Will we look back on Thanksgiving 2020 as the dividing line between a world in which our heads were filled with Donald Trump and one in which we can think about someone – and something – other than Trump?
It certainly seemed like that was the case here on the politics desk. We came back to work after the brief holiday and tackled stories that, with one exception, were about other countries, other issues, other people.
As the U.S. election was playing out, Peru was going through a political crisis. At one point, the country had three presidents over the course of one week. Our story on that crisis shows how the new president, Francisco Sagasti, must restore the country’s faith in democracy, and that his task is precisely the same one that was tackled – unsuccessfully – by Peruvian leaders 20 years before.
Another story cites the statistic that one-quarter of millennials believe the “Holocaust was exaggerated or entirely made up.” The article’s author digs into how that denial is “an enduring form of anti-Semitic propaganda” and suggests taking the fight to where it lives these days – on social media – by highlighting the accounts of those who lived through the Holocaust. That story includes an astonishingly prescient comment from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who visited the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945 “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the near future, there develops a tendency to
charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.‘”
Finally, an election law scholar highlights the successful effort by James A. Baker III to win the disputed presidential election for George W. Bush in 2000 – and how Baker’s savvy management is a contrast to Rudy Giuliani’s hapless efforts to overturn the election that Donald Trump lost. Trump’s not entirely out of our heads, it seems.
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