The New Yorker:

Race-baiting South Africa’s visiting leader was a perfect summation of Trump’s racially charged second term.

By Susan B. Glasser

Considering Donald Trump’s many outrages, his theatrically hostile reception of Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa, in the Oval Office on Wednesday may soon be forgotten. Or perhaps it will live on as a dim memory, an inappropriate act, to be sure, but of a piece with all of Trump’s other crazy stunts in a week that saw the President picking fights with Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift and dissing European leaders during talks over the war in Ukraine (“You cannot insult our nations, Donald,” the French President, Emmanuel Macron, reportedly responded.) When the Trump Administration threatens in the space of a few days to prosecute everyone from Andrew Cuomo and Oprah Winfrey to James Comey and the former leaders of the Kennedy Center, it’s hard to recall the details of any one mini-drama. What was that Comey thing about, anyway—something related to an Instagram post featuring seashells that supposedly constituted a threat to Trump’s life? On Thursday night, Trump was set to appear at a black-tie dinner at his Trump-branded Virginia golf club with two hundred and twenty investors who purchased more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of a $TRUMP meme coin that will benefit Trump and his family—a monetizing of access to the Presidency without any precedent.

More substantively, the past few days were among the most politically consequential of Trump’s second term so far, with the President going up to Capitol Hill to personally strong-arm wavering Republican House members to approve his tax-cuts-for-the-rich, Medicaid-cuts-for-the-poor bill, a huge omnibus package that contains more or less his entire domestic agenda for the year. The measure, which passed the House on a 215–214 vote early Thursday morning, will now go to the Senate, where it’s likely to undergo substantial changes. Nonetheless, Trump celebrated the House vote as a triumph for “the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of Our Country!” For Trump, bigness is the bill’s main selling point—the measure’s official title is the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act, a nod to a President for whom “big” is the ultimate compliment. Expect debate about the measure to dominate next year’s midterm elections; as currently written, it would add trillions of dollars to the national debt, cause an estimated ten million Americans to become uninsured, slash food-stamp benefits for millions more, repeal clean-energy credits, and cut rates for the wealthiest ten per cent of taxpayers. The House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, perhaps optimistically, said that Thursday “may very well turn out to be the day that House Republicans lost control of the United States.”

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