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In 2016, my vantage point on the donnybrook between Donald and Hillary was an Irish bar in Queens, where I was a bartender a few nights a week. It was a cash-only joint that sometimes stayed open until 7 a.m. and sold discounted cigarettes driven up from Virginia, the sort of place where you could make $800 under the table but you also might get a bottle or a chair thrown at you. This was where I watched the presidential debates and noticed something interesting. Half the patrons were Irish immigrants who considered Mr. Trump a real eejit, but the other half, the Irish Americans, thought he was just grand.

Something didnt compute. Werent the Clintons universally beloved by all with Irish blood? (See Derry Girls on Netflix for a sample of the rock star treatment they got after Bill brought peace to Northern Ireland.) It was puzzling to watch the barflies buzz about Trumps anti-immigration rhetoric a drawbridge mentality from a crowd whose lineage had been met with Irish Need Not Apply signs. The craic in the Queens shebeen turned out to be a sudsy microcosm: The green vote has never been more red.

All those Irish were Democrats for literally hundreds of years, said James F. McKay III, the president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the largest Irish Catholic organization in the country. But what is the old saying? When they got the wrinkles out of the belly, they became Republicans.

No doubt. My own grandfather, one of 12 children raised in a two-bedroom house in County Armagh, sailed to Philadelphia, and cheered when John F. Kennedy became president. Sixty-six years later, some of my grandfathers children and his brother voted for Donald Trump.

The Irish vote has become not, unfortunately, the lockup of the Democratic Party, said Brian ODwyer, vice president of the Irish American Democrats, a political action committee. But it is one of the few swing votes, along with the Catholic vote, left in the United States, and you can see various patterns back and forth where the Irish in particular have gone one way or another.

Everyone agrees that theres no longer a cohesive bloc that votes on issues of Irish statehood or identity. But politicians have recognized that appealing to this nebulous tribe is just one more way to win precious swing votes.

We have millions of Irish, and I think I know most of them, because theyre my friends, President Trump said at a 2019 news conference with the Irish prime minister, or taoiseach, Leo Varadkar. More than 33 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, and the swing districts that propelled Mr. Trump are mulched with them. His campaign has instructed supporters to text SHAMROCK to a phone number to join a new coalition, Irish Americans for Trump, and is hawking Trump Luck of the Irish whiskey glasses, two for $30.

During the Iowa caucuses, Joe Biden, the great-grandson of a blind fiddler from Irelands Cooley Mountains, dispatched Kevin OMalley, a former ambassador to Ireland, to towns with Catholic populations. Biden brought out the big guns by circulating a two-page endorsement letter handwritten by a nun. On St. Patricks Day, his campaign held a conference call with Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and a close Clinton ally, and leaders of Irish American organizations.

Last month, Mr. Biden did a virtual town hall with Hillary Clinton and nodded to both pols ties to the heavily Irish city of Scranton, Pa., by invoking James Joyce: You know that famous quote by Joyce, When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart? I think when we die, Scranton will be written on our hearts.

Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, calls blarney. He was in Scranton in early March to speak to a packed house at an anti-abortion prayer breakfast and told me: I think Biden is a weak candidate in this regard, as weak as Hillary. Hes just a globalist hes supported every one of these trade deals, he pushed NAFTA and hes soft on China. These issues, Mr. Bannon said, will be brought up to the working-class, blue-collar unions, which have still got a heavy participation by Irish Catholics.

The mythos of the once mighty Irish vote dates to the 1870s and to Tammany Hall. As the diarist George Templeton Strong wrote at the time: Our rulers are partly American scoundrels and partly Celtic scoundrels. The Celts are predominant, however, and we submit to the rod and the scepter of Maguires and OTooles and OShanes.

Since then, many presidents have claimed Irish ancestry, even Barack Obama. While in office he visited the town of Moneygall, home to one of his great-great-great grandfathers, and joked that Ive come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.

Of course the true zenith of Irishness was reached in 1960 with Kennedy. It was no easy feat to elect him, with many Americans suspicious that a Catholic commander in chief would put pope over country. Still, he listened to the advice given to him by Robert Frost: Be more Irish than Harvard.

By then, the Irish vote was decomposing. The tides of immigration from the Emerald Isle had waned. Irish Americans left the cities for the suburbs, and in 1980 many became Reagan Democrats, and, not long after, Republicans.

Its the repositioning of every ethnic group when they come to America, said Niall ODowd, the founder of Irish America magazine, the Irish Voice newspaper and IrishCentral.com. But theres a natural leaning of the Catholic Church being so far to the right on many issues in America that has taken many Irish Catholics with them, particularly on the issue of abortion.

Bill Clinton figured out how to juice the demographic years later. In 1992, during the New York primary, he pledged to a group of influential Irish power brokers that, should he become president, he would appoint a special envoy to Northern Ireland, then mired deep in the sectarian conflict known as the Troubles. It was a risky move that instantly rankled the British, but Mr. Clinton became a friend of the Fenians that day. He won his primary. When Hillary Clinton ran for a New York Senate seat in 2000, Bill hit the streets of Queens to play the Irish card on her behalf, as the Irish Times put it then.

This was one of the first bases Mrs. Clinton tapped as she geared up for her second presidential run. As early as 2012, Mrs. Clinton, then secretary of state, invited top Irish supporters to accompany her on a state trip to Dublin. And yet, some of them feel that candidate Clinton could have better used her Irish connection to meet swing voters where they were. Hillary missed a trick, said Mr. ODowd. I was sitting there when the head of Notre Dame offered her the huge invitation to speak. She wanted to do it, but following up with the campaign proved to be awfully impossible.

Caitriona Perry, an Irish journalist who crisscrossed the U.S. to write The Tribe: The Inside Story of Irish Power and Influence in US Politics, agreed that Mrs. Clinton paid insufficient attention to Irish-American communities. Ms. Perry said of the coterie around Trump, Weve seen so many Irish Americans pass through this administration that they are themselves reflective of Irish American families and communities who do align more broadly with the Republican Party and then specifically with Donald Trump.

The alt-Irish, as theyve been called, include Sean Spicer; Kellyanne Conway (ne Fitzpatrick); and the new press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to name a few. But just as Eugene McCarthy had a Celtic foil in Joseph McCarthy, theres a Denis McDonough (a chief of staff to Barack Obama) for every Mick Mulvaney (Trumps former acting chief of staff), a Lawrence ODonnell for every Sean Hannity.

Whatever the case, President Trump does seem to know a thing or two about the Irish. You have to keep them as your friend, he said while being presented with the traditional shamrock bowl by the Irish prime minister at the White House last year. You dont want to fight with the Irish. Its too tough its too bloody.

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Donald Trump, Joe Biden and the Vote of the Irish - The New York Times

As protests rage after the death of George Floyd, his brother has described the actions of police as a "modern-day lynching" and called for the police officers involved to be charged with first-degree murder.

The death of Mr Floyd while a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck prompted a global outcry of anger over police brutality towards black people in the United States, which led to at-times violent protests across the country.

Derek Chauvin, the then-Minneapolis Police Department officer who was kneeling on Mr Floyd when he died, has been charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, but Mr Floyd's brother, Philonise, said all officers involved should "be convicted of first-degree murder and given the death penalty".

"They didn't care about what they wanted to do with my brother. He wasn't a person to them, he was scum, he was nothing," he told MSNBC.

"I can imagine how many people they did like that. I don't need them on the streets to kill anybody else.

"I'm hurt, my family's hurt, his kids are hurt they will grow up without a father. Everybody is crying and in pain right now."

Philonise Floyd spoke to MSNBC anchor and prominent African-American activist Al Sharpton about his brother's death and the response to it, saying President Donald Trump got in touch with him but that he struggled to get a word in.

"It was so fast. He didn't give me an opportunity to even speak," he said.

"I was trying to talk to him but he just kept pushing me off like 'I don't want to hear what you're talking about'.

"I just told him I want justice. I said I couldn't believe they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight. I can't stand for that.

"It hurt me. I just don't understand, man.

"Why we got to go through this," he continued, clearly emotional.

"Why we got to have all this pain, man. I love my brother and I'm never going to see him again."

Protesting started in Minneapolis days after video of George Floyd's final moments spread across the internet.

Since then, there have been mass demonstrations in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and more in the wake of not just Mr Floyd's death, but also the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia.

Some protests have spilled over into rioting and looting that has seen buildings burned down.

While Philonise Floyd said he did not condone the more violent actions, he completely understands their frustration, anger and pain.

"I see why a lot of people are doing a lot of different things around the world," he told CNN.

"I don't want them to lash out like that, but I can't stop people right now, because they have pain. They have the same pain that I feel.

"I want everything to be peaceful, but I can't make everybody be peaceful. I can't. It's hard."

Link:
George Floyd's brother says Donald Trump barely let him speak during their conversation - ABC News

American Comeback, the Trump campaign titled a new ad out this week. THIS NOVEMBER, the ad proclaimed, making clear the comeback he is referring to is not just the countrys struggle with the coronavirus pandemic but the restoration of his own political fortune, THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY IS WRITTEN.

That Trumpin the throes of the worst public health crisis in more than a century and the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depressionis writing rosy history long before it has actually happened might seem audacious. It borders on the fanciful when considering the slew of numbersthe steadily mounting death toll, near-record unemployment and a majority of Americans dissatisfied with his handling of the crisisthat sketch a future trending in the opposite direction. But this is a page from a playbook Trump has used many times before.

At key points in Trumps long and public lifefrom his nadir in the 1990s to The Apprentice more than a decade later to his embattled campaign a decade after that and finally to his tumultuous presidencyTrump has used the idea of the comeback as a critical weapon in his arsenal of self-invention. A believer in a binary worldview that was a core teaching of his flinty fatherthere are winners and losers, and he always must be the former, not the latterTrump has used comeback as a fortifying piece of rhetoric that masks periods of failure, delaying a reckoning until theres something to brag about. Others might wait for actual evidence that a comeback has occurred, but Trump repeatedly has advertised his comebacks months and even years in advance. He has used it to bend in his favor unflattering media narrativesto tweak perception, to alter realityto conjure power, positivity and a sense of propulsion, especially at junctures when hes running low on all three.

The world that he lives in and projects, there are just two roles in it, Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. Youre a winner or a loser. And if theres a moment that youre not quite a winner, youre almost a winner. Youre practically a winner. Its a cloak that contains winning as a part of it.

Its his way of saying, I had a setback, and now Im coming backbut he never says he had a setback, former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me.

He also uses it as a starting off point to build momentum, added Marcus, who worked for Trump from 1994 to 2000. It was a word that he pushed off on.

Comeback, said Sam Solovey, a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice, who prepped for the show by reading every Trump book and biography, is the placeholder until victory is at hand.

It helped him get to the White House. And now, forced by circumstance to abandon his victory lap messaging of Keep America Great, Trump is reaching for it again as he tries his hardest to stay there.

Its just as critical to 2020 as it was in 2016, if not more so, former Trump aide Jason Miller told me. If hes the outsider, if hes the insurgent, he wins reelection. If hes viewed as the insider, the one whos the power holder in a tumultuous time, then winning becomes much tougher.

My name is Donald Trump, he said in the intro of the first show of the first season of The Apprentice, launching into a quick series of words and pictures associated with success. For Trump, the reality television show on NBC, which debuted in 2004, was a chance to cement his comeback taleand to do it in the way that he wanted, sandwiching what he took to calling his glitch or his blip basically between brackets of unfettered triumph. But it wasnt always easy, he explained. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back. And I won.

In the first half of the 90s, Trump constantly skirted financial ruin, facing for years the possible permanent tarnishing of the image he had cultivated in the 70s and 80s as an infallible deal-doer. Donald was broke, Stephen Bollenbach, the CFO Trumps lenders made him hire, would say. He was worse than broke. He was losing money every day. Even so, Trump talked about his comeback, not when his struggles began to wane but practically from their start.

All Donald knew was that he was still a story, Wayne Barrett wrote in his seminal biography. In the spring of 91, according to Barretts reporting, Trump announced to a consultant that he was determined to return to the cover of Time. He said he would be the comeback of the century.

In 1992, he redoubled his efforts, earning honeyed headlines on the cover of New York magazine and on the front page of the Washington Post. He refused to reflect on the past, skated through the present and relentlessly spun toward the future. Im not going to look back and say it was tough and blame myself, he told the Sunday Times of London. I could be even bigger than ever.

Gossip columnists marveled at Trumps ability to shape the nature of the story. I mean, Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News told the Boston Globe in 1994, its not like hes the president.

Business bigwigs, meanwhile, marveled at it because it wasnt true. I think his recovery is an illusion, a real estate executive who did frequent business with Trump said to the reporter from the Globe. Its like the emperor has no clothes. I guess if you keep repeating it long enough people begin to believe it.

And he did. And they did.

And it worked.

In 1995, not quite five months after Trump successfully started selling stock in his failing casinos in New Jersey and his resurgence was looking legitimately less and less like a mirage, some of New Yorks business and government leaders honored Trump at a luncheon in Manhattan for what they dubbed the comeback of the decade. The lieutenant governor called him the comeback kid. Bill Fugazy, a limo company tycoon and onetime Roy Cohn crony, gave Trump a glass-encased boomerang. You throw it, he said, and it always comes back.

In 1996, in articles about Trump, the Daily News and the New York Times used comeback in headlines. By this time, thanks to the casino deal plus at-long-last development on a plot of land he was involved with on the Upper West Side, those headlines were no longer wrong. I think it says, Trump said, what Ive been doing over the years has been right. (Sound familiar?)

And in 1997, out came The Art of the Comeback, the sequel of sorts to The Art of the Deal. It never occurred to me to give up, to admit defeat, Trump (really Kate Bohner) wrote. He simply skips over the losing part. It is the unspoken chapter in the ongoing narrative, said Solovey, the first-season Apprentice contestant. He left out the Art of Losing.

Hence the intro to the show in 04. That same year, too, on multiple occasions, he made the claim that the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as having made the greatest personal financial comeback of all time. Its true. It did, in 1999 and 2000, a Guinness World Records spokesperson told me, before the Records Management Team decided the concept of a comeback was not standardizable across the globe. To use it the way he wanted to use it, he didnt need it to be.

He kept comeback as a cudgel, of course, when he turned toward politics.

In 2015, a little more than a month before he came down the escalator and officially entered the fray as a presidential contender, he gave a speech to the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. Our country is not going to have a comeback, he said, with any politician.

The rest of 2015 and into 2016, for most of the campaign, he didnt use the word that muchuntil he needed it, in October, when polls pointed to him losing to Hillary Clinton and perhaps by a lot. I know how to make a comeback, he said in a speech October 3 in Loveland, Colorado, referring to his experience in the 90s. I dont even think of it as a comeback, he said that same day in a speech in Pueblo, Colorado. It was just, like, you know, we had tough periods, good periods, tough periods. We just knew that things were going to be just fine.

Americas comeback begins on November 8, he said in a speech in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on October 15, a week after the uncovering of his lewd comments on the Access Hollywood tape, when many figured his candidacy surely was doomed.

Hes never stopped using the word as president. But it started to tick up at the turn of the year. He was always going to run in 2020 by talking about a comeback.

But he wanted to run on one he was saying had just occurredand that he had engineered. Three years ago, we launched the great American comeback, he said in his State of the Union address the first week of February. Were in the midst of the great American comeback, he said repeatedly that month and into early March.

At that point, though, the dire reality of the coronavirus and its consequences began to become clear. It was no longer a credible pitch. The Trump campaign this year was going to be about KAGKeep America Greatbut now its another round of MAGA. Make America Great Again. Again. Trump not only has not shied away from using the word comeback but has doubled down, simply shifting from trumpeting one to forecasting anotherto trying, as is his wont as a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale, to speak it into existence, never, ever losing, always either winning or on the way.

Theres going to be a comeback very, very quickly, as soon as this is solved, he said in a coronavirus briefing on March 18. And it will be solved. We will win. And there will be a comeback.

Were going to have a very quick comeback, he said on Fox News on March 24.

Well be the comeback kids, he said in the briefing on April 15. All of us. All of us.

He has very few moves, Marcus, the former Trump publicist, told me, and one of those moves is the comeback move.

See the article here:
Donald Trumps Lifelong Obsession with Comebacks - POLITICO

It was a mic drop designed to thrill conservatives and infuriate liberals and the media.

Kayleigh McEnany, the latest White House press secretary aiming to become the acceptable face of Trumpism, had been asked if she wanted to take back a bold prediction in February that we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.

I guess I would turn the question back on the media, and ask similar questions, McEnany said on Wednesday. Consulting her briefing book, she reeled off a list of outlets and articles she said had downplayed the threat.

Ill leave you with those questions, she said, and maybe youll have some answers in a few days.

And with a triumphant smile she stepped away from the lectern, ignoring shouted questions. Reporters wore surprised and stony faces, then relaxed into wry smiles. It was a classic piece of whataboutism as practised by pundits on cable news.

The TV president now has a TV emissary, a spokesperson who sometimes takes her eyes off the reporters in the room and looks directly into the camera. McEnany is from what the president likes to call central casting: a polished performer, devout Christian and devout Trumpian. And she is only 32.

Kayleigh McEnany: beautiful, Christian, conservative designed by nature to enrage MSNBC viewers, tweeted Ann Coulter, a rightwing author and commentator, referring to the liberal-leaning network whose hosts often eviscerate the president.

Read or listen to her words prior to her decision to jump on the Trump train. She is a completely different person

But to critics, McEnany is a Trump apologist trying to explain the inexplicable and excuse the inexcusable. They characterise her as an opportunist motivated by fame and power rather than any ideological faith. They say she has abandoned her religious principles to normalise a president widely condemned as a misogynist and racist.

The eldest child of a roofing contractor, McEnany is from Plant City, Florida, which she describes as the worlds strawberry capital. She attended the Academy of the Holy Names Catholic high school in Tampa and found time to volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004. She moved to Washington to study at Georgetown, took an exchange year at Oxford to study politics and served an internship in the Bush White House.

After graduating in 2010, she worked for three years as a production assistant at Fox News for Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and father of Sarah Sanders, Trumps second press secretary. In 2012, she wrote a tweet about Barack Obama, the countrys first black president, that has come back to haunt her: How I Met Your Brother Never mind, forgot hes still in that hut in Kenya. #ObamaTVShows.

McEnany wanted a job in front of the camera but couldnt get a break. Eventually she decided to become a student again, first at the University of Miami School of Law, then transferring to Harvard. Huckabee told the New York Times last month: I think one of the reasons that Kayleigh went on to law school was because she didnt see she was going to have an on-air opportunity at Fox any time soon.

But in 2015, McEnany received some intriguing career advice over cocktails from Michael Marcantonio, a fellow summer associate at a law firm and a Democrat. In an interview with the New York Times, he recalled telling her Donald Trump is going to be your nominee, adding that if a smart, young, blond Harvard graduate wanted to get on television and have a career as a political pundit, you would be wise to be an early backer.

McEnany did so. Networks were struggling to find eloquent champions of the Trump cause but she fitted the bill. She became a paid contributor on CNN, feeding the outrage machine and the concept of cable news as combat sport.

A political commentator acquainted with McEnany, who did not wish to be named, said: They brought her on board when it became pretty clear that there were few people who were willing to defend Donald Trump that were somewhat sane. Most people who were credible and experienced were not willing to put their names or reputations on the line to defend Donald Trumps crazy during 2016.

In June 2015, McEnany had described Trumps comments about Mexican migrants as racist and dismissed him as a showman. She quickly changed her tune. The source said: She is unrecognisable. If you were to read or listen to her words prior to her decision to sell her soul and jump on the Trump train, she is a completely different person.

To Trump supporters, McEnanys ability to rile liberals made her something of a heroine. Even at the nadir of the Trump candidacy, when an Access Hollywood tape revealed him boasting about grabbing womens genitalia, she had his back, saying: Those comments are despicable [but] he apologised for them.

Sean Hannity, a Fox News host, wrote in a forward to McEnanys book, The New American Revolution: The Making of a Populist Movement: Outnumbered 8-to-1, or if she was lucky, 7-to-2, Kayleigh never backed down in fighting for the conservative movement supporting Donald Trump.

Jason Miller, who also appeared as a pro-Trump pundit on CNN and is now co-host of the podcast War Room: Pandemic, said: Keep in mind that she went through a couple of years of being a CNN political commentator where she was rumbling with Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo and Van Jones and Ana Navarro and every other hater thats out there.

So if Kayleigh can go toe to toe with the toughest anchors and commentators on TV, shell do just fine with the White House press corps.

Once Trump had stunned the world by winning the White House in 2016, McEnany joined the Republican National Committee as spokeswoman, then moved to the Trump campaign in a similar role. She would sometimes work 18 or 20 hours a day, according to Tim Murtaugh, director of communications for the Trump campaign.

Kayleigh was fantastic, he said. Shes smart, shes energetic, shes engaged and shes the most prepared person that I know. She has a keen grasp of policy and is able to turn what are sometimes complicated policy matters into language that is easily digested by the listener.

Murtaugh accused opponents of discriminating against McEnany because of her looks and gender.

The first thing the liberals want to do when they see an attractive young woman in a position like this is they want to question her intelligence. And I would just say to people, you underestimate Kayleigh McEnany at your own peril. I dont think that theyre turning out too many dummies from Oxford and Harvard Law School.

Murtaugh also recalled how McEnany organised a Bible study group with other staff that met weekly in a conference room at campaign HQ in Arlington, Virginia. Since the pandemic lockdown, the group has continued to meet virtually.

Like many evangelicals, McEnany apparently sees no contradiction between Trumps behaviour and Christian values. Two years ago, when she had a preventative double mastectomy because of a BRCA2 genetic mutation that had put her at high risk of breast cancer, she wrote: My faith in Jesus Christ was my strength that day.

I will never lie to you. You have my word on that

She is an ardent admirer of Ravi Zacharias, a preacher whose organisation included a study centre in Oxford. She wrote in 2013: Oxford needed a Christian to respond to Richard Dawkins. Found that in Ravi, who has dismantled atheism. This week her sister, Ryann, who also works for the Trump campaign, tweeted: Watching my sister take the stage for her first White House press briefing last Friday was a surreal moment! Gods spirit was ever-present in that room and undeniably flowing through you.

In 2017 McEnany married Sean Gilmartin, a pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays. She posed with Blake, the couples five-month-old daughter, at the White House lectern after her debut briefing, the first by a press secretary in more than 13 months, where she declared: I will never lie to you. You have my word on that.

She now has three briefings under her belt. She has echoed Trumps false and misleading statements but avoided major controversy and, importantly, avoided stealing too much of his limelight.

Kurt Bardella, a political analyst and Trump critic who bested McEnany in a debate on gun control on MSNBC, said: Kayleigh is very on point, succinct, direct and speaks with a lot of confidence and comfort from the podium.

Like Conway, Bardella believes, McEnany saw a chance for career advancement and seized it.

Outside of the president, the White House press secretary traditionally is the most visible person in the administration. This is something that she will be able to live off of for the rest of her life.

I dont think that its diehard ideological alignment more than just an opportunity. Donald Trump is a person with no ideology or core conviction. This is someone whose core ideology is nothing more than whatever is transactional and advantageous to him at that moment in time.

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Kayleigh McEnany the 'acceptable' face of Trumpism who infuriates liberals - The Guardian

But President Donald J. Trump? He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody... and not a single major daily newspaper would call for his resignation. I admit that -- just like the original Trump quote it references -- that Fifth Avenue statement is a bit hyperbolic, but think about it:After three years of political and actual carnage under Trump, including Robert Mueller's description of acts that amounted to, he told Congress, obstruction of justice; Trump's "fine people on both sides" reaction to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed; his rampant conflicts of interest and credible accusations of his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution; his close to 17,000 false statements; a travel ban that primarily targets mostly Muslim-majority countries; impeachment for alleged extortion of a foreign government (he was acquitted in the Republican Senate), and the gross mishandling of a deadly pandemic, you'd think somebody on an editorial board might say it's time for the President to leave.

But this has not happened. Why not?

Not knowing the answer, I set out to talk to a lot of smart people to find out why.

I did this because history would lead you to believe that most of the editorial boards of America's newspapers/digital sites would have stepped up to that plate already. To be clear, editorial boards are the group of writers and editors behind the daily editorials on the news -- appearing in the editorial pages -- that reflect the newspaper's values. These are separate from the "op-eds" commissioned by opinion editors from outside writers that reflect a range of views -- often at odds with those of the editorial board.

Pulling no punches on Nixon and Clinton

The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment for Nixon and sent them to the House; he resigned before they could vote on them.

Twenty-four years later, in 1998, more than 100 newspapers called for the resignation of President Bill Clinton, both during the Kenneth Starr investigation and the subsequent impeachment trial for obstruction of justice and perjury, over his affair with a White House intern.

Peter R. Bronson, then-editorial page editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, told the Times, "'As soon as we saw the Starr report and got knee deep, we said, 'This really smells, we've seen enough, the evidence is compelling and damning,''' Mr. Bronson said.

The ground shifts

And Trump's offenses were much more far reaching than Clinton's: he used American foreign policy to leverage a political favor, and he's also certainly had a fair share of tawdry scandals

What has changed?

Just about everything, it seems, beginning with the media: the explosion of 24/7 news networks and the endless horizon of internet-on-demand caused some newspapers to fold or shrink and lose relevance. The lucky few left standing wobbled through a decade trying to claw their way back into news dominance. Papers lost advertisers, lost readers and increasingly lost influence with the public, particularly the editorial pages: so much opinion journalism was readily available from so many other new online sources.

Why have so many editorial pages railed -- over and over -- against Trump's behavior in the most vehement terms, through scandal, impeachment, botched pandemic response and much more, and yet they won't call for him to go?

Editorial boards' new reluctance

I put this question to more than a dozen experts, media columnists, editorial writers, academics and White House reporters. What emerged was not one simple explanation, as journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University explained it, but a number of factors that have discouraged editorial pages around the country from taking this bold step.

Central to these, according to John Avlon, a senior political analyst at CNN and the former editor in chief of the Daily Beast, is that "the reality of the hardened partisanship is beyond reason. We've become really unmoored from our best civic traditions." And one of our best civic traditions used to be holding political leaders to account -- demanding, in extreme situations, that they resign.

See more here:
Why aren't editorial boards screaming: Trump has to go? - CNN