A group of protesters began barking at Trump supporters at a Trump rally in Claremont on October 3. The protesters continued barking when one of the Trump supporters asked if they “kn[e]w how f**king stupid [they] are,” and waved signs bearing slogans such as “Grab Him By The Ballot,” a reference to the president’s 2005 comments about women during an appearance on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. https://twitter.com/TomasMorales_iv/status/1312452128166699009?s=20 Earlier tha

Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that “it shall be the policy of the United States not to promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the Federal workforce or in the Uniformed Services, and not to allow grant funds to be used for these purposes.” This executive order could have a profound impact on the Claremont Colleges, affecting events such as last week’s Athenaeum talk by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be An Antiracist, as well

Trump’s campaign has finally settled on a negative message. In Joe Biden’s America, cities will burn as radical leftists control his every move. It is a combination of a Nixonian law and order message and a characterization of the Democratic Party as a socialist breeding ground. Two premises underlie the strategy: Biden cannot secure our streets and he will be pulled to the extreme left of the Democratic Party. The argument is politically clever — but not sound. However, ther

Earlier last month, President Trump signed the recently negotiated phase-one trade deal with China. During a ceremony at the White House, Trump called the deal a “momentous step, one that has never been taken before with China, toward a future of fair and reciprocal trade.” This claim, however, is far from the truth. But to understand the truth surrounding the phase-one trade deal, one must first understand the reality of tariffs against China. The bottom line is that tariffs

A few weeks ago, I took an Uber from a student journalism event at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda to Claremont. Right as I got in the car, the driver struck me, and my editor, as…interesting. He was wearing a t-shirt reading “Trump 2020” across the front. He asked us if we were college students, and when we answered affirmatively, he laughed. “I bet you don’t like Trump then, huh?” I told him that, while I hadn’t been old enough to vote in the 2016 e

On Monday—amid the Venezuelan presidential crisis in which human rights activists and international observers accused Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro of an illegitimate election—Scripps College hosted two pro-Maduro speakers to defend the regime against perceived foreign intervention in the country’s crisis. Scripps has previously hosted pro-Maduro officials and speakers three times, including during last November. Scripps, a women-only college, is part of the Claremont Co

Last week, the Claremont Independent had the distinct opportunity of interviewing Claremont McKenna College (CMC) alumnus and former Congressman David Dreier at the screening of Better Angels—a documentary examining how rivals United States and China can benefit from increased economic and cultural exchange—in Los Angeles. Dreier is a co-executive producer of Better Angels and a trustee of both CMC and the California Institute of Technology, as well as a member of the Jet Pro

This semester, Scripps College’s Humanities Institute’s semesterly speaker series, titled “Exclusive Nationalisms: Global Migration and Immigration,” invites various speakers to purportedly answer the question of “How does global migration and immigration feed into exclusive nationalist narratives?” Despite the plurality in its title, according to its description, the speaker series focuses on one type of nationalism: xenophobic, white nationalism. It asserts that “anti-immig

Yesterday’s debate featured exactly the Trumpian performance we’ve come to expect: the Donald’s signature one-two punch of incoherence and lies, paired with enough bizarre non sequiturs—“I have a son who’s 10, he’s so good with computers,” anyone?—so as to border on the surreal. With such a ‘bigly’ amount of sheer ineptitude, however, genuinely important debate moments are being forgotten. It’s easy to miss the insanity buried amidst the absurd, the moments such as when Trump

To find the greatest irony of this year’s presidential election, look no further than any one of the national polls conducted since the final presidential primaries took place in June. Majorities of voters disapprove of and mistrust each major-party presidential nominee. Three-fifths of the electorate views Republican Donald Trump unfavorably, and less than one-in-three voters describe Democrat Hillary Clinton as “honest and trustworthy.” Third-party candidates—little-known e

One of the enduring critiques of Donald Trump from conservative Republicans throughout the primary process has been that the businessman’s cocksure temperament and draconian immigration policy proposals, though popular among certain segments of the Republican primary electorate, will all but ensure his defeat in a general election campaign against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. I have levied this criticism against Mr. Trump in the past; after all,

In an opinion editorial published in this morning’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump unleashes a blistering critique of the presidential nomination process, excoriating the party establishment for “defending a system that for decades has served the interest of political parties at the expense of the people.” The editorial embodies the anti-establishment flavor of Mr. Trump’s campaign as it rails against a “rigged delegate-s

Yesterday, a student wrote the phrase “Make America” (presumably the beginning of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”) in faint letters on a mural at Pitzer College. Additionally, the word “Trump” was spray painted on Pitzer’s clock tower. In a widely shared Facebook post, one student government representative described the statement as a “hate crime,” and calls for the student who painted it to be prosecuted. Pitzer College joins Scripps,

Last week, Scripps College’s Student Body President, Minjoo Kim, sent an email to the Scripps community describing a “racist incident” that occurred on campus. “A Mexican-American Scripps student woke up to find her whiteboard vandalized with the phrase: ‘#trump2016’.” A similar incident occurred at Emory University where students felt frightened and disturbed after pro-Donald Trump chalkings appeared on campus with the phrase “#trump2016.” “This racist act is completely unac

Many journalists and political commentators have already opined on the problems which would accompany the selection of Donald J. Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee for the highest office in the land. Many conservatives are concerned that Mr. Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton in the general election, given his poor poll numbers against the former secretary of state. A survey conducted this week in Utah, a state which has voted Republican in every presidential contest si

On the Republican side Donald Trump marched to victory in four of the five Republican primaries on Tuesday, steamrolling Senator Marco Rubio on his home turf in Florida and holding back an insurgent Senator Ted Cruz in Missouri, Illinois, and North Carolina. His only loss came in Ohio, where John Kasich, the state’s popular governor, won handily. After his disappointing loss in Florida, Marco Rubio suspended his campaign, shrinking the GOP field to three candidates. The only

What is Super Tuesday? Since our last feature on the Iowa Caucuses, four states, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada have all cast their votes for both the Republican and Democratic Presidential nominees, respectively. With two caucuses and two primaries, these early voting states represent each region of the United States: the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, and the Far West. Both the RNC and the DNC set rules for when states can hold their primary elections,

What are the Iowa Caucuses? In both parties’ nomination processes, the first state to cast its votes is the state of Iowa, which does so in the form of a caucus. While New Hampshire’s state constitution has a law dictating that New Hampshire must be the first state to hold a primary each election cycle, Iowa skirts this law by remaining loyal to the caucus system. The Iowa caucus rose to prominence in the media in 1972, (in large part due to the long-shot candidacy of then Go