Monday, June 1, 2020

On Politics: The Nation Seethes

Mass protests denounce racial inequality and police violence: This is your morning tip sheet.
Good morning and welcome to On Politics, a daily political analysis of the 2020 elections based on reporting by New York Times journalists.

With protesters expressing a new level of outrage, President Trump blasts back — and Democrats seek to embrace a rising movement. It’s Monday, and this is your politics tip sheet.

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Where things stand

  • Protests spread rapidly throughout the country over the weekend, beginning with calls for justice for George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pinned down his neck. They blossomed into a nationwide weekend of forceful demands for racial justice, as well as for a decrease in funding for police departments. In cities from New York to Los Angeles, paramilitary-attired police officers squared off with demonstrators by the thousands in some of the most bellicose mass protests of the past half-century.
  • President Trump’s response to the upheaval has followed a familiar pattern: He issued a statement that seemed to condone violence (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, suggesting that the police could be justified in shooting protesters, and invoking a segregationist police chief from the 1960s); it was immediately met by a backlash. Only after a disquieting delay did he try to walk back the statement. It’s roughly the arc of countless similar incidents throughout his presidency, in which he has invariably sought to push the boundary to the right on what is considered acceptable discourse from a commander in chief — or from any major American politician.
  • Trump claimed later on Friday that he had been misinterpreted, and he said at a round-table discussion that he understood “the pain” behind the protests. But the president has made his position clear: He stands largely against the demonstrations, and in favor (as he has tweeted repeatedly since Friday) of “law and order.” His most pointed symbolic move of the weekend came on Sunday, when he said on Twitter that he would designate antifa — a loose collection of left-wing activists whose name stands for “anti-fascist” — as a terrorist organization. It remains unclear whether the president has the legal authority to make such a designation, but the strategic value was obvious: He was pointing attention toward one of today’s most belligerent leftist movements, while seeking to divert the spotlight away from the grievances of community-led protests in Minneapolis and other cities around the country. The growing death toll and economic devastation caused by the coronavirus went virtually unmentioned on Trump’s Twitter feed over the weekend.
  • But what about Joe Biden? For any presumptive Democratic nominee seeking to walk a moderate line, the specter of radical protests from the left in an election year would be grounds for concern. Studies show that since the 1960s, white voters in particular have been irked by the most aggressive forms of black activism. Democrats tend to fare poorly in elections held soon after urban uprisings and protests led by black people that include attacks on property. Democrats do better, the research suggests, in the wake of nonviolent black protest movements. But a rising tide of white racial awareness — driven partly by the circulation of videos showing police killings of black people, and partly by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement — has coincided with an increasingly radical turn among millennials and Generation Z, changing the calculus of the Democratic Party.
  • Rather than simply urging protesters to stop damaging property and lighting structures ablaze, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, sounded acutely aware of the delicate balance he needed to strike on Friday morning. “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish unheard,” Walz said. “Now generations of pain is manifesting itself in front of the world — and the world is watching.” Just moments after Walz addressed Minnesotans, Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck even after he had become unresponsive, was arrested and charged with third-degree murder.
  • The protests have led many black leaders to amplify their demands for tangible commitments from Biden on pursuing racial justice. Those leaders mostly agree that at the very least, Biden should pick a black woman as his running mate. Meanwhile, the past week’s events have turned an unflattering spotlight on Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is seen as a top contender to be Biden’s vice-presidential choice. She has been dogged by complaints about her work as the Hennepin County attorney in the early to mid-2000s; in that position, she declined to prosecute multiple cases against police officers who had been involved in shootings. One such case involved Chauvin, though it was dismissed only after Klobuchar had left her post to join the Senate.
  • Twitter took its first step on Friday to rein in Trump’s onslaughts, attaching a warning to his tweet condoning violence against looters. It was the latest in an ongoing saga between the president and what is still his most-used social media platform (if perhaps no longer his favorite). Unlike the warnings Twitter pasted on two other Trump tweets last week, this one prevented the message from being seen on his feed unless users clicked to view it. Last week, angered that Twitter was putting limits on what he could say, Trump threatened to cut social media companies’ legal protections in lawsuits over defamatory speech, and he sicced his followers on an individual Twitter employee who he (falsely) said had censored him.

Photo of the day

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Demonstrators walked down an avenue in Brooklyn on Saturday. All weekend, they gathered across New York City, with peaceful protests interspersed with outbreaks of violence.

Many Republicans want Mike Pompeo to run for Senate in Kansas. Instead, they’ve got Kris Kobach.

Author Headshot

By Katie Glueck

reporter

For months, national Republicans had hoped that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would return to Kansas and run for the Senate, confident that he could unite the party and keep the seat in Republican hands, as it has been since the 1930s.

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But with Pompeo resistant to a run (not to mention mired in a congressional investigation into his use of State Department funds), and the June 1 filing deadline now at hand, Republicans are bracing for a messy intraparty brawl. And they’re increasingly anxious that a race in this deep-red state could be competitive in the fall.

Their biggest source of worry: the former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, a hard-line Trump supporter who lost the governor’s race to Laura Kelly, a Democrat, in 2018. Kobach is a well-known, if polarizing, figure in the state, and some Republicans worry that he could win the primary but lose the general election to State Senator Barbara Bollier, a moderate Democrat from suburban Kansas City.

Anti-Kobach Republicans appear increasingly inclined to unite around Representative Roger Marshall, a deeply conservative congressman from the rural western part of the state. Any Democrat running statewide in Kansas faces a major uphill battle — but both Republicans would test whether there are limits to the success of a message rooted in fealty to President Trump even in Republican territory.

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Your Monday Briefing

Another night of unrest across the U.S., and the tumultuous journey of Tara Reade

Good morning. Protests raged again last night. Police are responding aggressively. And The Times tells Tara Reade’s story. Let’s start by taking a close look at Minnesota.

‘The Minnesota Paradox’

Protesters in front of the 5th Precinct in Minneapolis on Saturday.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro area has one of the country’s highest standards of living by many measures: high incomes, long life expectancy, a large number of corporate headquarters and a rich cultural scene.

But these headline statistics hide a problem: The Twin Cities also have some of the largest racial inequities in the U.S.

Incomes for white families are similar to those in other affluent metro areas, like Atlanta and Los Angeles. Incomes for black families are close to those in poorer regions like Cleveland and New Orleans:

By The New York Times

Samuel L. Myers Jr., an economist at the University of Minnesota, has named this combination “the Minnesota paradox.” Because the area is predominantly white, the racial gaps can get lost in the overall numbers.

Now, these inequities have captured the nation’s attention, after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police sparked nationwide protests. Several other recent high-profile police killings have also taken place in the region.

Why does the Twin Cities have especially deep racial problems? The region is in many ways a microcosm of the country, albeit a more extreme one. Decades of government policy and private-sector decisions have given benefits to white families that black families haven’t received. (A new article by John Eligon and Julie Bosman goes into more detail.)

When the region built an interstate highway in the 1950s, it spared white neighborhoods but tore up a black neighborhood, in the eastern part of the Rondo area in St. Paul, that was “rich with institutions, like churches, social centers, and clubs,” as Quartz reported.

Working-class white families were able to buy their first homes in the mid-20th century — and start building wealth — with help from federal loan programs that excluded black families, as Richard Rothstein explains in his book “The Color of Law.” More recently, banks have been more likely to turn down black loan applicants, Myers found, even after controlling for income and credit risk.

Consider this recent stat: About 76 percent of Twin Cities households headed by a white person own their home, compared with 24 percent of black households.

“We so want to believe we are not racist,” Doug Hartmann, chairman of the University of Minnesota sociology department, has told The Star Tribune, “we don’t even see the way that race still matters.”

For more: “Minnesota, the longtime Democratic presidential stronghold that Donald Trump nearly won in 2016, has suddenly become ground zero in a campaign that already promised to inflame racial and cultural divides,” Politico writes.

THREE MORE BIG STORIES

1. Protests rage again

Police and protesters near the White House in Washington last night.Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For the sixth day in a row, protesters poured into the streets, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not.

Fires burned outside the White House, and the building turned off almost all of its external lights. In New York, chaos erupted in Union Square, with fires in trash cans. In Birmingham, Ala., protesters began tearing down a Confederate monument. Here are the latest updates.

Police in many cities have responded aggressively, with batons, tear gas and rubber bullets. In some instances,the aggression seems to have been unprovoked. In Minneapolis, as officers apparently fired paint canisters at people on their porches, one officer said, “Light them up.”

Footage of such incidents has been shared widely online, and it has fed further complaints about police behavior. At the same time — in Houston, Flint, New York and elsewhere, some officers showed their solidarity with protesters.

Weiyi Cai, Juliette Love, Jugal K. Patel and Yuliya

Other protest developments:

2. Could protests fuel Covid?

Protesters in Los Angeles on Saturday. Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Health officials are worried that the mass protests may seed new coronavirus outbreaks. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said she was concerned that demonstrations could increase infections in communities of color, which have already been hit disproportionately.

Measuring risk: The protests are in the open air, which could reduce the risk of transmission, and many of the demonstrators have been wearing masks. But shouting can create more respiratory droplets, and police tactics — including tear gas and pepper spray, which cause people to tear up and cough — may also accelerate transmission.

3. Tara Reade’s tumultuous journey

The Tara Reade-Joe Biden story continues to be vexing. On the one hand, false accusations of sexual assault are extremely rare. On the other hand, Reade has a history of making statements that aren’t always true, such as claiming to have a bachelor’s degree from Antioch University Seattle.

To get a better sense of the story — and Reade’s allegation against Biden — The Times has interviewed nearly 100 of her friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors, as well as reviewed court records. That reporting shows how Reade’s pluck and smarts helped her overcome an abusive childhood to find opportunities in acting, politics and law. It also shows that she has a tendency to embellish and has left several former friends feeling disappointed or duped.

Jim Rutenberg, Stephanie Saul and Lisa Lerer offer much more detail in an article that runs more than 5,000 words.

Here’s what else is happening

  • Indian and Chinese troops fought with rocks, clubs and fists along their disputed border in the Himalayas.
  • Two NASA astronauts aboard a spacecraft launched by SpaceX successfully docked with the International Space Station yesterday.
  • Christo, an artist known for large-scale installations — including wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin and zigzagging thousands of saffron-curtained gates throughout Central Park — died at 84. He collaborated with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who began sharing equal billing with him on all their projects in the 1990s.

BACK STORY: LESSONS FROM THE AIDS CRISIS

Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and infectious disease epidemiologist Julia Marcus.CNN

When Julia Marcus saw people being shamed on social media several weeks ago for going to a public park during the lockdown, she had a flashback. It reminded her of the shaming of gay men for having sex during the AIDS crisis. And she thought it was both cruel and unproductive.

So Marcus, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, began speaking out in tweets, television interviews and two articles in The Atlantic.

I think she’s emerged as one of the most thought-provoking writers on the coronavirus, and I wanted to encourage people to think about her argument.

Marcus is calling for a “harm reduction” approach. People won’t remain shuttered in their houses for months, just as they won’t stop having sex. The key instead, she says, is helping people understand how to reduce their risk of contracting the virus — say, by meeting up with a few (masked) friends in a public park. If shaming keeps them from doing so, they may instead meet indoors, which is much more dangerous.

“The abstinence-only and harm reduction approaches share the same goal of reducing illness and death,” she told me, “but from what we know about H.I.V., substance use and other areas of health, harm reduction is far more likely to work.”

For more, check out an infographic on risk that Marcus and Ellie Murray, another epidemiologist, created; and Marcus’s more recent Atlantic article, which promotes the Canadian idea of “double bubbles,” in which two families agree to merge their quarantines.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, DANCE

Take a trip through Bangkok’s food scene

Pla Goong, or spicy Thai shrimp salad.Davide Luciano for The New York Times

Crispy peanut chips, endless rows of seafood and noodles served by boat — these were among the sights one photographer captured in Bangkok’s bustling markets, before the lockdown.

And though you may not be there yourself, perhaps a homemade plate of pla goong, a spicy Thai dish somewhere between shrimp salad and ceviche, can help you pretend.

Lady Gaga is back

It’s been seven years since Lady Gaga’s last dance-pop album, and her newly released “Chromatica” is a highly anticipated return to form. The Times’s pop music editor, Caryn Ganz, writes that the album “has some sparkling vocal moments” and ready-for-the-dance floor hits.

“But it feels overwhelmingly safe — a low bar to clear when you’ve released two of the greatest pop albums of the century,” she continues.

Dreaming of a park bench and a book

Listening in on a lunchtime poetry reading in Bryant Park in 1969.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times

Much like the jingle of an ice cream truck, a lazy day spent reading on a park bench or sprawled on a park lawn is a hallmark of summer in New York City. To capture some of that spirit, the Book Review put together an archival photo series of people reading during summers past, filled with images of more normal times.

Diversions

Games

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Land of piazzas and pizzas (five letters).

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

P.S. The word “livestreamings” — in an article about the choreographer Stephen Petronio — appeared for the first time in The Times yesterday, as noted by the Twitter bot @NYT_first_said.

The Times is hosting an online event, “America, Inflamed,” with the reporters John Eligon, Audra Burch and Richard Fausset, at 11 a.m. Eastern time tomorrow.

You can see today’s print front page here.

Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about the weekend protests.

The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.

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Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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