Rupar Aaron Public Notice
7 24 no lnx
PROLLY NEGLECT SEE LINKAGES
SEE FEDSOC https://www.publicnotice.co/p/jeffrey-clark-eastman-charges-federalist-society
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2 26
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-fulton-county-raid
while it may seem like the entire federal government is currently focused on violently attacking immigrants and anyone who supports them, that’s simply not true. A significant part of the federal government is also focused on destroying free and fair elections.
Now, that’s multitasking.
It’s honestly difficult to unpack all the ways in which the administration is undermining the safety, security, and constitutionality of elections in genuinely unprecedented ways. This isn’t intended to minimize the decades-long Republican efforts to dismantle the Voting Rights Act — looking at you, John Roberts. Nor should we overlook that conservatives have long touted nonexistent voter fraud as a way to suppress votes in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions. But the efforts of the Trump administration go far beyond that, into the dumbest and most dangerous places.
[
We are all passengers in Trump’s death cab
[David R. Lurie](https://substack.com/profile/2615625-david-r-lurie)
·
Feb 12
[Read full story](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-polling)](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-polling)
The FBI’s recent raid on the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, where federal agents descended with a search warrant alleging that 2020 ballots and other election material were evidence of a crime, is one of those things where every way you can describe it sounds overwrought. It’s unprecedented. It’s unbelievable. It’s catastrophic. The federal government seized the county’s 2020 ballots, ballot images, voter rolls, and tabulator tapes as part of President Trump’s ongoing attempt to prove he won the 2020 election.
The DOJ tried to subpoena Fulton County’s 2020 election records last fall, then filed a civil suit in December when the county didn’t respond to the subpoena. But hey, why go the civil route when you can gin up long-debunked allegations of criminal conduct to get a search warrant?
And speaking of that warrant — it’s genuinely distressing that a magistrate judge signed off on this.
Restart the steal
Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas is no right-wing election denier or newbie. She’s been in the job for 10 years and has a background as a public defender and in legal aid. So, this can’t be automatically chalked up to malice or incompetence. However, the affidavit supporting the search warrant is fatally flawed in three glaringly obvious ways.
First, it relies on long-debunked allegations that have already been thoroughly investigated. These are things like missing ballot images or claims of duplicate ballots, evidence only of regrettable, yet routine, human error, not some nefarious plot to deny Trump the election. Beyond the fact that there were multiple audits and investigations, all of which determined that any errors did not affect the accuracy of the election results, there’s also the whole thing where Fulton County’s 2020 ballots were counted, then recounted, then recounted again, with the same results.
Fun fact: the brain geniuses in Kash Patel’s shop did not reach out to Georgia state investigators to get copies or any information about those past investigations, because they wouldn’t want any facts to get in the way of their conspiracy theories.
Next, election deniers provided much of the “evidence” for the debunked claims in the affidavit. In a normal world, the FBI wouldn’t lean on weirdo conspiracy theorists as support for an unprecedented search warrant that is breathtaking in scope, but we no longer live in a normal world. Instead, what we have is an affidavit explaining that the criminal investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, the “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.”
Who is Kurt Olsen, you might ask? He’s a Stop the Steal lawyer who was in close contact with Trump on January 6. He served as a special counsel for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton when Paxton filed his unhinged lawsuit trying to invalidate election results in four states Trump lost. And, just so you understand Olsen is a well-rounded election denier, not just a garden variety Trump 2020 election denier, he was sanctioned and fined for repeating “unequivocally false” election claims in court when representing Kari Lake in her failed bid for Arizona governor in 2022. In a normal world, Olsen would be unemployable after his democracy-destroying antics, but instead he is a high-level government employee who has unfettered access to sensitive intelligence data in his quest to prove Trump won in 2020. Great.
[
The Federalist Society's mugshots
[Lisa Needham](https://substack.com/profile/10292-lisa-needham)
·
August 28, 2023
[Read full story](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/jeffrey-clark-eastman-charges-federalist-society)](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/jeffrey-clark-eastman-charges-federalist-society)
Finally — and this is a biggie — the affidavit does not actually allege a crime took place. Yes, it mentions criminal statutes that allegedly apply, but that’s not the same thing. Instead, it says that “if these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law” and “if these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, the election records” seized are evidence of violations of Title 52 U.S.C. §§ 20511 and 20701.
Section 20511(2), quoted in the affidavit, makes it a felony to “knowingly and willingly” deprive a state’s residents of a fair and impartial election by procuring, casting, or tabulating ballots “that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.”
Section 20701 makes it a misdemeanor if someone “willfully fails” to comply with the requirement to preserve election records for 22 months following an election.
You’ll see that both of these statutes require an intentional, knowing act. Inadvertent errors don’t count as violations of the law. Even carelessness wouldn’t count. Put another way, an intentional act is a required element of both crimes.
Search warrants require a showing of probable cause that a crime has been committed, but there are no allegations in the affidavit that any specific person did anything intentionally. The government isn’t required, when seeking a warrant, to prove there was an intentional act, but it is required to provide sufficient allegations to show there is probable cause to believe it was intentional.
Oh wait, there’s a fourth problem with the affidavit, which is that the statute of limitations for the alleged crimes has already expired, and there is nothing in the affidavit that would explain why that is not the case.
Besides having the most irregular, BS affidavit to justify this search, there’s the genuinely illegal presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The agencies Gabbard oversees are restricted from conducting intelligence activities within the United States. Having your spy chief show up for a domestic law enforcement matter — particularly when the affidavit supporting the search did not allege any foreign interference in elections — is not great. Having your spy chief facilitate a call between the president and the FBI agents performing the search so he could praise them for their work? Also not great. But hey, at least the whole thing allowed Gabbard to get back into Trump’s good graces, which is clearly all she cares about.
If seizing Fulton County’s election records was the only thing the administration did, that would be bad enough, particularly because the seizure of the records was incredibly sloppy. Agents did not provide an inventory of what they took, forcing local officials to just ballpark how many boxes were seized. Additionally, removing ballots from the election center and opening any sealed materials breaks the chain of custody.
For this administration, though, these are features, not bugs.
“We have states that I won that show I didn’t win
The administration wants to undermine confidence in elections. More specifically, the administration wants to undermine confidence in the ability of states to conduct elections so that Trump can demand we “nationalize” the vote.
It isn’t really clear what the scope of “nationalizing” the vote means, but Trump let everyone know that at the very least, it should include allowing Republican officials to “take over” voting: “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt later tried to clean up these remarks, saying that what Trump was really talking about was the SAVE Act, the voter suppression measure currently hurtling through Congress, having passed the House on Wednesday.
But even the New York Times couldn’t carry water for Trump on this one, noting that Trump never actually referenced the SAVE Act and that SAVE doesn’t federalize elections.
Well, not technically. But SAVE is an attempt to impose Trump’s will nationwide, undercutting the independence of states to set their own election rules. Also, SAVE is terrible on its face. It mandates that voters provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. No, your driver’s license isn’t proof. Not even your REAL ID. Passports or birth certificates are pretty much it. And if you happen to have changed your name when you got married, which may include as many as 69 million women, your birth certificate won’t suffice.
[
Trump's talk of canceling elections is a sign of desperation
[Noah Berlatsky](https://substack.com/profile/2185926-noah-berlatsky)
·
Jan 20
[Read full story](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-canceling-elections)](https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-canceling-elections)
States would also be required to conduct monthly purges of voter rolls by checking against the Department of Homeland Security’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. Sure, that’s not a database remotely related to voting and sure, creating a centralized database actually makes elections more, not less, vulnerable to attack, and sure, states that have already decided to voluntarily check their rolls against the SAVE database have ended up disenfranchising citizens. But all of this is a small price to pay to combat a nonexistent problem.
Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and occurs in such minuscule amounts that it cannot possibly affect election outcomes. The Brookings Institution reviewed the voter fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a staunch proponent of the voter fraud myth. For example, in Arizona, Heritage found 36 cases of fraud across 25 years, out of over 42 million ballots cast. That’s a whopping .0000845%.
Voting by noncitizens is also very rare, but red states nonetheless keep trying to remove alleged noncitizens from their voting rolls en masse, only to learn that whoops, they are actually removing citizens.
The SAVE Act is not expected to pass the Senate, but in some ways, it doesn’t really need to. It has already served the same purpose as the Fulton County raid: undermining confidence in elections by amplifying baseless suspicions and lies about fraud.
Finally, there is the administration’s demand that all states hand over their complete voter rolls. Federal courts in Michigan, Oregon, and California have dismissed lawsuits filed by the DOJ against states that did not agree to break their own laws by willy-nilly handing over unredacted voter data, but at least 10 states have voluntarily turned theirs over. Thus far, Texas and Alaska have also signed an agreement that lets the DOJ analyze their voter rolls and order them to remove anyone the DOJ decides should be removed within 45 days.
It’s a backdoor way of giving the executive branch power over elections, despite the fact that the Constitution leaves elections to the states, with only Congress retaining the power to alter regulations. Let’s be frank: it’s also a way for the administration to hoover up ever more data in its quest to create a nationwide surveillance database it can use to target immigrants and those willing to protest on their behalf.
The Internal Revenue Service has already improperly shared confidential taxpayer data for thousands of immigrants with DHS. The Department of Government Efficiency already shared social security data on an insecure third-party server, with one DOGE employee stationed within the Social Security Administration signing an agreement with an unidentified group to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states.”
Nothing that is being done here is at all about ensuring elections are free of fraud, because they already are. State officials know how to run elections and they know how to ensure that only eligible voters get to cast ballots. Trump lost the 2020 election, and it wasn’t because of immigrants or voting machines or Hugo Chavez or Democrats, but since he will never let it go, we’re all stuck here too.
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RWW
11/13/2025
by
- Michael S. Schmidt @ The New York Times: In Matt Gaetz Scandal, Circumstances Left Teen Vulnerable to Exploitation
A 17-year-old with a homeless parent wanted money for braces and ended up having sex for money with powerful men. She wants the public to have a fuller understanding of how she was victimized.
- Brandy Zadrozny @ MSNBC: The conspiracy crowd’s reaction to the Epstein emails? Yawn.
Far-right conspiracy theorists and influencers are a big reason the Epstein scandal hasn’t died. But the newly released emails about Trump haven’t impressed them.
- Jeremy Kohler @ ProPublica: How Trump Has Exploited Pardons and Clemency to Reward Allies and Supporters
In his second term, President Donald Trump has largely used his clemency power to benefit allies, donors and culture-war figures — including Jan. 6 defendants.
- Hunter Walker @ Talking Points Memo: JD Vance Received a Dire Warning About the Groyper Takeover of the GOP From a Strange Source
The call warning of a dangerous tide of extremism in Donald Trump’s Washington is coming from inside the house — the vice president’s house.
- Tommy Christopher @ Mediaite: Megyn Kelly Spends 2 Solid Minutes On How Maybe Jeffrey Epstein Was Actually ‘Not A Pedophile’
YouTube and Sirius XM host Megyn Kelly took a detour to riff about how deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein might not have been “an actual pedophile.”
- Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson @ Public Notice: “It’s 4chan s**t": The govt's deranged social media presence
"You see Trump administration accounts that look like they’re literally run by Groypers," Charlie Warzel tells us.
- Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: Kash Patel’s Girlfriend Is Driving MAGA Nuts
She’s litigious. They’re sexist. It’s a miasma of loathing.
- David Gilbert @ Wired: Stewart Rhodes Relaunched the Oath Keepers. Even Old Oath Keepers Don’t Care
Militia leader Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted for his role in the January 6 attack, is asking potential new members and supporters to send money. Former allies are unconvinced.
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Trump repost on Truth Social: “There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. >#Democrats dont know the difference.”
===
ymail 12 24
Trump’s reelection has prompted many to wonder, How did we get here again? One under-discussed factor is the role identity politics played in his campaign.
This might sound counterintuitive. Pundits, after all, have attributed Kamala Harris’s loss to identity politics, accusing her campaign of being too “woke” — a term that refers to any position intended to specifically benefit marginalized people.
In reality, Harris went to painstaking lengths to avoid campaigning on identity issues, including downplaying the significance of her possibly becoming the first woman president. Trump, by contrast, ran a campaign that associated Harris with the outgroups his supporters are united in despising — among them migrants, trans people, and anyone who spends time thinking about their pronouns.
Trump kept his coalition together by stoking shared grievances. In this way, his presidential bid represented a type of inverted identity politics. He didn’t campaign on making life better for certain identity groups. He campaigned by mobilizing people against ones they loathe and fear.
Throughout his campaign, Trump proposed three core sets of policies that are steeped in this form of identity politics: mass deportation, law and order, and policing gender identity.
Kamala Harris’s hidden barrier](
https://substack.com/redirect/2a608ff8-144a-418c-ba22-db1929f67782?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw)
First, Trump championed stricter immigration policies, including mass deportations and completing a wall along the US-Mexico border, framing them as essential for keeping America safe and protecting jobs. These policies appealed directly to voters, both white and non-white, who view immigration as a threat to their economic and cultural status — recall Trump regularly talking about migrants purportedly “taking Black jobs.” This relentless fear-mongering was not just about security or economic concerns, but also about the reality of changing demographics.
Generation Z is the last majority-white generation in US history, with Latinos and Hispanic people steadily increasing their representation over time. The right has weaponized this shift to stoke fears among voters who believe immigration jeopardizes their standing. These appeals were mainly aimed at white voters, but they were also successful with people of color to the extent that Trump won Latino men.
Second, Trump emphasized “law and order,” frequently calling for the reinstatement of “stop and frisk” policies and advocating for police immunity, particularly in response to protests against police brutality and incidents of “migrant crime” he sensationalized at every opportunity. These appeals were aimed at voters who view racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter as destabilizing and/or are fearful of Black and brown people. Once again, the goal was to generate hysteria around a perceived threat to an existing social order.
Finally, Trump's campaign focused on gender identity with crude transphobia and by portraying Harris as a radical advocate for trans causes, even as she avoided talking about them on the campaign trail. Notably, Trump blanketed the airwaves with TV ads claiming "Kamala Harris is for they/them. I am for you." He regularly mocked transgender athletes at his rallies and vowed to "get transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports." Harris may have tried to avoid engaging on this issue, but Trump forced it upon her and made it seem as though she was the one playing identity politics.
The reality is that none of this was about actually improving life circumstances for Trump’s identity coalition, or anyone else for that matter. Mass deportations, for example, will disrupt key sectors like agriculture and construction where immigrants make up a significant portion of the workforce. These disruptions could increase the cost of food and housing, both of which were among the reasons Trump won in the first place.
A government by toxic men, for toxic men
Evidence also shows that Trump’s proposed “law and order” policies are ineffective. Stop-and-frisk policies do not reduce crime or make communities safer (neither does police immunity). Trump’s attempts to campaign as a crime-fighter were absurd for many reasons, not the least of which is that crime has actually fallen since he left office in January 2021.
Along similar lines, Trump’s talking points about the country being in the throes of an occupation by violent migrants are a dystopian fantasy. From 1850 to 2020, immigrants actually had similar orlower incarceration rates than white men born in the US. In places like Texas, where the border is a major issue, both documented and undocumented immigrants have lower rates of offenses compared to US-born individuals.
Lastly, in an era of evolving gender identity and expression, it’s important to note that despite the uproar about trans people, they make up only about one percent of the American population. Anecdotal evidence from Minnesota shows that efforts to introduce gender-neutral bathrooms have actually made students feel safer.
The panic around trans people ignores the facts. Trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime and are at greater risk of experiencing sexual assault and suicidal ideation. Everything anti-trans advocates fear might happen to them and their communities is already happening — at alarming rates — to trans people. That’s why not protecting trans people opens up the floodgates for harm to be done to anyone else in the name of “safety,” including women the right does not deem sufficiently “feminine.”
Trump spoke to his coalition’s fears, not their realities. He successfully masked policies that will harm his voters with a negative brand of identity politics. He won’t solve actual problems, but he will validate grievances.
As Trump rolls out his nightmarish cabinet nominees and resumes his chaos machine method of governing, his rhetoric continues to define "American" identity in the narrowest way possible. His vow to carry out mass deportations now comes with “no price tag” and his incoming border czar is talking about arresting Democratic officials who refuse to comply. His attacks on trans people have emboldened Republicans to call for the abolition of marriage equality and to make bigoted attacks on the first transgender person to be elected to Congress.
The MAGA playbook will remain the same: dividing, conquering, and pitting one group against another. It’s a terrible way to run the country, but as Trump just demonstrated, it’s still an effective way to win elections.
msg
COMM DR 10 24
From start to finish, Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was a torrent of bigotry and fascistic rhetoric, with the former president and a bizarre lineup of preceding speakers trashing Puerto Ricans and Palestinians, condemning the press, and casting their political opponents as a satanic "enemy from within."
SHE IS THE DEVIL ANTICHRIST A RUPAR
The New York City event, held on the second to last Sunday before the November 5 election, amounted to a closing pitch for a candidate who has pledged to wield the power of the federal government—including the U.S. military—against those he views as obstacles to his ascent to power and his political project, which includes a large-scale deportation campaign, massive deregulation for industry, and another round of tax cuts for the wealthy.
"When I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy," Trump said Sunday, characterizing Democratic nominee Kamala ^Harris and other party leaders as mere "vessels" for the "radical left machine," which the former president called "massive, vicious, [and] crooked."
"It's just this amorphous group of people. But they're smart and they're vicious. And we have to defeat them," said the Republican nominee, who falsely claimed the U.S. is an "occupied country" facing a "migrant invasion" that only he can stop.
While the rally featured familiar bloviating from Trump about crowd sizes and other petty obsessions—as well as absurd speakers such as Hulk Hogan and Dr. Phil—historians and other observers were horrified by what they described as the authoritarian ambitions that were front and center and shamelessly expressed Sunday night.
"The point here is that fascism is on full display, openly: no dog whistles, no plausible deniability," said Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University whose work has focused on the white supremacist movement in the United States.
"It's a show of power and another attempt to make this look and feel normal," Belew added. "And it will not just magically disappear after the election, regardless of the outcome. In fact, it might be worth thinking through the very likely possibility that this kind of display suggests that this candidate and this movement don't care that much about the outcome."
One journalist called Trump's event "the most overtly fascist mass rally in New York since 1939"—referring to a pro-Nazi rally held that year at Madison Square Garden—and criticized media coverage of the former president's remarks, pointing to a now-changed USA Today headline as a particularly stark example.
House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) appearance at the rally made clear that Trump and the leadership of the Republican Party are in sync as the GOP pursues full control of Congress on November 5 and lays the groundwork to enact the former president's agenda.
"We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected, because we can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we're going to do really well with the House. Right?" Trump said late Sunday, pointing to someone in the audience—possibly Johnson.
"He and I have a secret," Trump added, in remarks carried live by all three major cable news networks. "We'll tell you what it is when the race is over."
Other speakers at the rally included far-right pundit Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and billionaire Elon Musk, who has funneled roughly $118 million into the 2024 campaign in support of Trump.
"I'm not just MAGA," Musk said, pointing to his black hat. "I'm dark, gothic MAGA."
MSG fail 10 24 no pix twt
Popular, famous, and highly-influential Latino stars, and superstars including Bad Bunny, Luis Fonsi, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin, are lashing out at Donald Trump after his six-hour Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday served up racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic rhetoric. A New York Times headline described it as "Trump's racist rally."....
===
I picked a hell of a night to log off.
We were planning to run an RNC table-setter today — it’ll instead run tomorrow as a special edition — but as the weekend unfolded, I of course felt compelled to devote this edition of the newsletter to the shooting Saturday during the opening minutes of Trump’s speech in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left him lightly injured, one of his supporters dead, and two other audience members critically injured.
Instead of delving deeply into the politics surrounding the shooting or what it might mean for the presidential campaign (hint: nobody really knows), I think it’s worth taking a step back and unspooling some big picture thoughts before I give you a chance to weigh in too.
First, some quick personal backstory. As longtime readers are aware, I’ve watched just about every Trump rally over the past eight years, so of course I cleared my Saturday afternoon to watch some of his speech in Pennsylvania before heading to an Earth, Wind & Fire and Chicago concert with my mom. But Trump ended up running more than an hour late, so I ultimately made the call to skip the rally and go get dinner ahead of the show.
Surreal to read in hindsight. (Source: twitter)
We were about 10 minutes down the road when my phone started buzzing nonstop with the stunning news that shots had been fired at the rally. I caught a few minutes of the audio of CNN’s coverage before we arrived at the restaurant. It became clear pretty quickly that Trump wasn’t seriously injured, and I spent the rest of the night doing my best to enjoy the concert. My only contribution to the online discourse was to advise people to wait for facts before leaping to wild conclusions.
As I write this Sunday evening, there’s still a lot we don’t know, including the shooter’s motive. We will also need to have serious discussions about the AR-style rifle he used and how he obtained it (reportedly from his dad), security failures, and the completely irresponsible, incendiary rhetoric Republicans like Rep. Mike Collins spewed in the immediate aftermath of the violence.
But there are a few things we already know to be true. So here goes.
There’s no excusing or justifying political violence
First and foremost, it’s worth emphasizing that political violence of the sort that happened Saturday in Pennsylvania is beyond the pale in democratic societies like ours. It is never excusable or justifiable as a means to an end.
The very reason we fight against authoritarianism is so that our disagreements can continue to be resolved at the ballot box, not with guns and bombs. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I view Trump as an existential threat to democracy, and you can argue that after January 6, our courts and institutions should’ve acted more vigorously to hold him accountable and prevent him from being in a position to return to power. But the bottom line is that it’s now up to voters to reject his bleak vision for the country with votes, not violence.
Thankfully, Trump’s coup attempt following his loss in the 2020 election failed. This is still a country where, by and large, we’re able to elect our representatives and the rule of law applies. In that context political violence is wrong. Full stop.
Nobody has done more to stoke political violence than Trump
But you can condemn Trump’s shooting while also acknowledging the ugly fact that nobody has done more to worsen the climate of political violence in this country than him.
From encouraging his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies, to invoking the possibility of “Second Amendment people” attacking Hillary Clinton, to glorifying police brutality, to inciting an insurrection, to suggesting military leaders he doesn’t like should be executed, to mocking Paul Pelosi after he was assaulted by one of his supporters — glorifying violence and threatening his enemies with it has been a weapon Trump has wielded over and over again throughout his political career.
This is the reason the calls by Trump supporters to turn down the rhetorical temperature in the wake of Saturday’s shooting ring so hollow. It’s as absurd as asking a Republican to run on a platform of increasing taxes on the rich. Spewing invective on his enemies until they fear for their safety is part of Trump’s brand and always will be.
Speaking the truth about Trump is not incitement
Before we knew much of anything about Trump’s shooting — such as the fact the shooter reportedly was a registered Republican — Republicans wasted no time trying to blame Democrats for it.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this came courtesy of US senator and vice presidential hopeful JD Vance, who posted a tweet suggesting Biden’s critiques of Trump are to blame.
Source: twitter
Here’s the thing though: Trump is an authoritarian who wants to destroy democracy. This isn’t a smear, it’s a fact. January 6 was the culmination of a scheme to steal power Trump set in motion nearly a year prior, and to this day he talks about the MAGA rioters who stormed the Capitol and beat police officers as “hostages” rather than criminals. The fact Trump got shot doesn’t change any of that, nor does it absolve him of his past misdeeds.
It’s quite clear that Republicans are hoping to exploit Trump’s shooting as a way to chill legitimate criticism of their leader. Another much-discussed example of this came courtesy of CNN commentator Scott Jennings.
Source: twitter
But every single sentence of Biden’s tweet is correct. Trump is a threat to the nation, our freedom, and democracy. Again, none of that justifies violence — it underscores the importance of beating him at the ballot box this November so he doesn’t have the opportunity to wield it against his enemies from the comfort of the White House.
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Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape proving otherwise. | Vox
no lnx
Trump says “Russia, if you’re listening” was a joke. There’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is layering lie upon lie to rewrite the history of his encouragement of Russian hackers.
by Aaron Rupar
Sep 29, 2020,
Trump accused reporters this weekend of mischaracterizing comments he made in July 2016 publicly encouraging Russian hackers to attack Hillary Clinton. But the way he described those comments is completely at odds with reality, and there’s video to prove it.
“Do you remember when I said, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, find her emails,’ or whatever the hell I said? ‘Find her emails,’ and then we all laughed together, 25,000 people in a stadium,” Trump said at a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. “They cut it off exactly before we all started to laugh together, right? And for two years they’ve been saying, ‘He dealt with Russia. He asked Russia to please get her emails,’ or whatever the hell we were asking ... the whole place cracks up with me ... this is how dishonest these people are.”
This is no doubt part of his never-ending effort to discredit the media.
Watch:
Trump made the remarks in question during his first campaign, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
But Trump did not say this to a cheering and laughing crowd at one of his rallies. He actually said it in front of a handful of reporters during a news conference at his Doral property in Florida. That news conference wound up being his final one before the election, in large part because of the negative stir his remarks generated.
Furthermore, nobody laughed when Trump said it, and his comments are just as bad in context as they are when the “Russia, if you’re listening” line is considered on its own. Here’s the footage:
Jim Acosta of CNN, the reporter who asked the question that prompted Trump to say “Russia, if you’re listening” at the July 2016 news conference, tweeted on Tuesday morning that “the reporters at the news conference didn’t laugh. And Trump didn’t appear to be joking.”
The president seems to be trying to turn reality on its head, even though there’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is spitting on his supporters and telling them it’s raining
Retconning the incident has become a staple of Trump’s campaign speeches. On September 19 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for instance, Trump brought it up and claimed “everybody laughed” and “it was a joke,” then added the lie about it happening at a rally for the first time over the weekend.
Even if Trump didn’t mean for his comments to be taken seriously, Russian hackers apparently did. According to Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officials, on the same day Trump made those comments, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provided and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.”
Trump has made clear in the years since that he doesn’t think foreign interference in American elections is a bad thing, insofar as it helps him. In October 2019, Trump flatly told reporters that he thought the Chinese and Ukrainian governments “should investigate the Bidens.” Those comments were widely condemned but were defended as just a joke by Republican members of Congress like Kevin McCarthy and Roy Blunt, even though footage of the comment showed Trump was serious.
Trump’s comments about the July 2016 news conference were especially shameless, but they were far from the only brazen lie he pushed in Middletown. He told his supporters that just prior to the coronavirus hitting the US, “we were coming together ... I was getting calls from stone-cold, hard-line Democrats,” even though in reality he had just been through an impeachment trial. He claimed 35,000 people attended his Friday evening rally in Newport News, Virginia, but local reports indicate there were around 4,000. And he appeared to fabricate stats about excess mortality in order to mislead people about how hard the US has been hit by Covid-19.
Trump once advised his supporters in 2018 to “just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He’s not subtle about it.
See More:
2020 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Politics
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