Random Stories. Or Are They?
Trump is calling in the election-denier faithful to meet with him in advance of the midterm elections. We know this in part because people like Ed Martin have said so. He announced that Tina Peters, the Colorado elections clerk who went to prison for election crimes and was recently pardoned, met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterm elections.
According to a local Colorado reporter, Peters’ attorney said the plan involved “seizing ballots nationwide” and a “strategy for a potential civil war,” although there’s no word on whether those topics were actually discussed and what the President’s views on them are.
That meeting isn’t an isolated occurrence. Trump seems to be preparing to try and salvage a potential electoral loss in ways that are all too familiar for those of us who lived through January 6. We understand the concept. And like always, Trump says the quiet part out loud.
Trump: “We have some big surprises coming up in a few weeks, right Russ? He’s gonna be one of the important people in the history of our country.” Vought is, of course, the architect of Project 2025. The idea that Trump is touting “big surprises” in the next “few weeks”—the period of time up to and including the election—and that as a result, Voss will be “one of the important people in the history of our country,” should be a wake-up call for anyone who is still asleep.
Before we go further, let me make this point, yet again: It’s easy to challenge an election where the vote is close. But a 5-point or a 10-point election? Challenging one of those with the weak sauce “voter fraud” stuff Trump is fond of becomes hard to sustain in court. Turnout matters. We all have to vote.
Here’s a seemingly unconnected news report from The New York Times. The story is about the Civil Rights Division at DOJ and who it’s hiring: “The civil rights unit has recruited people whose questionable work histories and dearth of education and experience might have disqualified them in the past, former officials said.” Some examples include:
A former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents.
A one-time gambling executive who promoted conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017.
A Florida activist who once served 20 days in jail for hacking a local elections system.
According to the Times, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon “praised the quality of the new lawyers, and said she was revamping a division that had been dominated by liberals for far too long.” She’s also revamping DOJ’s voting rights section, whose mission is supposed to be protecting Americans’ voting rights. But Dhillon has a different mission, focused on seeking out “fraud,” and she’s aligned with Trump’s goals, which makes hiring people of this “caliber” a frightening prospect. The Civil Rights Division is supposed to be the conscience of the Justice Department, not a vehicle for executing the president’s political agenda and undoing the value of Americans’ right to vote.
Another apparently unrelated new story sheds more light. ProPublica, which has been doing yeoman’s work with its reporting, has this story. The bottom line is that ICE has detained over 100 American citizens, most of them people of color, because it disregarded them when they said they were citizens. And the government isn’t tracking the incidents.
Trump continues his attacks on the press. Is it all starting to feel like part of the same story? Angry about press reports of crowd size of all things, he posted on Truth Social that “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.” Normally this would be laughable, but we’re talking about Donald Trump, who is having the former Director of the FBI prosecuted over a picture of seashells.
There was that post and then there were Trump’s comments about Iran being welcome to bomb Los Angeles and San Diego, which his supporters tried to walk back. But when you’re the president of the United States, you don’t casually wander into talking about mass destruction of our population centers. Even if it’s “just” about rage-baiting the left, that’s an incredible thing to say. Barack Obama would have been pilloried for suggesting a country associated with terrorism against Americans might bomb American cities. But here, the outrage has been turned on the people who called out what Trump said as outrageous.
The account did an actual transcript showing what Trump said. “Let them take out Los Angeles.”
The president is out of control as the election looms. He will try to interfere with the votes we cast. He will try to discredit the press. He does not care if American citizens get harmed in the process. It is all one story. It’s the story we must pay attention to.
This administration is hoping you’ll feel intimidated and threatened by all of this. Don’t let them get away with that. This is our moment—the time when we register to vote, have a plan to vote, help the people around us vote. Overwhelming numbers of Americans are expressing disgust with the administration, which announced today that it will live stream the execution of a convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, who is facing the death penalty. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” Pete Hegseth said. Haven’t we had enough? Disgust, not fear, is the correct response to what this administration is trying to do to us. And they’re trying to interfere with our right to vote because they’re afraid of us and the power of our votes to put them out of a job and create real oversight to hold them accountable for what they have been doing.
The same federal judges who have lost confidence in Justice Department lawyers, who no longer extend the presumption of regularity to their conduct and question their truthfulness in court, will hear any cases that are brought involving the election, presumably some on an emergency basis. They already know this is not an administration that is acting in good faith. The same judges, many of them Trump appointees, who refused to turn a blind idea to what he tried to do in 2020 will be there again, hearing cases.
Vote early if you can, have an election day plan if you can’t, and let’s do whatever it takes, because we don’t need to keep living with this. Noncitizens aren’t determining the outcome of our elections. We are—eligible American citizen voters. And that’s precisely what Trump is most afraid of.
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We’re in this together,
Joyce