"I did not fully appreciate just how damaging and degrading a Trump presidency could become. "
“Repulsive though he is, nominee Trump’s character defects aren’t what make him a threat. What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger.”
I admit that, at the time, I did not fully appreciate just how damaging and degrading a Trump presidency could become. Trump’s two years of shameless and cynical exploitation of fears and anxieties within the ranks of his white base of support, and his unprincipled governance, have left this country more fractured along racial lines than at any time since the civil rights revolution.
The Trump effect has drawn the attention of The Post, the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League and other entities concerned about the hatred he has let loose in the land.
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And it’s being demonstrated through his federal judicial appointments. Trump’s racial animosity can’t get anymore obvious than his choice of Thomas Farr to be a district court judge in North Carolina.
Farr is well known for his work as a lawyer defending a 2013 North Carolina voter ID law ruled discriminatory against African Americans. The federal appeals court that struck down the law called it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow,” saying it targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision” because the forms of voter identification North Carolina deemed acceptable were ones disproportionately used by white people.
Farr also worked on the reelection campaign of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in 1990 that the Justice Department said sent more than 120,000 postcards to African American voters telling them that they were ineligible to vote and might be arrested if they tried.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) and two other members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote in a letter last year to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Farr’s nomination that “it is no exaggeration to say that had the White House deliberately sought to identify an attorney in North Carolina with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights and workers’ rights than Thomas Farr, it could hardly have done so.”
There it is. Trump knew what he was doing, and what the nation would be getting, when he chose to put Thomas Farr on the federal bench — a voter suppression advocate after Trump’s own heart.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-knew-just-how-damaging-and-degrading-a-trump-presidency-would-be/2018/11/30/4a30f536-f4bb-11e8-aeea-b85fd44449f5_story.html?utm_term=.24d76bc1d184
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