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.
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.
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.
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
“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 evidencethat 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.
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.
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.
Republican Former Lt. Governor: I am voting for Joe Biden. He is a decent person. I’m voting for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, who has no moral compass. Does anybody think anything's gonna get done if Donald Trump is the president? I mean, all he's going to do is go on this… pic.twitter.com/2E0QbVvL7q
It’s disappointing to watch an increasing number of Republicans fall in line behind former president Donald Trump. This includes some of his fiercest detractors, such as U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who raised eyebrows during a recent interview by vowing to support the “Republican ticket.”
This mentality is dead wrong.
Yes, elections are a binary choice. Yes, serious questions linger about President Biden’s ability to serve until the age of 86. His progressive policies aren’t to conservatives’ liking.
But the GOP will never rebuild until we move on from the Trump era, leaving conservative (but not angry) Republicans like me no choice but to pull the lever for Biden. At the same time, we should work to elect GOP congressional majorities to block his second-term legislative agenda and provide a check and balance.ExploreGeorgia Voter Guide: May 2024
The alternative is another term of Trump, a man who has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character. The headlines are ablaze with his hush-money trial over allegations of improper record-keeping for payments to conceal an affair with an adult-film star.
Most important, Trump fanned the flames of unfounded conspiracy theories that led to the horrific events of Jan. 6, 2021. He refuses to admit he lost the last election and has hinted he might do so again after the next one.
Those holding their nose and falling behind Trump tend to rely on similar arguments. Sometimes it involves, as Barr stated in his CNN interview, the, “duty to pick the person who I think would do the least damage to the country.”
Ironically, having served as his attorney general until December 2020, Barr saw firsthand Trump’s ability to cause damage. Barr’s declaration that the U.S. Justice Department uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election infuriated his boss and set off a chain of events that ended with Jan. 6.
He notes all the Big Lie conspiracies and arguments against Biden policies. But then he tells a truth that no Republicans seem willing to admit:
I get it. No one likes paying higher taxes, and these protests are unsettling. But the last year of the Trump presidency was hardly a time of tranquillity. His handling of the pandemic was erratic, including at one point musing about consuming disinfectants. His reliance on incendiary phrases such as “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” fueled racial unrest. His infamous march to St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street from the White House, flanked by top aides (including Barr) and brandishing a Bible, further set the nation ablaze.
Trump has shown us who he is. We should believe him. To think he is going to change at the age of 77 is beyond improbable.
He doesn’t mention the utter chaos of the first three years with legal problems, norm busting and corruption and his bizarre foreign policy horrors.
He notes that the election is close and that Trump could win and then addresses the GOP itself:
The healing of the Republican Party cannot begin with Trump as president (and that’s aside from the untold damage that potentially awaits our country). A forthcoming Time magazine cover story lays out in stark terms “the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”
Unlike Trump, I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life. This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.
He sees reality. If only more of his fellow Republicans would allow themselves to do the same.
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
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.”
Good heavens, this garbled mess from RNC co-chair Lara Trump.
“We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… So there was a moratorium for about 40 years on the RNC actually training people to work in these polling locations and the tabulation centers where the mail-in ballots come in. And last year, the judge who implemented that passed away, so that was lifted.”
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
“Poll observers are NEVER permitted to touch ballots,” tweets exasperated Democratic election protection attorney Marc Elias. “She is suggesting the RNC will infiltrate election offices.”
Observers physically handling ballots is BS, as Elias points out. But she’s just getting started on the wrongness.
First, some terminology. Poll watchers or observers are citizens pre-approved to be present inside a polling location as observers during voting. At most (at least in my state), they may bring to the attention of the chief judge any observed infractions or misapplication of voting rules, and that’s all. They are to sit quietly. No interactions with voters, verbal or physical. Poll workers are citizens approved and hired to administaer the actual election, issue ballots, check IDs, etc. Poll greeters or electioneers are political operatives who may interact with voters only outside the polling location’s marked electioneering boundaries.
The “moratorium” Lara Trump mentions was a standing court order enforcing a 1982 consent decree between the RNC and DNC. It limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in “ballot security” efforts without prior court approval. The RNC sued to get the decree rescinded after the election of Barack Obama. Third Circuit Appeals Court Judge Joseph Greenaway in his ruling noted, “the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.”
The RNC was never prohibited from appointing poll watchers, and did. Among other requirements, the RNC was probibited from engaging in a through g above. Observing vote counting has always been allowed, to my knowledge. I’ve watched mailed-in ballots be approved plenty of times.
I don’t have time to bird dog all of this, but per Wikpedia, Greenaway, 66, retired in 2023. He is still alive. District Court Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise issued the original 1982 ruling. He died in office in 2015, not last year. U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez (still alive) allowed the consent decree to expire in December 2017. Debevoise expiring had nothing to do with it.
Like her father-in-law, Lara Trump is way out of her depth.
Americans love a good courtroom drama as much a police procedural. That fascination may finally get uncommitted voters who have tapped out and tuned out of politics to pay attention to what’s at stake in the November presidential election, Anat Shenker-Osorio tells Greg Sargent in today’s Daily Blast podcast.
Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial begins today. The political press will drive a battle-of-the century narrative to draw eyeballs and clicks. Are these charges serious? Can District Attorney Alvin Bragg prove Trump paying off a porn star was election interference? Who will triumph? But the hubbub around the trial may communicate to non-political junkies the message that where there is smoke there is fire. Trump won’t come out of this unscathed even if acquitted.
The right forever has thrown smoke bombs at opponents to convince the less-tuned-in that there must be something suspicious afoot. Al Gore and the internet. Hillary’s emails. Obama’s birth certificate. Voter fraud. There’s a Deep State out to get you. That there is no there there is beside the point. Create doubt in people’s minds. It’s a death by a thousand cuts strategy for sabotaging an opponent. Or a country. Russians are professionals at it.
The irony as the trial begins today is that the black smoke swirling around Trump will be his emails. That’s not how Shenker-Osorio puts it. She uses the concept of social proof, “where people think the thing they think people like them think.” A lot of people are going to see smoke billowing from Trump and think there must be something to it.
The problem for Democrats, says Shenker-Osorio, is that they “cannot say on Monday that these people are an authoritarian faction” coming for your freedom — an existential threat to America — and on Tuesday promise to work with them. That’s not an effective, consistent or sticky message. “Either the theater is on fire or it’s not on fire,” she tells Sargent. (Democrats seem to have a biological aversion to consistent messaging.)
Polls show that only a fraction of voters “would be less likely to support Trump upon a conviction in this criminal trial.” But that’s enough in a contest with razor-thin margins. To this day, I celebrate one of our 2006 field organizers for losing the most Republican county in the district. Losing there by only 3,000 votes meant flipping the district from red to blue.
Dahlia Lithwick and Shenker-Osorio said the same at Slate on Friday:
Thus, while it is absolutely the case that 36 percent of independents saying that a guilty verdict would move them away from Trump is less than the 44 percent saying it wouldn’t, when your vote total is presently neck and neck and electoral precedent says it will come down to the wire, you cannot afford to lose anyone, let alone over a third of the gettable voters. That 36 percent matters greatly.
And so, those who are dismissing the electoral consequences of this criminal trial by declaring that events in Manhattan over the next few weeks will merely animate Trump’s base—a base that will see this trial as yet more proof of the Deep State’s (™) persecution of their Lord—are also demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of electoral math. You cannot mobilize the voters who are already absolutely voting for Trump to any greater heights. No matter how rabid their fury, and how bottomless their sense of shared grievance, they still get only one vote each—at least until they figure out how to commit the voter fraud they love to decry on a broader scale. The rank and file in the tank for MAGA cannot become more impactful.
Opening arguments today are not like Trump’s civil trials. This is a criminal case. Law & Order stuff. Must-see TV, even if it’s not on TV.
This means that voters who only barely register the drumbeat of political news will still see a man they are supposed to consider the potential leader of the free world falling asleep, muttering threats at jurors, and generally looking sad and trapped and small. And if he is declared guilty, this process will render him, in many voters’ understanding, a criminal.
Presidential elections are won and lost on broad narratives like “Morning in America” and “Yes We Can,” not on narrow policy disagreements.
What Trump on trial—and the constant barrage of chatter about it—ultimately does is clue these weary citizens into the actual consequences of this election. It changes the narrative from a tale of two old men, neither of whom they find appealing, into the possibility that a convicted criminal will be deciding which laws, if any, apply to him and also to everyone else. This, for everyday voters residing outside the commentariat, is what can become core to politics: a story of morality and possibly even some game-changing theater.
Another GOP non-solution to a non-problem from frightened men who can’t govern except by making it harder for U.S. citizens to choose their leaders. TFG Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson announced an “election integrity” bill at their Mar-a-Lago meeting on Friday. Their bill would make voting by non-citizens illegaler than it is already.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a bluff that has no chance to get past the U.S. Senate if Republicans even introduce it. Trump and Johnson got the publicity. They stoked the MAGA base’s xenophobia. They fed the voter fraud conspiracy theory. These guardians of the republic further undermined confidence in government of the people in which they themselves no longer believe. It’s a win-win-win-win.
How will they make the illegal illegaler? We don’t know, not having seen the bill (if it exists). People already must swear on penalty of a fine of “not more than $10,000″ or imprisonment of “not more than five years, or both” that they are U.S. citizens when they register to vote (to be verified by boards of elections). If they slip through somehow, it’s still a felony if they vote in a federal election.
Now, having required photo IDs to vote in state after state, will Republicans require citizens to produce at their polling stations their long-form birth certificates, Social Security cards, or passports at the polls? And which Americans might have the most trouble obtaining those and getting over this new barrier to casting a ballot?
CLAIM: Social Security Administration data shows the number of voters registering without a photo ID is skyrocketing in three key swing states, evidence that migrants who entered the country illegally are registering to vote in Arizona, Texas and Pennsylvania.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Election officials in all three states said the information being shared is incorrect. In fact, recent voter registrations in those states are well below the numbers being cited online. The posts are misrepresenting data from the SSA’s Help America Vote Verification system, which tracks requests by states to verify the identity of individuals who registered to vote using the last four digits of their social security number. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections and noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare, as states have processes to prevent it.
THE FACTS: With three months remaining in the presidential primary season, social media users are misrepresenting government data to suggest that the country is seeing a surge in voter registrations by migrants who came to the U.S. illegally.
Following up on a previous post, here’s Jamelle Bouie on Trump’s impunity”
At no point during his long career as a celebrity real estate mogul and businessman has Trump faced any meaningful consequences for his fraudulent, even criminal, behavior. He has operated, for decades, with a shield of impunity crafted from his shamelessness, his celebrity and his craven willingness to intimidate critics with litigation or even just the threat of litigation.
What is striking is the extent to which this shield of impunity has only been strengthened by the political and legal institutions of the United States. First and foremost among these is the Republican Party, which has never wasted a chance to thrust itself between Trump and the consequences of his actions. When it was the “Access Hollywood” tape, Republicans were there for Trump. They were there for Trump when it was his callous reaction to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. They were there for him when he was impeached for trying to coerce the government of Ukraine into supporting his political prospects, and they were there for him when he was impeached for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The much-vaunted guardrails of the Constitution have not done much to stop Trump, either. As I’ve discussed many times, we have the antiquated rules of the Constitution to thank for his elevation to the White House. And those same rules facilitated his effort to deny the will of the voters and retain his grasp on power.
The law has not been much better.
If you helped Trump try to overturn the results of the previous election, up to and including the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, then there’s a good chance you’ve had to face your day in court. One of Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, was ordered to pay nearly $150 million in damages relating to efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, while another Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor charges relating to the effort to manufacture evidence of voter fraud in the same state. And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of rioters who have been charged and sentenced in federal criminal court.
So far, however, Trump has gotten away scot free. Yes, he has been indicted in federal cases related to Jan. 6 and his handling of classified documents. But the Supreme Court has in effect delayed his trial until the fall as it considers the absurd (but no less serious) question of absolute presidential immunity for criminal conduct in office. The judge in the documents case, Aileen Cannon, can’t claim to be tackling a serious constitutional issue. She seems, instead, to be looking for any avenue that allows her to dismiss the charges against the former president, who nominated her to the federal bench in 2020.
[…]
Over the weekend, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz issued a warning to Letitia James that seizing Trump’s properties would put him back in office. “If the New York attorney general starts to take his homes away, starts to seize his assets, it’s all going to be on camera,” he said on CNN. “Pundits are going to sit there and scream about this, ‘This man cannot be elected.’ You’re going to create the greatest victimhood of 2024, and you’re going to elect Donald Trump.”
This is exactly backward. It is the refusal to enforce the rules — enforce the law — against Trump that has put him in a position to win the White House a second time. It is the impunity, as much as if not more than the cultivated sense of victimhood, that anchors his political appeal.
Yes, indeed. Trump has never had to pay a price for any of his corrupt misdeeds and I don’t have a lot of optimism that he will despite attempting a coup, inciting an insurrection, stealing classified secrets and presiding over the most flagrantly corrupt administration in US history. And in the end, he may end up keeping all his money as well…
It’s the shamelessness that makes this possible and we need to figure out how to deal with that. To the extent that we had a social contract it has completely imploded.
Lara Trump nomination: In a world where qualifications are often measured by titles and years of experience, we’re reminded of a truth: God does not call the qualified, he qualifies the called. Lara Trump is the embodiment of this truth pic.twitter.com/gnFK5Mjt2E
They all robotically acceded to Trump’s order to install his hand-picked sycophant and his daughter-in-law so they will help pay his legal bills. And they’ll take millions in small donations from brainwashed Americans who can’t afford it. I’d feel sorry for them if they didn’t support that orange fascist which is inexcusable.
The Republican National Committee on Friday selected new leaders who were handpicked by former President Donald J. Trump, a move expected to tighten the expected nominee’s hold on the party’s machinery ahead of the general election.
The committee unanimously elected Michael Whatley, who led the North Carolina Republican Party and was the R.N.C.’s general counsel, as its chair and Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, as co-chair.
Both Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump were endorsed by Mr. Trump last month after Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s leader since 2017, privately told the former president she planned to leave the position. Ms. McDaniel was for months the focus of intense pressure from inside and outside the Trump campaign to step down over the committee’s lackluster fund-raising and criticism over Republicans’ performance in 2022.
Many of Mr. Trump’s allies also criticized Ms. McDaniel, whom Mr. Trump originally picked for the position, for being insufficiently supportive of the former president. They cited her neutrality during the Republican primary and her resistance to his push to call off a series of debates that he refused to participate in.
The new leaders will take the reins of the national party at a critical juncture for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and their elevation is part of his larger effort to effectively merge the R.N.C. with his campaign.
After Mr. Trump dominated the primaries on Super Tuesday, his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, exited the Republican race, effectively handing him the party’s nomination. Mr. Trump is now focused on the general election, and his campaign is expected to begin raising money in concert with the party, allowing him to raise far larger sums and to tap into the existing party apparatus.
During Friday’s meeting, the R.N.C. voted to officially recognize him as the party’s presidential candidate, even though he has not yet locked up the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination.
In a speech after his election, Mr. Whatley vowed that the committee would “be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump,” flip control of the Senate and expand Republicans’ slim majority in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Whatley also said his priorities as chair would be “getting out the vote and protecting the ballot.” He pledged to build on the committee’s efforts to recruit and deploy poll watchers, workers and judges to serve as “real-time monitors” as votes are being cast as well as counted.
Mr. Trump — who continues to make false claims about voter fraud as he faces criminal charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — has told allies that he believes the R.N.C. needed to spend more money on “election integrity” efforts.
Mr. Whatley has backed Mr. Trump’s false election claims and has asserted, without basis, that Republican efforts in North Carolina prevented Democrats from cheating Mr. Trump out of victory there in 2020. In a statement, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee criticized Mr. Whatley as a “fringe election denier.”
On Friday, he said that the committee would “work relentlessly in every state to ensure that it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.” Mr. Trump has frequently and falsely contended on the campaign trail that Democrats pervasively cheat during elections.
“Saturday Night Live” made mad fun over the weekend of comments that President Joe Biden is sharp as a tack “behind closed doors.”
The New Yorker this morning offers a peek behind those closed doors. John Harwood tweets that the interview, like his own last fall, “shows talk of his alleged mental decline as utter bullshit.”
If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him. For as long as Biden has been in politics, he has thrived on a mercurial mix of confidence and insecurity. Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.” For Biden, the offense of the contested election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him. “I’d ask a rhetorical question,” Biden said. “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”
Trump tried to steal the presidency “from him.” That sense, that feeling, is how Republicans have sold imaginary voter fraud over decades to undermine the democratic process. They encourage conservatives to imagine how it would feel to have their vote stolen from them, to imagine it as a grotesque, personal violation like rape or assault. Perhaps Democrats should encourage their Bidenly serene base to conjure the same feelings. What the Trump GOP means to do this fall is exactly the personal violation of which they’ve accused the left for decades. If it motivates the right, could it motivate the left?
The rest of the piece is about Biden’s view of the upcoming election, about Trump’s weaknesses, and about polling on various policy stances and economic measures. And Biden’s age. Give it a rest. And stop giving column inches to David Axelrod.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, voiced a position that I encountered among many high-ranking Democrats. “He’s not the only option that we had,” he told me. “But, once he’d made the decision to go, he became the only option that we have.” In the months that remain, Whitehouse said, the best way to beat Trump is a strategy that he called “Biden plus offense.” When people are “frightened or angry, you need to convince them that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights,” he said. “If you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re waist-deep fighting alligators in the swamp, then nobody’s really thinking about your age.”
A Biden campaign staffer, Mike Donilon, opines on Biden’s “freedom agenda”:
It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “MAGA movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”
Bruce Reed, a close Biden aides, tells Osnos, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”
Remind normies just how crazy is crazy. Cut to the chase. Trump and his anti-Constitution, anti-rule-of-law, anti-democracy, royalist cult will sure as hell try to steal your vote this fall to install Trump as a monarch. Let the policy wonks quibble about polls and policies. Remind voters that it’s not just abstract democracy on the line this fall.
Republicans mean to fuck you over and gut your freedoms. What are you prepared to do about it? At a minimum, get off your ass.
