198 search results for ""election integrity""

He’s also unstable

The NY Times:

One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.

With droopy eyelids and mouth agape, Mr. Trump stammers and mumbles. He squints. His arms flap. He shuffles his feet and wanders laggardly across the stage. A burst of laughter and applause erupts from the crowd as he feigns confusion by turning and pointing to invisible supporters, as if he does not realize his back is to them.

But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.

On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.

It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.

“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.

“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”

It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics.

But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of his onstage pantomime: the argument that Mr. Biden is too old to be president.

Mr. Biden, a grandfather of seven, is 80. Mr. Trump, who has 10 grandchildren, is 77.

Even though only a few years separate the two men in their golden years, voters view their vigor differently. Recent polls have found that roughly two out of three voters say Mr. Biden is too old to serve another four-year term, while only about half say the same about Mr. Trump.

If that gap starts to narrow, it’s Mr. Trump who has far more to lose in a general-election matchup.

According to a previously unreported finding in an August survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 43 percent of U.S. voters said both men were “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” Among those voters, 61 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden, compared with 13 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

Last week, similar findings emerged in a Franklin & Marshall College poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania, one of the most closely watched 2024 battlegrounds.

According to the poll, 43 percent of Pennsylvanians said both men were “too old to serve another term.” An analysis of that data for The New York Times showed that Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump among those voters by 66 percent to 11 percent. Among all voters in the state, the two men were in a statistical tie.

Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall poll, said that Mr. Biden’s wide lead among voters who were worried about both candidates’ ages could be explained partly by the fact that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify age as a problem for their party’s leader.

“The age issue is one that if Trump gets tarred with the same brush as Biden, it really hurts him,” Mr. Yost said.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, noted that the former president maintained a commanding lead in Republican primary polls and that in the general election, several recent polls had shown Mr. Trump with slight leads over Mr. Biden.

“None of these false narratives has changed the dynamics of the race at all — President Trump still dominates, because people know he’s the strongest candidate,” Mr. Cheung said. “The contrast is that Biden is falling onstage, mumbling his way through a speech, being confused on where to walk, and tripping on the steps of Air Force One. There’s no correcting that, and that will be seared into voter’s minds.”

Mr. Trump’s rhetorical skills have long relied on a mix of brute force and a seemingly preternatural instinct for the imprecise. That beguiling combination — honed from a lifetime of real estate negotiations, New York tabloid backbiting and prime-time reality TV stardom — often means that voters hear what they want to hear from him.

Trump supporters leave his speeches energized. Undecided voters who are open to his message can find what they’re looking for in his pitch. Opponents are riled, and when they furiously accuse him of something they heard but that he didn’t quite precisely say, Mr. Trump turns the criticism into a data point that he’s unfairly persecuted — and the entire cycle begins anew.

But Mr. Trump’s latest missteps aren’t easily classified as calculated vagueness.

During a Sept. 15 speech in Washington, a moment after declaring Mr. Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead,” the former president warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which ended in 1945.

In the same speech, he boasted about presidential polls showing him leading Mr. Obama, who is not, in fact, running for an illegal third term in office. He erroneously referred to Mr. Obama again during an anecdote about winning the 2016 presidential race.

“We did it with Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “We won an election that everybody said couldn’t be won, we beat …” He paused for a beat as he seemed to realize his mistake. “Hillary Clinton.”

At a Florida rally on Oct. 11, days after a brutal terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mr. Trump criticized the country for being unprepared, lashing out at its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump appears to have soured on Mr. Netanyahu, once a close ally, after the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the 2020 election.

In the same speech, Mr. Trump relied on an inaccurate timeline of events in the Middle East to criticize Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs and, in the process, drew headlines for praising Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.

Last week, while speaking to supporters at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump praised Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister of Hungary, but referred to him as “the leader of Turkey,” a country hundreds of miles away. He quickly corrected himself.

At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”

Mr. Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said the former president was “clearly talking about election integrity and making sure only legal votes are counted.”

In a speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump sounded as if he were talking about hummus when he mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip and carried out one of the largest attacks on Israel in decades on Oct. 7.

The former president’s pronunciation drew the attention of the Biden campaign, which posted the video clip on social media, noting that Mr. Trump sounded “confused.”

But even Republican rivals have sensed an opening on the age issue against Mr. Trump, who has maintained an unshakable hold on the party despite a political record that would in years past have compelled conservatives to consider another standard-bearer. Mr. Trump lost control of Congress as president; was voted out of the White House; failed to help deliver a “red wave” of victories in the midterm elections last year; and, this year, drew 91 felony charges over four criminal cases.

That was refreshing. Now let’s see the media spend some time challenging the belief that Trump had an unprecedented number of accomplishments making him the greatest leader the world has ever known. His followers seem to believe that he single-handedly changed the world and the country was basically utopia when he was president. They believe this because he told them so 1,450,000 times. Needless to say, it is not true. Everything they believe about his is not true. It’s a case of mass delusion.

PA institutes automatic voter registration

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) announced this morning that “eligible voters getting a new driver’s license or ID card in Pennsylvania will now be automatically registered to vote,” reports NBC News.

Shapiro’s office issued a statement:

“Pennsylvania is the birthplace of our democracy, and as Governor, I’m committed to ensuring free and fair elections that allow every eligible voter to make their voice heard,” said Governor Josh Shapiro. “Automatic voter registration is a commonsense step to ensure election security and save Pennsylvanians time and tax dollars. Residents of our Commonwealth already provide proof of identity, residency, age, and citizenship at the DMV – all the information required to register to vote — so it makes good sense to streamline that process with voter registration. My Administration will keep taking innovative actions like this one to make government work better and more efficiently for all Pennsylvanians.”

The howls you hear outside belong to opponents of universal suffrage who believe the goal is to “bloat” voter rolls to boost Democratic turnout. Shapiro campaigned on implementing automatic voter registration (AVR).

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent adds:

An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.

[…]

By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.

Despite the right’s insistence that voter roll accuracy is critical to “election integrity,” GOP-led states are exiting the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the voter roll maintenance consortium, under pressure from the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists and election deniers. Election integrity is a right-wing marketing slogan for disguising efforts to undermine popular sovereignty.

Sargent continues:

Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.

That is encouraging at a time when democracy is under constant attack.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but a caveat about AVR. As part of an ongoing outreach effort to my local Hispanic/Latino community (designated HL in the state voter file), I surveyed multiple county precincts with concentrations of HL registrants.

Of the HL voters 45 and under, some unscientific observations. Note bolded section:

• About 60% of HL registrants 45 and under are registered unaffiliated.
• Only 9% report being born outside the U.S.; for another 18% birth_state is left blank.
• 35% of voters vote irregularly; women more than men by 3 to 2. (Many are presidential-year-only voters.)
• Of the nearly one-quarter (22%) of registrants who vote consistently, women outperform men by 2 to 1.
• Women and men who register but never vote (30%) do so about equally.

A local elections official suspects many of the non-voters register as an afterthought when prompted during a visit to the DMV or a social services agency, then forget about it. Registering them automatically could be even more invisible (depending on the style of AVR), even if citizens receive registration cards in the mail.

As the AVR study notes, while AVR “ultimately has a net positive effect on turnout,” new registrants “have a somewhat lower propensity to vote.”

Automatic registration is no panacea for boosting election participation. Outreach and voter engagement is key, especially since campaigns typically prioritize outreach to registrants with solid voting track records (the low-hanging fruit). What my limited survey in one population suggests is that many lower propensity registrants may not even remember they are registered by election time. They’ll need encouraging no matter their track record.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,”

This is the Trump agenda. Nothing else really matters. And there are many, many Republican voters who are all in with him on this:

DONALD TRUMP IS a long, long way from winning the GOP primary, let alone retaking the White House. But he always has revenge on his mind, and his allies are preparing to use a future administration to not only undo all of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work — but to take vengeance on Smith, and on virtually everyone else, who dared investigate Trump during his time out of power.

Rosters full of MAGAfied lawyers are being assembled. Plans are being laid for an entire new office of the Justice Department dedicated to “election integrity.” An assembly line is being prepared of revenge-focused “special counsels” and “special prosecutors.” Gameplans for making Smith’s life hell, starting in Jan. 2025, have already been discussed with Trump himself. And a fresh wave of pardons is under consideration for Trump associates, election deniers, and — the former president boasts — for Jan. 6 rioters.

The preparations have been underway since at least last year, with Trump being briefed on the designs by an array of attorneys, political and policy advisers, former administration officials, and other allies. The aim is to build a government-in-waiting with the hard-right infrastructure needed to turn the Justice Department into an instrument of Trump’s agenda, according to five sources familiar with these matters and another two people briefed on them.

Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

One idea that has caught thrice-indicted former president’s attention in recent months is the creation of the so-called “Office of Election Integrity,” which would be a new unit inside the Justice Department. It would be tasked not only with relitigating Trump’s lies about his 2020 election loss, but also with aggressively pursuing baseless allegations of election “fraud” (including in Democratic strongholds) in ways that Trumpist partisans believe the department has only flirted with in the past. 

This idea was recently pitched to Trump by a longtime Republican activist and an attorney who’s known the ex-president for years, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. (Republican officials have also begun voicing their own support for state-level offices of election integrity. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made the proposal a reality in his state. Officials in Tennessee, Missouri, and Wisconsin have proposed the offices, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, proposed a similarly named office.)

And when it comes to Special Counsel Smith’s office — which just handed Trump his third indictment, this one related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election — the former president and his fellow travelers already know what they want: They want the FBI and DOJ to name names.

This year, close advisers to Trump have begun the process of assembling lists of the names of federal personnel who have investigated the former president and his circle for years, and are attempting to unmask the identities of all the DOJ attorneys and others connected to Smith’s office. The obvious purpose of this, according to one source close to Trump, is to “show them the door on Day 1 [if Trump’s reelected]” — and so “we know who should receive a subpoena” in the future.

Such subpoenas would of course be instrumental in Trumpland’s vows to its voters that, should he return to power, Trump and his new attorney general will launch a raft of their own retaliatory “special counsel” and “special prosecutor” probes to investigate-the-investigator, and to go after their key enemies. As it were, Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official and a central figure in Trump’s efforts to subvert the legitimate 2020 presidential election results, has been on Trump’s informal shortlist for plum assignments, including even attorney general, in a potential second administration.

Sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his close ideological allies — working at an assortment of MAGA-prone think tanks, advocacy organizations, and legal groups — are formulating plans for a wide slate of “special prosecutors.” In this vision, such prosecutors would go after the usual targets: Smith, Smith’s team, President Joe Biden, Biden’s family, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray. But they’d also go after smaller targets, from members of the Biden 2020 campaign to more obscure government offices.

“There are almost too many targets to keep track of,” says one Trump adviser familiar with the discussions. Trump and members of his inner orbit have already outlined possible legal strategies, examining specific federal statutes they could wield in a Republican-controlled Justice Department to go after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who delivered Trump’s first indictment of this year.

The FBI’s investigation of over a thousand rioters who breached and trashed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — officially the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history —  is another area where Trump has stated he would like to reverse course. “I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” Trump told host Kaitlan Collins during a CNN town hall in May.

When the broader topic of possible second-term pardons has come up behind closed doors, Trump has at times said that such pardons should be signed at the start of the term, not saved for the later on, according to those who’ve heard him discuss it since last year. Aside from the rioters themselves, Trump has also privately floated issuing a wave of pardons to higher-ranking figures who were scrutinized in Special Counsel Smith’s two main investigations. 

“This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of DOJ’s work on these investigations,” a person intimately familiar with the conversations told Rolling Stone in March. In the past several months, when confidants have quipped to Trump that he may have to “pardon yourself,” should he return to the Oval Office, the ex-president has sometimes simply smirked and replied that they’ll have to wait and see.

Another major focus of some of these counter-probes would be “grand jury violations,” says one person familiar with the matter. The counter-probe of those alleged “violations” is the surest sign yet that in a second Trump administration, the Justice Department would seek to investigate the special counsel’s use of grand juries in the Mar-a-Lago and January 6 cases. (Indeed, Trump has already vowed to sic a special counsel on President Biden if he beats him in 2024.)

Some of these “special prosecutors” wouldn’t even be based out of the Justice Department, as special counsels typically are. In some of these private Trumpworld legal plans, some of the “special counsels” would be based out of places like the White House. This idea is nearly identical to the controversial position that Trumpist lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell tried to convince then-President Trump to give her in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Some lawyers and operatives close to Trump have pitched themselves for these kinds of roles, telling either Trump or some of his closest advisers that they’d be more than happy to take the gig in Trump’s possible return to power in 2025.

And along with having dreams of sweeping retribution and purges, the upper ranks of Trumpworld have spent years putting together projects to vet and prepare a new generation of appointments — for “special prosecutor” posts, as well as much else — and administrative talent.

In this informal vetting for Justice Department candidates, former senior Trump aides and well-connected activists have sought lawyers with a track record of loathing DOJ, particularly what they deem its supposedly “liberal,” “left-wing,” or “Marxist” elements. Between these different Trump allies, different private spreadsheets have been created in recent years, some laying out dozens of possible contenders, while some include upwards of a hundred names, sources with direct knowledge of the situation say. Former top Trump White House policy adviser Stephen Miller and other key Trump diehards have contributed names to several of these lists. 

Rolling Stone has reviewed one of these internal spreadsheets that has circulated among Trump lieutenants, and the roster is heavy on individuals connected to America First Legal, the Center for Renewing America, and other Trump-backing entities.

Prominent allies of the former president are open about plans to tie the Justice Department more tightly to the White House.

“I recall talking to a senior official in the Trump administration, who said after all of [these investigations] are over, we’ve got to think of a way to bring the Justice Department back into the government,” says Tom Fitton, president of the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch and a close ally of the former president.

The Justice Department has typically enjoyed a degree of insulation from White House control, a norm aimed at avoiding the politicization of prosecution. But Fitton argues that the department should be more “responsive” to a president’s priorities, a belief that Trump and various influential conservatives embrace enthusiastically. “Is the Justice Department going to operate as an entity outside the White House as opposed to an entity that’s controlled by the president, as the Constitution requires?” he says.

Putting it another way: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russ Vought, a former top Trump official who heads the Center for Renewing America, told The New York Times in a story published last month.

“I think there’s an argument that what the Justice Department’s doing to Trump now is criminal,” Fitton tells Rolling Stone, suggesting — of course — that a future administration should launch an investigation into Special Counsel Smith’s work.

Fitton also says the department should revisit Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the FBI probe of the Trump campaign in 2016. Durham, he argues, was a “failure” and acted only as “a glorified inspector general.”

Once, Special Counsel Durham was supposed to be Trumpworld’s savior, someone who Trump, his allies on Capitol Hill, and large swaths of conservative media were counting on to expose and imprison “Deep State” foes. But when the Durham probe ended earlier this year with lackluster results for a vengeance-hungry GOP, he became much less a hero and more a cautionary tale to the right.

As one conservative lawyer who has discussed “special prosecutor” ideas with Trump in recent months tells Rolling Stone, the guiding principle of this project is simple: “No more John Durham’s — never again.” 

It’s becoming conventional wisdom that Democrats and independents hate Joe Biden so much that they might not bother to vote next year. Do they hate him so much that this would be preferable?

Sadly, he’s been proven right

The NY Times used to keep a running tally of his lies but I think it just became too hard after a while, but there is still analysis:

Running through the indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was a consistent theme: He is an inveterate and knowing liar.

The indictment laid out how, in the two months after Election Day, Mr. Trump “spread lies” about widespread election fraud even though he “knew that they were false.”

Mr. Trump “deliberately disregarded the truth” and relentlessly disseminated them anyway at a “prolific” pace, the indictment continued, “to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Of course, Mr. Trump has never been known for fealty to truth.

Throughout his careers in business and politics, he has sought to bend reality to his own needs, with lies ranging from relatively small ones, like claiming he was of Swedish and not German descent when trying to rent to Jewish tenants in New York City, to proclaiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

If you repeat something enough, he has told confidants over time, people will believe it.

By and large, this trait has served him well, helping him bluster and bluff his way through bankruptcies and then to the White House and through crises once he was there: personal scandals, two impeachments and a special counsel’s investigation when he was in office.

But now he is being held to account in a way he never has been before for what a new special counsel, Jack Smith, is asserting was a campaign of falsehoods that undermined the foundations of democracy.

Already, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and allies are setting out the early stages of a legal strategy to counter the accusations, saying that Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights are under attack. They say Mr. Trump had every right to express views about election fraud that they say he believed, and still believes, to be true, and that the actions he took or proposed after the election were based on legal advice.

The indictment and his initial response set up a showdown between those two opposing assertions of principle: that what prosecutors in this case called “pervasive and destabilizing lies” from the highest office in the land can be integral to criminal plans, and that political speech enjoys broad protections, especially when conveying what Mr. Trump’s allies say are sincerely held beliefs.

While a judge and jury will ultimately decide how much weight to give each, Mr. Trump and his allies were already on the offensive after the indictment.

“So the First Amendment protects President Trump in this way: After 2020, he saw all these irregularities, he got affidavits from around the country, sworn testimony, he saw the rules being changed in the middle of the election process — as a president, he’s entitled to speak on those issues,” Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in the case, John Lauro, said on Wednesday in an interview on CBS.

“What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” he said.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 Republican in the House, said in a statement that Mr. Trump had “every right under the First Amendment to correctly raise concerns about election integrity in 2020.”

Representative Gary Palmer of Alabama, the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, called the indictment a “criminalization of disinformation and misinformation, which raises serious concerns about the public’s right to speak openly in opposition to policies they oppose.”

Legal experts were skeptical about the strength of those claims as a defense. They pointed out that the indictment said on its second page that all Americans had the right to say what they wanted about the election — even if it was false. But, the indictment asserts, it is illegal to use those false claims to engage in criminal conduct, the experts said.

An individual’s free-speech rights essentially end as soon as those words become evidence of criminality, they said. In the case of the indictment against Mr. Trump, the prosecutors argue that Mr. Trump used his statements to persuade others to engage in criminal conduct with him, like signing fake slates of electors or pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay Electoral College certification of President Biden’s victory.

According to the indictment, Mr. Trump “knowingly” used “false claims of election fraud” to try to “convince the vice president to accept the defendant’s fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes or send legitimate electoral votes to state legislatures for review rather than counting them.”

The indictment goes on to say that when those efforts failed, Mr. Trump turned to using the crowd at the rally on the Ellipse “to pressure the vice president to fraudulently alter the election results.”

Samuel W. Buell, a professor of law at Duke University and a lead federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Enron, said that it “won’t work legally but it will have some appeal politically, which is why he is pushing it

“There is no First Amendment privilege to commit crimes just because you did it by speaking,” Mr. Buell said.

Referring to both public and private remarks, Mr. Buell said that “there is no First Amendment privilege for giving directions or suggestions to other people to engage in illegal acts.”

Referring to the fictional television mafia boss Tony Soprano, Mr. Buell added, “Tony Soprano can’t invoke the First Amendment for telling his crew he wants someone whacked.”

For decades, Mr. Trump’s penchant for falsehoods and exaggerations was well known in New York City. He was so distrusted by Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s that one of the mayor’s deputies, Alair Townsend, famously quipped, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.”

Mr. Trump spoke with journalists by phone while pretending to be a spokesman representing himself, in order to leak information about his business or his personal life. He claimed to have dated women who denied being involved with him. He claimed that he lived on the 66th through 68th floors of Trump Tower, which in fact has only 58 floors.

I just saw that 69% of Republicans believe that the election was stolen on the basis of no evidence and just his word. His willingness to repeatedly and relentlessly lie is his superpower.

If he loses the primary don’t ever think he’ll take his ball and go home

I wish I understood what all these Republicans running for president hope to get out of it. It can’t be that they actually believe they are going to win. We know that Donald Trump will never accept that he lost so he will proclaim that the winner stole it from him and many of his followers will believe him and they’ll stay home handing the election to Joe Biden. Remember, he even claimed that Ted Cruz stole the Iowa caucuses in 2016. After first conceding the race he turned around and tweeted:

“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong any [sic] why he got more votes than anticipated. Bad!” 

He removed the word “illegally” but then followed it up with:

Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016

He let that go when he started winning primaries but once he got the nomination he famously declared that he would only accept the results of the general election if he won.

He did win but he still wasn’t satisfied because he lost the popular vote so within a couple of weeks he was declaring that it was the result of voter fraud.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

He even went so far as to create the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and packed it with vote suppression activists to prove it. They were unable to do that of course because there were no facts to support it.

Fast forward to 2020 and we all know what happened. The results of his Big Lie are that even today, nearly three years later 63% of Republicans still believe the election was illegitimate. Yes, it has shrunk from the 71% who believed it was stolen right after January 6th and the number of Republicans who now believe Biden won the election fair and square has risen from 22% to 36%. Big deal. The vast majority of Republicans are still convinced that Donald Trump is the legitimate president and most of them are going to vote for him.

And why wouldn’t they? If you really believe that the election was stolen from him you must also think that he’s got a right and a responsibility to take the White House back from the usurper.

Even if any of the challengers to his claim to the throne wanted to explode the Big Lie (which thus far only seems to be former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie) it would be hard to know where to start. Trump had dozens of different reasons why the election was stolen from him and there are new ones every day. Whether it’s the mail-in ballot scheme or the election machine rigging or censorship of the Hunter Biden story or foreign interference, Trump has claimed at one time or another each was responsible for his loss.

He understands instinctively that when you are advancing a totally preposterous lie, the best thing you can do is offer as many rationales for it as possible. Some people will pick a particular reason and that’s good enough for them. Others just see it as “there’s an awful lot of smoke, there must be a fire.”

Most Republican officials, including his rivals, have therefore decided to either back Trump’s lie outright or simply say that the election was full of “problems” that need to be fixed, which tacitly amounts to the same thing. They will twist themselves into pretzels making that case.

Here is GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel:

On Friday, Chris Wallace interviewed RNC chair Ronna McDaniel but first, CNN previewed it on Wednesday. It sounds like she's an conspiracy theorist, "I am saying there were lots of problems with the 2020 election and we need to fix it going forward" But there's a problem… (1/4) pic.twitter.com/rH4ySl6Kfo

— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) July 15, 2023

You don’t get any more “establishment” than the Chair of the Republican Party and she says she does not believe the election was fairly decided. So, of course the rank and file are going to believe that as well.

So let’s say that one of the other candidates starts to make a move and turns this into a real race. And let’s say that they end up eking out a win. As we know Trump will not graciously concede and endorse his rival. And I do believe that many of his followers will stay home. But I also think there’s every chance that he will tell them to write him in and many of them will. He’s just not the quitting type.

Maybe these candidates thought (hoped?) he would be taken down by one of the criminal investigations that are dogging him in various places around the country. I’m not sure why they would have thought that changed anything, however. He claims that too is a rigged deal on behalf of the “deep state” and his followers are in lockstep with him on that as well. Most of these candidates are barely willing to even timidly suggest that taking classified documents might not be exactly legal so there isn’t going to be much pushback there either.

So why are all these people running? They have to know that Trump will never admit that he lost. He even protested when he won insisting that he actually won bigger but they cheated him out of it! And by now they must realize that his base is going to stick with him no matter what.

I would guess that many of them just want to remain relevant in politics. Maybe they think that if Trump beats Biden they can get a job in the cabinet. Some might even think they have a shot at VP although I can’t imagine Trump rewarding anyone who had the temerity to run against him in this race. He believes he is the president in exile and shouldn’t have to run for the nomination at all. I’d be shocked if he chooses someone from the pack.

Florida Gov. Ron Desantis may have been the one who believed his own hype and thought that because he won re-election handily he really was in a position to knock out Trump. He’s clearly starting to see the error in that calculation. Florida isn’t America and even there, he’s losing to Donald Trump by 20 points. He’ll be lucky to get out of this with a political career at all. But the rest of them aren’t dumb and they had to know that Trump would not stand for anyone else snatching away the nomination from him — that he would sabotage the ticket if he isn’t on it simply because he is congenitally incapable of admitting that he lost.

I think the is that they all just want to be in position in case he moves beyond the Big Lie and takes the Big Sleep. For all the yammering about Biden’s age, Trump’s not a young man either. This primary is basically a kind of death watch, hoping that if it should happen, one of them will be the next in line and he or she will have preserved themselves tas MAGA’s heir apparent by never being disrespectful to the late leader.

The problem is that people like him tend to live long lives. And even if he doesn’t he will rise up from the grave to claim the deep state had him deep-sixed to prevent him from becoming president again and then demand a recount. In this election, for the GOP it’s Trump or no one. Either they let him have it or he’ll burn the party down. This is all a wasted exercise.

Salon

He’s such a God-fearing man…

The evangelicals seem to love his agenda more than the Republicans running for office:

One by one, Republican presidential hopefuls took the stage at this year’s Family Leadership Conference for one of their biggest opportunities so far in this cycle: The chance — without Donald Trump in attendance stealing the show — to win over religious conservatives in Iowa, a state increasingly seen as key to having a shot at winning the nomination.

And one by one, they were met with Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly turned to his favorite topics.

Mike Pence sparred with Carlson on January 6 and Ukraine, with the conversation getting noticeably tense as the former Fox News host repeatedly pressed him over claims that the Ukrainian government “has arrested priests.”

“I just told you I asked the religious leader in Kyiv if it was happening. You asked me if I raised the issue and I did,” Pence replied after one lengthy back and forth about Ukraine. During another portion of the conversation, when Carlson suggested Pence is more concerned for Ukraine than American cities, the former vice president pushed back, noting he’d “heard the routine from you before.”

Much of his conversation also focused on January 6, where Pence declined to describe the riot as an “insurrection,” a word Carlson derided on his former Fox News show, but rather opted to call it a “riot.”

Tim Scott was pressed about Carlson’s idea that Mexico is more dangerous than Russia, and dodged when asked if he supports sending cluster munitions to Ukraine (arguing instead that it wouldn’t be an issue if he were in the Oval Office.)

Asa Hutchinson perhaps fared worst of all: He spent much of his time in front of the roughly 2,000 attendees trying to defend his decision to veto a bill that would have barred surgeries and hormone therapy for transgender minors. At one point during that interview, Hutchinson tried to pivot, telling him that he hoped they’d “be able to talk about some issues.”

“Well, this is one of the biggest issues in the country,” Carlson replied to applause.

For some candidates, the opportunity to sit down with one of the most influential commentators in conservative politics proved to be a blessing: After the event, several attendees who spoke with Semafor singled out Vivek Ramaswamy as the candidate who impressed them most throughout the day by directly answering Carlson’s questions.

“I would negotiate the deal that ends the Ukraine war — freeze the current lines of control, yes, that means giving part of the Donbas region to Russia,” Ramaswamy said at one point. “I would make a hard commitment that NATO never admits Ukraine to NATO.”

Nikki Haley, who was largely saved from Carlson’s Ukraine probing, also impressed those watching the cattle call. She pledged to “keep fighting” against voting practices she felt were unfair, like certain uses of mail-in ballots, and cited “irregularities” in the 2020 election, but made clear she did not believe Trump won.

“Do I think that changed the results of the election? No,” she said. “I think President Biden ended up winning the election, but I think at the end of the day it showed we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of election integrity.”

Ron DeSantis, who wrapped up the evening, was pressed on his changing answers on Ukraine — he said onstage he wanted a “sustainable peace” and opposed “open-ended conflict” — and asked about whether he’d sign Florida’s six-week abortion ban on a national level.

“I’m proud to have been a pro-life governor and I will be a pro-life president, so I mean, of course I want to sign pro-life legislation,” he said.

Carlson’s style grated on some campaigns and observers, who felt he fixated on his own obsessions rather than topics more tailored to an evangelical audience. A Pence advisor told Semafor that they’d prepped the former vice president on both January 6 and Ukraine, but ultimately felt it was somewhat unfortunate that those were the two major topics in front of an audience of religious and social conservatives.

But the former Fox host also repeatedly made news by dropping the typically deferential style from other cattle calls and prodding candidates directly on some of the most sensitive questions with the party’s populist base.

“Tucker was amazing. He was on fire. His questions were incredibly provocative, but important — they were the right ones,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said. “I would be willing to bet that if you had done a straw poll at the end of this and included Tucker’s name in it, he would be top one or two as a presidential candidate.”

Not all attendees loved Carlson’s choice of questions: One couple said they weren’t as focused on Ukraine topics as he seemed to be.

“I think it’s a waste of time to ask a non-person, who can’t do anything about it, what they would do about it,” Scott Steelman, an Iowa voter in attendance, said. “I mean, Tucker Carlson has an issue with it, and he’s making it an issue.”

Carlson is a terrible blight on this country, right up there with Trump. He’s totally motivated by money and will do and say anything to get it. (I don’t believe that’s true of all right wing “influencers” by the way. But for this guy — money is everything.)

Trump decided to stay in Florida for the Turning Points Action conference where these other candidates are being ripped for failing to appear. He’s playing a completely different game.

TPM reports:

As Trump-appointed judges vie to see who can produce the most nakedly partisan rulings completely divorced from precedent and case law, a new contender has thrown his hat in the ring. 

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty on Tuesday barred Biden administration officials — everyone from Heath and Human Services to the Centers for Disease Control to the FBI — from flagging posts that spread misinformation to social media companies. Doughty ruled that such contact is a violation of the First Amendment. The companies include Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, Instagram and many more. 

The judgment bans the named officials from meeting with the companies, flagging worrying content, emailing or calling the companies about content, following up with the companies or even collaborating with groups like the Election Integrity Partnership to identify troublesome posts. 

“Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” Doughty writes. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

The case now goes through the familiar gauntlet of right-wing-friendly venues: the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and, likely, the Supreme Court. Should Doughty’s ruling survive, it’d be a sea change in the interpretation of this area of law. His injunction, at least, will likely remain in place for months, given the conservative dominance of the 5th Circuit and the time it’ll take for the case to reach the Supreme Court.  

Many anti-Biden administration litigants have recently filed lawsuits in the same pipeline — Trumpy district judge to 5th Circuit to Supreme Court — on everything from abortion to the Affordable Care Act.

The high court, though, has overturned Doughty before; he made the initial ruling banning the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements for health care workers at facilities that receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid, which the Court ultimately let stand.

Doughty tosses in a few exceptions to the contact ban, including on matters of national security and “criminal efforts to suppress voting, to provide illegal campaign contributions, of cyber-attacks against election infrastructure, or foreign attempts to influence elections.” 

Doughty tipped his cards far earlier in the process, allowing the plaintiffs — a pair of red state attorneys general plus individuals including The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft — to extract extensive discovery from administration officials like far-right archenemy Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s said he wasn’t involved in online content moderation. 

This newest ruling also dribbled out of the right-wing media vortex of conspiracy theories, where “government censorship” of conservatives’ social media activity is a constant complaint.

Fury about supposed “shadow banning,” stifling of content and throttling of follower counts is not relegated to right-wing cranks on message boards or those who host Fox News shows: Republican elected officials consistently echo the conspiracy theory, occasionally hauling in tech CEOs before their committees to answer shouted questions on the topic.

The Republican-majority House Judiciary Committee, among the censorship-obsessed and which has already subpoenaed the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, interrupted its anodyne Fourth of July posts to gleefully retweet news of the judge’s ruling, festooned with American flag emojis. 

“HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!” the committee celebrated.

This is going to be a common occurrence going forward. The Federalist Society salted the judiciary with many of these MAGA fools and they are working hand in glove with the looney MAGA right conspiracy freaks. And some of this nonsense is going to make it all the way to the top and we’ll just have to see how far down the rabbit hole the Supremes are willing to go.

Get busy fighting or brace for democracy dying

“A Red Alert for Voting Rights” is the Zoom call scheduled tomorrow by Carolina Forward. The topic is North Carolina politics. But the red alert is broader than that.

Twitter followers of former Ohio state Democratic Party chair, David Pepper (“Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American“), know he’s been leaning hard into Ohio Republicans’ attempt to thwart a citizen initiative to secure abortion rights in the state constitution. The GOP-dominated legislature has scheduled an August special election to pass a constitutional amendment that would make it harder for citizens to pass their “Right to Reproductive Freedom” amendment in November.

So dishonest.

Ohio business leaders sit in silence as their workers and customers and their families are directly attacked…and as their professional organization plays a central role in advancing that attack. https://t.co/qnVVGvaPtD

— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) June 13, 2023

Democracy Docket has an update on that Ohio fight:

On Monday, June 12, the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the Ohio Ballot Board and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) to rewrite parts of the ballot language for Senate Joint Resolution 2, a proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would increase the threshold to pass constitutional amendments from 50% to 60%. 

This decision stems from a lawsuit filed in late May by a group of Ohio voters and the group One Person One Vote arguing that the adopted ballot title and ballot language for the proposed amendment is inaccurate and misleading to voters in violation of the Ohio Constitution and state law. 

In particular, the petitioners alleged that the ballot’s title — “ELEVATING THE STANDARDS TO QUALIFY FOR AND TO PASS ANY CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT” — is inaccurate. 

In today’s order, the Ohio Supreme Court agreed with the petitioners in part, holding that “the word ‘any’ is likely to mislead voters” since it “could give voters the false impression that the proposed amendment would make it more difficult to qualify all proposed constitutional amendments for the ballot.” In reality, the proposed amendment — if passed — would only increase the ballot-qualification standards for citizen-led “initiative petitions but not for constitutional amendments proposed by the General Assembly or at a constitutional convention.”

[…]

This decision is a victory for Ohio voters since the ballot language and title will have to be rewritten to be more clear. Aside from this case, another lawsuit filed by One Person One Vote regarding S.J.R. 2 is currently pending in the Ohio Supreme Court. That lawsuit asks the state Supreme Court to prohibit LaRose from holding a special election on Aug. 8, 2023 regarding S.J.R. 2, alleging that it is against state law to hold a statewide election in August. 

Meanwhile, North Carolina Republicans have filed multiple bills aimed at rewriting the rules for voting, and stripping the governor of authorities in the administration of elections.

Democracy Docket again:

On Monday, June 12, North Carolina Republicans introduced Senate Bill 749, a bill to reform the structure of the state and county boards of elections, giving lawmakers more power in the process. 

S.B. 749 would remove the governor’s power to appoint board members and grant it to the North Carolina Legislature instead. Political parties would be able to nominate members, but the Legislature would not be required to follow their suggestions. Additionally, the boards would have an even number of Democrats and Republicans. Under current law, the party that holds the governor’s office (currently Democrats) is empowered to appoint a majority of board members.

This is not the first time that the North Carolina Republican Party has attempted to restructure the board. Following the election of Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in November 2016, but prior to his term’s commencement, the GOP-led Legislature enacted two bills, S.B. 4 and H.B. 17, that abolished the existing Board and Ethics Commission and created a new combined Bipartisan State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement. Former Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed the legislation into law the same day. In January 2018, after Cooper sued Republican legislators, the North Carolina Supreme Court found the bills violated the separation-of-powers provisions in the state constitution as they “imping[ed] upon the Governor’s ability to faithfully execute the laws.” 

In 2018, voters rejected an amendment by 62% that would have similarly granted the Legislature more control over the state board of elections. All living former governors of the state (three Democrats and two Republicans) came together publicly and urged North Carolinians to vote against the amendment with former Gov. Jim Martin (R) asserting,”This is not about partisan politics. It’s about power politics, and it must be stopped.”

NC S.B. 749 comes on the heels of proposed Senate Bill 747 that imposes a series of new voting restrictions:

The bill was introduced on the heels of reporting from WRAL, a local North Carolina outlet, that state lawmakers were drafting legislation with input from the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing organization run by Cleta Mitchell, who led former President Donald Trump’s legal effort to overturn the 2020 election results. Mitchell stated she did not help draft any legislation.

S.B. 747, according to journalist Will Doran, appears to be the first of the new election bills. The Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature has a narrow veto-proof majority after formerly Democratic state Rep. Tricia Cotham (R) switched parties in April. Now, the North Carolina GOP has the votes to override prospective vetoes from Gov. Roy Cooper (D).

Stay woke. Not all the attacks on democracy today are happening in Miami.

But they’re cagey about saying so

A friend who knows I’m into this sort of esoterica sent along this tale of GOP insincerity in its fight to restore confidence in an electoral system Republicans have worked for decades to undermine. Their particular election bogeyman shifts with the season. It’s dead people voting this time, double voters the next, voter impersonation, rigged machines, stuffed ballots, etc., and Black people. Always Black people.

“Election integrity” means Republicans always win, dontcha know. Each GOP loss spikes complaints, demands, and election law tweaks meant to boost integrity by tilting the playing field more in their favor.

An organization created to identify double voting, bad addresses, dead voters. etc., and to make election officials’ jobs easier is the once-obscure, nonprofit voter list maintenance consortium named the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). Or it was obscure until a three-part “expose” in January 2022 by Gateway Pundit that I wrote about in March. The post went viral on Gettr, Gab, Parler, Telegram and Trump’s Truth Social. Gateway Pundit alleged that ERIC is a George Soros-funded “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls,” the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote. “If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC.”

Um, no. Since then, eight states have exited ERIC under pressure from the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists and election deniers who vote in primaries. Republican candidates who want to shine-up their MAGA bona fides see ERIC as a target of opportunity, NPR reports.

“It’s this crazy zeal to get out of ERIC,” said J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney, “that is going to cause voter fraud to flourish.”

The Gateway Pundit posts drew on Adams’ criticisms of ERIC (NPR):

In late 2021, Adams appeared on a conservative radio program and called ERIC “diabolical.”

His voting advocacy law firm has sued a number of states for records related to ERIC. And he even wrote what’s believed to be the first article ever alleging a connection between Soros and ERIC, back in 2016. (The Soros-funded Open Society Foundations has given money previously to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped start ERIC, but Soros has never had any involvement in the organization.)

In an interview with NPR this year, Adams said he never intended his criticisms to lead to states actually leaving the organization.

“My view is that it’s better to be in ERIC than not in ERIC,” Adams said, because without it, “it’s absolutely impossible to do cross-state checking to see who’s voting twice in federal elections.”

But that assumes that the GOP’s election integrity crusade was sincere.

NPR’s report offers a useful history of how the organization originated that’s worth your review.

At its height, the partnership had 32 members, almost evenly split between the two major parties. The program helped officials clean up voter rolls and remove dead voters, which attracted Republican states like South Carolina, Utah and Texas.

“The ERIC program for us has been godsend,” said Iowa Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, in an interview with NPR earlier this year.

It also required states to reach out to eligible voters who weren’t registered yet, with a postcard explaining how to register. That helped attract Democratic states, like Connecticut, Oregon and, most recently, New Jersey.

“I had various conversations with my fellow secretaries, who gave positive and I want to say bipartisan feedback at the time,” said New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way, speaking about how she learned of the program.

But MAGA attorney Cleta Mitchell heard about the program, too. Mitchell was deeply involved in the Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania-based “open-source investigator” worked on the discredited election audits in Maricopa County, Arizona. At a secret ERIC summit Mitchell held last June, Honey presented a 29-page report calling ERIC a “threat to election integrity.”

The real threat conservatives see (and my interest) lies in those postcards ERIC members send to potentially eligible but unregistered citizens. For conservatives, removing dead voters, etc., was the carrot for states to join ERIC. For liberals it was the voter registration outreach. Now that they are aware of it, conservatives want out. ERIC is “bloating the rolls.”

“The impact of ERIC is that instead of cleaning up our voter rolls … they add more people to it,” Honey said. “People who aren’t even interested or disengaged don’t really want to register. But they just, you know, you ask them enough times, they’re going to say yes.”

Can’t have that. Insert “people of color and young people” whenever a GOP operatrive complains about registering people “who aren’t even interested or disengaged [and] don’t really want to register.”

Once again:

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a father of movement conservatism and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, told a religious right group in Dallas during the 1980 campaign. Plenty more where he came from still hold that belief and work every election to limit access to the ballot to the right people.

Look at this nonsense:

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says the results of voting in all 50 states should be announced on Election Night. Haley spoke to a crowd in Ankeny tonight and was asked if she feels elections are fair.

“I don’t mind absentee voting and I don’t mind early voting, but you have to prove you are who you say you are and when those ballots come in, they need to verify signatures and count them as they come in,” Haley said. “There’s no reason any state can’t produce the results on Election Night. There’s no reason whatsoever.”

Haley suggested “a lot of states” are doing things right and she urged the crowd to “keep the faith” about election integrity. “The good thing from COVID is we had a lot of election integrity laws that passed in multiple states,” Haley said. “There are a few states out there that we still have problems with and we’ve got to be careful and they bent the rules and they tried things and we’ve got to make sure that we continue to press those states to do it the right way because integrity in the election process matters.”

She has said in the past that the election was not stolen. Now she’s hedging. Of course. These people are the worst cowards politics has ever produced.

Nobody “bent the rules.” This has all been litigated. There were dozens and dozens of court cases, many of which were heard before right wing judges and none of them found any lack of integrity. We did see a president try to “bend the rules” by strong arming Republican officials into “finding” him the votes he needed to win. We saw him establish a Big Lie that the election was stolen. And we saw him incite an insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power. We saw all that. But, no there wasn’t any “bending of the rules” that “we need to keep an eye on” in the states unless she’s talking about Republicans trying to steal more elections.

And adopting the fatuous Trump line that we can always tell the results of the election night is such an enormous pile of nonsense I hardly know what to say. States never “produce results” of an election on election night. It takes weeks to certify elections and she knows that. Media call elections on election night most of the time based on projections — unless they are close. When they are, as ours often are these days, they have to wait for all the votes to be counted — which is not possible between the hours of 8pm and 12 midnight on election night.

This is a Trump line that she’s flogging. He says that no votes should be counted after midnight because Democrats to go out and manufacture votes in the middle of the night to beat him. That’s where this is coming from. And Haley knows it.

These cynical GOP candidates are worse than Trump. They are lending their “moderate” imprimatur to his worst ideas.