Group items tagged

All of which is fuelling the fear that it will be Britain’s fate to get the worst of both worlds: a higher death rate than comparable countries and a more ravaged economy. That dread now radiates from Tories like a pungent musk

public approval of the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen to a new low of just 3 in 10.

the inevitable public inquiry is convened it will have to decide how much blame should be allocated to longstanding institutional weaknesses and how much can be attributed to the actions and inactions of particular individuals.

Many Tory MPs are flashing knives at Public Health England, which they blame for early mis-steps in establishing an adequate testing regime

Where energy ought to have been directed to making important things happen, it was expended on concocting brags that might temporarily garner approving headlines or neutralise hostile ones. The result has been a persistent pattern of over-promising and underperforming.

The scientific advisers on the Sage group flagged up the vulnerability of care homes as early as February. Yet the government devoted more zeal to protecting the prime minister’s rule-breaking adviser, Dominic Cummings, than it did to safeguarding the lives of the fragile elderly. A just-released report by the National Audit Office estimates that 25,000 elderly people were discharged from hospitals into homes without being tested at the height of the pandemic.

Time and again, I have heard accounts from inside government of warnings given and action exhorted only for the machinery never to properly click into gear for want of decisive leadership.

Boris Johnson was complacently late to grasp the gravity of the crisis and then animated by a panic-driven urge to try to impress the public by throwing out pledges he could not deliver. One critique, often to be heard now even from erstwhile admirers, is that his outfit at Number 10 is not so much a government as a campaign

, this Number 10 is obsessed with polling and focus grouping, which they conduct daily, and how things are projected in the media. “The problem with this government is that it is led by journalists,”

The Tories have been in power for more than a decade and the NHS’s current configuration is a result of the “Lansley reforms” implemented during David Cameron’s premiership.

His weaknesses have been magnified because he deliberately appointed a cabinet conspicuously light on talent – “the nodding dogs”, as one senior Tory labels them. The cabinet were chosen not for their ability, dynamism or independence of thought, but for their devotion to a hard Brexit and obedience to Number 10.

No other European country has made such an abysmal mess of reopening schools.

Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites

Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think.

she is devoted to endlessly exploring, acknowledging, and seeking to undo whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to do this “work,” as adherents of this paradigm often put it, renders one racist.

Her assumption that all people have a racist bias is reasonable—science has demonstrated it. The problem is what DiAngelo thinks must follow as the result of it.

DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward.

Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism.

When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times

For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality.

DiAngelo’s depiction of white psychology shape-shifts according to what her dogma requires.

iAngelo also writes as if certain shibboleths of the Black left—for instance, that all disparities between white and Black people are due to racism of some kind—represent the incontestable truth.

The problem is that White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult.

We must consider what is required to pass muster as a non-fragile white person.

Refer to a “bad neighborhood,” and you’re using code for Black; call it a “Black neighborhood,” and you’re a racist; by DiAngelo’s logic, you are not to describe such neighborhoods at all, even in your own head.

You must not ask Black people about their experiences and feelings, because it isn’t their responsibility to educate you. Instead, you must consult books and websites. Never mind that upon doing this you will be accused of holding actual Black people at a remove, reading the wrong sources, or drawing the wrong lessons from them.

You must never cry in Black people’s presence as you explore racism, not even in sympathy, because then all the attention goes to you instead of Black people.

If you object to any of the “feedback” that DiAngelo offers you about your racism, you are engaging in a type of bullying “whose function is to obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium.”

That is a pretty strong charge to make against people who, according to DiAngelo, don’t even conceive of their own whiteness

if you are white, make no mistake: You will never succeed in the “work” she demands of you. It is lifelong, and you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner.

Whites aren’t even allowed to say, “I don’t feel safe.” Only Black people can say that.

She does stress that she is not dealing with a good/bad dichotomy and that your inner racist does not make you a bad person. But with racism limned as such a gruesome spiritual pollution, harbored by individuals moreover entrapped in a society within which they exert racism merely by getting out of bed, the issue of gray zones seems beside the point.

By the end, DiAngelo has white Americans muzzled, straitjacketed, tied down, and chloroformed for good measure—but for what?

herein is the real problem with White Fragility. DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society.

DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous.

A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people.

In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.

n 2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me.

Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings.

I cannot imagine that any Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.

DiAngelo preaches that Black History Month errs in that it “takes whites out of the equation”—which means that it doesn’t focus enough on racism. Claims like this get a rise out of a certain kind of room, but apparently DiAngelo wants Black History Month to consist of glum recitations of white perfidy.

Or simply dehumanized us.

DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking.

The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.

John McWhorter is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He teaches linguistics at Columbia University, hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley, and is the author, most recently, of Words on the Move.

There is also the inevitability of backlash: History shows that there are always people who turn to hate in the very moments that others find hope.

We know little about how to combat hate effectively; the federal government has cut funding for programs to counter right-wing extremism and blocked the dissemination of data on the subject

Ms. Olsen had never thought too hard about being white. Like many white Americans, she never had to. She grew up in a largely white school district in Eugene, Ore., and she did not interact meaningfully with people of other races until her late 20s, when she moved to Portland for her embalming career. She had paid such little mind to race as a concept that there was a flatness to her understanding of it, a one-dimensionality susceptible to simplified reasoning.

To Ms. Olsen, these people seemed smart. Just as important, she told me, “they seemed immensely interested in me and my life, and they wanted to be my friend.” To someone who “grew up without friends, that was very appealing. It made me feel like I must be doing something right.”

Then came the election of President Barack Obama. “Right-wing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool,” a Homeland Security report noted in 2009. The first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Stormfront registered nearly 100,000 new users.

The most basic definition of hate is personal animus, but there is a more useful, and frightening, description: Hate is a social bond — a shared currency — and it abhors a vacuum

“social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can coexist with, even substitute for, hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”

So can a need for validation, visibility and purpose. For someone like Ms. Olsen, hate becomes a cure for loneliness.

People who are drawn to the hate movement have an acute desire to make sense of their place in the world. There’s a gap between who they are and who they think they should be, what they have and what they want. They want to seize or regain what they believe is a rightful status. They want empowerment, with minimal effort. Hate promises them that.

White Citizens’ Councils and other organs of resistance emerged in reaction to the civil rights movement. Hate fed on opposition to second- and third-wave feminism, the expansion of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shifting racial demographics.

She wasn’t always sure that she believed what she said when she echoed her new friends’ views, but what mattered was that they wanted to keep talking to her; all she had to do was log in and start typing. If playing a part graduated to instinct, maybe they would like her even more.

Ms. Olsen was part of this wave, which also found fuel in the xenophobia of the post-Sept. 11 era and public disgust with the financial crisis.

Many people rationalize their racism — or even refuse to call it that — by insisting that it isn’t as bad as someone else’s. They could spit on immigrants instead of complaining in private about foreigners stealing American jobs. They could put Jewish people in camps instead of muttering about how they have too much power.

Bigotry has many branches, some bigger and stronger than others, but they all derive from the same trunk. No wonder, then, that when “somebody said he didn’t like Black people, or he told a racist joke, or he said illegal immigration is wrong,” Ms. Olsen recalled, she assumed he might be interested in becoming a neo-Nazi, too.

n her telling, Ms. Olsen decided to leave the hate movement because she realized that she could not tolerate violence. That may have been part of it, but when I spoke to her, it was clear that she also exited because the movement stopped giving her the meaning and camaraderie she wanted.

People don’t leave the hate movement because a veil lifts and they are suddenly able to see hate for what it is. The truth is more disappointing. They leave because it makes sense to them and for them, because the value hate once gave them has diminished or evaporated. Ms. Olsen seemed to know this, writing once on a blog, “The reality is, people rarely change their personality or ideals during adulthood, and if they do, it needs to be something they do on their own, for themselves.”

Some prominent white supremacists now point to the birth of Black Lives Matter as a pivotal moment in their radicalization

Perhaps more people than ever will emerge from 2020 on the side of justice. Still, there are those who will turn to hate, finding it — perversely — to be a kind of balm.

Research shows that a shared sense of racial identity is hardening among white Americans. The political scientist Ashley Jardina has found that some 20 percent of white Americans, roughly 40 million people, now have “strong levels of group consciousness,” meaning they “feel a sense of discontent over the status of their group.”

Having group consciousness does not automatically translate into prejudice, but the hate movement is poised to exploit white people’s grievances and fears.

What can we do to stop it? There aren’t easy answers.

while reporting on the hate movement, I found it difficult not to feel despondent. Magnifying my gloom were encounters with white liberals who made statements that I recognized as precisely the kind of bait white nationalists use to make their case to the mainstream.

The least Americans can ask of one another is to have frank conversations about whiteness, no matter how uncomfortable.

People concerned about the tide of hate can also work to empower minority populations, tackle inequality, foster dialogue about prejudice and root discriminatory ideas out of American life. They can vote bigots out of office. They can support the work of groups like Life After Hate, which helps people leave far-right groups.

First, though, combating hate requires understanding it. Not what it seems to be, but what it actually is. That includes who embraces it, and why.

So much of history is made up of small moves. Hope, too, dwells in increments. There is hope if white Americans can confront the true face of hate and their own complicity in bigotry. There is hope if we can see white nationalism as a crisis of individual and collective responsibility.

But Mr. Trump has appeared to generate a countervailing enthusiasm among both educated white voters and minority voters. The turnout of both groups spiked in 2018 as well.

If Mr. Trump is to be successful turning out new voters, there are plenty in swing states, which remain bastions of the non-college-educated white vote. But most of these states have also been undergoing the same changes in the electorate as the country as a whole.

The table below shows the shifts in the voting-age population of the Trump coalition (white voters with no college degrees) and the Biden coalition (minority voters and white voters with college degrees).

“Over time these underlying shifts are really quite potent,” Mr. Teixeira said, “and would suggest that just getting rid of Trump may not be enough for the Republicans to right the ship.”

The Senate was initially going to recess, but now the trial will not break for the Sabbath and is expected to continue Friday evening and Saturday.

Democrats, including President Joe Biden, see acquittal as the assured outcome and don't want the trial to further impede the new President's agenda.

Trump himself, who has revolved through multiple legal teams as he prepares for the trial, is more concerned about the effect the trial may have on his public image, according to one person who has discussed the matter with him, rather than the potential outcome

The former president has kept a low profile since making a dramatic exit from Washington in the hours before Biden was sworn in and has been eager for his trial to end so he can start his post-presidency life, which people close to him have said is likely to include paid speeches overseas and domestic rallies targeting those who crossed him politically

His defense team was assembled a little more than a week ago after the five attorneys initially brought on to represent him all left days before legal briefs were due, which one person described as a mutual decision while another said it was over a difference in strategy.

The two attorneys arrived in Washington with their staffs Monday to conduct a walkthrough on the Senate floor where they will make their client's case. The walkthrough was almost identical to the one that happened a year ago, although instead of working out of the vice president's Senate office, Trump's team will set up shop in a sizable room next door to it for this trial.

Like he did during his first impeachment, Trump is expected to watch his attorneys on television from his private quarters at Mar-a-Lago

Trump watched nearly every minute of the first trial, becoming so consumed with his team's performance that aides later used the impeachment proceedings as an excuse for why he was distracted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The former president has not been as closely involved with the defense as he was the last time around. He was been more "checked out" than expected because he's confident he will be acquitted, one person told CNN.

If Americans couldn't fully wrap their minds around the arcana of a phone call with the Ukrainian President or the complexities of Russian collusion, or follow the quibbling protests over what the meaning of the word "is" is, they could certainly follow the tragic events from the summer of 2020 up to January 6, which led to five people, including a police officer, losing their lives.

House managers laid them out methodically and holistically, revealing a deeply sinister, calculated plot to overthrow the government; overturn the election' harm or even kill Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers -- and assault any police officers who'd get in their way.

They brought brace knuckles, stun guns and other weapons. They went "hunting" in the halls looking for lawmakers to hurt

it's overwhelmingly clear that the instigator is Trump himself.

The dots were meticulously connected, linking Trump's incitement of his supporters in the months leading up to the November election to the insurrection at the Capitol. There was Trump in his own words, telling them to fight. There were his supporters in theirs, telling him they would.

With everything we now know -- and we don't even know it all yet -- it's clear this trial is not about politics. It's not about Republicans or Democrats.It's not about free speech, and whether we should lock someone up for saying things we don't like.It's about the near-overthrow of our government, the deaths of five people, the assault on our law enforcement, the unimaginable danger our elected officials, their staffs and in some cases their families were put in, and the clear-as-day connection to the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States. It's nothing less than the "crime of the century."

The combination of China’s early coronavirus recovery, the catastrophic health and economic situation in the United States, an administration whose “America First” instincts have turned the country inward, and a mostly every-country-for-itself response to the global pandemic has put China in the geopolitical driver’s seat. So far, Beijing has squandered the opportunity in dramatic fashion

The United States, however, should take small comfort in that realization. The underlying dynamics remain: China is pulling out of recession faster than North America and Europe, its military grows stronger each year, and countries in economic doldrums may exit the pandemic more reliant on Chinese capital and markets rather than less so. Chinese leaders believe that the future is theirs, as they pass fractious and declining democracies like the United States on the way up.

America has been lucky that Beijing hasn’t acted with more deftness this time around. The world has experienced a six-month geopolitical vacuum, and China has filled it poorly. What happens next may have less to do with Chinese than American policy. An active, revitalized United States can once again compete effectively with China and resume its role as a global leader. If it does, the past six months could look more like an aberration than a prologue.

“I think, generally, the last two months have been a good reminder that most people made up their minds about Donald Trump a long time ago, and nothing is going to change their opinion,”

“If they like him, everything he does just affirms why they like him, and if they don’t like him, everything he does reaffirms why they don’t like him.”

In last week’s national CNN poll, two-thirds of white men without a college degree said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak

While 55 percent of blue-collar men said in the CNN poll that they are comfortable returning to their normal routines, 68 percent of college-educated white women said they are not

twice as many non-college-educated white men said Trump is providing helpful, rather than harmful, information on the virus; college-educated white women were more than three times as likely to say that his information was harmful rather than helpful,

non-college-educated white women exhibit more strain over the outbreak than college-educated white men. In the Navigator polling, these women were considerably more likely to say that they worry about falling behind on bills. And while a slight majority of the men in the CNN survey said they are comfortable returning to their routines, three-fifths of the women said they are not.

while these women report more unease over the pandemic, they are more likely than the men to praise Trump’s response to it. In the Navigator polling, 56 percent of the women said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, compared with just 44 percent of the men

education trumps gender in shaping attitudes about the president’s performance.

Operatives in both parties believe that Trump’s volatile and often-erratic pronouncements about the outbreak—such as suggesting the use of bleach and ultraviolet light to treat patients, and announcing that he is taking hydroxychloroquine—have compounded existing doubts among many well-educated white voters about his fitness for the presidency.

the 2018 exit polls generally showed the GOP suffering some erosion among blue-collar white women, with the party’s advantage slipping to 14 percentage points. The latest round of surveys suggests that, among those women, Trump has stabilized at that diminished level, leading by roughly a dozen points (or slightly less) among them.

ox News surveys last month in Pennsylvania and Michigan put Biden even among non-college-educated white women, and he led Trump among them in the latest Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin.

Among nonwhite voters, gender, not education, remains the key divide

When England started its first phase five days earlier on 13 May, new daily cases had fallen but were still about 75% of its late-April to early-May peak.

On Monday, when Ireland started phase one of its gradual easing, new daily cases had tumbled to about 11% of the country’s late April peak.

he UK appeared to lack sufficient testing and contact-tracing capacity for such a surge, said L’Estrange. “Perhaps they can get it up and running quickly. But they’re behind the curve and playing catch-up. You have to have sufficient testing and contact-tracing capacity ready to go before you ease restrictions. They’ve put the cart before the horse. They released the virus without having the apparatus in place to control it, and they’ve released it at a high level.”

Ireland’s lockdown easing started after England’s and is scheduled to go more cautiously and slowly, with the last phase starting on 10 August, and schools opening in September. England’s plan envisages schools starting to open on 1 June and the final phase of lifting starting on 4 July.

the decision about schools was political. “It is not a scientific decision. Scientists can offer some advice.”

An editorial in the British Medical Journal this week excoriated the UK’s record on testing and tracing. “Meaningless political soundbites promising to recruit 18,000 contact tracers, test 200,000 people a day, or invest in unjustified contact tracing apps, divert focus and could lead to more deaths. These headline grabbing schemes should be replaced by locality-led strategies rooted in communicable disease control,” it said.

He rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.

Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety.

Trump’s transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.

Take the poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90 percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58 think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36 percent who think blacks are.

He comprehends his audience all too well

Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten our cultural and ethnic character.

That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who say that blacks do

Another key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African Americans to succeed

The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes that Trump arouses white Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”

In 2016, Vox reports, Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per the raw exit polls)

Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson dismissed, as gently as possible, the crackpot allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy using rogue voting machines, he was savaged across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless quisling. Lesson learned.

fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial, religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump: The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.

Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”

This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.

In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes the growth of “a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”

“Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.”

As Republican strategists well appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.

In launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.

Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.

Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious “other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.

As Trevor Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times, Trump “is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”

Support for Trump’s wall is nearly unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support separating children from their parents when a family enters the country without permission.

Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest psychological illness: his imperishable narcissism; his ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and he cannot let go.

Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.

a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology more than lived experience.

This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites. After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?

Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth, did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the prescription for worker-friendly policies.

For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for the country.

The best thing that could happen educationally is an investment in community colleges that enhances their value, rigor and prestige.

I sometimes fear the Trump administration has reduced us, emotionally and intellectually, to a single thought, played like a Gregorian chant on an endless loop: Just. Make. It. Stop.

Now, all of a sudden, we’re being reminded that we have real problems, like rising inequality, collapsing social mobility and the mounting financial burden one generation is placing on the next.

Biden’s higher education plan would make community college free for up to two years. For those who want to go further he’d make public colleges tuition free for most students and liberate many of the poor kids who were lured into signing up for an ungodly amount of debt.

t: I have no problem making college more affordable, but I’m generally against making things free on the view that people rarely value, or stick with, what they don’t pay for.

Anyway, the point here is just to think fresh. After four years of Trump, discussing these things feels a bit like seeing the sun and hearing those chirping birds you were just talking about for the first time in years.

We have gone from staffing top jobs with T-ball players to recruiting major league veterans. The former proved to be a disaster; but the big-leaguers have yet to prove themselves.

The shift in the quality of the executive branch raises a host of interesting questions:

Can Biden rebuild an executive branch that Trump demoralized and hollowed out?Can governance based on the best available facts produce results?

Can Biden prove centrist government is alive and well — and can win over voters?Can Biden seize an opportunity when more Americans are sensitized to issues of racial justice to make significant reforms and create a new spirit of reconciliation?

In Florida, for instance, where seniors make up around 30% of voters, Biden's winning with voters 65 and older. Last time around, Clinton lost those voters by nearly 10 points in the final preelection polls

No Democrat has really come close to winning with voters 65 and older. The last time the network exit polls had any Democrat winning with seniors was in 2000, with Al Gore. Even then, it was just by 4 points, and most other data sets did not have Gore triumphant with this group.

As I pointed out previously, Biden's been doing better with seniors than Clinton since before the pandemic hit earlier this year. A year ago, he was up 11 points over Trump in a CNN poll.

Whatever the root cause, losing seniors is one big reason that Trump is a significant underdog at this point. They're about 25% of the electorate. When you're doing 15 points or more worse with a quarter of voters, you'll likely be in big trouble. And so it is for Trump.

It's not clear that investigators ever had concrete evidence of a relevant bank transfer from the Egyptian bank. But multiple sources said there was sufficient information to justify the subpoena and keep the criminal campaign finance investigation open after the Mueller probe ended.

Justice Department confirmed that when the special counsel's office shut down in 2019, Mueller transferred an ongoing foreign campaign contribution investigation to prosecutors in Washington. Some of CNN's sources have confirmed that the case, which Mueller cryptically called a "foreign campaign contribution" probe, was in fact the Egypt investigation.

The probe was confirmed this week by a Justice Department senior official who responded to CNN's queries: "The case was first looked at by the Special Counsel investigators who failed to bring a case, and then it was looked at by the US attorney's office, and career prosecutors in the national security section, who also were unable to bring a case. Based upon the recommendations of both the FBI and those career prosecutors, Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney, formally closed the case in July."

there could have been money from an Egyptian bank that ended up backing Trump's last-minute injection of $10 million into his 2016 campaign, according to two of the sources.

Yet neither the special counsel's office, nor prosecutors who carried on the case after Mueller, got a complete picture of the President's financial entanglements. Prosecutors in Washington even proposed subpoenaing financial records tied to Trump, before top officials finally concluded this summer they had reached a dead end, the sources said.

Mueller's primary task was to investigate Russian government attempts to interfere in the 2016 election, which had consumed the political and investigative conversations in the early days of Trump's presidency. But Mueller's mandate also allowed him to take on related criminal investigations, which in this case included another probe of potential foreign influence connected to the campaign.

Zainab Ahmad, a former international terrorism prosecutor, and Brandon Van Grack, a national security and counterintelligence specialist, co-led it, according to sources. Public records also show they focused on cases separate from other trial attorneys in the special counsel's office and had senior titles equivalent to other Mueller team leaders.

Mueller's team tried to understand both the $10 million contribution Trump gave to his campaign 11 days before the 2016 election and the Trump campaign's ties to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, according to sources and redacted interview records released from the Mueller investigation.

One official familiar with the work said some investigators believed the Egypt inquiry presented a more direct avenue for Mueller's team to examine Trump's finances, in part because it did not have an obvious tie to Russia.

Soon enough, the bank was arguing it shouldn't have to give Mueller records because it was interchangeable with the foreign government that owned it. The US courts disagreed repeatedly, saying the company couldn't be immune from the Mueller team subpoena.  

Mueller's office pressed witnesses to explain how the Trump-Sisi meeting in late 2016 came about. Ahmad, whose aims on the investigation were cloaked in secrecy, was repeatedly present in interviews touching on both Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign and the campaign's ties to Egypt.

In a session months later, Bannon was asked about Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign, according to another recent release of Mueller's interview memos.

Mueller asked the President, "Did any person or entity inform you during the campaign that any foreign government or foreign leader, other than Russia or Vladimir Putin, had provided, wished to provide, or offered to provide tangible support to your campaign?" Trump wrote back in his written answers that he had "no recollection of being told during the campaign" of support from a foreign government.

Needing a final push before Election Day as the polls tightened in 2016, the Trump campaign was running low on cash. Trump's top campaign officials scrambled to convince Trump to inject money, according to memos of witness interviews from the investigation and contemporaneous news reports. Trump lagged well behind a pledge he made to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Trump wrote his campaign a $10 million check, publicly calling it a loan. Campaign finance records showed it as his single largest political contribution, by far, and not one the campaign would reimburse him for.

When the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, heard arguments in the case in December 2018, security cleared journalists from an entire floor of the federal courthouse, allowing attorneys involved in the case to enter and exit the building and the courtroom without being seen.

The case even landed before the Supreme Court in early 2019. The high court ultimately declined the company's bid to block Mueller's subpoena in March 2019.  Even then, however, the standoff between US prosecutors and the Egyptian bank ended in a stalemate. 

In the end, it was the bank's word against the investigators. The court proceedings ended with prosecutors getting nothing more than what the bank was willing to turn over, and the bank was excused from hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that had accrued for defying the subpoena. It appeared to be a dead end -- and not justification enough for Mueller to keep his office open to finish this case alone.

In late March 2019, shortly after Mueller's investigation concluded, Howell, overseeing final court proceedings in the Egyptian bank's subpoena case,  asked a prosecutor point-blank if the investigation was over. "No, it's continuing. I can say it's continuing robustly," David Goodhand of the DC US attorney's office told the court.

Liu told prosecutors she didn't believe they had met the standard needed to seek the records. The investigation stagnated, but Liu didn't close the case. She declined to comment for this story.

It's unclear how much activity occurred after Liu rejected the subpoena request. Prosecutors who disagreed with her decision believed it was now impossible to resolve questions about Trump's 2016 campaign contribution. Liu told people in her office that if the investigation had produced enough evidence, Mueller would have made the decision to take additional steps, according to sources.

On paper, Mueller described the investigation with only three vague words: "Foreign campaign contribution."

Republicans in the Trump years have gotten used to competing under rules biased in their favor. They have come to fear that unless the rules favor them, they will lose. And so they have learned to think of biased rules as necessary, proper, and just—and to view any effort to correct those rules as a direct attack on their survival.

What I wrote in 2017 has only become more true since: “We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.”

“No one could do anything to stop him.” No one has stopped Trump from directing taxpayer dollars to his personal businesses.

Trump’s clemency to Stone reminded others who might hold guilty knowledge—people like Paul Manafort and Ghislaine Maxwell—of the potential benefits to them of staying silent about Trump.

How did Trump get away with using a public power for personal advantage in this way? There’s nothing to stop him. The Constitution vests the pardon power in the president.

a second-term Trump could demand that associates break the law for him—and then protect them when they are caught and face punishment. He could pardon his relatives—and even try to pardon himself.

Abuse of Government Resources for Personal Gain

Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him,

No one has stopped him from defying congressional subpoenas looking into whether he was violating tax and banking laws. No one has stopped him from hiring and promoting his relatives.

Trump has a lot to hide, both as president and as a businessman. The price of his political and economic survival has been the destruction of oversight by Congress and the discrediting of honest reporting by responsible media

No one has stopped him from using government resources for partisan purposes. No one has stopped him from pressuring and cajoling foreign governments to help his reelection campaign.

No one has stopped him from using his power over the Postal Service to discourage voting that he thinks will hurt him.

The Hatch Act forbids most uses of government resources for partisan purposes. By long-standing courtesy, however, enforcement of that law against senior presidential appointees is left to the president. It’s just assumed that the president will want to comply. But what if he does not? The independent federal agency tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, has found nine senior Trump aides in violation of the law, and has recommended that Trump request their resignation. He has ignored that recommendation.

“No one could do anything to stop him.” In his first term, Trump purged the inspectors general from Cabinet departments and punished whistleblowers. In a second Trump term, the administration would operate ever more opaquely to cover up corruption and breaches in national security.

The Justice Department would be debauched ever more radically, becoming Trump’s own law firm and spending taxpayer dollars to defend him against the consequences of his personal wrongdoing. The hyper-politicization of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments would spread to other agencies.

Directing Public Funds to Himself and His CompaniesIn the 230-year history of the United States, no president before Trump had ever tried to direct public dollars to his own companies—so no Congress had ever bothered to specifically outlaw such activity.

Trump’s superpower is his absolute shamelessness. He steals in plain view. He accepts bribes in a hotel located smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. His supporters do not object. His party in Congress is acquiescent. This level of corruption in American life is unprecedented.

A willingness to line the Trump family’s pockets has become a mark of obeisance and identity, like wearing cowboy boots during the George W.  Bush administration

The result of this almost-universal Republican complicity in Trump’s personal corruption has been the neutering of Congress’s ability to act when corruption is disclosed.

Republicans in the House cheerfully support Trump when he defies subpoenas from Democratic chairs, setting a precedent that probably will someday be used against them.

Abuse of the Pardon PowerOn July 10, 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone. As Stone’s own communications showed, he had acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks in 2016. Had Stone cooperated with federal investigators, the revelations might have been dangerous to Trump. Instead, Stone lied to Congress and threatened other witnesses.Just as Stone was supposed to go to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Commutation was more useful to the cover-up than an outright pardon. A commuted person retains his Fifth Amendment right not to testify; a pardoned person loses that right.

In a second Trump term, radical gerrymandering and ever more extreme voter suppression by Republican governors would become the party’s only path to survival in a country where a majority of the electorate strongly opposes Trump and his party. The GOP would complete its transformation into an avowedly antidemocratic party.

Inciting Political ViolenceTrump has used violence as a political resource since he first declared his candidacy, in the summer of 2015. But as his reelection prospects have dimmed in 2020, political violence has become central to Trump’s message. He wants more of it

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox & Friends on August 27. Two nights later, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters headed into downtown Portland, Oregon, firing paintball guns and pepper spray, driving toward a confrontation during which one of them was shot dead.

The people best positioned to regulate the level of political violence in the country are local police, whom Trump has again and again urged to do their work in ways that support him, no matter how “tough” that requires them to be. The police are represented by unions often aligned with the Trump campaign

“I can tell you,” Trump said in a March 2019 interview with Breitbart News, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Trump’s appeal is founded on a racial consciousness and a racial resentment that have stimulated white racist terrorism in the United States and the world, from the New Zealand mosque slaughter (whose perpetrator invoked Trump) to the Pittsburgh synagogue murders to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. In recent weeks, political violence has caused those deaths in Kenosha and Portland

It’s a trick of authoritarian populists like Trump to proclaim themselves leaders of “the people,” even as large majorities of the electorate reject them. The authoritarian populist defines “the people” to exclude anyone who thinks differently. Only his followers count as legitimate citizens.

Legend has it that in the 1870s, “Boss” William Tweed, the famously corrupt New York City politician, taunted his critics by saying, “What are you going to do about it?”* Trump’s relentless defiance of law and decency does the same. Congress has done nothing. So it’s up to voters.

On Friday, those figures had passed 45 million cases and more than 1.1 million deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Taiwan's landmark achievement comes in a week when France and Germany are enacting new lockdowns and the United States identified a record 88,000-plus cases in a day. The state of Florida, which has a similar population size to Taiwan, with approximately 21 million people, identified 4,188 cases on Wednesday alone.

Taiwan's response focused on speed. Taiwanese authorities began screening passengers on direct flights from Wuhan, where the virus was first identified, on December 31, 2019 -- back when the virus was mostly the subject of rumors and limited reporting.

Taiwan confirmed its first reported case of the novel coronavirus on January 21 and then banned Wuhan residents from traveling to the island. All passengers arriving from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao were required to undergo screening.

All this happened before Wuhan itself went into lockdown on January 23.

By March, Taiwan banned all foreign nationals from entering the island, apart from diplomats, residents and those with special entry visas.

One is geography -- Taiwan is an island, so it's easier for officials to control entry and exit through its borders.

Taiwan also had experience on its side. After suffering through the deadly outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, Taiwan worked to build up its capacity to deal with a pandemic

Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE.

The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing.

"Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.

“at how profoundly divided we’ve become. Donald Trump capitalized on that — he didn’t invent it — but someday soon we’re going to have figure out how to bring our country together, because right now we’re on a dangerous path, so very dangerous, and so vulnerable to bad actors.”

I can’t know all their motives for wanting to speak to me, but one thing many of them share is a desire to make clear that the alarm bells heard across the country are ringing loudly inside the administration too, where there are public servants looking to avert conflict, at all costs.

History may note that the most important thing that happened that day had little to do with the religious leader and his large life, save a single thread of his legacy.

You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces.

“That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.”

He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence. Officials I interviewed described this scenario again and again.

Even if it takes weeks or months before the result is known and fully certified, it could be a peaceful process, where all votes are reasonably counted, allowing those precious electors to be distributed based on a fair fight. The anxiety we’re feeling now could turn out to be a lot of fretting followed by nothing much, a political version of Y2K.Or not.

For Mr. Trump, the meeting was a face-to-face lifeline call. When he returned to Washington, he couldn’t stop talking about troop withdrawals, starting with Afghanistan. During his campaign, he had frequently mentioned his desire to bring home troops from these “endless wars.”

“were it Obama or Bush, or whatever, they’d meet Billy Graham’s grandson and they’d be like ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and take it to heart, but then they’d go and they’d at least try to validate it with the policymakers, or their military experts. But no, with him, it’s like improv. So, he gets this stray electron and he goes, ‘OK, this is the ground truth.’ ”

Senior leadership of the U.S. government went into a panic. Capitol Hill, too. John Bolton, who was still the national security adviser then, and Virginia Boney, then the legislative affairs director of the National Security Council, hit the phones, calling more than a dozen senators from both parties.

“Is there any way we can reverse this?” he pleaded. “What can we do?”

Mr. Kelly was almost done cleaning out his office. He, too, had had enough. He and Mr. Trump had been at each other every day for months. Later, he told The Washington Examiner, “I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that.”

“I think the biggest shock he had — ’cause his assumption was the generals, ‘my generals,’ as he used to say and it used to make us cringe — was this issue of, I think, he just assumed that generals would be completely loyal to the kaiser,”

In February 2019, William Barr arrived as attorney general, having auditioned for the job with a 19-page memo arguing in various and creative ways that the president’s powers should be exercised nearly without limits and his actions stand virtually beyond review.

“President Trump serves the American people by keeping his promises and taking action where the typical politician would provide hollow words,” she said. “The president wants capable public servants in his administration who will enact his America First agenda and are faithful to the Constitution — these principles are not mutually exclusive. President Trump is delivering on his promise to make Washington accountable again to the citizens it’s meant to serve and will always fight for what is best for the American people.”

To replace Mr. Coats, Trump selected Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, a small-town mayor-turned-congressman with no meaningful experience in intelligence — who quickly withdrew from consideration after news reports questioned his qualifications; he lacked support among key Republican senators as well.

There are many scenarios that might unfold from here, nearly all of them entailing weeks or even months of conflict, and giving an advantage to the person who already runs the U.S. government.

“sends letters constantly now, berating, asking for the sun, moon, stars, the entire Russia investigation, and then either going on the morning talk shows or calling the attorney general whenever he doesn’t get precisely what he wants.” The urgency, two F.B.I. officials said, ratcheted up after Mr. Trump was told three weeks ago that he wouldn’t get the “deliverables” he wanted before the election of incriminating evidence about those who investigated and prosecuted his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The speculation is that they could both be fired immediately after the election, when Mr. Trump will want to show the cost paid for insufficient loyalty and to demonstrate that he remains in charge.

Nov. 4 will be a day, said one of the former senior intelligence officials, “when he’ll want to match word with deed.” Key officials in several parts of the government told me how they thought the progression from the 3rd to the 4th might go down.

A group could just directly attack a polling place, injuring poll workers of both parties, and creating a powerful visual — an American polling place in flames, like the ballot box in Massachusetts that was burned earlier this week — that would immediately circle the globe.

Would that mean that Mr. Trump caused any such planned activities or improvisations? No, not directly. He’s in an ongoing conversation — one to many, in a twisted e pluribus unum — with a vast population, which is in turn in conversations — many to many — among themselves.

“stand back and stand by” instructions? Is Mr. Trump telling his most fervent supporters specifically what to do? No. But security officials are terrified by the dynamics of this volatile conversation.

Conservative media could then say the election was being stolen, summoning others to activate, maybe violently. This is the place where cybersecurity experts are on the lookout for foreign actors to amplify polling location incidents many times over, with bots and algorithms and stories written overseas that slip into the U.S. digital diet.

Those groups are less structured, more like an “ideology or movement,” as Mr. Wray described them in his September testimony. But, as a senior official told me, the numbers on the left are vast.

That army Trump can direct in the difficult days ahead and take with him, wherever he goes. He may activate it. He may bargain with it, depending on how the electoral chips fall. It’s his insurance policy.

Inside the Biden campaign they are calling this “too big to rig.”

Races tend to tighten at the end, but the question is not so much the difference between the candidates’ vote totals, or projections of them, as it is what Mr. Trump can get his supporters to believe. Mr. Trump might fairly state, at this point, that he can get a significant slice of his base to believe anything.

There were enormous efforts to do so, largely but not exclusively by the Russians, in 2016, when election systems in every state were targeted.

The lie easily outruns truth — and the best “disinformation,” goes a longtime C.I.A. rule, “is actually truthful.” It all blends together. “Then the president then substantiates it, gives it credence, gives it authority from the highest office,” says the senior government official.

Mr. Trump will claim some kind of victory on Nov. 4, even if it’s a victory he claims was hijacked by fraud — just as he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s three million-vote lead in the popular vote was the result of millions of votes from unauthorized immigrants.

In the final few weeks of the campaign, and during Mr. Trump’s illness, he’s done two things that seem contradictory: seeking votes from anyone who might still be swayed and consolidating and activating his army of most ardent followers.

The F.B.I. has been under siege since this past summer, according to a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The White House is using friendly members of Congress to try to get at certain information under the guise of quote-unquote, oversight, but really to get politically helpful information before the election,”

“They’re the reason he took off the damned mask when he got to the White House” from Walter Reed, the official said. “Those people eat that up, where any reasonable, rational person would be horrified.

You ask it to be refilmed, and you take off your mask, which, in my mind, has become a signal to his core base of supporters that are willing to put themselves at risk and danger to show loyalty to him.”

Not since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 run had the state gone for the GOP nominee.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker, after all, had a lock on the state for years, and proved that the GOP could prevail there with the right mix of muscle, moxie and money.

His message to white, working-class voters plainly resonated. Clinton, notably, never visited the state as the nominee. Black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee sank through the basement.

“But Wisconsin!” was only second to “But her emails!” in the annoying outbursts political reporters have been using as shorthand for the last four years.

Heading into 2020, Democrats knew they needed to offset the Republican suburban counties northwest of Milwaukee, but not by much. Trump in 2016 underperformed Mitt Romney’s numbers in those suburbs by 7 percentage points.

Biden appears on better footing than Clinton — in no small part due to his running mate Kamala Harris whose historic run is expected to energize Black voters.

Clinton at this point four years ago was up 6.5 percentage points, according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages. Biden is up 6.4 percentage points in the same meta-analysis. A Washington Post/ ABC News poll released yesterday suggested Biden’s lead to be an actual 17 percentage points.

Very, very few political pros believe this to be the case, citing the fact no other polls show it to be that much of a runaway for the former VP. The most plausible reason Republicans aren’t despondent about Wisconsin comes down to who is expected to show up: While Democrats have almost doubled their early voting numbers from 2016, Republicans are up four-fold.

That year, they had a three-point increase in their support of Obama over 2008. But, according to one study, Black voter participation in Wisconsin fell 20 percent between 2012 and 2016.

In August, police responding to reports of a domestic incident shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back four times, leaving him paralyzed. Deep unrest followed in Kenosha, about 45 minutes south of Milwaukee. Protestors took to the streets, demanding justice for Blake.

Both Trump and Biden visited the state after the shooting, giving Black voters a clear view of what their choices were come November. Trump stood with the police, who say they were responding to a call about someone with an outstanding arrest warrant and, they say, had a knife. Biden called for compassion and police reform.

“Everybody says your vote is your voice, so I feel like if you don’t vote, you are comfortable being silenced.”

Although there were many reasons Clinton didn't win in 2016, a key factor was that she did not energize enough Black, Latino and younger voters to show up to the polls and win her the White House.

Black voters made up 12% of the electorate in 2016 and 89% voted for Clinton over Trump, according to exit polls.

According to Channel 4, the Trump digital campaign targeted the "deterrence" voters with Facebook ads attacking Clinton, including a video that resurfaced the Democratic nominee's past "super predator" comments. The Trump campaign's tactic of "microtargeting" as described by the Channel 4 News report is legal, and used by other campaigns, political strategy firms and interest groups.

In comments to CNN after the hearing, Wylie alleged that Black Americans were particular targets of Cambridge Analytica's "voter disengagement tactics," which he said were used to "discourage or demobilize certain types of people from voting," and that campaigns and political action committees requested voter suppression from Cambridge Analytica.

"Since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook -- what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn't happen today," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN. "We have 35,000 people working to ensure the integrity of our platform, created a political ads library, and have protected more than 200 elections worldwide. We also have rules prohibiting voter suppression and are running the largest voter information campaign in American history."