Slate Voice

Last week, President Trump explained to a crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania, how he decides which polls to trust. “I believe in polls,” he said. “Only the ones that have us up, because they’re the only honest ones. Other than that, they’re the fake news polls.” Trump half-grinned, and the crowd laughed. But Trump really does let his beliefs follow his biases. He accepts the word of dictators and police, not of women, immigrants, or elected European leaders.

Donald Trump embraced his role as a radical nativist from the very beginning of his presidential campaign. Whether it was a conscious strategic decision or a product of his substantial populist instincts is almost beside the point.

For all the powerful abusers exposed and censured over the past 12 months, one of the biggest accomplishments of the #MeToo movement has been the reintroduction and reframing of past misconduct.

In a few weeks, the citizens of Georgia won’t just be casting ballots for their governor; they will be deciding the fate of their democracy. The Democratic nominee, Stacey Abrams, has pegged her campaign to progressive policy and voter mobilization, hoping to turn the state’s substantial population of white liberals, black Americans, and other nonwhite residents into a voting majority. If elected, Abrams would be the first black woman elected governor in the United States.

A central architect of the Constitution, James Madison was deeply sensitive to the threat majorities posed to minorities. On important social questions, “[N]o other rule exists … but the will of the majority,” he wrote in 1785 while a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, “but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.

Climate change is a hoax. If it’s not a hoax, it’s overrated. If it’s not overrated, it’s a problem for other countries, not for us. It’s just a pet issue for panicky liberals. If you believe any of these things, I have bad news: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—basically, the world’s best weather and earth scientists—has just issued a report on rising temperatures and the problems they’re causing around the world.

Ana María Toledo Cáceres landed in Las Vegas on a sweltering September day in 2014. In the car with her fiancé, en route to her new home in Utah, the 49-year-old Guatemalan tried to take in the stark, red rock landscape. Cáceres had been sad to leave her two daughters behind in Guatemala City, but now she felt excited and ready to marry the man she loved.

The salient feature of now-seated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony during the hearing that was intended to assess whether he had committed sexual assault in his youth was, as many have noted, his anger. It was anger that made him lash out inappropriately, anger that contorted his face in a way that made many viewers feel sick.

On July 10, one day after President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, reporters in the Capitol were trying to suss out Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ impressions of the judge. One asked if she was concerned that Kavanaugh might gut the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions, as yet another lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general sought to do.

Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, would like to correct a misunderstanding. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Thursday night, Kavanaugh promises to be an impartial justice, not the liberal-baiting flamethrower he played in his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. We’ve seen this from Kavanaugh before: rage, animus, and political warfare, followed by a scramble to clean things up. The cleanup is an act.

In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, dramatic action revolves around Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell, in a small Alabama town in the 1930s. Atticus Finch is his court-appointed lawyer, and after he gets the case, his daughter, Scout, the narrator, must contend with the disdain and ostracism of their neighbors. Atticus, too, stands against the weight of public opinion, even stopping a mob of men eager to dispense vigilante justice.

“Perhaps we didn’t do too good a job teaching the importance of preserving democracy by an enlightened civic discourse,” said Kennedy on Friday, speaking to high-schoolers in his hometown of Sacramento, California. “In the first part of this century, we’re seeing the death and decline of democracy.

Did Brett Kavanaugh drink a lot as a teenager? Is he lying about what he did while drunk? Should senators take that into account when voting on his confirmation to the Supreme Court? The answers to these questions are yes, yes, and yes. There’s been a lot of indignation on the right, including from Kavanaugh, over questions about his drinking and what they have to do with his merits as a judge.

On Friday, Sen. Jeff Flake was joined by Sen. Lisa Murkowski and other swing-vote senators in calling for a one-week FBI investigation into the recent allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before holding a final vote on his confirmation. Senate Republicans and the White House then announced that the bureau would, in fact, take a week to review “current credible allegations” against Kavanaugh.

Thursday’s judiciary committee hearing was a study in contrasts whose differences were oddly erased by their result. Christine Blasey Ford seemed terrified but brimmed with good will. The extent of her cooperation is measurable: She went to great lengths to be as painfully precise as she could be, clarifying her comments at every turn. She was considerate of the committee and answered every question, repeatedly going out of her way to offer more than was asked.

Every year for the past decade, the Family Research Council has hosted the Values Voter Summit, a convention of conservative activists who vote based on traditional right-wing values. Those values are predictable: They’re opposed to gay marriage, abortion rights, and immigration; they support gun rights, tax cuts, and personhood for both fetuses and corporations.

For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone.

While refusing anything so prosaic as an actual FBI investigation (which Anita Hill’s claims received when Clarence Thomas was a nominee), Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have reached a tentative agreement to hear the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, via a baroque negotiation that insists on their competence to “investigate” something like this while functionally stripping themselves of the power to actually investigate it.

One of the most surprising things about the Democratic Socialists of America is that there are democratic socialists in America. That was perhaps under the radar until Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started making headlines. On a recent episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca spoke with Maria Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. * * * Mike Pesca: Let’s go to 2011 and 2012.

On this week’s Political Gabfest, David Plotz and Emily Bazelon are joined by David French, senior fellow at the National Review Institute, to discuss the sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. A transcript of this conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.