donald Trump returned to Twitter this afternoon with a missive jam-packed with information, yet completely opaque in their connections to each other. As you can see, there’s a lot going on here:

So the Washington Post is running the Reagan Foundation, and RINO Paul Ryan is on the Board of Fox, which has been terrible. We will win anyway, even with the phony @FoxNews suppression polls (which have been seriously wrong for 5 years)! https://t.co/fOi3AROxuz

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020

Let’s start with the inspiration for this tweet. University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato yesterday tweeted a Washington Post story about how the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which runs the late president’s library, asked the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to stop selling coins with Reagan’s face on them as a fundraising strategy. (It’s important to understand that the Reagan folks did not ask the Trump folks to stop selling Reagan coins because they don’t like Trump. From the article, it appears simply to be a copyright issue; only the Reagan Foundation can profit off of the former president’s face.) Sabato then noted the connection between the Reagan Foundation and the Post: someone named Frederick J. Ryan Jr is in a leadership role at both places. 

Trump took this connection and really ran with it. He seems to blame the dustup between his campaign and the Reagan Foundation on the Post, which he claims the Post controls.

In the same sentence, Trump—possibly inspired by the tweet to meditate on people with the Ryan, possibly just confused—next expresses his displeasure with former Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Fox News. These two belong together in this sentence because this Ryan is on the board of Fox, the parent company of Fox News.

Finally, Trump concludes that he will win reelection 100 days from now because the polls, including the ones from Fox News, are fake. 

Mystery solved.

On this day in 1951, the Disney film Alice in Wonderland premiered in London. But it is us, you and me, who live in the real wonderland, friend! Bizarre, through-the-looking-glass stuff going on in our lives! Up-is-down shit, you dig? Not only has it been raining cats and dogs all year, but also the cats and dogs are ghosts and they wear shoes on their heads and hats on their feet. 

Here is a headline from the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

Couple flaunt swastika face masks at southwestern Minnesota Walmart

I hear wedding bells! Anyway, this is obviously a deeply disturbing headline. But in the Trump era, Nazis and their various accoutrements seem to be a fairly regular subplot in the news, so unfortunately it’s a bit “dog bites man,” but—Callooh! Callay! O frabjous day!—there is one sentence in this story that is very “man bites dog.”

“If you vote for Biden, you’re going to be living in Nazi Germany,” the woman with the swastika mask told Mueller, as her companion bagged up toilet paper and an enormous canister of cheeseballs. (emphasis mine—BD) The two were apparently using the masks to protest Minnesota’s mask mandate, which took effect Saturday.

I get that it takes a thief to catch a thief, but this is a bit much. 

(via @MattDelong)

President Donald Trump walks to the Rose Garden for a press conference at the White House on July 14, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/CNP via ZUMA

President Trump blazed into Sunday with a strong assessment of his campaign’s standing, just 100 days until November 3. 

The Trump Campaign has more ENTHUSIASM, according to many, than any campaign in the history of our great Country – Even more than 2016. Biden has NONE! The Silent Majority will speak on NOVEMBER THIRD!!! Fake Suppression Polls & Fake News will not save the Radical Left.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020

In this alternate reality, Trump is on track for a second victory. But on Earth One, things look very different. 

National polls in recent months have given former Vice President Joe Biden a steady lead. In the last week, Biden has led by between 2 and 10 points, with most giving him a lead in the upper single digits. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by 2 points. But Clinton is not president because the Electoral College (a white supremacist institution) picks the president. But Trump is currently underwater in crucial swing states that he won in 2016, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Donald Trump won in 2016 when traditionally blue states in the Rust Belt—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—turned red. This year, political realignments threaten Trump’s ability to repeat that victory. On Sunday, an NBC News/Marist poll shows Democrat Joe Biden leading Trump by five points in Arizona, a state that has gone for a Democrat only twice since 1948. There are two reasons why it might be posed to go a third time: According to the poll, voters in Arizona, a Coronavirus hot spot, trust Biden to handle the pandemic over Trump. And as federal agents are dispatched to foment conflict on the streets of American cities as part of Trump’s law-and-order campaign theme, Arizona voters said they trust Biden on race relations over Trump by a 20-point margin.

There was some qualified good news for Trump, but also news that exhibited his weakness in this moment. A higher number of Trump’s supporters in Arizona were enthusiastic about him at 74 percent compared to Biden’s 61 percent. Enthusiasm will provide insight into who shows up to vote, including during difficult situations like a pandemic. But it also shows the limits of the Trump campaign, which has catered to its base at the exclusion of appealing to a broader number of Americans. When Trump brags about the enthusiasm of his supporters, he is bragging about the faithful in a shrinking pool. 

Trump also received higher marks on the economy than Biden in Arizona. But if states are shutdown by coronavirus, the economy may not be the first order concern that it generally is during presidential elections. And the longer the economy sputters, the more Trump risks losing the public’s confidence in his economic abilities.

The Arizona poll isn’t the only bad news for the president at the 100 day mark. Its representative of a larger trend. CNN released a poll Sunday showing Biden ahead in Arizona as well as Florida and Michigan.

New @CNN polls this morning:

Florida:
51% Biden
46% Trump

Arizona:
49% Biden
45% Trump

Michigan:
52% Biden
40% Trumphttps://t.co/wPvJLX8iBq

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) July 26, 2020

Florida, another state being ravaged by the pandemic, is a critical swing state and Trump has virtually no path to victory without it. In all three states, CNN found that Trump’s low numbers are the result of a lack of support from women. But Trump is certainly struggling with another problem that may prove decisive in November: a loss of support among seniors. A key constituency for Trump in 2016, this cohort has moved away from the president as he has failed to control a pandemic that threatens their lives most immediately.

But Trump does have some reason for optimism and his opponents for vigilance. Trump claims there is a “silent majority” that will reelect him. But the fear for Democrats is actually a silencing of the majority. Trump won four years ago with a minority of the popular vote, and the hurdles to voting are only growing during the pandemic. Mail-in ballots may be discarded at high rates, a shrinking number of polling locations and a lack of poll workers could result in long lines, as demonstrated by primaries. Election officials, low on resources, have just 100 days to carry out an election in a pandemic.

Political fortunes can change and polls may narrow, but as we pass the 100-day mark, Trump’s hopes for reelection increasingly rest on a majority of Americans having their will subverted once again.

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 11, 2016.

Donald Trump is no stranger to high-profile feuds, but his long-running battle with New York City Mayor Ed Koch was epic even by Trumpian standards. Trump’s rise to fame and fortune overlapped almost perfectly with Koch’s three terms as mayor from 1978 to 1990, and Koch, who died in 2013, tangled with Trump over building plans, tax breaks, and even Trump’s demand for the city to evict street peddlers on Fifth Avenue near Trump Tower.

The feud reached its high (or low) point in 1987. Trump held the rights to a large chunk of land on the Upper West Side where he was hoping to build “Television City,” a huge development that included new studios for NBC and a 150-story skyscraper that would have been the tallest building in the world. But he also wanted tax breaks and zoning concessions from the city, and Koch wasn’t having any of it.

Koch rejected the tax break in May and then released a nasty series of letters the two men had sent each other about the decision. Koch said Trump’s project was too risky to justify giving away so much tax revenue, while Trump called Koch’s refusal “ludicrous and disgraceful.”

After the letters were released, Trump said the “moron” mayor should quit his job. “The city under Ed Koch is a disaster,” he told the New York Times. “If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right,” Koch fired back.

Days later, Trump was saying that Koch’s New York was “a cesspool of corruption and of incompetence,” while Koch was calling the developer “greedy, greedy, greedy” and “piggy, piggy, piggy“—before unironically declaring that he had “no intention of allowing this important matter to degenerate into a barnyard kind of contest.”

The fight then flared up again in August when Trump was interviewed for story by PBS’ MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. “Ed Koch could do everybody a huge favor if he got out of office and if they started all over again, because what Ed Koch has is nothing,” Trump said. “I would say he’s got no talent and only moderate intelligence,” he added later in the piece.

The insults even continued after Koch suffered a stroke (his doctors called it “trivial”) that same month. Koch called Trump a “flop” at a September press conference, and Trump responded by asking, “How can our idiot mayor go to Nicaragua when he can’t even run New York City properly?” after Koch announced he’d visit the Central American country as part of a peace delegation.

Eventually the name-calling died down, and the two men even shared a tense handshake in October 1987, but there was no love lost between them. In 1988, as Koch geared up to run for a fourth term, Trump threatened to dump $2 million into an anti-Koch ad blitz. That money never materialized, but, according to Newsday, Trump did donate a small amount to Koch’s primary opponent, David Dinkins—who defeated Koch and replaced him at City Hall.