Trump likes to cite the “evidence” in that piece of garbage “2000 Mules” as part of his Big Lie. Well….
Following the 2020 election, D’Souza released 2000 Mules as an attempt to justify Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden. Trump famously held a screening of the movie at his Mar-a-Lago estate and MAGA supporters promoted the film during it’s release in May 2022.
The film was produced by Salem Media Group, a conservative radio juggernaut that airs the likes of Sebastian Gorka and Charlie Kirk.
In a new statement, Salem apologized for the film and said it would cease distributing it. The move came after a man featured in the movie sued Salem for defamation.
The movie featured video showing the man, Mark Andrews, putting five ballots in a drop box in Lawrenceville, Georgia in 2020. D’Souza falsely claimed in the film that Andrews’ actions were criminal, describing the votes as “fraudulent.”
The statement from Salem blamed D’Souza for the smear.
“In publishing the film and the book, we relied on representations made to us by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote, Inc. (‘TTV’) that the individuals depicted in the videos provided to us by TTV, including Mr. Andrews, illegally deposited ballots,” the company said in a statement. “We have learned that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has cleared Mr. Andrews of illegal voting activity in connection with the event depicted in 2000 Mules.”
The upshot?
“We have removed the film from Salem’s platforms, and there will be no future distribution of the film or the book by Salem.”
D’Souza is a fellow convicted criminal whom Trump pardoned before he left office. Birds of a feather.
The best part of this week as a Scottish man is realising that as a convicted felon Trump is no longer allowed to set foot in our beloved land… pic.twitter.com/e8zW0ua4aS
Countries around the world implement stringent entry requirements to protect their citizens and maintain national security. According to the World Population Review, G7 nations Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan have established policies that prohibit entry to individuals with felony convictions. Additionally, Israel and China also impose such bans. These regulations often result in automatic denial of visas or entry permits to convicted felons, potentially impacting Trump’s ability to travel internationally.
Based on data from the World Population Review, here is a list of countries that do not allow convicted felons to enter:
Argentina
Australia
Canada
China
Cuba
India
Iran
Israel
Japan
Kenya
Macau
New Zealand
South Africa
Taiwan
United Kingdom
United States
Additionally, there are further countries that Trump may now be denied entry to. Not all countries actively check from criminal records at the border, but they will deny entry if a convicted felon is discovered. The following countries implement this:
Brazil
Cambodia
Chile
Dominican Republic
Egypt
Ethiopia
Hong Kong
Indonesia
Ireland
Malaysia
Mexico
Morocco
Nepal
Peru
Philippines
Singapore
South Korea
Tanzania
Tunisia
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
It seems like a bit of an impediment for a president, no?
Ten percent of Republican registered voters say they are less likely to vote for Donald Trump following his felony conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Friday.
The two-day poll, conducted in the hours after the Republican presidential candidate’s conviction by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, also found that 56% of Republican registered voters said the case would have no effect on their vote and 35% said they were more likely to support Trump, who has claimed the charges against him are politically motivated and has vowed to appeal.
The potential loss of a tenth of his party’s voters is more significant for Trump than the stronger backing of more than a third of Republicans, since many of the latter would be likely to vote for him regardless of the conviction.
Among independent registered voters, 25% said Trump’s conviction made them less likely to support him in November, compared to 18% who said they were more likely and 56% who said the conviction would have no impact on their decision.
The verdict could shake up the race between Trump, who was U.S. president from 2017-2021, and Democratic President Joe Biden ahead of the Nov. 5 election. U.S. presidential elections are typically decided by thin margins in a handful of competitive swing states, meaning that even small numbers of voters defecting from their candidates can have a big impact.
Biden and Trump remain locked in a tight race, with 41% of voters saying they would vote for Biden if the election were held today and 39% saying they would pick Trump, according to the poll, which surveyed 2,556 U.S. adults nationwide.
I don’t know that this means much in any case.A lot will happen between now and election day. But it is striking that only 10% of Republicans think it’s not ok if the president is a convicted felon. Remember when they called themselves the moral majority?
Update—
Here’s another one:
One of the first polls conducted since a New York Jury found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records find that a significant minority of Republicans and Independents want him to drop out and a majority of registered voters approve of the jury’s decision.
The Morning Consult poll conducted on Friday offers some of the first clues about how voters are reacting to the unprecedented situation.
54% of registered voters “strongly” or “somewhat” approve of the guilty verdict compared to 34% who “strongly or “somewhat” disapprove. 49% of Independents and 15% of Republicans said Trump should end his campaign because of the conviction.
The polls found the race effectively tied nationally in a 1-on-1 with Biden at 45% and Trump at 44%.
While they may agree with the guilty verdict, the poll found that more voters think Trump should get probation (49%) rather than go to prison (44%) 68% of registered voters said the punishment should be a fine.
President Joe Biden’s comments on the Trump conviction were in Dan Pfeiffer’s opinion calibrated about right. “He’s a serious person addressing a serious matter.”
However, that doesn’t excuse the rest of us from being surrogates. Big moments matter, Pfeiffer reminds readers. Trump’s cut over the eye. It may be unseemly for Biden to pound him. But not for us. Work the eye. Now (emphasis mine):
One of President Obama’s cardinal rules of politics is that if you don’t talk about the giant elephant in the room, the voters will wonder what you are trying to hide. Trump’s conviction while running for President is a giant fucking elephant.
Just ask yourself, how would Republicans handle it if Joe Biden were convicted of a misdemeanor related to the handling of classified information? Would they turn the other cheek and tell people to respect the verdict before pivoting to inflation or another issue?
Seems unlikely.
The Republicans would use every weapon in their media arsenal to brand the President as a criminal in the eyes of voters. Heck, Trump, the GOP, and the MAGA media have called him ‘Crooked Joe’ absent a conviction, an indictment, or one iota of evidence.
There is simply no need to recite rote talking points about the sanctity of the judicial system. Our opponent in the election was convicted of serious crimes; we should make him answer for it at every opportunity. The Republicans running up and down the ballot are slavishly devoted to defending that criminal. They should explain why they think a former President is above the law.
The media will move on in a matter of days. Other news will intrude. One of the core lessons of communications—especially in a world where the traditional press has a fraction of its previous reach—is that if you want people to know something, you have to tell them and then tell them again and again. Once you are so sick of saying something that you might puke, you probably need to say it a couple more times.
Trump’s bizarre, rambling press conference, where he whined about his plight at the expense of a message that actually persuades voters, is yet another argument for why Democrats should talk about his conviction as often as possible.
Make it news. Keep it in the news.
Marcy Wheeler was on a tear about that last night, albeit spurred by complaints about Merrick Garland.
When all is said and done, the fight against fascism is being lost NOT for what Merrick Garland didn't do, but for what YOU didn't do.
— emptywheel (synonym: inquiry) (@emptywheel) May 31, 2024
“The left is losing the fight against fascism politically,” Wheeler added. “That’s not Garland’s fight. It’s yours.”
Republicans be like: “Though Trump could not pass a background check to be a custodian in a middle school, he should be given back the keys to the White House.”
— why you should have an animal (@shouldhaveanima) May 29, 2024
Located in Tokyo, the Capybara Café is a place where you can experience capybaras up close and enjoy a moment of relax with them.pic.twitter.com/J1mBOy4FLo
Since China first sent giant pandas to the National Zoo following the normalizing of ties with the U.S. in 1972, the iconic bears have been a sign of friendship between the two nations. But the number of giant pandas at U.S. zoos has dwindled as tensions between Washington and Beijing rose in recent years. D.C.’s last three pandas — Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and their cub, Xiao Qi Ji — returned to China in November per the terms of the zoo’s loan agreement with the Chinese government. A return was uncertain.
Now, the many new bears China has pledged to send to the U.S. in recent months are a promising sign for “panda diplomacy.” Diplomatic goodwill was on full display during the National Zoo announcement, where Chinese ambassador Xie Feng dubbed the duo “our new envoys of friendship.”
🐼 Meet the pandas: Bao Li is a 2-year-old male and the son of Bao Bao, the female panda born at the zoo in 2013, and the grandson of Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, the two pandas who left the zoo last year. He’ll be joined by Qing Bao, a 2-year-old female.
Bao Li and Qing Bao were chosen for their promising genetic match. But there’s no rush to reproduce. “We’ll have a few years just to enjoy these two, and then people can start asking about cubs,” Smith tells Axios. The average age for cub-bearing starts between 5 and 7.
Reproduction is still important, but it isn’t the #1 priority in this new phase of the program. “We had to crack the code on how giant pandas reproduce — that box is checked,” Smith tells Axios. She says a new focus is habitat health — studying bamboo forests and regrowth — and diseases and issues impacting the animals’ health. The conservation program has helped the species move off the endangered species list to “vulnerable.”
The new homemakers can expect one bougie bear den. Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein’s $9 million panda habitat is getting a $2.5 million facelift — which includes 40 new cameras for a higher-grade PandaCam.
Pandas might be pricey to keep and study, but it’s free to see them at the National Zoo — a big boon for conservation efforts, according to director Smith. “Pandas are the gateway to saving other endangered species,” Smith tells Axios. “You love pandas, but then you might love hellbenders next.”
One of DC’s most important conveyors of conventional wisdom, John Harris of Politico, says something unexpected:
Yes, it’s obviously true that a 34-count felony conviction would be enough to demolish the career of any normal politician.
Yes, it’s obviously true that former president Donald Trump is not a normal politician. His most devoted partisans will only become more so following Thursday’s guilty verdict. Just as they did after the Access Hollywood tape, the impeachments, the Jan. 6 riot and other examples too abundant to recount or, for many people, even to recall.
But these two obvious truths tend to obscure another one. Trump simply cannot beat President Joe Biden relying solely on the votes of people who think his legal travails are a politically motivated scam, and who cheer Trump not in spite of his transgressions but because of them. Or, more specifically, because they thrill to the outrage and indignation Trump inspires among his adversaries.
There are plenty of such people — enough to power this generation’s most important political movement — but still not enough to win the election. Trump’s only path to victory is a coalition that includes many Republicans and independents who find him deplorable but think a second Biden term would be even more so.
That is why — even as the full consequences likely will emerge slowly — this week was easily the worst so far this year for Trump and the best for Biden.
This doesn’t mean the Manhattan verdict will suddenly transform the race — nothing in Trump’s history of scandal suggests it will. This doesn’t mean huge legions of swing voters will suddenly agree with Biden’s argument that democracy itself is on the ballot this fall. If someone wasn’t buying that up until now, why would a case of document falsification to cover up an alleged sexual indiscretion change their mind?
It does mean that many voters who don’t much like Biden received an emphatic, unambiguous reminder of why they don’t like Trump. The movement of even a small percentage of voters in closely contested swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all must-win for Biden — could echo decisively through the balance of the race.
I’m sure that Republicans will commission some snap polls which say the opposite and many in the Washington establishment will immediately rush to say that Trump is more popular than ever now that he’s a convicted felon. But hopefully this epiphany by Harris is indicative of a bigger phenomenon among the DC cognoscenti. It simply can’t be good that a presidential candidate is an adjudicated criminal. If that’s the case then our culture is totally lost.
For those of you who don’t want to sit through 45 minutes of this lunatic rambling, here are some morning-after highlights.
Trump: Put him in jail twice. He is 77 years old. Normally, I would say that's an old guy. But I don't feel 77. Nobody ever says that about me. I would like them to say, we have to have a little sorrow for this man because they just don't say that about me. pic.twitter.com/wy7uw7P9DD
Trump: We have people sitting in schools with languages where very few people have even heard of these languages. It is not like Spanish or French or Russian. pic.twitter.com/YHcUroQaKh
Trump: I wanted to testify. The theory is, you never testify. As soon as you testify, anybody, if it were George Washington, don't testify, because they will get you on something you said slightly wrong and they sue you for perjury. pic.twitter.com/DeY4W3AyMD
Many people testify in their own defense. A normal man running for president at the same time he is being tried for 34 felonies would almost certainly want to do it in order to prove his innocence. No, that’s not required in a court of law but you’d think someone in his situation would have felt it necessary to do that if nothing else to appear fearless and strong. But he knows his people and they apparently prefer a sniveling whiner.
CNN: Donald Trump is making this 2024 campaign all about him and not about you. That's precisely what he did at this rambling… don't even know what to call it, just a venting session before cameras? He was going on and on for 45 minutes. It was surprisingly incoherent,… pic.twitter.com/rqhFTHiVkz
The right wingers are having themselves a good old-fashioned cry today. Or, more accurately, a full-blown tantrum. It’s just astonishing.
Fascinating to hear the GOP Speaker of the House admit to having private conversations with multiple justices who expressed concern to him about Trump’s conviction. I’m sure those justices will recuse from any eventual appeal to avoid sitting on a case they’ve pre-judged. https://t.co/ZbGVZP7qYi
This is my favorite take on that by Philip Bump. He asks Republicans a question I wish everyone would ask:
“I’m running because far too often, we have two standards of justice — one for the rich and powerful and connected, and another for everyone else,” Bragg said in a video announcing his bid. “We must follow the facts wherever they lead, regardless of how influential the person under investigation is.”
In the years since, the idea that there are two standards of justice has been embraced by Bragg’s most prominent target: former president Trump. In Trump’s formulation, the issue isn’t that people in positions of influence are getting away with crimes. Instead, it’s that he — and theoretical others on the right — are being unfairly targeted by an out-of-control criminal justice system.
It’s an argument that holds enormous sway with Trump’s base of support and the broader right-wing media bubble that surrounds it. It is also an obvious extension of Trump’s long-standing rejection of any criticism, any investigation into him or his family. With Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday, though, it would behoove Trump supporters and Republicans more broadly to consider an alternative view of that outcome and the other indictments Trump faces: They are a function not of some indirect effort to damage him politically but, instead, of the criminal justice system responding to violations of the law.
It would be beneficial to America if more Trump supporters entertained the idea that maybe he actually did something wrong.
No kidding. But that’s not going to happen. This MAGA GOP has a very unique populist philosophy. They believe that their (alleged) billionaire leader is being persecuted by a system that’s rigged against people like him.
Bump points out that this eternal whine is an umbrella that conveniently covers all of Trump’s misdeeds.
For America, though? For America, this rhetoric is dire. There is lots of objective evidence suggesting that Trump is not uniquely targeted by his political opponents but, instead, uniquely dishonest among American presidents and uniquely vulnerable to criminal prosecution. This was the argument made by special counsel Jack Smith in combating Trump’s argument that he had immunity from criminal prosecution for things he did as president: Trump’s actions were not comparable with past actions by American presidents.
Trump’s ascent within the Republican Party took advantage of increasing skepticism on the right about American institutions. He ran with that idea, building power in part by ripping it away from the Republican Party, the government and law enforcement. He has helped build enormous hostility to public officials tasked with combating crime for the simple reason that that often means combating him. This means that he has more political capital to undercut federal law enforcement should he return to office and that any further criminal prosecution will be granted the same skepticism as all the others.
This all flows from one failure by America’s political right: the refusal to even entertain the idea that Donald Trump broke the law and faces criminal indictment because he broke the law. They have come to terms with his other moral failings, from his affairs to his dishonesty. But Republicans generally refuse to consider that those failings extend further.
100%. I think they are probably afraid that if they let this idea creep into their minds their entire belief system will collapse. Trump is a con man and there is always a resistance to admitting that you might have been conned. But it will happen for some people eventually. Let’s hope it starts happening sooner rather than later.
Russian state-controlled media apparatus closely followed legal troubles of the former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, spicing up most of their coverage with pro-Trump clips from Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury and were visibly disappointed when Trump became a convicted felon on all 34 charges he was facing.
On Friday morning, Dmitry Kulikov, host of Solovyov Live, the self-described “most patriotic channel” in Russia, said on-air, “They wronged our Donald Trump!” Malek Dudakov, a political scientist who specializes in America, said that the hope for a miracle—meaning a hung jury—was extinguished. He said, with Russia’s affectionate middle name usage, “The miracle did not happen. Our Donald Fredovych was found guilty on all 34 counts.” For that, Dudakov blamed the judge and the jury and baselessly claimed that all of them were prejudiced against Trump. “Now, he is a felon,” he surmised, while also noting that the former president’s incarceration as a result of this conviction is unlikely.
Dudakov expressed hope that despite his legal troubles, Trump would still win in the upcoming presidential election. Kulikov and Dudakov jointly echoed Tucker Carlson’s assertions that their preferred candidate will prevail, “unless desperately panicked Democrats will organize an assassination of Donald Fredovych.” They expressed hope that Biden—not Trump—would die before the elections.
Similar reaction reverberated across Russian media outlets. Appearing on a state TV show 60 Minutes Friday morning, State Duma member Aleksei Zhuravlyov opted to discuss Trump’s conviction before addressing other bad news Russia is facing, with Western governments broadly signing off on Ukraine’s right to defend itself by striking Russia on its own turf. Zhuravlyov said he would address this “escalation” later and started with his rant against America for turning Trump into a felon.
Mischaracterizing the prosecution by describing it as “a lawsuit brought by Stormy Daniels,” host Olga Skabeeva chimed in and described Trump as “a former and potentially future U.S. president.” She surmised that the situation is too ridiculous for words and keeps escalating on every front. Skabeeva complained that earlier predictions of a hung jury did not come true, bitterly adding in perfect English, “Shit happens.”
Zhuravlyov angrily asserted, “There are idiots in every country, but this is the only instance where idiots have their own country. This is something new in history.” The state lawmaker complained that in supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself by striking Russia’s territory, Americans are not even afraid of the retaliatory nuclear strikes by Russia. Skabeeva scornfully added, “Our universally beloved Donald Trump thinks they can sit it out across the pond.”
