Top of the Ticket

Donald Trump is a salesman who has never let truth get in the way of peddling a product. As president, he tried unsuccessfully to sell various schemes to repeal and replace Obamacare by using the same technique he used to sell the bogus curriculum of Trump University: make outlandish claims of value and quality that are nowhere close to the truth.

Now he is applying the same approach to tax reform.

In the middle of a pool game in the back room of the Flying Bull tavern, my new friend, Jarrod Stout, pulled me aside. He wanted to make sure I had his back if things got rough. As soon as he’d come into the bar he had gotten glaring looks from some of the white patrons, and now a grim-faced guy with a custom-made pool cue was acting a bit strange.

At this small town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, there is a history that is well-known and a history that has been hidden.

The familiar history is the story of militant abolitionist John Brown, who on the night of Oct. 16, 1859, came with a party of 22 raiders to seize the United States arsenal.

On the dark night of Aug. 11, hundreds of neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched across the University of Virginia campus chanting “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us!”

RICHMOND, Va. — Monument Avenue is a broad boulevard that stretches through some of the finer real estate in this city. At several intersections, the streets carve central squares and circles and at the center of those stand monuments to the venerated heroes of the Confederacy, monuments that some people would like to sweep into the trash heap of history.

I was shuffling along a path beside the James River in the hot Southern sun, tied loosely by a rope to 17 other people while an actor dressed as an 18th century slave overseer paced beside us screaming demeaning, racist epithets.