A diverse coalition of around 150 organizations on Tuesday collectively spoke out against US President Donald Trump's recent attack on the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with ties to the Democratic Party establishment. The Republican president, through one of his lawyers, threatened to sue the center last month over…
Page A3From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 September 2026
100 civil society groups condemn Trump's attack on think tank as Jeffries demands GOP denounce 'stone-cold racist' ally.
As it ran on the front
You want to know how a party decides who's worth defending? Watch what happens when the accusation lands versus what happens when the target is one of their own. A hundred-plus civil society groups — that's not a fringe number, that's a coalition big enough to fill a stadium twice — come out and condemn an attack on a think tank, a boring, wonky, unsexy institution whose entire crime is publishing research the administration didn't like. And what happens? A statement. A letter. A news cycle that moves on by Thursday.
Now watch the other one. Hakeem Jeffries stands up and calls Laura Loomer a stone-cold racist — his words, on the record, not implied, not read-between-the-lines, stated — and demands Republicans denounce her. And the demand just sits there. Nobody's rushing to the microphone. Nobody's cutting the ties. The silence isn't an accident, it's a policy position with no press release attached, which is the most honest kind.…
…(cont) Here's the euphemism autopsy, because that's the job: 'denounce' is a word politicians use when they want credit for the sentence without doing the thing the sentence describes. Jeffries used the real word — racist, stone-cold, no hedge — and the ask that follows a word like that is supposed to be simple. Say it's wrong. Cut it loose. That's it. That's the whole ask. And when the ask doesn't get answered, the silence tells you the actual value of the relationship, which is apparently worth more than the discomfort of a one-sentence denunciation.
Meanwhile the think tank story tells you the flip side of the same coin: it's not that this administration doesn't respond to pressure, it's that it responds selectively, based on who's applying it and what it costs to ignore them. A hundred groups can write a hundred letters about an attack on an institution and get a shrug. One member of the other party can name a name and get met with silence that's somehow louder.
That's the con, plain as the receipts: accountability is a courtesy extended to friends and withheld from everyone else, and the withholding is the message.
“A hundred groups sound the alarm on an attack on a think tank and get a news cycle; Jeffries calls a Republican ally a stone-cold racist by name and gets silence. Watch what gets a response and what gets ignored — that's the actual party platform, unwritten. Silence is a policy position too.”
“Look, 'denounce' isn't a legal obligation, it's a courtesy, and courtesies are extended selectively, that's just — that's not a great sentence to say out loud, actually, let me rephrase.”
The receipts
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) went after right-wing influencer Laura Loomer for her rhetoric toward prominent left-leaning Black women in politics including Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon and Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). “The media will clip my language about @AngieNixon…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.