Opinion | Trump’s race obsession is very weird. Should Democrats call it that? – The Washington Post
Plus: Southwest’s new seating policy, old people’s chime and more tension in the Middle East.
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In today’s edition:
File Wednesday under “Who you gonna believe: me or your lying eyes?”
Donald Trump saying that Vice President Harris isn’t Black, or only recently became so? JD Vance saying she speaks with a Southern accent? What is going on??
Matt Bai writes that these (false! very false!) comments were Trump and Vance showing us “exactly what kind of campaign they’re going to run against their new opponent” — one obsessed with identity and exclusion that is, as Harris accurately called it, divisive and disrespectful.
But Matt worries that Harris is taking the bait here. Trump knew exactly what he was doing during his interview at a conference for Black journalists. As Colby King writes, “Trump was not speaking to them but to a MAGA audience beyond the Hilton Chicago that loves mocking people of color.” He was playing his own game.
Harris, therefore, needs to play her own, too, Matt advises. She can’t let herself be goaded into straying from her message and playing into the stereotype Trump wants to create. Matt crafts a pretty good response Harris could have used: “I don’t know why he’s talking about me being Black again, or where I grew up, or whatever. It’s kind of strange, this fixation with who belongs and who doesn’t. The vast majority of Americans don’t really define each other by skin color or where their parents came from anymore, but I guess Donald missed all that.”
Strange, indeed — or as Democrats can’t seem to stop saying: weird!
Jen Rubin sees the upsides to the coordinated messaging about how “weird” Republicans are, but she warns that it understates the threat inherent in a second Trump presidency. Her column dives into the “long, sad history of writing off fascists as buffoons” — and watching that strategy backfire.
Chaser: Nearly a week ago, one of my favorite non-Post writers, John McWhorter, anticipated all the attention over Harris’s race in a great New York Times column on what it means to be Black, biracial and both.
Anne Lamott has been writing all year about the old. Today, she writes about the very old.
She conjures the beautiful image of a tiny chime that sounds from within people who have sufficiently quieted the clamor of younger existence. These chimers, Anne writes, have “seen over and over that most things will be okay as long as we’re tender with each other. They are whom I want to be in 10 years, if I am alive and can remember this one thing.”
She profiles a few posses of the very old she’s fallen into over the years, including the group of septuagenarians who served as flower girls at her wedding. There’s also the Kiwi theater star who died a few years ago at 93, leading Anne to the most gorgeous metaphor of age-as-ocean:
“Here I am, it says, deep today; here I am now, medium, in organized waves; here I am now shallow and lacy, and coming in fast — better step back and wait while I roll in, until I roll all the way out again.”
From Marc Fisher’s column on the American cultural emergency unfolding at the airport. (“The airport?! What is it?” “It’s a big building with planes around it, but that’s not important right now.”)
Southwest recently announced it was ditching its longtime open-seating policy, whereby “everyone is equal, you can sit anywhere you like, and the prized seats go to the quick and the savvy … rather than the people with the most money to spare,” Marc writes. In other words, quintessential Americanness.
But Americans have rolled over to accept algorithmic nickel-and-diming. Southwest’s seating was the last gasp of assured egalitarianism. Maybe that’s not actually quintessentially American anymore. Maybe, Marc writes, Southwest is at last “embracing a new American way.”
Chaser: On the latest “Impromptu” podcast, Marc, Chuck Lane and Catherine Rampell discuss the broader economics of flying and how customers might be helping drive a race to the bottom.
Even as peace has seemed within reach for Gaza, this week deepened the enmity between Israel and Hamas, particularly with Wednesday’s assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, David Ignatius reports.
Now Biden administration officials are “scrambling once again … to keep the lid on a dangerous situation,” David writes.
Their job is made only harder by Israel’s prison scandal, involving allegations of abuse that rival those from Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Max Boot reports.
Max passes on the horrible reports: beatings, torture, amputations; prisoners kept permanently in blindfolds and diapers; surgeries without anesthesia; sexual abuse and rape. And on top of it all, there’s what Max calls Israel’s “cruel bombast” in responding to the allegations.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
“Boarding group 9F,
Please line up by salary!”
The chime goes silent
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
