#but also! look out for local rallies and protests. similar to the aftermath of the roe v wade overturn.

[neverendingford]

.

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Jan. 14, 2021 

Dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in Washington for pro-Trump events Jan. 6, a day that ended in a chaotic crime rampage when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with evidence gathered in the FBI’s investigation.

The majority of the watch-listed individuals in Washington that day are suspected white supremacists whose past conduct so alarmed investigators that their names had been previously entered into the national Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, a massive set of names flagged as potential security risks, these people said. The watch list is larger and separate from the “no-fly” list the government maintains to prevent terrorism suspects from boarding airplanes, and those listed are not automatically barred from any public or commercial spaces, current and former officials said.

The presence of so many watch-listed individuals in one place — without more robust security measures to protect the public — is another example of the intelligence failures preceding last week’s fatal assault that sent lawmakers running for their lives, some current and former law enforcement officials argued. The revelation follows a Washington Post report earlier this week detailing the FBI’s failure to act aggressively on an internal intelligence report of Internet discussions about plans to attack Congress, smash windows, break down doors and “get violent . . . go there ready for war.”

Since its creation, the terrorist watch list, which is maintained by the FBI, has grown to include hundreds of thousands of names. Placing someone’s name on the watch list does not mean they will be watched all of the time, or even much of the time, for reasons of both practicality and fairness, but it can alert different parts of the government, such as border agents or state police, to look more closely at certain individuals they encounter.

Several law enforcement officials said they are shocked by the backgrounds of some individuals under investigation in connection with the Capitol riot, a pool of suspects that includes current and former law enforcement and military personnel as well as senior business executives and middle-aged business owners.

The TSDB, often referred to within government as simply “the watch list,” is overseen by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. The watch list can be used as both an investigative and early-warning tool, but its primary purpose is to help various government agencies keep abreast of what individuals seen as potential risks are doing and where they travel, according to people familiar with the work.

Before the Jan. 6 gathering of pro-Trump protesters, FBI agents visited a number of suspected extremists and advised them against traveling to the nation’s capital. Many complied, but according to people familiar with the sprawling investigation, dozens of others whose names appear in the terrorist watch list apparently attended, based on information reviewed by the FBI.

FBI investigating whether some rioters aimed to kill or capture lawmakers

Separately, while the FBI is hunting hundreds of rioting suspects who have dispersed back to their hometowns, federal agents are increasingly focused on alleged leaders, members and supporters of the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist group with ties to white nationalism, these people said. Proud Boys members participated in last week’s protests, and FBI agents are taking a close look at what roles, if any, the group’s adherents may have had in organizing, directing or carrying out violence, according to people familiar with the matter.

The group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio, had planned to attend Trump’s Jan. 6 rally but was arrested when he arrived in D.C. and charged with misdemeanor destruction of property in connection with the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church during an earlier protest in Washington. He is also accused of felony possession of two extended gun magazines. Tarrio told The Post on Wednesday that his group did not organize the Capitol siege.

Tarrio said he’s actively discouraging members from attending planned armed marches scheduled Sunday, and the Million Militia March next week when Biden is inaugurated. Proud Boys, he said, are on a “rally freeze and will not be organizing any events for the next month or so.”

It is unclear how many Proud Boys devotees will abide by the freeze, or if such a shutdown might lessen the FBI’s interest in the group. Even before the Jan. 6 riot, federal and local investigators were working to understand the group’s plans, goals and activities. Privately, some federal law enforcement officials have described the group as roughly equivalent to a nascent street gang that has garnered an unusual degree of national attention, in part because Trump mentioned them specifically during one of his televised debates with Biden during the campaign. Other officials have expressed concern that the group may be growing rapidly into something more dangerous and directed.

The FBI has already arrested dozens of accused rioters, and officials have pledged that in cases of the most egregious conduct, they will seek to file tough, rarely used charges such as seditious conspiracy, which carries a potential 20-year prison sentence.

The bureau continues to face blowback over its handling of a Jan. 5 internal report warning of discussions of violence at Congress the next day. Steven M. D’Antuono, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, claimed in the days after the riot that the bureau did not have intelligence ahead of time indicating the rally would be anything other than a peaceful demonstration.

The Jan. 5 FBI report, written by the bureau’s office in Norfolk, and reviewed by The Post, shows that was not the case, and the Justice Department took other steps indicating officials were at least somewhat concerned about possible violence the next day. The Bureau of Prisons sent 100 officers to D.C. to supplement security at the Justice Department building, an unusual move similar to what the department did in June to respond to civil unrest stemming from racial-justice protests.

Mindful of the criticism that law enforcement took a heavy-handed, all-hands-on-deck approach to Black Lives Matters protests in D.C. in the spring and summer, Justice Department officials deferred to the Capitol Police to defend their building and lawmakers. Some former officials have questioned whether the FBI and Justice Department should have done more.

“It would not have been enough for the bureau simply to share information, if it did so, with state and local law enforcement or federal partner agencies,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department national security official. “It was the bureau’s responsibility to quarterback a coordinated federal response as the crisis was unfolding and in the days thereafter. And it’s presently not clear to what extent the FBI asserted itself in that fashion during the exigencies of January 6 and in the immediate aftermath.”

(selected segments of the article)

[kirstymcneill]

Effective Activism in a Time of Coronavirus: what are we learning six months in?

This post first appeared on Global Dashboard on the 8th of July 2020.

Nothing I’ve read has captured our times and our task better than this essay from Western States Center ED Eric K. Ward: “leading in easy times is, well, easy. But these times are not them”. Leading in difficult times is unbelievably hard, but we will all be better at it if we share what we’re learning and invite others to challenge our thinking and contribute their own. In that spirit, here are the four things that I think are emerging as lessons about effective activism in a time of coronavirus.

In a fight between a rewind and a revolution, revolution’s gonna lose

My timeline is still going nuts for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s powerful “Message from the Future”. The bit that gives me pause comes in at the 3 minutes mark, “the world’s leading climate scientists told us we had 12 years left to cut our emissions in half, 12 years to change everything”. It was released, of course, before the coronavirus crisis, but the pandemic has given prominence to a similar rhetoric elsewhere.

Here in the UK, for example, the Build Back Better coalition argue we are in a similarly transformative moment: “let’s not go back to normal … what we do next could change everything”. And the crisis has seen a new lease of life for the slogan “we won’t go back to normal when normal was the problem”,  first used in protests in Chile towards the end of 2019 but now turning up everywhere from graffiti in Hong Kong to the fridge doors of activists to university research programmes.

That positioning is understandable – many of our missions face an existential threat from climate change and the need to dismantle white supremacy and racism could hardly be more urgent. But it is precisely because the stakes are so high that we have to focus on winning big rather than talking big.

How should we respond to the evidence that many people are absolutely desperate for a “return to normal” and not sure if they’d like to change very much, never mind “everything”? Roger Harding’s essay here charts that the crisis has seen a big spike in demand for nostalgic television and music, and it may not be an accident that the BBC’s coming of age drama Normal People is the breakout success of lockdown. If what’s happening in popular culture is any guide, people want to look back before they move forward. We need to accept that in a fight between a rewind and a revolution, revolution’s gonna lose.

Likewise, publics may not recognise the two separate worlds that Arundhati Roy charts so beautifully in her “The Pandemic is a Portal” essay. In Roy’s telling, we are faced with “a gateway between one world and the next” and the choice before us is whether we “choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us” or whether we “walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”.

I wonder how many people see the pandemic in quite this way, with a clear delineation between the old world ‘yesterday’, the crisis ‘today’ and the recovery ‘tomorrow’. Some may also see today’s pandemic as merely what journalist Ros Wynne-Jones called “a grim dress-rehearsal” for the emergencies to come. For that constituency there will be a real premium on immediate strategies for securing recent gains, starting with the list George Graham lays out here.

Fighting campaigns that can deliver immediate and tangible change isn’t a substitute for bolder transformation, but it is a necessary precursor to it, because strategies which confuse a public appetite to build back better with one to build back completely different just aren’t going to attract a big enough base. As one union organiser told me, “there’s no point asking people to trust you to organise a revolution if you can’t get a microwave in the staff canteen”.

‘Don’t mourn, organise’ is the wrong mantra for our times. We need to do both

I’ve written before about the work we’ve been doing to defend aid and development in the UK. It’s good work – innovative, strategic and delivered with discipline. I’m proud of it, and of our success in defying political gravity to maintain support for aid in the face of sustained attacks. We have, however, just suffered a huge defeat, with the Prime Minister choosing to abolish our world-leading development department in the middle of the biggest humanitarian crisis for 100 years and on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the “great generation’s” Make Poverty History campaign.

It isn’t hard to see what is going on here. A ‘new front in the culture war’ is opening and it’s increasingly clear that “retoxification” is not a by-product of the strategy, it is the strategy. At the end of 2019 I felt that identifying models that could galvanise but not polarise was the core strategic campaigning question of the decade, but I now feel it’s a much more insistent one that should dominate our summer.  

Professor Tim Bale’s excellent research into the divergent attitudes of voters, activists and political leaders shows where we are headed, at least in the UK. The voters who have ‘lent’ their votes to the government on the basis of values alignment and economic competence are going to start peeling off fast as soon as furlough ends, unemployment climbs and the government’s reputation for economic competence takes a battering. At that point, this research implies, there’s no strategy available to the government other than dialling up the cultural campaign. We can expect to see more, and not less, of “the war on woke” and an increased push from the ‘Britannia Unchained’ generation in the cabinet to do away with regulations and protections.

If that analysis is right, activists have a strategic choice to make and only a matter of weeks to make it: are we here to win a culture war, or to end one?

Of course we need to spend this period re-strategising, including asking ourselves the question campaigners most hate to answer, but need to: if you’re so smart, how come you’re getting beaten so badly? But more than that, we need to give ourselves the time to mourn what we have lost.

We have literal grieving to do – for all the people who have died before their time, the pain compounded by the knowledge that structural racism and poverty have done as much damage as biology here. And we have grieving of the more abstract sort to do too – the kind of coming to terms with loss we all need to do when something we truly value, not just desire, has gone.

The Collective Pyschology Project’s “This Too Shall Pass” report gives us a toolkit for how to grieve but it is actually earlier work by its founder Alex Evans that tells us why activists have to learn to grieve. If we don’t work through denial, anger, bargaining and depression properly, we’ve no hope of getting to acceptance and, therefore, to a place where we can see clearly what our next move should be.

I’ve written elsewhere about the power of Andrew Tenzer’s “The Empathy Delusion” report but his latest research, “The Aspiration Window” should also give activists pause for thought. If we, like our colleagues in communications, also score highly on a sense of personal agency, that can be a tremendous source of resilience and optimism in normal times. It is, however, a recipe for burn-out and guilt in these times. We have to accept we can’t campaign our way out of a pandemic, and we can’t always beat overwhelming political odds.

“Don’t mourn, organise” is the wrong mantra for now. Let’s do both.

Think global, act local has come of age – but we need to buttress it

Many of us have spent many years desperately trying to generate a sense of global citizenship, recognising that global problems need global solutions, but global solutions need global constituencies to push for them. The pandemic has helped illuminate that like nothing else in our lifetime – and events like the Global Citizen #TogetherAtHome concert have given our sense of interconnectedness a public expression.

While some governments have pushed a sense of national exceptionalism (and certainly benefitted in the short term from a ‘rally around the flag’ effect), there’s actually limited evidence that people are identifying particularly fervently with the nation state, despite its prominence in everything from paying our wages to dictating when we can get a haircut.

Instead, counter-intuitively, we seem to be feeling simultaneously more local and more global than ever before. This will be welcome news for community organisers and internationalists alike, but we shouldn’t take it for granted that this feeling will be permanent.

Here in the UK, British Future��s Sunder Katwala’s careful reading of the polls throughout the crisis gives him a cautious optimism – we feel that we are likely to come out of this crisis more connected and kinder than we went into it, but this effect is much more pronounced about people with whom we have direct social contact. The more we know people, the more we trust them, and the street or estate where we live is now full of people we newly know.

Likewise, findings from the team at the Neighbourly Lab suggest a new sense of connection is powerful at a micro-local level, but it will need permanent infrastructure to be instituted quickly if the new neighbourliness is to be maintained. “The Moment We Noticed”, from the Relationships Observatory, makes a similar case, pointing to how “ten million willing citizens have chosen to spend at least 3 hours a week caring for one another” and inviting us to consider what we can do together to sustain new relationships into the future.

Both reports also contain some interesting watch-outs about what might happen when we move from the ‘honeymoon’ to the ‘disillusionment’ phase that is often seen in the aftermath of an emergency, and encourage us to recognise that communitarian feeling is often rather fragile and dependent on a sense that others are doing their bit.

Certainly our thinking when we put together the “#OurOtherNationalDebt” essay collection was that a focus on repaying those who’ve made an outsized contribution (or paid an outsized price) at this particular time was more likely to command sustained public support than anything that felt like a reheat of long-held pre-pandemic positions. Society might have changed a bit but in general it’s still the case that we quite like the people we’ve got to know, but we’re also alert to any signs of free-riding or, worst of all, queue-jumping.

Elsewhere in Europe, the European Council on Foreign Relations call both the idea that there has been a sudden surge in belief in an expanded role for the state and one in nationalism “illusions that could lead European governments to fall foul of public opinion as they plan the recovery”. Instead, they show “that the overwhelming majority of people want more EU cooperation”, but recognise that this is motivated more by a sense of wanting collective insurance than a rejuvenation of a sense of common ideals.

At the same time, the OECD predict that it’s at least possible that global aid flows will be maintained or even increase in coming years, pointing to some successes in securing debt relief, multilateral funding for Gavi and an increase in support for humanitarian efforts.

Part of what is going on here is the public’s sophisticated understanding of the coronavirus – that the experience might be universal, but it is it not uniform. We understand that there are people in precarious employment in every country, parents struggling to put food on the table in every country, children trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide in every country. Lockdown and school closures in particular have been near-universal experiences, but their effects have been far from uniform between countries or inside them. People get that both local neighbourliness and multilateralism can provide particular protections, mitigating catastrophe and smoothing out vulnerabilities a bit.

Support for both local mutual aid efforts and international solidarity efforts is, in other words, conditional. We instinctively feel the local and the global are the right levels to deal with different elements of the pandemic and its effects, but we want to be sure everyone is pulling their weight, and we’re getting enough out of it for what we’re willing to put in.

That means we need to be planning now for campaigning infrastructure that can turn the new neighbourliness into the new normal, while helping people draw connections between their new local involvement and the need for active citizenship at a national and global level.

The Dignity’s Project’s research on the mutual aid movement suggests there are foundations already in place, but activists will need to be careful not to over-interpret the data, with 57% of respondents saying “mutual aid groups like mine have nothing to do with politics”.

So if we want people to move towards more active civic involvement, to make what the New Citizenship Project calls the big shift “from consumer to citizen”, we need to introduce the idea of political activism as something that sits in service of, and not in a separate realm to, people’s individual moral choices and willingness to muck-in locally.

The new National Health Team is one attempt to operate at these three levels – individual, local and political. The coming months are likely to see a flowering of these kinds of efforts, as we increasingly recognise that none of individual behaviour change, local volunteering or traditional advocacy-led campaigning will be enough on their own.

An imperfect message that gets heard is better than a perfect one that doesn’t

The social change sector globally is currently producing a large number of really superb messaging guides around coronavirus and there are some brilliant research projects on the go about attitudes about everything from climate change to regulation to social security. The challenge for our movements is whether we can do enough with the insights once we have them.

Two barriers present themselves. The first is that research which shows how to communicate for one purpose (for example, to shore up support for aid, in the case of our Public Insight 2020 project) will not necessarily be widely adopted by people with a brief to communicate for another important purpose (for example, recruiting donors or promoting an organisation’s brand). That’s not just the case for international issues – the tension plays out around storytelling efforts on domestic poverty too. Organisations with enough marketing budget or media reach to make a dent in public opinion are, almost by definition, also likely to be delivering frontline services under the extraordinary pressure of rising demand and falling income.

Meanwhile, many of the organisations which are nimble enough to internalise the insight lack the reach to make it count. Across our fields we’ve got a lot of money being spent crafting narratives no-one is going to hear. It’s time to get much more serious about thinking about our routes to market when we embark on insight work and we need to be willing to pay for the distribution as well as the design of the messages.

Serious strategic communications efforts cost money – and mobilisation efforts which can actually leverage the latent political power of the people who agree with your message even more so. At Save the Children we’ve introduced a strong organising flavour into our campaigning work (as Tom Baker lays out here) and in the Aid Campaign we’ve focused on building local ‘power postcodes’ groups in the places that matter most. We will be spending the summer thinking about how to scale that work.

While it’s massively welcome that we’ve seen a big uptick in the amount of insight work big NGOs and funders are investing in, it’s all pretty academic if we’re not overlaying it with an understanding of political geography and overlaying that in turn with investment in local power.

We are only six months into the coronavirus crisis and don’t yet know when – or how – it will end. What we do know is that activism is unlikely to be what speeds our exit from the crisis, but it is the single biggest determinant of whether that exit is equitable. This moment demands our best ever work and we won’t do it without plans to deal with the biggest strategic challenges in front of us. This list of four may be incomplete, but it’s where I think we should begin.  

[mykidsgay]

How Do I Talk to My Students and Co-Workers About Trump?

"I'm a middle school teacher in a suburban, mostly white area. I am "out" on a need-to-know basis, but everyone is very supportive and accepting. Everything that has been going on politically since the election has had a profound effect on me personally, and I have been struggling with how, or if I should even try, to talk about this stuff with co-workers and students. Any ideas on an appropriate way to bring it up?"

Question Submitted Anonymously Answered by Sara Kost

—

Sara Says:

Hello, fellow teacher.

Thank you for your question! I completely understand and share the same feelings around how this election and the resulting current Administration has affected us as queer teachers. I know for me personally, I’m lucky to have found comfort and solidarity with colleagues at work. I’ve also found a place to detach from the emotional stress of the news and just be in the moment with my students.

Many people in the education profession are feeling frustrated, sad, and fearful every time a new news report comes out. With the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education (*shudders*), the rollback of protections for trans+ students, and the overall political climate as of late, we educators have a lot to be stressed about. We want to advocate for ourselves, our profession, and our students. We want to scream from the roof of our schools about how important free, public education really is to our country and our society. But most of all, we want to share our thoughts and feelings with our co-workers and students.

Talking with co-workers and talking with students are two very different situations, so let’s tackle co-workers first. Depending on how friendly you are with your co-workers, there have probably been times where you’ve had the opportunity to talk with them about a wide variety of topics. Lunchtime conversation topics in the teacher’s lounge may vary from personal life, to students, to curriculum, to current events and politics, to cool deals at Target, and more! Whenever current events and politics come up, you can absolutely add your opinion to the conversation. Of course, time and place matter. Talking politics while on hallway duty or bus duty or during a team meeting might not be the best time. Before school, after school, or during lunch when students aren’t around would be appropriate times to chat with co-workers about the state of our union.

You may find that your co-workers have differing opinions from you, or you may find that you share similar values. Respect your co-workers differing opinions, while challenging racism, sexism, homophobia, and overt falsehoods. One easy way to do this is by asking where your co-workers are getting their information from. Fact checking and exposing fake news is easy to do, and it’s one way to remind your co-workers that, as teachers, we need to be able to think critically about the news we are getting. Of course it’s important to teach students how to fact check, but it’s just as important for adults to do the same!

Additionally, you can steer your conversation topics to how current events have affected your students, students’ families, and their community, which may feel more relevant than broader election topics. You can ask how the election has affected your co-workers and their families, and you can also bring up how the election has affected you personally as a queer person. As we found out during the fight for same-sex marriage, knowing someone who is gay or lesbian affects how people view LGBT issues and, in turn, can affect how people vote. The more out, open, and honest we can be with our families and friends, the more likely they are to think about us when they go vote. Making that connection between their own lives and our lives is important because it humanizes us.

In addition, have you thought about checking in with your union or becoming a union steward for your building? Public education is a target of the current Administration; Rallying your co-workers around cuts to Education, either federally or in your state, is a good way to build coalition and community around resistance. Find like-minded staff in your building, and plan a time to meet up after school to write or call your representatives. Your resistance can and should be multidimensional and intersectional, and focusing on Education issues as well as LGBTQ+ issues is a great way to validate two very important parts of your identity.

As far as bringing up current political events with your students, there are a few things to consider. First, did your District or Admin provide any guidelines from which to work? For example, my District and Admin team sent out a few different emails right after the election with guidelines and tips to have these tough conversations with students. See if there’s a framework or any considerations your superiors have laid out for you first. Tread carefully: politics in the classroom can get and has gotten teachers in trouble.

With that in mind, some small ways you can show your support for your students might be to wear a safety pin, a rainbow pin, or another small token as a non-verbal signal that you are a safe and supporting adult in the building. You could also put up a safe space sticker or poster in your classroom, put up posters of diverse important people for your subject area, or make a poster with any number of supportive quotes that are going around social media right now, like #RESIST. I saw a quote from a teacher on the internet a while ago that started out “Dear Undocumented Students… Dear Black Students… Dear Muslim Students…” which I really liked.

You could also try to incorporate these topics into the curriculum! This may look different depending on what subject you teach. For example, current events in Social Studies are easy to fit in. Reading news articles, practicing non-fiction reading, and examining fallacy in arguments is good for English Language Arts. A Fine Arts class can examine forms of protest art. A Math class could look at the Elector count or the budget. There are ways to be creative and work these topics into your classroom, regardless of what subject you teach.

If your school permits it, you might also think about starting an after-school club for community service to turn your student’s post-election energy into action. The club doesn’t need to have a partisan lean to address important topics. Your students can design community service projects for local community problems, learn about community issues, and feel like they can change the world one small step at a time.

I believe the most important thing to help youth feel less frightened and more powerful is to encourage them to take action. As a community, LGBTQ+ people have been traumatized by the aftermath of the 2016 election, along with many other marginalized communities. Every day we reexperience some of that trauma anew with whatever recent screwed up thing is in the headlines now. It’s exhausting. Depending on the amount of energy you already spend in your daily life outside of school, it may feel good to spend some energy on your students, encouraging them to write letters to the editor, organizing an after-school community service/action club, or helping them find resources or information about participating in the political process at their age. Good luck!

***

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[gizedcom]

Trump not ready to commit to election results if he loses

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is refusing to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming White House election, recalling a similar threat he made weeks before the 2016 vote, as he scoffs at polls showing him lagging behind Democrat Joe Biden. Trump says it’s too early to make such an ironclad guarantee.

“I have to see. Look … I have to see,” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace during a wide-ranging interview on ”Fox News Sunday.” “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.” The Biden campaign responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

Trump also hammered the Pentagon brass for favoring renaming bases that honor Confederate military leaders — a drive for change spurred by the national debate about race after George Floyd’s death. “I don’t care what the military says,” the commander in chief said.

The president described the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as a “a little bit of an alarmist” about the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump stuck to what he had said back in February — that the virus is “going to disappear.” On Fox, he said, “I’ll be right eventually.” The United States tops the global death toll list with over 140,000 and confirmed infections, with 3.7 million.

It is remarkable that a sitting president would express less than complete confidence in the American democracy’s electoral process. But for Trump, it comes from his insurgent playbook of four years ago, when in the closing stages of his race against Hillary Clinton, he said he would not commit to honoring the election results if the Democrat won.

Pressed during an October 2016 debate about whether he would abide by the voters’ will, Trump responded that he would “keep you in suspense.”

Trump has seen his presidential popularity erode over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and in the aftermath of nationwide protests centered on racial injustice that erupted after Floyd’s death in Minneapolis nearly two months.

Trump contends that a series of polls that show his popularity eroding and Biden holding an advantage are faulty. He believes Republican voters are underrepresented in such surveys.

“First of all, I’m not losing, because those are fake polls,” Trump said in the taped interview, which aired Sunday. “They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016.”

Trump was frequently combative with Wallace in defending his administration’s response to the pandemic, weighing in on the Black Lives Matter movement and trying to portray Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, as lacking the mental prowess to serve as president.

Among the issues discussed was the push for wholesale changes in policing that has swept across the nation. Trump said he could understand why Black Americans are upset about how police use force disproportionately against them.

“Of course I do. Of course I do,” the president said, adding his usual refrain that “whites are also killed, too.”

He said he was “not offended either by Black Lives Matter,” but at the same time defended the Confederate flag, a symbol of the racism of the past, and said those who “proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism.”

“They love their flag, it represents the South, they like the South. That’s freedom of speech. And you know, the whole thing with ‘cancel culture,’ we can’t cancel our whole history. We can’t forget that the North and the South fought. We have to remember that, otherwise we’ll end up fighting again. You can’t just cancel all,” Trump said.

Wallace challenged Trump on some of his claims and called out the president at time, such as when Trump falsely asserted that “Biden wants to defund the police.” The former vice president has not joined with activists rallying behind that banner. He has proposed more money for police, conditioned to improvements in their practices.

Trump continues to insist that Biden “signed a charter” with one of his primary rivals on the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. At one point in the interview, Trump calls on aides to bring him documentation to support his assertion. Trump, however, is unable to point to language from a Biden-Sanders task force policy document released this month by the Biden campaign.

Trump stood behind his pledge to veto a $740 billion defense bill over a requirement that the Defense Department change the names of bases named for Confederate military leaders. That list includes Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas and Fort Benning in Georgia.

The president argued there were no viable alternatives if the government ever tried. “We’re going to name it after the Reverend Al Sharpton?” Trump asked, referring to a prominent civil rights leader. “What are you going to name it?”

Trump, 74, stuck to a campaign charge that Biden, 77, is unable to handle the rigors of the White House because of his age. As for polls showing the incumbent is trailing, Trump noted he was thought to be behind for much of the 2016 contest. “I won’t lose,” he predicted.

The president and top advisors have long accused Biden of using the pandemic as an excuse to stay in “his basement” in his Delaware home. Biden has indeed shifted much of his campaign online, but frequently travels in Delaware and Pennsylvania, organizing speeches and small gatherings with voters and community leaders that are within driving distance of his home. Biden’s campaign says it will begin resuming normal travel and campaign activities, but only when health officials and state and local authorities say it is safe.

Questioned about the coronavirus, Trump chided Fauci, the National Institutes of Health expert, and repeated false claims that anybody could get a test and that increased testing was the only reason that the U.S. was seeing more cases.

Case are rising because people are infecting each other more than they were when most everyone was hunkered down. The percentage of tests coming back positive for the virus has been on the rise across nearly the entire country.

___

Associated Press writer Hope Yen contributed to this report.

WILL WEISSERT

COLLEEN LONG

Aamer Madhani

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