pressler scott
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RWW 10 26
- Brendan Hartnett @ The Bulwark: Top GOP Operative Let Out-of-State Voters Vote From His PA Home
Legal experts say Scott Presler’s houseguests could run afoul of election law.
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MMA
Trump’s shambolic policy-making by Fox segment hits the airports
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 03/23/26
President Donald Trump threw his administration into chaos on Saturday by demanding the stationing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at U.S. airports in response to long lines triggered by the expiration of funding for the Transportation Security Administration.
Top administration officials offered disparate explanations for what those ICE agents would be doing — explanations which also seemingly diverted from Trump’s own vision — as they scrambled to turn the president’s social media posts into some sort of coherent policy.
Meanwhile, ICE and Department of Homeland Security sources are grumbling to the press that the deployment will reduce their ability to focus on the president's deportation agenda.
The president-mandated mayhem appears to stem from Trump’s habit of governing based on policy ideas he gets from his television, particularly the MAGA talking heads at Fox News. This Fox-Trump feedback loop has at various times driven everything from administration staffing to legislative and communications strategy to presidential pardons and federal contracts.
Both the problem — long airport lines caused by Trump’s opposition to funding TSA — and his response — stationing ICE agents at the airports — seem to have their origins in Fox segments he had been watching.
A government shutdown is hitting TSA and it’s Trump’s fault (with a Fox assist)
A partial government shutdown which impacts DHS is causing major disruptions at some U.S. airports, including long security lines. And while that shutdown originated with Democratic opposition to the Trump administration’s lawless immigration enforcement, it continues because of the president’s Fox-fueled demand that future appropriations come stapled to his unrelated legislative priorities.
Senate Democrats have refused to support appropriations for ICE or Customs and Border Protection absent reforms to their operations in light of the rampages by those agencies, while Senate Republicans have to date blocked Democratic attempts to separately fund TSA and other DHS agencies. And Trump is reportedly standing in the way of a deal pitched to him by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) in which “Senate Republicans would support funding all of DHS except ICE,” funding for which would be handled separately on a partisan basis via reconciliation.
What explains Trump’s intransigence, which has become the primary cause of the airport lines? He is using the TSA funding as leverage as he tries to ram through the SAVE America Act, legislation otherwise stymied in the Senate that would rewrite the nation’s election laws. And he is doing so in response to something he saw on Fox.
On March 8, the president declared on Truth Social that he had been so moved by MAGA activist Scott Presler’s comments about the SAVE Act on Fox & Friends that morning that he would sign no other legislation until it was passed.
“It must be done immediately,” he posted. “It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION - GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY - ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL: NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN!”
The implications of this pledge for TSA funding seem to have largely gone unnoticed. But on Sunday night, Trump explicitly tied the two together.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” Trump posted to Truth Social, claiming, “It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate.”
After denouncing what he portrayed as the Democratic position on DHS funding and rattling off a list of the SAVE Act’s provisions, he urged Senate Republicans to combine the two, writing: “Lump everything together as one, and VOTE!!! Kill the Filibuster, and stay in D.C. for Easter, if necessary.”
Right-wing radio caller -> Fox segment -> presidential post -> policy
ICE agents are currently patrolling some U.S. airports after a right-wing radio caller proposed the idea, the show’s host took it to Fox, and the president adopted the policy in a social media post, as Semafor’s Ben Smith first detailed in a Sunday report.
“Linda from Arizona” called into The Clay and Buck Show on Friday afternoon proposing to “bring in ICE agents” as “a solution to the TSA problem.” Clay Travis, the show’s co-host, liked the idea so much that he brought it up that night during a hit on Fox’s Jesse Watters Primetime.
“I had a caller on the show, The Clay and Buck Show, today, Charlie, had an interesting idea,” Travis told guest host Charlie Hurt. “What if President Trump announced that ICE agents were now going to be supplementing TSA agents inside of all of the airports? The ICE agents are still being paid. How quickly would Democrats panic if he said hey, we're going to put some ICE agents in line with the TSA, help to expedite everybody?”
“And oh, by the way, if we think you might be an illegal when you're coming through to try to get on an airplane, we're going to go ahead and arrest you at the airport, too,” he added. “I think that might solve things in a hurry. It was a great caller suggestion. But it also goes to let's let people actually do something normal, go through security and get on airplanes — Democrat, Republican and independent, I think it connects with everybody.”
“Yes, it absolutely does,” Hurt replied.
:{Video
Citation
From the March 20, 2026, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime
Hurt and Travis weren’t the only ones enamored with “Linda from Arizona’s” idea — the next morning, the president adopted the proposal. In a Saturday morning Truth Social post, Trump stressed — just as Travis had — that the ICE agents would be used both for security and for arresting undocumented immigrants.
“If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before,” he posted, “including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia, who have totally destroyed, with the approval of a corrupt Governor, Attorney General, and Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, the once Great State of Minnesota.”
Trump made clear that the plan was moving forward in another post two hours later, writing, “I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!”
“The White House hasn’t commented on whether Trump did, in fact, hear the TV segment and act accordingly,” CNN’s Brian Stelter noted Monday. “But Trump has a decade-long track record of watching Fox and posting his reactions on social media.”
In another sign that the policy process driving this policy is the Fox-Trump feedback loop, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's “first post Saturday came as a surprise to officials inside ICE and at DHS, who have spent the weekend trying to figure out how it could work, according to three people familiar with the matter.”
Indeed, in Sunday interviews, two top Trump officials one would expect to be involved in executing the policy offered starkly different explanations for what ICE agents would be doing at the airports.
White House “border czar” Tom Homan, who Trump posted Sunday morning is “in charge” of the ICE deployment, stressed that the agents would be assigned to tasks like guarding airport exits, which he said would free up the TSA officers doing that work to do screening to reduce lines.
“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because they’re not trained in that, but there are certain parts of security that TSA is doing that we can move them off those jobs and put them in the specialized jobs and help move those lines,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.
But the same morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy suggested that the ICE agents would be screening passengers alongside TSA officers.
“TSA agents are law enforcement,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “They know how to pat people down, they know how to run the X-ray machines because they are, again, under Homeland Security with TSA. So if we can bring in other assets and tools to assist TSA to get rid of these lines, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.”
Notably, both Homan and Duffy are in their administration roles at least in part due to their Fox ties. Homan, who has gone through the revolving door from the first Trump administration to a stint as a Fox contributor and then back to the second Trump administration, has taken on a larger role overseeing ICE operations after a Fox & Friends co-host suggested increasing his responsibilities. Duffy, meanwhile, is a former Fox contributor and host (he is also married to a current Fox & Friends Weekend co-host, who worked in that role alongside the nation’s current defense secretary).
Homan and Duffy both seem to be trying to salvage some sort of workable plan from the president’s Fox-stoked half-idea. Notably, neither pitched what Travis initially floated and Trump actually asked for in his initial post — ICE agents specifically tasked with arresting undocumented immigrants en masse. And that’s what the president still says is going to happen.
A reporter asked Trump at a Monday morning gaggle, “Will we see ICE arresting illegal migrants at airports?”
“Yeah,” he responded. “That's why the Democrats are going crazy.”
The president added that ICE agents “love it because they're able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. That's very fertile territory.”
That’s not what the Journal is hearing. “Officials at ICE and DHS expressed frustration with the plan, saying it will distract from Trump’s core goal of deporting as many people in the country illegally as possible,” the paper reported.
It’s no wonder they are concerned. Either the ICE agents have been moved away from positions supporting the president’s mass deportation effort and are not going to be arresting immigrants at the airports, or they are going to be carrying out their brutal arrest operations in front of airport crowds and end up further damaging the agency’s reputation. The president has put ICE in a no-win situation, all to support a policy of holding TSA funding for ransom to secure unrelated legislation.
That’s what happens when you govern via Fox segment.
//
11/19/24 7:30 AM EST
11/13/24 11:34 AM EST
01/26/26
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reuters
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Screen capture of Jimmy Kimmel after returning to television on September 23, 2025
‘MASSIVE PURGE OF THESE EVIL PSYCHOS’
The campaign to punish Kirk’s critics began almost immediately.
About 30 minutes after Trump’s announcement that Kirk had died, right-wing influencers mobilized. Among the first was Chaya Raichik, operator of the widely followed Libs of TikTok account, which had posted on X, “THIS IS WAR,” before highlighting a Massachusetts teacher who had written: “Just a reminder, We’re NOT offering sympathy.”
By night’s end, Libs of TikTok had published or reposted the professional details of 37 individuals, often accompanied by commentary such as “absolutely vile,” “Your tax dollars pay her salary,” or “Would you want him teaching your kids?”
“It’s actually terrifying how many of them are teachers, doctors and military members,” Libs of TikTok wrote the next day. “We need a massive purge of these evil psychos who want to kiII all of us for simply having opposing political views.”
In the week after the shooting, Libs of TikTok shared the names and profiles of at least 134 people accused of celebrating violence or mocking Kirk’s memory, frequently tagging Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi. At times, the influencer posted disciplinary actions taken against specific government employees.
Screenshot of the Libs of TikTok X account on September 10, 2025
“BREAKING: This marine was fired,” Libs of TikTok posted on September 12, a day after calling out a Marine Corps captain. The officer had responded to Kirk’s death by posting an emoji of clinking beer mugs, according to a screenshot the influencer shared with followers. Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the beer-mug post; the captain declined to comment. Libs of TikTok also reported similar disciplinary actions involving an Army Reserve officer and an Army colonel who had commented on the death on social media.
The Pentagon and the Justice Department issued statements condemning celebrations of Kirk’s death but did not address questions about their relationship with Libs of TikTok.
Right-wing influencer Scott Presler began posting screenshots of Kirk commentary, too.
“Take a screenshot of EVERY single person celebrating today,” he told his followers on September 10. “You bet your behind we will make them infamous.” Over the next week, Presler shared posts on X about 70 people who had commented on the killing, and wrote in one message: “Almost every person we’ve posted about – who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination – has been fired.” Presler didn’t respond to requests for comment.
For many on the right, outraged by celebratory reactions from the left, the wave of firings became a form of catharsis.
“It’s good that they are shamed and humiliated and must live with the repercussions for the rest of their lives,” right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh told his audience as he discussed the firings. “It’s good if they wake up every day until they die wishing they had not said what they said.” Asked for comment, Walsh emailed back: “f**k off.”
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rww June 17, 2024
- Stephanie Mencimer @ Mother Jones: MAGA Youth Activist Charlie Kirk’s Big Conservative Shindig Is Full of Old Folks
Judging from the first two days of the event, it would be hard to call this a youth movement. Saturday morning, I attended a breakout session headlined by voter registration activist Scott Presler. There were about 50 or 60 people in the room, virtually all well over 40. When Presler opened the floor for a Q&A, the first questioner said he was 77 years old.
- Tricia Crimmins @ The Daily Dot: ‘Who says romance is dead?’: Right-wing influencers launch campaign to ‘outbreed the left’
Far-right figures Chaya Raichik and Charlie Kirk both said they plan to “outbreed the left” this week by having more children than liberals and raising them to have right-wing views.
- Amanda Marcotte @ Salon: A tradwife drops a racist slur: Why the right’s trolling economy made Lilly Gaddis’ rise inevitable
Cashing in as a “cancel culture” martyr is getting harder, so attention addicts have to get more extreme.
- Kathleen Culliton and David Edwards @ Raw Story: ‘It’s God’s plan’: Mike Lindell intends to ‘deputize’ Trump voters for Election Day
MyPillow CEO and election-denier Mike Lindell told conservatives this weekend he was going to deputize them as part of “God’s plan” for former President Donald Trump’s Election Day victory.
- Eric Hananoki @ Media Matters: Trump-backed House candidate Mark Burns: A wife should be “submissive” and “obey”
Burns made the remarks on a show hosted by Jesse Lee Peterson, who has repeatedly said allowing women to vote was a mistake.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/gab/daniel-kelly-surrogate-scott-presler-using-antisemitic-platform-gab-recruit-support-wisconsin
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https://www.mediamatters.org/local-news/wisconsin-media-should-ask-daniel-kelly-why-hes-campaigning-qanon-conspiracy-theorist
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mma 1 23
Republican groups in Pennsylvania are set to hold training workshops with right-wing social media influencer Scott Presler in the coming weeks. Presler is a January 6 insurrectionist who helped organize “Stop the Steal” events around the 2020 election, frequently promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, and worked with a leading anti-Muslim group.
Presler helped organize election-denying rallies following then-President Donald Trump’s loss. During one protest outside the Pennsylvania capitol, for instance, he led people in yelling for politicians to “stop the steal” and “audit the vote.”
He also went on right-wing media to encourage viewers to protest the vote. While speaking on
, for instance, he told viewers that they needed to rally against the “stolen election,” stating: “This is your legacy. This is your defining moment in history. … And so tomorrow's Saturday. Show up at your state capitol, no matter what state that you are living in, and make your voices heard. Don't regret it.”
On January 6, 2021, he went to Washington, D.C., and was outside the Capitol for what he (absurdly) claimed was “the largest civil rights protest in American history." [vid twt]
media Matters previously documented that Presler promoted QAnon in dozens of instances on his Instagram account. Presler has also worked for the anti-Muslim group Act for America, which, The Associated Press wrote, “is identified by the Anti-Defamation League as the largest anti-Muslim group in America. The group spreads conspiracy theories about Muslims and ‘stokes irrational fears’ of them, ADL says.The Southern Poverty Law Center also labels Act for America as an ‘extremist hate group.’”
Right-wing media figures have frequently and falsely alleged that the 2020 election was stolen, including in Pennsylvania. During the 2022 election, Pennsylvania Republicans nominated January 6 insurrectionist Doug Mastriano as their gubernatorial nominee. Mastriano ran a far-right campaign that, among other things, focused on election denialism. He lost by roughly 15 percentage points in the battleground state.
Yet Republicans in Pennsylvania are scheduled to work with Presler in the next several weeks:
- The Media Borough Republican Committee is scheduled to host Presler on February 4 for a “voter registration/mail-in ballot training.”
- The Mayor of Slippery Rock, PA, Jondavid Longo, is slated to host Presler on February 6 for a “Republican workshop,” described on a promotional poster as “a class on ballot harvesting, voter registration, and canvassing in Pennsylvania.” Presler joined Longo and the Butler County Republican Committee for an event in 2020.
- The Republican Committee of Allegheny County is scheduled on February 8 to host Presler for “a Republican Workshop” on “canvassing, candidate recruitment, voter registration, and mail-in ballots.”
Additionally, a regional captain for the Franklin County, PA, GOP, Deb Howard, posted on Facebook that Presler is “joining us in Franklin County” on February 9. Presler responded with an event link describing the training as including “voter registration, how to get out the vote, as well as ballot harvesting techniques.”
Media Matters has documented other instances of Republican groups across the country teaming up with Presler. Additionally, just this month, Presler returned to Louisiana and said that he “conducted 2 volunteer trainings” and “registered voters.” He also met with Louisiana GOP Chair Louis Gurvich, Louisiana RNC Committeewoman Lenar Whitney, and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (who is running for governor this year). The Republican Party of Louisiana thanked him for coming, with Presler replying: “Thank you so much for having m
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