As coronavirus cases spike, public health officials are pleading with Americans to avoid large crowds and hold more muted Independence Day celebrations, but subdued is not President Donald Trump’s style, and he aimed to go big, promising a “special evening” in Washington that could bring tens of thousands to the National Mall.
Trump’s “Salute for America” celebration on Saturday evening was to include a speech from the White House South Lawn that he said would celebrate American heritage, as well as a military flyover over the city and an enormous fireworks display that could pack people downtown.
The president kicked off the holiday weekend by traveling to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for a fireworks display Friday night near the mountain carvings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. In his remarks, he accused protesters who have pushed for racial justice of engaging in a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history.”
In a presidential message Saturday on the 244th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Trump acknowledged that “over the past months, the American spirit has undoubtedly been tested by many challenges.”
His Democratic rival, Joe Biden, said in a statement that the U.S. “never lived up” to its founding principle that “all men are created equal,” but that today “we have a chance to rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country.”
His participation in big gatherings comes as many communities have decided to scrap fireworks, parades and other holiday traditions. The goal is to try to prevent further spread of the coronavirus, which large gatherings could spur. Confirmed cases are climbing in 40 states, and the U.S. set another record Friday with 52,300 newly reported infections, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.
For the Mount Rushmore event, GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, a Trump ally, insisted social distancing wasn’t necessary and masks were optional. Trump spent little time in his Mount Rushmore address reflecting on pandemic, which has killed more than 129,000 Americans.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions that mass gatherings like the one scheduled for Washington present a high risk for spread of the virus.
Personally, I don’t know why anyone would ever want to go to one of Trump gatherings, even without a deadly pandemic raging through the country. But apparently, some do. I just saw a couple interviewed on TV saying they think the pandemic is overhyped and they don’t think there’s any reason not to go about your normal business.
Hopefully there aren’t very many of those types in DC right now and he’ll get a humiliatingly sparse crowd like he did in Tulsa.
….In a certain way, our tremendous Testing success gives the Fake News Media all they want, CASES. In the meantime, Deaths and the all important Mortality Rate goes down. You don’t hear about that from the Fake News, and you never will. Anybody need any Ventilators???
Positivity rate and hospitalizations are way up also. The daily death rate is holding steady… for now.
They’ve learned a lot about the disease so people aren’t dying as quickly as they were and they go to great lengths to keep them off of ventilators these days.
It’snice to see the president being a snotty little bitch about a global pandemic though. Very reassuring.
MPI/Getty ImagesA William Charles cartoon depicting King George III getting a bloody nose from President James Madison, after the US won early victories in the War of 1812, circa 1813
David Rothkopf in the NYRB on the worst president in history and why he was anticipated by the founders. I pick it up partway through:
America’s worst presidents demonstrate something essential about what is most broken or troubling in the character of the country and the temper of the times. A dismal or dire US president is a symptom of great problems within society that weaken it or put it in peril.
In this year of a presidential election, we must account for our forty-fifth president because the real challenge before us is not simply to replace a terribly flawed leader, but to understand how to fix a system that produces, promotes, protects, and even values the dangerous toxicity we see daily from our commander-in-chief.
It has been said that one of the most important ingredients for a successful career is wisdom in choosing the right predecessor: if the one who came before was bad enough, the one who comes after is almost certain to look better by comparison. This may be some consolation to whoever is Donald Trump’s successor—it certainly worked to the advantage of George Washington.
As much as the United States was founded on ideals, it was also established in response to the manifold failings of King George III. The British monarch is, in fact, the defining bad leader of American history. He and the system over which he presided were so dire that they fundamentally shaped our idea of what a leader should and shouldn’t be—inspiring Thomas Paine, the English radical who arrived on these shores in 1774, to compose Common Sense, the definitive condemnation of England’s abuses and an argument for breaking with the country. Paine wrote of kings (and, we might add, by extension those born into privilege at any time):
Men who look upon themselves as born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.
The Declaration of Independence, published only months after Paine’s pamphlet, was itself primarily a denunciation of George III. The crux of the document is a section devoted to his wrongs—“a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”—a litany of twenty-seven separate complaints about his rule.
George is condemned for, among other offenses, having refused to approve laws that are “necessary for the public good,” for bullying governors, for blocking reasonable legislative progress, for blocking immigration to the states, for “obstructing the Administration of Justice,” for bending the judiciary to his will, for seeking to make the military “independent of and superior to the Civil Power,” for conspiring “with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution,” “for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” and for having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” Any of those grievances sound familiar?
During the impeachment proceedings against President Trump, Representatives Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler both cited a letter Alexander Hamilton wrote to George Washington warning that:
When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”
Hamilton also observed that “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.” And it was Washington, our first president, who noted in turn that, for the republic to succeed, “the form of government must be supported by a virtuous citizenry.” The Founders saw that good governance required leaders and citizens of good character, and realized neither was a given.
Should we conclude, then, that Donald Trump is the embodiment of the Founders’ worst fears?
Every day, there are new outrages, to be sure. We would need a list of more than twenty-seven complaints if we were to enumerate a lifetime of Trump’s misdeeds, from defrauding US tax authorities and obstructing justice to violating the Constitution. He has invited our enemies to interfere with our elections to help him win, then sought to do it again. He has misused federal resources, inappropriately elevated his own family members, and enriched his own businesses. He has repeatedly attacked the First and the Fourteenth Amendments. He has had infants thrown in cages and denied relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria at the cost of thousands of lives. He has gutted environmental protections and attacked alliances that the US spent decades building and maintaining. And now he has mismanaged the worst public health crisis in a hundred years, overseen the greatest economic crisis since the Depression, and attempted to use the US military to crush legitimate protests on the streets of the capital.
Lately, in the space of just a few days, he was revealed to have endorsed concentration camps in China and to have again sought the assistance of a foreign adversary in winning a US election, was quoted as calling for the deaths and imprisonment of US journalists, defended the slave power traitors of the Confederacy, admitted that he suppressed testing during the pandemic because true data about the rate of infections would harm him politically, sought to fire more truthtellers in the administration and had his attorney general remove an official in charge of investigations into him and his supporters. He was reportedly briefed about a Russian scheme to place bounties on American and allied troops in Afghanistan, and not only did nothing about it but continued to act as an advocate for Putin. And so it goes on… before we even consider the many complaints about his character—his racism and misogyny, his ignorance and contempt for science and history, his lies, his narcissism, his vulgarity, his demagoguery. Has there ever been a public official in US history so unable to relate to others, show an emotion besides anger, or view the world through any means but his own self-interest?
It is easy to imagine he is the worst leader the US has ever had. It is a view endorsed by the American Political Science association, which canvassed some 170 historians who ranked Trump dead last—a largely bipartisan verdict, too, since even self-identified Republicans on the panel rated him fortieth against the forty-four other contenders. C-Span has conducted similar surveys of presidential historians in 2000, 2009, and 2017 (none of these, naturally, include Trump). The bottom ten in the most recent survey were James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, Chester Arthur, and Martin Van Buren. (There were some shifts in the group over the three surveys, with, for example, George W. Bush making the bottom ten in 2009, but just missing the cut in 2017.)
Several patterns become apparent from such lists. In addition to a negative association with the divisions of the Civil War period, corruption and scandal were another way on to the list for several of those ranked among the worst (for example, Grant and Harding). Of the presidents who faced impeachment, Andrew Johnson is always ranked in the bottom group, Nixon is sometimes, and Clinton is not. Trump is on his way to joining Johnson.
The best—maybe only—saving grace for Trump in the history books is that no one could accuse him of causing the Civil War. That said, the signature approach of defending and promoting white supremacists and ethno-nationalist policies that has come to define his presidency has capitalized on precisely the legacy of those regional and racial divisions in America that did lead to the Civil War.
It is one thing to compare Trump to others who have held the country’s highest office, but as the Founders also pointed out, the fate of the country rests in the hands of those who ultimately wield the power of government in our shaken but still standing republican system: the people. Many may despise those aspects of our society embodied in Trump’s presidency, but in a democracy it is up to us to work to correct what is wrong with our communities. If we have a president who is selfish, ignorant, venal, dishonest, racist, misogynist, and corrupt, what does it tell us that a significant minority of American citizens celebrates such a leader, while another segment of our compatriots are willing to tolerate them, at least enough to give him their votes?
His supporters have had plenty of encouragement from politicians and press pundits who have normalized his behavior. And they have had little discouragement from an opposition party that has been far too flaccid in its response to Trump’s abuses, too often indulging in finger-wagging rather than taking effective action. Even when Democrats took the action of impeachment, they ceded ground, limited their hearings, abandoned efforts to subpoena vital witnesses, and failed to rally public opinion to prevent the president’s party from derailing the process. But we, too, must own up to our part in enabling this dereliction.
Acknowledging that Donald Trump is very likely the worst president American democracy has ever produced and that we, as citizens in that democracy, must accept a general responsibility for choosing such a man, is only the first, and perhaps easiest, step we can take in remedying the situation. If the worst presidents are produced by their historical moment, enabled by their parties, and reflective of deep divides and flaws in American life, simply voting them out is insufficient. We must address the root causes that enabled a man as profoundly flawed and corrupt as Trump to win high office.
[…]
The worst among American presidents prior to Trump—Buchanan, Johnson, and Pierce, for example—were all produced by the Democratic Party of the nineteenth century—a party that sought to defend or forgive slavery, and that tolerated and promoted a divided nation. Since President Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the modern Republican Party increasingly taken on that mantle. Trump is often said to have commandeered the GOP. But properly viewed in historical terms, the reverse is also true: President Trump could not exist without the post-Nixonian GOP that has Mitch McConnell patrolling the Senate and Bill Barr providing legal cover for the virtually unlimited power of the “unitary executive.”
This is a Republican Party that has produced two presidents in the past fifty years who worked to undermine constitutional government and have faced impeachment. The GOP has also worked hard to rig the system in its favor. The party has promoted gerrymandering and voter suppression to help Republicans capture statehouses, and has cemented biases in the courts by appointing increasingly partisan, ill-qualified judges. Such power grabs have become an intrinsic part of the government failure we face today.
Ending Trump’s misrule and restoring confidence in the presidency demands the undoing of impediments to free and fair elections. That will entail root-and-branch campaign finance reform, an end to voter suppression, new defenses against foreign interference in elections, and reining in the digital disinformation engines. These are perhaps only the minimum demands for restoring American democracy.
Trump is a sign that we as a nation have lost our way. Just as Hamilton warned, a confusion of celebrity for leadership, fame for accomplishment, and popularity for genius has given us “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune.” Seizing the opportunity, unscrupulous “insolent men” have pandered to the lowest common denominators of fear and greed to win power and exploit it for a small elite. November’s election is a judgment day for this nation’s form of republican government. Or else, only “civil commotion” awaits us.
There’s no going back. Too much has been destroyed …. and revealed. There is no choice but to move forward. It’s not going to be easy.
Here’s Kim Guilfoyle speaking at an indoor event in South Dakota, no masks in sight, that was also attended by Kristi Noem the day before it was announced Guilfoyle tested positive for Covid (video from Facebook) pic.twitter.com/UGafeRak2s
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of President Trump’s eldest son and a top fund-raising official for the Trump re-election campaign, tested positive for the coronavirus on Friday before a Fourth of July event at Mount Rushmore, a person familiar with her condition said.
Ms. Guilfoyle traveled to South Dakota with Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., in anticipation of attending a huge fireworks display where the president was set to speak. They did not travel aboard Air Force One, according to the person familiar with her condition, and she was the only person in the group who tested positive.
Ms. Guilfoyle was not experiencing symptoms, the person familiar with her condition said.
Covid Kim and Junior are driving back to DC so they don’t infect anyone on an airplane.
She was also at the Tulsa rally where a bunch of campaign staffers and secret service were infected. Herman Cain is in the hospital after appearing there on behalf of Donald Trump and not observing any guidelines. Now Guilfoyle. Junior is with her.
It’s all around him. You’d think he’d wear a mask.
At the foot of Mount Rushmore’s granite monument to his presidential forebears, President Trump on Friday delivered a dark speech ahead of Independence Day in which he sought to exploit the nation’s racial and social divisions and rally supporters around a law-and-order message that has become a cornerstone of his reelection campaign.
Trump focused most of his address before a crowd of several thousand in South Dakota on what he described as a grave threat to the nation from liberals and angry mobs — a “left-wing cultural revolution” that aims to rewrite U.S. history and erase its heritage amid the racial justice protests that have roiled cities for weeks.
Praising presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the men carved into the cliffs behind him, Trump declared that their legacies are under assault from protesters who have defaced and torn down statues. As he has done with increasing fervor in recent weeks, the 45th president denounced not just rioters and vandals but also much of the social movement that propelled the mass demonstrations in response to the killings of black men at the hands of police.AD
“The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society,” Trump said. “It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and turn our free society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.”
The president, who recently signed an executive order aimed at punishing those who destroy monuments on federal property, referred to “violent mayhem” in the streets, even though many of the mass demonstrations have been largely peaceful. He warned that “angry mobs” were unleashing “a wave of violent crime” and using “cancel culture” as a weapon to intimidate and dominate political opponents — in what he compared to “totalitarianism.”
And Trump asserted that “children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe the men and women who built it were not heroes but villains.”
“This radical view of American history is a web of lies,” he added.
“They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” Trump said. “But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them.”
[…]
In his speech, Trump vowed that Mount Rushmore “will never be desecrated. These heroes will never be disgraced. Their legacy will never, ever be destroyed. Their achievements will never be forgotten. And this monument will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and our freedom.”
The crowd stood and applauded, while chanting, “USA! USA!”
Uhm… Happy 4th?
I have a sentimental streak about America, I admit. Maybe I was brainwashed in school. But if anything can strip whatever’s left of my warm feelings about the ideals that formed the country, it’s listening to Donald Trump turn them into fetid compost with speeches like that.
We are exceptional. Exceptionally stupid, apparently.
By the way, he only mentioned the catastrophe we are currently living through by giving a brief shoutout to doctors and first responders. Other than that, as far as Trump and his braindead cult were concerned, the only threat we face is from Antifa and political correctness. Other than that, things are going great.
He’s nowhere to be found on the NY Times this Fourth of July morning:
Nor the Washington Post:
And he’s not on CNN, either:
Who’s missing from the top of these mainstream news Web sites? The same person who was missing during the summer of 2016 more days than most:
The Democratic contender for president of the United States.
In 2016, I was counting: on average, the Republican nominee was mentioned more than 6 times as often as the Democratic at the top of the front pages. It felt as if exactly one person was running for president and when only one person is running, the election’s results are foregone.
Air Force One soared above the Black Hills of South Dakota Friday evening carrying the nominal leader of this sea-to-shining-sea nation. He came to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore. He is running for president again this fall, for the chance to give a second inauguration speech. Friday night’s was, as former President George W. Bush said of this man’s first inaugural address, “some weird shit.” It was the trailer for #AmericanCarnage 2 — America Laid Waster.
This is the grimmest July 4th in memory. The coronavirus pandemic has spread from blue, coastal cities into Republican red states. Deadly. About 130,000 Americans alive at the dawning of 2020 have not survived to see this Independence Day. Nearly three million Americans contracted the virus while the panjandrum occupying the Resolute Desk attempted to wish it away between mean tweets. What once was New York City’s catastrophe now has Texas intensive-care units overflowing. Hospitals in Florida are at or near capacity.
In the streets, white supporters of the acting president shout angrily that they will not have their birthright liberty constrained. No, not by a virus they pretend is no worse than the flu nor by the politicians belatedly trying to stem the carnage by asking that they wear masks to slow its spread. This by-God America! Besides, to wear as mask is to publicly confess that their avatar of whiteness failed to protect their health, their jobs, and their privileged place in the preordained order, that neither America nor their champion is living up to the hype. This they cannot concede.
This July 4th the white majority is getting a taste of how nonwhite neighbors experience America. It is a place where liberty and justice are as substantial as a Potemkin village, where equality is as hollow as Confederate monuments to centuries of human bondage. They don’t like being reminded of it. Not one bit.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II recited more of that Douglass speech at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC this time last year. Having it read aloud has more power than words on the page.
At Mt. Rushmore last night, the Pretender-in-Chief, claimed to be defender of monuments to America’s history. He appropriated the memory of Reverend Martin Luther King when in monotone he read from his teleprompter, “We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King when he said that the founders had signed a promissory note to every future generation.”
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
What was true in 1852 and was true in 1963, is still true in 2020.
Writer James Baldwin told filmmaker Ken Burns, “For a Black America, for a black inhabitant of this country, the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke, meaning nothing to us.”
The memory of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery and too many other nonwhite Americans to mention here are monuments to this country’s failure to live up to its promises and to the hypocrisy of its public pieties 168 years after Douglass spoke. The union Lincoln preserved has yet to be perfected.
We have solemn work to do.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
NY Rep. @KathleenRice, who’s leading the charge in this video, tells me she sheperded the ducks all the way from Third Ave. to Central Park — a trek that took 45 minutes.
“I’m proud to serve every New Yorker, including those with with webbed feet,” Rice says. https://t.co/D4UJsQo3j1
This piece by Robin Wright about the loss of American ideals is both interesting and sad…
The real saga of the Statue of Liberty—the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show—is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clue is the chain under Lady Liberty’s feet: she is stomping on it. “In the early sketches, she was also holding chains in her hand,” Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, told me last week. The shackles were later replaced with a tablet noting the date of America’s independence. But the shattered chain under her feet remained.
The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom—this time for all people—first embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
The now famous line—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus—wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted. The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base. It has since associated the Statue of Liberty with a meaning that Laboulaye never intended.
One has to wonder what Laboulaye would think of America today, amid one of the country’s gravest periods of racial turmoil since the Civil War. Last month, a poll by Ipsos found that an overwhelming majority of people in fourteen countries, on six continents, support the protests that erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd. Russia, the fifteenth country in the survey, was the only place where a minority—about a third—backed the demonstrators.
On the eve of America’s anniversary—our two hundred and forty-fourth—much of the world believes that the country is racist, battered and bruised. “Europe has long been suspicious—even jealous—of the way America has been able to pursue national wealth and power despite its deep social inequities,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, in London, told me. “When you take the Acela and pass through the poorest areas of Baltimore, you can’t believe you’re looking at part of the United States. There’s always been this sense of an underlying flaw in the U.S. system that it was getting away with—that somehow America was keeping just one step ahead of the grim reaper.”
The flaw, he said, is reflected in the American obsession with the stock market as the barometer of national health—economically, politically, socially. The reaction to Floyd’s murder exposed the deep injustices in the American economic model, as well as in the police and judicial systems, Niblett said. Europeans, he added, are no longer so envious.
The Trump Administration’s ineptitude in handling the covid-19 crisis, as well as the President’s disdain for longstanding allies and international treaties, have compounded the damage to America’s image. A second poll, released last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, reported that public perceptions of the United States are increasingly negative in virtually all of the European nations surveyed.
In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot.” The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small”—as low as six per cent in Italy.
America’s standing worldwide has sunk before, although usually over foreign-policy decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The mood globally feels different now, Richard Burkholder, who was the director of Gallup’s international polling for decades, told me. Criticism is now focussed on American practices at home.
“The United States was once a beacon,” he said. “I don’t see people looking up to us as they did before.” Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, was blunter. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” he wrote, in April. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
Any country that would elect Donald Trump and completely fail to hold him accountable for the monumental corruption, criminally and ineptitude is pitiful indeed.
I didn’t know that story about the chains at Lady Liberty’s feet. Fascinating. We need to update our history books. I think it’s great that the statue is associated with immigrants, as reflected in the poem. That was added at a time of massive immigration and there was plenty of backlash for doing it. So that should stay.
But I think we need a new one to go with it, don’t you?
