Opinion

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican by his own definition, promoted the passage through Congress of the Antiquities Act, permitting him and future Presidents to utilize their executive powers to create or expand National Monuments, preventing the mining, drilling or logging of wide swaths of land on the American continent, and preserving those areas of natural beauty for future generations of Americans to enjoy.

Editor's Note: Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. Her latest book is White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Ward.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Take a long look at the photograph above of Donald Trump speaking to the American Conservative Union, the umbrella organization of the right. The ACU was founded in 1964, the year conservative icon Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for president and was crushed at the polls that fall by the liberal, Lyndon B. Johnson. Keep that photograph in mind as you read my conversation with historian Rick Perlstein, which we might have subtitled “From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump: You Must Be Kidding!” Perlstein has now written three best-selling books on the modern conservative movement. He still blinks at the thought of Trump’s triumph in capturing the Republican nomination last year and then beating Hillary Clinton. The photograph suggests the seminal moment in 2015 that led to both victories — as Trump convinced conservatives he was one of them. The legacy of both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan is now his. So is the Republican Party. He tightened his grip on the GOP in the last few days when two prominent Republican senators who are leaving politics rebuked the president as “dangerous to our democracy,” even as some of their colleagues were rushing into Trump’s arms with wet kisses, fearing, perhaps, that if they were any less ardent, Steve Bannon would come galloping down upon them in a future primary with an even more radical challenger. I asked Rick Perlstein to talk about these matters.

On Sunday’s edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, guest Bruce Bartlett referred to the right-wing hosts of Fox & Friends as “those three idiots.”

The scariest thing this Halloween isn’t any horror movie. It’s real-life policies that are affecting our most vulnerable communities. Here are 10 to watch and hints about how we might combat them.

What if Donald Trump became your boss?

Many Americans complain that Donald Trump has a tiny vocabulary. But he disproved his critics Wednesday during an impromptu press conference on the South Lawn of the White House.

The National Retail Federation says Halloween spending on candy and costumes will reach 9.1 billion this year. To put that in perspective the U.S. Food for Peace program, which fights world hunger, normally gets around 1.5 billion in funding a year. The U.S. McGovern-Dole program, which feeds hungry school children overseas, might get 200 million a year from Congress.

Since January, opening email yields at least one urgent call to action from any number of progressive groups. As a journalist who’s spent the better part of a decade reporting on the LGBT community, I’m no stranger to the motivational value of panicked predictions of impending legislative disasters. That kind of all-hands-on-deck organizing has long proven crucial to forming a unified front of resistance, and indeed worked well to build broad coalitions of opposition to blatant anti-LGBT laws like North Carolina’s House Bill 2, Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and any number of ill-fated attempts to block the forward march of marriage equality.

No matter who you are, or what side of the political spectrum you fall on, it is likely that President Donald Trump has significantly increased your anxiety levels, distorting your perception of the world and negatively affecting your behavior in ways you are unaware of.  But the good news is that these cognitive biases and behavioral changes can be reversed if one becomes cognizant of their existence and makes a conscious effort.

There's a certain satisfaction for those of us who came of age at the time of the Christian Right’s ascendancy to see such widespread acknowledgement of what many of us knew all along—that the so-called Christian Right was always a scam, a caustic combination of patriarchy and big money interests scamming the country behind an edifice of “family values” and “morals.”

Given what we know today, there are several important events in the Trump election timeline that deserve re-examination.