The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, July 2, 2026

Notably: On the approach of the 250th it’s worth noting that last week’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court ratifying our president’s bigotry against Black and Brown nations never, in the Alito majority opinion, once quote the president on the subject, because it couldn’t. Had it done so, it would have demolished its own reasoning–that Trump’s racism really aren’t what people make them out to be. That the assumption that Trump wants Syrians and Haitians kicked out because of his racial animus is not plausible. So Justice Kagan did it for the court in her dissent. “It is more than plausible,” she wrote. “Even putting the clear-error standard aside, the Haiti plaintiffs have carried their burden. The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print. (Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful. [In an illustrative footnote, Kagan wrote: “For example: “[P]overty and deprivation are no reflection on character, and there is no justification for denigrating the character of Haitians who suffer from and bear no responsibility for their country’s ills.”] So here are some of those statements. Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” [I am excluding Kagan’s technical references to the original documentation, such as 2 App. 802; see id., at 644, and so on.] And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” Id., at 698–699. And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” Id., at 698. And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?” The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not “overtly racial,” but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community. No very “sensitive inquiry,” of the kind Arlington Heights compels, is needed to see them for what they are; judges, as we often say, are “not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.” The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”

 

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The chant erupts in a college auditorium in Washington, as admirers of a conservative internet personality shout down a black protester. It echoes around the gym of a central Iowa high school, as white students taunt the Hispanic fans and players of a rival team. It is hollered by a lone motorcyclist, as he tears out of a Kansas gas station after an argument with a Hispanic man and his Muslim friend.

Trump

Trump

Trump

In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Mr. Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans’ public discussion of race. Mr. Trump has attacked Mexicans as criminals. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. He has wondered aloud why the United States is not “letting people in from Europe.” His rallies vibrate with grievances that might otherwise be expressed in private: about “political correctness,” about the ranch house down the street overcrowded with day laborers, and about who is really to blame for the death of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. In a country where the wealthiest and most influential citizens are still mostly white, Mr. Trump is voicing the bewilderment and anger of whites who do not feel at all powerful or privileged. But in doing so, Mr. Trump has also opened the door to assertions of white identity and resentment in a way not seen so broadly in American culture in over half a century, according to those who track patterns of racial tension and antagonism in American life.

–From “For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance,” by Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times, July 13, 2016.

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