198 search results for ""election integrity""

Trump is too good at wiggling out of trouble

Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) for his running mate is the biggest Republican candidate blunder since Sen. John McCain of Arizona chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to join him in defeat. But stupidity is not a crime. Insurrection is. Don’t let the press forget it. Nor his attempts to overthrow the democratic process. He’s planning another coup if he loses in November.

Jason Statler on Mastodon:

TAKE THIS COUP SERIOUSLY

Trump is doing everything he can to delegitimize democracy.

The press needs to put the coming coup attempt and his last attempt in context, explains Marcy Wheeler.

I emphasized over the weekend that the press will move on from Trump’s promise to Christian nationalists to a) end all elections in his second term, or to b) render elections (the consent of the governed) irrelevant. The press will move on to the next news cycle. You must not.

Marcy Wheeler agrees, but castigates “horse race journalists” for finding it initially “more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris” before acknowledging his threat to democracy. Only hours later did that story surface.

Marcy writes:

That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)

In spite of disinterest by journalists paid to write horserace stories, the clip went viral on social media, setting off a debate about what Trump meant. Right wing trolls pushed the same horseshit claims of low turnout (again, we’re talking about the in-person and TV audience for a Turning Point conference!) that Gold provided. Others attributed it to Trump’s narcissism, a suggestion that he only cares about votes so long as he would be on the ballot.

Three Sunday morning shows dealt with it — all abysmally.

Martha Raddatz for example, let Chris Sununu dismiss the comments as a “classic Trumpism,” without asking what he meant by “this stuff” when he said it “can be fixed.” Then she went back to the horse race.

Let’s get real, Wheeler continues:

There are several things people are ignoring.

First, Trump said something quite similar — and he said it at another Turning Point conference — just a month and a half ago, in Detroit.

Only, at that point, before Joe Biden had dropped out of the race, Trump said,

I said, we don’t need votes. And Charlie Kirk is helping. He’s got his army of young people. These are young patriots. They don’t want to see happen what’s been happening in our country.

Thank you Charlie.

[USA chants]

And I said to Charlie, and I said to Michael [Whatley], listen, we don’t need votes. We’ve got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote, we need to guard the vote.

We need to stop the steal.

In mid-June, before Biden dropped out, Trump wasn’t concerned about turnout. Now he is.

This comment — to the people Charlie Kirk had assembled to listen to Donald Trump — is best understood as a comment about Trump’s plan to win. As the January 6 Committee discovered, when Trump decided in late December 2020 that he was going to speak and march to the Capitol, Carline Wren turned to Kirk to help turn out bodies. Turning Point was also allegedly used to launder speaking fees to Don Jr and his girlfriend. As it happened, Kirk backed out of attending and deleted his boasts about arranging dozens of busses so others could do so. He pled the Fifth rather than explain to the January 6 Committee anything about all that.

But nevertheless, Charlie Kirk got busloads of people to Trump’s insurrection.

To the extent that Trump needs lots of bodies to be somewhere, Charlie Kirk is a key part of that process. And in June, he wanted them out to surveil polling centers, once again mobilizing Stop the Steal. Friday, he emphasized he actually needs some people to show up to the polls.

If you follow Tim Alberta, he’s reported that Trump axed the GOP’s field operation and turned it over to “allied organizations such as Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.” But especially to Turning Point. Kirk’s org had become a punch line among the GOP’s strategists after promising to win big in Kirk’s Arizona in 2022 and losing bigger. The RNC wanted to invest in field, in GOTV. Trump would rather invest in “election integrity,” that is, in blocking the vote, Alberta reported:

The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.

Doubling down on the Big Lie is a helluva tell, Wheeler notes. But that was before Biden dropped out. Now he needs GOP turnout too.

I’d noted an important Blue Sky thread by Sarah Posner but could not get to commenting. Wheeler does:

The point is, Trump’s audience of Christian nationalists do view taking over government in apocalyptic terms. They did, on January 6. And it nearly worked the first time.

This was only a Trumpism, as Sununu called it, to the extent that Trump is an epic conman who knows how to mobilize his audience, even Christian nationalists with whom Trump shares little more than a fondness for authoritarianism.

So sure: Perhaps this was just an attempt to juice more turnout out of a group that already turns out in high numbers, almost exclusively for Republicans. Or maybe — as his comments in June were — it’s part of a larger effort to delegitimize democracy.

But even beyond Trump’s last coup attempt, there’s a context here, one you need to at least acknowledge if you’re going to claim to assess his comments.

Trump is too good at wiggling out of trouble. The press is going to move on to the next heat in the horse race. We have to hold him accountable for his words and his plans in the streets, on people’s doorsteps, and on social media. The press will not.

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Yes, they are running war game simulations to anticipate what they think is the guarantee that the Democrats are going to try to steal the election in November. Among the possibilities they ran? Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.

The Washington Post reports:

“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” saidMike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”

The report said a key finding was that the sitting president is the greatest danger to the peaceful transition of power, with no mention of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss. Instead it offered that conclusion as justification for doubting the outcome of the 2024 election and trying to reject anything other than a Trump victory. Trump himself has repeatedly declined tosay he will accept the results or rule out a violent response. He has told his supporters that he can only lose through cheating.

Howell said the exercise would lead Heritage to file more litigation over election procedures. He also said it should help the public resist “psychological operations” that he claimed were used in 2020 and are being used again. He didn’t say who supposedly ran the operations.

“The upshot is that we will see a contested election the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Adam Ellwanger, a rhetoric professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who helped lead the simulation. “If we see the kind of manipulations that we saw in 2020, I wonder if average Americans who are supporters of the president [Trump] will swallow that so easily as they did in 2020.”

The simulation, known as the “2024 Transition Integrity Project,” is technically independent of the Heritage Foundation but included multiple Heritage employees. The full list of participants was withheld, which Howell said was for their safety. Another participant present Thursday was Josh Findlay, who was until recently the Republican National Committee’s director of election integrity operations. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts spoke at the end of the event.

I guess this doesn’t surprise me. The Big Lie is the main organizing principle of the Republican Party and the cult has been programmed to believe that Donald Trump simply cannot lose the election. If they lose they are going to go completely nuts.

I’ll be looking forward to all the viral videos of Democrats saying that Biden can’t win used as evidence in the event that he does pull it off.

Time for the NCGOP to rewrite the rules again

Digby has a post prepped for later today on Republican sore-loserism in Georgia (based on a Rolling Stone piece). It’s the sort of tactic with which we are well familiar next door in North Carolina. It’s simply this: If Republicans lose under established election rules, change the rules.

Judd Legum spotlights the latest Republican effort in North Carolina to tip the governor’s race in favor of Lt. Gov. Mark “Choking on my own blood” Robinson, the freaky Christian nationalist and conspiracy theorist. He’s trailing in fundraising behind the state’s Attorney General Josh Stein (D).

“The most recent campaign finance reports show that Stein has raised over $19 million, with $12.7 million cash on hand,” Legum begins. “Robinson, however, has raised less than $11 million and has $4.5 million in cash.”

Time to change the rules:

Republicans in the North Carolina legislature have responded by introducing legislation that would dramatically alter the state’s campaign finance rules in the middle of an election. 

Under existing North Carolina campaign finance law, corporations and labor unions cannot contribute directly or indirectly to state campaigns or committees. This prevents the main national fundraising vehicles for gubernatorial campaigns — the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) — from donating to North Carolina political committees. These committees, known as 527s, accept unlimited contributions from corporations and individuals. 

The changes proposed by North Carolina Republicans would allow the RGA and the DGA (or any other 527) to donate unlimited amounts to any “[s]tate, district, or county executive committee of any political party or an affiliated party committee.” Should these changes become law, the only requirement is that the 527s must create two “accounts”—one accepting corporate money and another accepting individual donations in any amount. The Republican proposal would allow the 527s to donate unlimited amounts to North Carolina committees from the account that accepts individual donations.

Bob Hall, a veteran North Carolina campaign finance expert, explained that the new rules would allow “wealthy individuals with new ways to give tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars to support a North Carolina candidate without their name being identified with the donation.” 

Didn’t see that coming, didja?

Anonymity is important to deep-pocketed donors committed to maintaining Republican control but who don’t want their fingerprints on money supporting Mr. “It’s not your body anymore.”

In June 2021, for example, Robinson called LGBTQ people “filth” and said exposure to LGBTQ people and issues in schools was child abuse. In a sermon later that year, Robinson said “straight” couples were “superior” to same-sex couples and compared being gay to “what the cows leave behind.” Robinson has also called LGBTQ people “devil-worshiping child molesters”

On Facebook, Robinson repeatedly minimized the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. “I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were,” Robinson wrote on Facebook in 2017. He accused unknown forces of “pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years.” 

In 2019, Robinson said that abortion rights were “not about protecting the lives of mothers” but “about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” Robinson said women choose to have an abortion so that they can keep living “on easy street” and “keep running to the club every Friday night.” He favors an abortion ban from the moment of conception.

“It’s not your body anymore” is just a remarkable thing to say. @markrobinsonNC must never become governor – for the sake of North Carolinians (and frankly the NCGOP). https://t.co/psKww14p3o

— Drexel Heard (@drexelheard) June 4, 2024

The ad above is part of a seven-figure buy by Stein’s campaign, NBC News reports:

“Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers,” Robinson says in the clip used in the ad. “It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” 

(You might send Robinson a message about that via Stein at ActBlue. )

By any means necessary

Gerrymandering, of course, is an age-old tradition in which both major parties partake to gain advantage. Gotta credit Republicans for their 2010 REDMAP program to flip legislatures all over the place ahead of 2011 redicstricting. But since the election of the first Black president, they’ve really taken their game to the next level (or two) in states David Pepper calls “Laboratories of Autocracy.”

Democrats have been playing Whac-A-Mole ever since against some deviously clever efforts to squeeze every advantage out of existing rules and rule tweaks. From strategically starving blue cities of revenue to purging voter rolls to erecting barriers to voter registration to making voting itself harder to Thomas Hofeller’s computer-aided gerrymandering to trying to rig the 2020 census, the GOP has pulled out all the stops. Lest we forget, they instigated a violent insurrection after losing the 2020 presidential election. We have to implement these changes, Republicans insist, to restore public confidence in election integrity (their buzzword) that they’ve spent relentless decades undermining.

Dramatically altering North Carolina’s campaign finance rules is just another clever tweak. Watch for that mole to pop up its head in your Republican-controlled state.

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It’s almost quaint now to look back at the shock we all felt at presidential candidate Donald Trump attacking the judge presiding in the Trump University fraud lawsuit as biased because he was Latino and Trump was talking about building a border wall. Most Americans assumed that it would be impossible that such a disrespectful and, frankly, racist person could be elected in the 21st century but as it turned out that was just a preview of many such attacks to come. (That lawsuit eventually settled for $25 million)

Because Trump is such an inveterate lawbreaker, he has been the subject of many legal cases over the years and biographers and armchair psychologists have speculated that his strategy has always been to publicly denigrate the judges and the prosecutors in these cases due to his father’s admonition that one must always fight with everything they have. But it’s just as likely that he’s following the advice of his mentor, the odious attorney Roy Cohn who has been called “one of the most reviled men in American history.” If anything it was Cohn who pulled Trump out from under his father’s shadow.

In fact, Trump’s current troubles and many in his past stem from his weird relationship with Cohn, who taught him that there are no rules and no limits to what he can get away with if he has the chutzpah to challenge the very concept of reality itself, daring people to disbelieve his lies or risk destruction. It’s the ethos of the bully and the gangster and despite all the drama in his life Trump’s gotten away with all of it, eventually becoming the most powerful man in the world with a full-fledged cult following of tens of millions of people. Cohn’s student learned his lessons well.

The case unfolding in New York these past few weeks centers on another of Trump’s lawyers, Michael Cohen, who Trump saw as a low rent Roy Cohn who would carry out the dirty business Trump feels entitled to engage in without accountability. He eagerly took on the job of Trump’s legal henchman, never questioning the ethics or morals of what he was asked to do and when asked how he could have done that he testified this week that he was “knee deep in the cult of Donald Trump.” The trial has shown how much Cohen yearned for Trump’s approval and how little Trump respected him in return.

Cohen is a broken man today, loathed by the press with which he had a hostile relationship as Trump’s hatchet man and humiliated before the entire country as a liar and a loser on the witness stand, even as he provides the testimony that corroborates evidence that his former boss broke the law. Michael Cohen paid a high price for his loyalty to Donald Trump.

We’ve also been reminded in this trial of another of Trump’s lawyers, the former US Attorney and mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. Once a front runner himself for the Republican presidential nomination, and esteemed by many as a hero for his leadership of the city after 9/11, Giuliani is now one of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election interference trial, has been held liable for $148 million for his defamation of two election workers, is facing disbarment and was fired from his radio show. This week he left the judge overseeing his bankruptcy aghast as he’s completely non-compliant and has not followed any of the court’s instructions.

Rudy Giuliani has been completely destroyed by his loyalty to Donald Trump, which he maintains until this day despite the fact that Trump has not helped him financially and would have no power to pardon him if he were to become president again. All of this is a result of the dirty work he did on behalf of Trump’s Big Lie.

Two other lawyers, Jeffrey Clark (who appeared at the courthouse in support of Trump on Thursday) and John Eastman have had their reputations shredded and their lives upended willingly plotting with Donald Trump to overturn the election in 2020. Both men are co-defendants with Trump in the Georgia case as well and Eastman has been disbarred and was fired from jobs at Chapman University and the University of Colorado over his involvement in the January 6th plot. Loyal legal soldiers and Trump co-defendants, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have also been destroyed by their involvement with Trump’s schemes. Like the others, they were thrilled to be part of Trump’s nefarious plans and are paying the price for it today.

Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Powell and Chesebro are all unindicted co-conspirators in the federal case against Donald Trump brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. What an ignominious end to their legal careers. And it’s all in service of Donald Trump.

Trump has more lawyers, of course, although it’s not as easy to find them as it once was. Many can obviously see the writing on the wall. (The running joke is that MAGA actually stands for Make Attorneys Get Attorneys.) Luckily for the newer hires, the campaign is paying the bills these days so they don’t have the same worries as Trump’s previous attorneys about getting paid — yet.

Trump seems to be very attached to his attorney Alina Habba who defended him the NY civil fraud trial and the Carroll defamation cases, all of which he lost. They frequently travel together and she has attended the NY hush money trial as moral support as well. Another of his favorites is Christina Bobb, recently indicted in the Arizona fake electors case, who has been hired by the Republican National Committee to head their election integrity unit.

His top lawyer in both the Mar-a-lago and NY case, Todd Blanche, is a former prosecutor with a good reputation who has thrown his lot in with Trump entirely, moving his practice and his family down to Florida and is reportedly very “broey” with Trump. So far he hasn’t broken any laws in his defense of Trump so his reputation and standing as a lawyer remains intact.

Just as all those Republican office holders who are making the ritual pilgrimage to that Manhattan Courthouse to demonstrate their fealty to Donald Trump as Michael Cohen once did, so too should his current lawyers .

His first lawyer Roy Cohn taught Trump everything he knows about being a ruthless, belligerent, con man who can get away with murder with a take-no-prisoners, win at all costs attitude. And Trump loved him for it. But when Cohn got AIDS (and lied about it claiming it was liver cancer) and the walls started closing in on him for tax evasion and he was disbarred, Trump abandoned his mentor without a second thought. Cohn’s secretary Susan Bell told Michael Kruse of Politico that he “dropped him like a hot potato, he really did.”

If he would do that to his mentor and muse he would do it to anyone. Just look at the broken human wreck named Rudy Giuliani.

It’s not going to be pretty

The mainstream press has finally turned its focus to what a second Donald Trump administration will look like should he win the White House in 2024. Salon has been covering this since Trump first flew off to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 and it was obvious that unless something happened to his health, Trump would be the 2024 nominee and the rest of the GOP would be developing a multi-faceted program to grant themselves unlimited power. None of this was anything but predictable once we saw what they were capable of during the post election period of 2020 and the events of January 6th.

The mainstream media has caught up and over the past few months has produced in-depth features and front page articles on the new MAGAfied Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Schedule F, Agenda 47 and the details within all of those and other plans which reveal an authoritarian, anti-democratic crackdown on Americans’ rights and a full rollback of safety regulations and vital programs. The proposals for foreign policy and national security are even more horrifying. Trump is as narcissistic as ever and his motives remain purely personal but he’s got a full crew of authoritarian lackeys ready to take the wheel who are prepared to serve him well as they transform the United States into a full-blown autocracy for their own purposes.

So kudos to the media for doing what they need to do. Informing the public of Trumps plans should he win is job one. But we should probably also prepare ourselves for what they will do if he loses. I think we all know that he will not gracefully concede and quietly retire to play golf and cash in his political chits. In fact, he recently told TIME magazine, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election” and elaborated in a later interview, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results…If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” Does anyone doubt that he believes there is no such thing as a fair election that he loses?

It’s important to remember that he won’t be the incumbent president as he was in 2020 and will not have the same tools at his disposal. He cannot try to deploy the Justice Department to illegally interfere in process on his behalf and while his henchmen could theoretically plan another fake elector scheme, as long as Vice President Harris performs the constitutional duty of counting the electoral college votes they wouldn’t get anywhere with it. He also won’t be able to draw up plans to seize voting machines or declare martial law and his bully pulpit will be limited to sore loser press conferences carried live on Fox and Newsmax.

However, Trump also has some advantages he didn’t have the last time, the first being that virtually the entire Republican establishment has bought into the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and are clearly ready to back Trump’s claims that it will have been stolen in 2024:

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance told CNN that he’ll accept the results if they’re “fair and free” and previously said that if he were VP he’d tell states to send in alternate electors, apparently so that he could personally pick and choose which ones to accept as legitimate.

South Carolina Senator and top VP contender Tim Scott famously evaded the question on Meet the Press earlier, saying that he wouldn’t answer hypothetical questions.

Asking whether you will accept the 2024 election results is not a “hypothetical” question. It is the foundation of our constitutional democracy and if you can’t do it, it should disqualify you from office. https://t.co/IGvKxO0VVC

— Richard Stengel (@stengel) May 12, 2024

The Republican National Committee, now run by Trump’s family and personal henchmen, will not hire anyone who doesn’t avow that Trump actually won the 2020 election. I think it’s indisputable that if Trump loses, they will all rise up to declare once again that it was stolen. You can’t have a democracy if one party is unwilling to accept that they lost.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump campaign is planning a “leaner” and “more efficient” operation this time out because Trump has “told them to not worry about getting out the vote since he could do it himself. He told them to ‘focus on the cheating.'”

To that end, it appears that Trump and the party are preparing to turn the election itself into a chaotic mess. Starting last December, Trump began employing a phrase used by his disgraced former National Security Adviser and QAnon adherent Michael Flynn: “guard the vote” telling his supporters to “go into” cities including Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta to “watch those votes when they come in.” This tactic was tried in the 2022 election when armed citizens staked out lock boxes, intimidating voters as they attempted to drop off their ballots. We can expect more of that driven by outside groups and Trump’s exhortations at his rallies.

The new RNC chair Lara Trump announced that the party is building a massive “election integrity” unit with a program to send 100,000 poll watchers all over the country who will be able to “protect the vote and ensure a big win.” She said, “We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers, people standing in polling locations, but people who can physically handle the ballots.” (Actually, they cannot.)

In other words, the party is doubling and tripling down on voter suppression in order to win. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to have the effect that it used to have back in the old days when the GOP had to be put under a consent decree after it was successfully sued for intimidating racial minorities at the polls. Today we have early voting and vote by mail (and Trump has trained his flock to mistrust those methods.) That’s why they have also concentrated on intimidating election workers and plan to do more of it during the counting process.

If all that doesn’t work to ensure him a win, he will obviously challenge the vote count. They plan to have lawyers stationed in every swing state to prepare the charges of voter fraud in the event he does come up short. He won’t be relying on the likes of Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell this time. Now that the whole GOP establishment has been completely absorbed into the MAGA universe, they’ll have higher quality legal minds working on overturning the results. It’s a good career move.

And then if all else fails, they will have their violent mob ready to explode and that possibility will be hovering over every other tactic they deploy. Trump said recently,  “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country” and “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.” This are very thinly veiled threats in a climate where his followers are being brainwashed by his lies into believing that he has a massive, unbeatable lead in the polls which is entirely untrue. And according to WIRED, the militia movement is on the rise again. One recent Facebook post shows where their thoughts are leading:

“When the government tries to steal the election again and they think we’ll just sit and take it … It won’t be like the last time … Just remember, they started it … We just wanted to be left alone … We prefer ballots over bullets … But …”

The sad reality is that the worst of all possible worlds is that Trump wins the election in November. But Trump won’t go quietly into this good night if he loses and neither will his followers. Either way, the election itself is just the beginning.

Salon

The “election integrity” party has a little problem with voter fraud.

The Georgia GOP went MAGA. And look what happened:

Georgia’s Republican Party has removed one of its officers after an administrative law judge found he voted illegally nine times after moving to the state.

The state Republican Committee voted 146-24 on Friday to remove Brian K. Pritchard, its first vice chairman, state Chairman Josh McKoon said after the closed meeting.

Georgia is one of a number of state Republican parties that have experienced turmoil as supporters of Donald Trump have taken over at the grassroots level, ousting previous leaders and demanding that the party prioritize Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

Many established Georgia Republicans including Gov. Brian Kemp have walked away from the state party organization. Kemp, for example, doesn’t plan to appear at the state Republican Convention next week in Columbus.

And yet:

But the fervor is having an impact, and demands for “election integrity” have translated into multiple changes to Georgia election law. Earlier this week Kemp signed a law that could ease the removal of people from the voting rolls through challenges to voter eligibility.

Yes, he stood up to Trump’s entreaties to overturn the election in Georgia in 2020. But like most Republicans it hasn’t stopped him from continuing on with the vote suppression efforts that have been the goal of white supremacists American politics since 1864 — which was what set the table for a demagogue like Donald Trump.

Mike Johnson: Integrity Patriot

It’s election year again, so voter fraud fraudsters are again flinging smoke bombs into newsrooms and shouting, “Fire!” By the time the smoke clears and no fire is found, they’ve gotten their headlines and reinforced the notion among viewers that all-but-nonexistent voter fraud is a huge problem.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R), flanked by other Republican election integrity patriots outside the Capitol Wednesday, announced a bill to make voting by noncitizens illegaler than it is already. In apparent exchange for Donald Trump’s blessing, the Louisiana congressman committed to addressing the non-problem in a manner, writes Philip Bump, that “blends two of Trump’s favorite strawmen: illegal voters and immigrants.” He offered several “incorrect or misleading” reasons for the proposed legislation.

The Washington Post:

First, he said, there is “no current mechanism to ensure only those registering or voting are actually citizens.” This isn’t true; as PolitiFact outlined when Trump elevated this concern in 2020, numerous states have processes that validate whether voters are citizens.

Second, Johnson claimed that “I believe the number is close to probably, at this point, 16 million” immigrants who entered the country illegally since President Biden took office. This is wildly inflated. There have been about 7.7 million encounters at the border, according to Homeland Security data, but that includes millions of immigrants who were quickly deported. In January, The Washington Post reported that 2.3 million immigrants had been released into the United States. This excludes immigrants who evaded detection, but there are fewer such immigrants than before the expansion of border barriers.

Johnson has no evidence to prop up his strawman. But among voter fraud promoters, absence of evidence is never evidence of absence. That voting by noncitizens is a problem is not a matter of fact, but a matter of intuition — Truthiness. It’s something Johnson knows not with his head but with his gut.

Reporter: “Are you saying that there are currently non-U.S. citizens voting in federal elections? … Do you have an estimate of how many?”

House Speaker Mike Johnson: “It's not been something that is easily provable. We don't have that number.” pic.twitter.com/vBVSaO2uLM

— The Recount (@therecount) May 8, 2024

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said.

“Here’s an intuition for you,” tweeted Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles. “People terrified of contact with government because they don’t want their lives destroyed by deportation don’t register to vote illegally and then vote illegally for the reward of having a tiny tiny influence on federal electoral outcomes.”

Bump offers more, but his colleague Aaron Blake followed up with this observation on Johnson’s “We don’t have that number” comment:

It’s at least somewhat transparent. It also undercuts the leader of the Republican Party, former president Donald Trump, who has ridiculously pegged the number of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants in the 2016 election at 3 million to 5 million (just enough, as it happens, to explain away his 2.9 million-vote loss in the popular vote). After the 2020 election, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani also ridiculously pegged the number of such illegal votes in Arizona alone at between 40,000 and 250,000 — as many as 1 out of every 14 votes cast.

There is precisely no evidence that this is a problem on any significant scale. The idea that large numbers of people who are in this country illegally would take the risk of being detected to cast a single vote in a presidential election is nonsensical on its face.

Donald Trump is nothing if not nonsensical. He already believes he is invincible. The only way he can lose is for someone else (or lots of brown-skinned someones) to out-cheat him. Trump has likely heard the rumor (I won’t repeat) about noncitizen voter registration that the Associated Press felt obliged to debunk a month ago.

I’ve written before that the “Republican argument” here is quite different when it comes to addressing gun violence. There is no need for additional “gun laws criminals will simply ignore; we just need to enforce laws already on the books. Except when it comes to voting restrictions, we need new laws on top of those they complain the state is already not enforcing.”

We need new laws, Republicans argue, to restore people’s confidence in elections Republicans have spent decades undermining.

Remember what the GOP meta-narrative is here:

Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.

They don’t want everybody to vote. They do not believe in a representative democracy where they cannot predetermine the outcome.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) took the podium and said without apparent irony, in support of Johnson’s bill, “The most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in elections and undermine the integrity of our elections, and to destroy this republic by making it unclear as to who’s voting.”

It’s pretty clear by now that destroying the republic is a central plank of the MAGA platform defined by one word: Trump.

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When Trump took over the RNC and purged all the suspected disloyal employees they hire two new lawyers to oversee “election integrity.” That hasn’t worked out so well. Benen writes:

One of the attorneys hired at the RNC was Christina Bobb, who was tapped to serve as the party’s senior counsel for election integrity. It wasn’t long, however, before an unfortunate problem emerged: Bobb was recently indicted for alleged election-related crimes.

The other attorney was longtime Republican lawyer Charlie Spies, who was hired to serve as the RNC’s chief counsel. At least, that was the idea two months ago. NBC News reported over the weekend:

Republican National Committee chief counsel Charlie Spies is parting ways with the party apparatus just months after stepping into the role. He was “pushed out,” according to a source familiar with the move.

After the news was made official, Trump turned to his social media platform to celebrate the developments. “Great news for the Republican Party. RINO lawyer Charlie Spies is out as Chief Counsel of the RNC,” the former president wrote, denouncing the experienced Republican lawyer who’d been hired by his own RNC team.

What did this highly experienced GOP lawyer do to deserve such a scathing put down?

NBC News’ report added, for example, that in 2021, Spies publicly contradicted false claims about voting machines switching votes. When asked during a Conservative Political Action Conference panel what he’d do about voting machines switching votes, he pushed back against the false conspiracy theory that has been backed by Trump allies.

“I may get booed off the stage for this, but I have to say that’s simply not true. There is just zero evidence that’s true,” Spies said at the time.

Indeed, a Washington Post report over the weekend noted that the lawyer’s RNC career was cut short, at least in part, because Trump “grew angry about his criticism of the former president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.”

That sort of reality-based commentary is simply not allowed in Trump’s orbit. He said so in his TIME Magazine interview and his VP wannabes have all demonstrated that they must twist themselves into a pretzels on this subject if they want to be considered.

I fully expect Spies to endorse Trump and encourage people to vote for him anyway. These people have no pride.

His Big Lie is the gift to the Democrats

Donald Trump was all over the place in his big TIME Magazine interview this week but there is one issue on which he’s never wavered. When asked if he thought there would be violence around the election this fall he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” On Wednesday he went even further, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “if everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” It’s pretty clear that in his mind and the minds of his followers there is no such thing as an honest and fair election that doesn’t result in a Donald Trump victory so there’s little doubt about what to expect if they don’t get their way in November.

Over the past three years Trump’s Big Lie has become the main organizing principle of the Republican Party. There had been a festering sense of grievance and resentment among the GOP base for decades which Trump skillfully tapped into. But ever since his flukey win in 2016, his insistence that the succession of losses the party has suffered under his leadership were all the result of rigged elections, has taken a toll. Among the Republican faithful these days are quite a few who question whether it’s even worth it to participate.

A local Pennsylvania GOP organizer named Milo Morris told Antonia Hitchens of the New Yorker that he was confronted with a lot of suspicion and distrust from his own voters who say to him “this whole game is just ridiculous and I’m not going to participate anymore.” He said, “the skepticism is hurting us. A lot of people are disenfranchised by the fraud allegations.” Gosh, I wonder where they are getting those crazy ideas?

Trump’s campaign and his supporters in the media begged him to stop talking about the Big Lie and insisting that it was going to happen again. They knew that this relentless drumbeat going into another election was counter productive. But he won’t stop and they’ve apparently accepted that fact and are now trying desperately to compensate for it. Unfortunately, he’s sabotaging those efforts as well.

Trump has been disparaging early voting and mail in voting since before the 2020 election when he correctly surmised that he was going to have trouble getting re-elected. States were changing some of their election procedures to deal with difficulties getting to the polls due to the pandemic and if he lost he saw that he could use that as an excuse to challenge the election. He and his henchmen (such as Attorney General Bill Barr) spend months suggesting that the mail-in votes were rife with fraud and told his voters not to use that method or trust the results where it was was used. This formed the basis for his claims that the election was stolen despite no evidence that anything untoward had happened.

But that has presented a big problem for the party in subsequent elections. Early voting and vote by mail boost turnout. They are convenient methods for people to participate and they like using them but by insisting that Republicans should only vote on election day, some voters just don’t make it to the polls. Moreover, it makes it much more difficult for the people running the ground game to focus their get out the vote efforts. State and local Republicans are desperate to get their people to use these methods and are working to persuade voters to forget what they’ve been told in the last two election cycles and vote early. Unfortunately, they keep running into one big orange roadblock.

Trump is hooked on the idea that elections should only be held on one day and that they should be done with paper ballots and hand counted. He reiterated that this week in Wisconsin. He told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in February, “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.” (He has also stated in the past that he thinks the counting should be stopped at midnight, which is certifiably insane.)

Trump has also posted on Truth Social that people should vote absentee or early, but it’s obviously something he did under duress. After all, it’s almost as if he’s admitting he was wrong about something and that simply cannot happen.

There are various groups working to persuade voters to essentially forget that Trump has been instructing them for years to only vote on election day because it’s the only way they can be sure their vote will count. Last month the NY Times published a big, sexy profile of Turning Point Action’s get-out-the-vote program called “chase the ballot” which they characterize as attempting to fix this problem. But Axios recently quoted the COO of the organization, Tyler Bowyer, saying “we’re not trying to encourage more people to get on the early voting list. If you vote too early, you’re basically telling Democrats how many votes they need to win” which is simply bizarre since it would do no such thing. (Bowyer, by the way, is also one of the fake electors who was indicted in Arizona last week so he is something of an expert on voter fraud.)

Donald Trump has no one to blame but himself for this problem. But it’s unclear whether the Republican party is really putting its efforts into getting out the vote anyway. From what we hear from the new Chair of the RNC, Trump’s daughter in law Lara Trump, the real efforts are going toward something else entirely: vote suppression and intimidation.

Lara Trump: We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… pic.twitter.com/xd06medJal

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 24, 2024

This comes from the top. Trump has said for years now that “sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate.”

Openly, as usual, suborning election theft. https://t.co/XWfpma4AnM

— Barton Gellman (@bartongellman) January 15, 2022

His daughter in law didn’t mince words when she said that they will have people in the polling places “handling the ballots” and issuing threats of prosecution. Why bother with trying to maximize turnout when you can intimidate the election workers and manipulate the vote count?

This is really their last resort. Their leader has spent the last several years basically telling their voters that their votes are irrelevant because the system is rigged and now they’re having to scramble to try and convince them they should vote anyway, even as he’s still saying it’s probably pointless. Their only option is to turn election day into a chaotic circus and hope that somehow they can find a way to disqualify enough votes to eke out a win in the electoral college. That’s what they like to call “election integrity.”

The popularizer of “fake news” conspired to create it

Projection. Long has the left used that term to describe conservative accusations against the left. When Republicans allege the left commits some infraction against, what — Decency? Patriotism? Rule of law? Election integrity? — then likely they themselves are secretly or more subtly doing the same.

Inoculation is the underlying purpose. Loudly and often accuse your opponent of misbehavior in which you engage so that if ever caught in the act you can both-sides the affair. “Well, they do it too.”

Fake news is another Donald Trump effort at inverting reality. Trump, authoritarian-in-training, has long attempted bending reality to his will. His inauguration crowd was not more bigly than Barack Obama’s? Photographs prove it? Fake news! His team would present “alternative facts” they knew were untrue but were the Trump-approved version of history. Period!

Now on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, Trump has summoned the MAGA cult, as he did on Jan. 6, 2021, to come by the thousands to protest unfairness like you’ve never seen. Only a handful of pro-Trump protesters answered the call on Monday.

I counted a total of 3 Trump supporters at courthouse today. The loudest person was the guy yelling at them “Bill Clinton balanced the budget!” pic.twitter.com/fbELdxn7Xw

— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) April 22, 2024

Ah, but that is fake news! Time to invert reality again.

Trump on Tuesday repeated his summons when supporters failed to show up for the second day of his trial. They were out there, Trump insisted, but complained that “for blocks , you can’t get near this courthouse.” By the thousands MAGA cultists were kept away from the courthouse by a massive police cordon!

Trump, speaking before entering the courtroom, again calls for MAGA protests outside the NYC courthouse where he's being tried pic.twitter.com/DBUnAlNc7N

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 23, 2024

Reporter Vaughn Hillyard captured what Tuesday actually looked like outside the New York courthouse.

Trump just claimed that the police have shut down the streets around the courthouse for blocks & that his protesters can’t be here.

Just…not true. There is one pro-Trump person here & the main street along the courthouse is open to traffic. pic.twitter.com/JyrH3ZkNrX

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) April 23, 2024

Inside the courthouse, what testimony by David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer, revealed is that Trump and Pecker conspired in 2016 both to suppress stories harmful to Trump and to publish fabricated stories harmful to his primary opponents.

From The New York Times:

Prosecutors called it the “Trump Tower conspiracy,” arguing that Mr. Pecker, Mr. Trump and Michael D. Cohen, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, hatched a plot at the meeting to conceal sex scandals looming over Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Their effort led Mr. Pecker’s tabloids to buy and bury two damaging stories about Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen purchased the silence of a porn star, a deal at the heart of the case against the former president.

Trump asked Pecker and his tabloids “to help the campaign,” to “catch and kill” stories harmful to Trump’s political fortunes. That was the suppress-the-truth part of the conspiracy. Then came the damage-opponents part:

The tabloid, for example, ran stories about Mr. Trump’s primary opponents, including Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The prosecutors illustrated the point for jurors, posting several lurid headlines on screens: “Donald Trump Blasts Ted Cruz’s Dad for Photo with J.F.K. Assassin,” “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson left Sponge in Patient’s Brain!” and, in a moment of ironic foreshadowing, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star.”

Stories Pecker fabricated on Trump’s behalf are, in Trump’s parlance, fake news. Trump’s fake news claims are, in Pee Wee Herman’s schoolyard vernacular, a case of he who smelt it, dealt it.

That is the supreme irony of what we have learned so far in the Trump trial. The man who popularized “fake news” for discrediting unfavorable stories, the man who insists on bending reality to his will, was himself complicit in creating and disseminating phony stories. Trump was accusing opponents of exactly what he and his confederates were engaged in.

That fact didn’t escape notice by comedian Trae Crowder, the “Liberal Redneck”:

I do think it’s kind of poetic that while [Trump] was out in public popularizing the concept of fake news, at that same time, behind the scenes he had a full fake news team making fake news arrangements with Big Fake News in an effort to fake as much news as possible. Just kind of sums him up, I think.

ON DAVID PECKER AND THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER AND ALL THAT pic.twitter.com/230FG0Iam7

— Trae Crowder (@traecrowder) April 23, 2024

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