This is an adapted excerpt from the May 13 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Last month, a fourth grade class in Greensboro, North Carolina, received a simple assignment from their teacher: Write a persuasive essay on a topic of your choosing and send it to someone in a position of authority. It’s basic elementary school civics.
One student, Christian Mango, chose a topic he was passionate about: electric vehicles, specifically tax rebates for EVs that the Trump administration eliminated. Christian thought the White House should bring them back. The 10-year-old said he is worried about climate change.
He sent his essay to his representative, Republican Virginia Foxx, and the congresswoman responded by email. First she thanked Christian for his letter, but then things took a turn. Foxx sent the elementary school student a list of articles from conservative outlets like Fox News and the National Review for “perusal” so he could learn “about the disastrous record of policies enacted to address ‘climate change.’”
The congresswoman then went on to lecture Christian — a child — about the national debt and to insult the teacher who gave him the assignment. “Incidentally, please ask your teacher to explain propaganda to you,” Foxx wrote. “While I will never be able to know, my guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad.”
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After asking his mom to help explain what the hell his 82-year-old representative was talking about, Christian said he was upset that Foxx attacked his teacher, who did not choose the topic of his essay.
It was an unhinged response from Foxx to one of the most banal aspects of being an elected representative. Kids write to their elected representatives all the time. Lawmakers visit classrooms, give tours of the Capitol and speak at graduations. And generally, as a rule, they don’t insult the children they are speaking to.
But this is Foxx we’re talking about, a true zealot, who was MAGA before there was ever such a thing as MAGA.
So when you hear some claim that “so many congressional Republicans are secretly against Donald Trump and embarrassed by his behavior,” it’s worth remembering that, while that may be true for a handful of people across the House and Senate, many, many more are just like him.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).