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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Congress Prepares to Open Its Wallet for Texas</h1>
            
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>The flood waters in Houston have yet to recede, and it might take days or weeks to assess the full damage wrought by Hurricane Harvey. But Texas lawmakers are already sure of one thing: They’re going to need more money from Congress.</p><p>Calls for the House and Senate to approve an emergency spending package for Texas and possibly Louisiana began quickly on Monday following the weekend’s deluge, even as officials acknowledged they have no idea yet how much cash they’ll need. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat who represents a large portion of Houston, said in an email she’d be working with other Texas lawmakers to draft a request based on discussions with local leaders. “What they say will influence the amount of the funding request we introduce,” Jackson Lee said. “But based on early estimates, the amount of the initial request will likely be in the multibillion-dollar level. As we recover, there may be more needed. Together, we will get through this, whatever it takes.”</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>In television interviews, Republican Senator Ted Cruz said he’d gotten assurances directly from President Trump that the administration would support additional aid to the state, where flooding has submerged the nation’s fourth-largest city in several feet of water. “He just said, ‘Ted, what do you need? What does the state need? The answer is yes,’” Cruz recalled in an interview Monday on Fox News.</p><p>At a press conference later in the day, Trump said the government had enough money for the immediate rescue efforts but that the total price tag for Texas’s recovery would be “many billions of dollars.” Congress has a packed agenda in September and needs to raise the debt ceiling and fund the entire federal government, among other must-pass items. Trump has already complicated those efforts by threatening a government shutdown if Congress does not approve money for a Southern border wall. But on Monday, he said Texas’s needs were separate and would not get in the way.</p><aside class="callout" data-omni-click="r'article',r' ',d,r'related',#data-omni-index,@data-article-id"><hr><h4>
        
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            <img width="242" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/08/RTRJCL1/thumb_wide_medium.jpg?1503952722" alt="Stranded motorists look over a flooded I-45 North near downtown Houston after tropical storm Allison, in 2001."></a>
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    <p><a href="/technology/archive/2017/08/how-much-does-houston-spend-on-flood-control/538257/" data-omni-index="0" data-article-id="835335" data-omni-click="inherit">How Much Does Houston Spend on Flood Control?</a></p>
    

    <hr></aside><p>“I think it will happen very quickly. It will go very fast,” the president said.</p><p>With the fiscal year ending in just over a month, FEMA has about $1.8 billion left in its disaster-relief account, and Trump has issued formal designations allowing that money to be used. But officials have already warned that the recovery of Houston and low-lying areas of southeast Texas will take years. Brock Long, FEMA’s administrator, said on Monday afternoon that the region faced “one of the largest housing-recovery missions the nation has ever seen.”</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector2" targeting-pos="boxinjector2" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-3"><p>From a political standpoint, Texas is in luck. As the country’s most populous Republican-dominated state, it wields considerable power in a national government run by the GOP. Texas’s senior senator, John Cornyn, is the second-ranking Republican in the Senate leadership, and its 36-member House delegation includes 25 Republicans and several committee chairmen. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee is Representative John Culberson, who also represents part of Houston and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-28/top-lawmakers-call-on-congress-to-pass-hurricane-relief-bill" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538272'">told <em>Bloomberg Television</em></a> on Monday that a supplemental spending bill would be needed in the coming weeks.</p><p>“We will help those affected by this terrible disaster,” said AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, although she noted that the Trump administration must first submit a formal request for emergency funds. Democrats signaled they would offer little opposition, having criticized the GOP for holding up disaster-relief packages in the recent past. “Republicans must be ready to join Democrats in passing a timely relief bill that makes all necessary resources available through emergency spending,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said. “American families deserve to know that their government will be there for them when disaster strikes, without question and without hesitation.”</p><p>Texas will likely get its money from Congress, but not before its most conservative lawmakers get an earful from fellow Republicans still sore from the last debate over a major natural disaster nearly five years ago. Conservatives, including Cruz, initially held up a $50 billion relief package for New York and New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy, infuriating lawmakers from those states. “I won’t abandon Texas the way Ted Cruz did New York,” Representative Peter King of New York <a href="https://twitter.com/RepPeteKing/status/901824286754791424?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538272'">tweeted</a> on Sunday. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie chimed in Monday, calling the Texas Republicans who opposed the Sandy measure “hypocrites,” <a href="http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/08/christie_blasts_texas_gop_hypocrites_urges_swift_f.html" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538272'">according to the <em>Star-Ledger</em></a>. Asked about the criticism, Cruz on Monday <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/28/rep-ted-cruz-on-hurricane-harvey-focus-is-search-and-rescue-not-political-sniping.html" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538272'">told <em>CNBC</em></a> that the “political sniping” should wait until after the crisis in Texas is over. But he said he opposed the legislation in early 2013 because it included billions in “pork-barrel spending” unrelated to the storm.</p><p>At the time, some conservatives also wanted to enact spending cuts elsewhere in the budget to pay for the additional funds going to the Northeast. There has been little talk of that happening this time around. After Sandy had lashed and flooded the coastline of the Eastern Seaboard, Christie and local Republicans warned their counterparts in the Gulf that their turn to ask for federal help would come again, just as it had a decade earlier following Hurricane Katrina. “It was just a matter of time,” Christie said on Monday. On that score, he was proven right.</p></section>
    
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                <a href="/author/russell-berman/" class="author-link">Russell Berman</a> is a senior associate editor at <em>The Atlantic</em>, where he covers political news. He was previously a congressional reporter for <em>The Hill</em> and a Washington correspondent for <em>The New York Sun</em>.

                
            
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Empty Rituals of an American Massacre</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/james-fallows/" itemprop="url" title="James Fallows" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">James Fallows</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed his “deep sadness,” but continues to block gun-control proposals that enjoy the support of most Americans.</p>
        
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            <p>The financial and political power of the National Rifle Association leaves many politicians terrified of crossing it. And because of its ideological and propaganda power, a segment of Americans now equates any proposed limit on gun use or ownership as a catastrophic step toward the extinction of individual liberties and the dawn of a confiscatory, totalitarian state.</p>

<p>Americans recognize that public-safety controls on use of a car—licensing laws, speed limits, insurance requirements, DUI penalties—don’t threaten the “right to drive.” They recognize that restrictions on some prescription drugs don’t threaten their right to buy aspirin, nor limits on what they can carry onto a plane threaten their right to travel or fly. But the NRA and its allies have succeeded in making gun control an absolute issue. If you believe in the Second Amendment, then whatever the potential control—on gun-show sales, on bulk purchases of ammunition, on waiting times for background checks—it must be fought as a step not so much onto a slippery slope as over a cliff and into the abyss.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Abraham Lincoln's Secret Visits to Slaves</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/william-r-black/" itemprop="url" title="William R. Black" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">William R. Black</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">In the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed thousands of former slaves, some of whom claimed the president came to their plantations disguised as a beggar or a peddler, telling them they’d soon be free.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Shortly before the election of 1860, a man <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.130/?sp=231">came upon</a> a plantation near Marlin, Texas, some 20 miles southeast of Waco. Though nobody knew who he was, the plantation owner took him in as a guest. The stranger paid close attention to how the enslaved people working on the plantation were treated—how they subsisted on a weekly ration of “four pounds of meat and a peck of meal,” how they were whipped and sometimes sold, resulting in the tearing apart of families. Eventually, the stranger said goodbye and went on his way, but a little while later he wrote a letter to the plantation owner, informing him he would soon have to free his slaves—“that everybody was going to have to, that the North was going to see to it.” The stranger told the owner to go into the room where he’d slept, and see where he’d carved his name into the headrest. And when the slaveholder went and looked, he saw the name: “A. Lincoln.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What's Actually Behind Cape Town's Water Crisis</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Blame austerity-obsessed technocrats, irresponsible development, and willful ignorance.</p>
        
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            <p>The city of Cape Town was plonked by its founders onto a peninsula where the Indian and Atlantic oceans merge, often violently, beneath the imposing banks of Table Mountain. To its north lie the fertile fruit and wine farms that weigh down the city’s restaurant tables with unimaginable bounty. Every day when the clock strikes noon, a cannon blast echoes from Signal Hill, a reminder of the city’s colonial heritage. It was established first as a vegetable garden by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, then repurposed as a stronghold for the British until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910; later it served as the apartheid regime’s parliamentary stronghold. In 2014, The <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/10/travel/2014-places-to-go.html">declared it</a> the best place in the world to visit. Britain’s <em>Daily Telegraph</em> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/africa/south-africa/galleries/reasons-why-cape-town-is-the-best-city-in-the-world/">concurred</a>.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Once and Future Speaker?</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/russell-berman/" itemprop="url" title="Russell Berman" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Russell Berman</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Is Nancy Pelosi's leadership the key to Democrats regaining the House, or the thing that will hold them back?</p>
        
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            <p class="dropcap">H<span class="smallcaps">ere,”</span> Nancy Pelosi likes to say, “the currency of the realm is the vote.”</p>

<p>With a majority of the votes in Congress, you have power. Without them, you have nothing. Pelosi, the House minority leader, knows it as well as anyone in Washington. She had the votes to make history in 2007 when she became speaker of the House, not only becoming the first woman to hold that title but in the process, rising higher in U.S. electoral politics—and closer in the line of presidential succession—than any woman before or since. Four years later, the votes were gone, washed away in a Republican wave that relegated Democrats back to the minority. Now, with Democrats poised to make a run at recapturing the House majority this fall, Pelosi has a chance to set another mark: the first person to reclaim the speaker’s gavel in more than 60 years and the first ever to do so after so long an interval.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">If Porn Could Be Banned, Why Not AR-15s?</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/james-hamblin/" itemprop="url" title="James Hamblin" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">James Hamblin</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">People willing to discuss regulations on sex-related media should conceivably be open to discussing further regulation of firearms.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Pornography is officially a “public-health crisis” in Utah, according to 2016 legislation. The Republican representative Todd Weiler, who championed the bill and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/a-crisis-of-education/478206/">told me</a> at the time that he sees a lot of porn in his Twitter feed, has been working to make it illegal for internet service providers to provide internet that contains porn.</p>

<p>When I covered this story it felt like a fringe movement, born of conflicting ideas about the role of government in public health. Banning porn means expanding government oversight in a way that infringes on personal liberties and squelches an enormous industry that creates wealth and jobs. These tenets seem contrary to many conservatives’ stated objectives and free-market approach, yet it was conservatives beating the drum.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Why Can't the U.S. Treat Gun Violence as a Public-Health Problem? </h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/sarah-zhang/" itemprop="url" title="Sarah Zhang" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Sarah Zhang</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-15T12:21:13" />
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        <p class="dek">A 1996 bill has had a chilling effect on the CDC’s ability to research firearms.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>After a deadly shooting, the debate always, it seems, breaks down like this: One side argues for gun control, and the other argues there is no research proving those measures work. There is, in fact, <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2595514">little research into gun violence at all</a>—especially compared to other causes of death in the United States.</p>

<p>The modern origins of the impasse can be traced to 1996, when Congress passed an amendment to a spending bill that forbade the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using money to “advocate or promote gun control.”</p>

<p>The National Rifle Association had pushed for the amendment, after public-health researchers produced a spate of studies suggesting that, for example, having a gun in the house increased risk of homicide and suicide. It deemed the research politically motivated. Gun-rights advocates zeroed in on statements like that of Mark Rosenberg, then the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. In response to the early ’90s crime wave, Rosenberg had <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/us/new-tactics-urged-in-fight-against-crime.html">said in 1994</a>, “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes ... It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol—cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What Color Is a Tennis Ball?</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/marina-koren/" itemprop="url" title="Marina Koren" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Marina Koren</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">An investigation into a surprisingly divisive question</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr">It seemed like an easy question.</p>

<p dir="ltr">The query came from <a href="https://twitter.com/cgpgrey/status/961700363131908096">a Twitter poll</a> I spotted on my news feed last week, from user @cgpgrey. “Please help resolve a marital dispute,” @cgpgrey wrote. “You would describe the color of a tennis ball as:” green, yellow, or other.</p>

<p dir="ltr"><em>Yellow, obviously</em>, I thought, and voted. When the results appeared, my jaw dropped with cartoonish effect. Of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with “other.”</p>

<p dir="ltr">I was stunned. I’d gone from being so sure of myself to second-guessing my sanity in a matter of seconds. More than that, I could never have imagined the question of the color of a tennis ball—surely something we could all agree on, even in these times—would be so divisive.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Congressional Stalemate Over Guns and Immigration Isn't Going Away</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/ronald-brownstein/" itemprop="url" title="Ronald Brownstein" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Ronald Brownstein</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">It's the result of cultural, demographic, and economic divides that are only going to grow.</p>
        
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            <p>The dim odds that Congress will respond to the Parkland school massacre with meaningful gun control and the flickering prospects it will pass immigration reform both reflect the same obstacle: the widening trench between the forces of transformation and restoration in American politics.</p>

<p>The convergence of the two policy debates today—with the nation reeling from Wednesday’s shooting in Florida and the Senate voting down an array of proposals on immigration—is coincidental but revealing. Both issues illuminate the central divide between the parties as their political coalitions have sorted and separated along lines of race, generation, education, and geography. On both matters, Republicans are championing primarily non-urban and predominantly white constituencies that want fewer immigrants and more access to guns. Democrats reflect a mirror-image consensus: Their voters coming from diverse urban areas usually support more immigrants and fewer guns.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Ruth Bader Ginsburg Opens Up About #MeToo, Voting Rights, and Millennials</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The Supreme Court justice talks about sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and the cases she’d like to see overturned.</p>
        
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            <p><em>On Monday, </em>The Atlantic<em> contributing editor Jeffrey Rosen spoke at length with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the National Constitution Center, where Rosen is president and CEO. In a wide-ranging conversation before a live audience, Ginsburg offered a supportive critique of the #MeToo movement, confessed her affection for Millennials, discussed the Supreme Court cases she’d like to see overturned, and told some personal stories about the progress women’s rights have made—while reminding the audience of just how recently gender discrimination in American law seemed not only normal but entrenched. What follows is a condensed and edited version of their conversation. —Adam Serwer</em></p>

<hr><p><strong>Jeffrey Rosen:</strong> What are your thoughts on the #MeToo movement and will it prove lasting progress for women’s equality?</p>


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        <p class="dek">Republicans—and some liberals—downplay the significance of the president’s outbursts. But his words are quietly radicalizing both the left and right, with untold consequences for the future of policy.</p>
        
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            <p dir="ltr">Do the president’s words matter?</p>

<p dir="ltr">In Donald Trump’s first year in office, there has been a surprisingly widespread effort to argue that they do not. Liberals and moderates <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gyjavm/the-case-for-ignoring-trumps-tweets">occasionally</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/business/media/if-trump-tweets-it-is-it-news-a-quandary-for-the-news-media.html">insist</a> that the media and the public should shift their attention from the president’s vulgar statements to the real policy work happening at federal agencies. Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have <a href="https://newrepublic.com/minutes/146577/trumps-embarrassing-fisa-tweets-show-republicans-simply-ignoring-him">repeatedly</a><a href="https://nypost.com/2017/07/02/gop-senator-ignore-trumps-tweets-focus-on-health-care/"> ignored and dismissed</a> Trump’s most shocking comments;<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/focusing-trumps-tweets-will-make-you-out-touch-americans-republican-senator-695725"> criticized the media</a> for paying attention to his tweets;<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/1/12/16885312/trump-shithole-countries-denial"> feigned forgetfulness</a> of his vulgarities; and even<a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/356338-ryan-roasts-trump-i-scroll-twitter-to-see-which-tweets-i-will-have-to-pretend"> made jokes</a> about all that ignoring, dismissing, and forgetting.</p>

<p dir="ltr">The upshot seems to be: <em>Ignore the words, heed the substance.</em></p>

<p dir="ltr">But Trump’s words are his substance. “Politics is persuasion as well as coercion,” the political scientist Jacob Levy <a href="https://niskanencenter.org/blog/the-weight-of-the-words/">wrote</a> last week, rightly arguing that Trump has “changed what being a Republican means.” He has done so not through legislative coercion—indeed, he <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-trump-demanded-loyalty-asked-for-end-1496859119-htmlstory.html">barely seems to understand</a> the basics of American government—but through persuasive insistence. On issues as diverse as the alleged dangers of immigration and the nature of truth, Trump’s words have the power to cleave public opinion, turning nonpolitical issues into partisan maelstroms and turning partisan attitudes on their head. Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t produce the legislative artifacts that journalists typically use to analyze presidential power—it hasn’t translated to many actual laws passed. But the country is only just beginning to understand the scope of Trump’s lexical influence.</p>


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