Gabrielle Gurley
Gabrielle Gurley is The American Prospect’s deputy editor. Her email is ggurley@prospect.org.
Recent Articles
Three Minutes with Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards
The women’s reproductive-rights leader shares some thoughts on President Trump and community activism.
Oct 13, 2017
With President Trump and the Republican Party determined to bulldoze over decades of women’s health-care gains, reproductive-rights advocates like Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, have been on the front lines of an all-consuming battle to beat back that onslaught. “If we had a majority of people in Congress who could get pregnant, we wouldn’t be fighting about birth control,” she told The American Prospect, underlining one of her signature phrases. “I look forward to that day.” After the 2016 election, Planned Parenthood and Richards (whom The American Prospect featured in a cover story last year) emerged as a kinetic force in the resistance movement. In tandem with dozens of other progressive organizations, Planned Parenthood has spearheaded get-out the-vote drives, town hall meetings on health-care policies, and immigrant-rights and racial-justice marches. The Prospect spoke to Richards before she and Danielle Henry, of the...
The Vietnam War: A Conversation with Ken Burns
America’s foremost documentary filmmakers lift the curtain on the country’s psychic wounds in this stunning new history of our most divisive conflict since the Civil War.
Sep 15, 2017
I n fall of 1967, the Vietnam War was unraveling. The Marines had been battling North Vietnamese Army troops from their hilltop outpost at Khe Sahn near the Demilitarized Zone since the spring. “ The true peace-keepers are those men who stand out there on the DMZ at this very hour, taking the worst that the enemy can give,” President Lyndon Johnson said in September speech in San Antonio. He was “ready to talk peace … tomorrow,” with Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam’s nominal leader, Johnson said. Weeks later, little had changed and 50,000 antiwar protestors marched on the Pentagon. Half a world away in the DMZ, Roger Harris, a 19-year-old Marine Corps volunteer , tried to come to terms with the killing, the dying, and the unspeakable atrocities. In The Vietnam War , he recalls that his fellow soldiers told him: “this is war; this is what we do.” The Vietnam War is the product of a more than decade of work by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick who...
Will Harvey Dent Trump’s Climate Change Denial? (Probably Not)
Trump brings his un-presidential touch to the Southeast Texas disaster-in-progress
Aug 28, 2017
Absent an 11th-hour conversion, President Donald Trump, who believes that climate change is a Chinese hoax, is unlikely to concede that the warmer waters of the Gulf have played a role in the country’s worst hurricane since Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012. He’s not likely to urge the climate-change deniers he’s placed atop the Environmental Protection Agency to change their tune. And if his climate denial were not enough, his stream-of-deranged-consciousness tweets in the hours as Harvey approached and made landfall continue to demonstrate his total unfitness for the office of presidency. Like New Orleans, Houston has always been a city at risk from hurricanes and tropical storms. Americans will debate for years to come who was responsible for what in the country’s fourth largest city. This much is known: Houston failed to prepare and was bound to suffer the devastating blow which Harvey delivered— as a recent Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation...
Trump Sets His Sights on Phoenix
Nothing good can come from a presidential visit by a man determined to lead the country to the dark side after Charlottesville.
Aug 18, 2017
If Donald Trump’s schedule holds, the latest chapter in the detestable saga of his presidency opens next week in Phoenix, where Trump is set to speak at a rally of his faithful, deranged followers. Despite public outrage, negative headlines, and many Republicans in Congress ever so faintly humming kumbaya, the president of the United States continues to revel in a perverse sort of post-Charlottesville euphoria that only he and his white-supremacist and neo-Nazi brethren can experience. As the president gleefully blabs and tweets his way to civil discord, Phoenix braces for the worst. Arizona’s two senators, Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake, have excoriated him, while Greg Stanton, the city’s Democratic mayor, has asked him to stay away, to no avail so far. So the Tuesday rally could rip open angry wounds in a city still smarting from the excesses that S.B. 1070, the state’s harsh immigration law, produced. All the more so if Trump decides to pardon Joe...
Trump’s Trivial Pursuit of New Hampshire’s Opioid Crisis
A throwaway comment undercuts the president’s own drug addiction commission and spotlights his tone-deafness on combatting a national epidemic in one of the worst-hit states.
Aug 04, 2017
New Hampshire can be safely added to the encyclopedia of people, places, and things that the 45th president of the United States has publically insulted or, in the case of the Granite State, denigrated on the phone with foreign leaders. In his continuing desire to remind the world that Americans elected him and not Hillary Clinton to put his business acumen to work on drug abuse and trafficking across the southern border, he told Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in late January, “I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.” (As usual, Trump has a tenuous acquaintance with verifiable facts. He did win the first-in-the-nation Republican presidential primary but Clinton inched to victory in New Hampshire in November 2016.) No topic is safe from Trump’s loose lips and poor judgment. It’s not the first time that he has trivialized New Hampshire’s drug abuse epidemic. “You know what really amazed me when I came here and I...
