Tag: GOP now the cult of Trump

DFL Party Statement on MN GOP’s Baseless Claims of Voter Fraud


SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA — Today, Minnesota DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin issued the following statement on the Minnesota Republican Party’s absurd claims of voter fraud:

“The Minnesota Republican Party has gone all in on Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert a free and fair American election based on no evidence whatsoever. Baseless and reprehensible attacks on the legitimacy of our elections are corrosive to the most basic ties that bind our country together.

“When election results we do not like become election results we do not accept, American democracy will cease to function. Minnesotans of all political affiliations must repudiate this attack on democracy if we are to remain a country with the incredible freedom to elect our own leaders.”

Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History

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The president’s push to prevent states from certifying electors and get legislators to override voters’ will eclipse even the bitter 1876 election as an audacious use of brute political force.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.

Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.

“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.” Continue reading.

Survivor of the Jonestown Massacre compares Trump to Jim Jones: ‘The rhetoric is so similar’

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It was 42 years ago, on November 18, 1978, that cult leader Jim Jones encouraged a mass suicide in Guyana — where more than 900 of his followers died after drinking Flavor-Aid (a drink similar to Kool-Aid) that had been laced with poison. KRON-TV in Northern California, on the 42nd anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre, discussed the tragedy with some of the survivors — and one of them compared Jones to President Donald Trump.

Jones’ cult, the People’s Temple, was founded in San Francisco, where he persuaded hundreds of his followers to join him in a settlement he set up in the South American country of Guyana — and he named that settlement, Jonestown, after himself. Yulanda Williams, a People’s Temple member, went to Jonestown with her husband and her one-year-old daughter. Williams, who avoided the Jonestown Massacre, explained to KRON why Trump reminds her so much of Jones.

Williams told KRON, “I sometimes listen to our commander in chief — he sounds so much (like him), and the rhetoric is so similar to that of Jim Jones. But it is absolutely eerie for me, and I think that over 240,000 people have lost their lives due to COVID. When we say Jonestown is the most tragic incident of a massacre of people, I say don’t forget about the commander in chief who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.” Continue reading.

‘A grand scheme’: Trump’s election defiance consumes GOP

Many party officials are suggesting to the rank and file that the election was stolen or that the outcome stands to be reversed.

It was just noise when it started — Donald Trump spouting wild, unsubstantiated claims about election fraud, his lawyer seething at an almost comical press conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business.

But one week after an election in which Joe Biden received close to 5 million more popular votes than Trump and captured more than 270 electoral votes, the president and top Republican Party officials are nowhere near conceding.

And with his posturing — and statements of Cabinet officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — Trump is fueling a bonfire that’s consuming the GOP and disrupting the traditional transfer of power. Continue reading.

‘What’s the downside for humoring him?’: A GOP official’s unintentionally revealing quote about the Trump era

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When the history of the Trump era is written, we’ll struggle to find quotes that are as revealing as one recorded Monday evening by The Washington Post’s Amy Gardner, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Emma Brown.

Speaking about President Trump’s and his legal team’s myriad and baseless claims of massive voter fraud, an anonymous senior Republican official offered a rhetorical shrug.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the official said. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

Indeed, what’s a little undermining of democracy between friends? Continue reading.

My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump

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Benjamin L. Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration. 

President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him.

This is as un-American as it gets. It returns the Republican Party to the bad old days of “voter suppression” that landed it under a court order to stop such tactics — an order lifted before this election. It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority.

These are painful words for me to write. I spent four decades in the Republican trenches, representing GOP presidential and congressional campaigns, working on Election Day operations, recounts, redistricting and other issues, including trying to lift the consent decree. Continue reading.

The GOP under Trump now resembles authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey: study

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Liberal democracies aren’t necessarily replaced with authoritarian rule because of an armed coup d’état. In some cases, critics of President Donald Trump have been warning, authoritarians will gradually undermine a country’s system of checks and balances — which is what those critics have accused Trump of trying to do. And according to a new Swedish study, the Republican Party now resembles authoritarian parties in Turkey and Hungary.

The study was conducted by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, which compared political parties in a long list of countries and found that under Trump, the Republican Party’s rhetoric now resembles authoritarian parties like AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — both of whom Trump has praised — are two disturbing examples of authoritarians who were voted into office and have been attacking the checks and balances and democratic norms in their countries.

Journalist Julian Borger, discussing the study in The Guardian, notes that that V-Dem uses an “illiberalism index” that “gauges the extent of commitment to democratic norms a party exhibits before an election” — and Borger points out that the GOP has “followed a similar trajectory to Fidesz, which under Viktor Orbán, has evolved from a liberal youth movement into an authoritarian party that has made Hungary the first non-democracy in the European Union.” Continue reading.

Trump did it again — the same blackmail scheme that got him impeached

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Back thousands of years ago, in February of 2020, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a “moderate” Republican, justified her vote to acquit Donald Trump at his impeachment trial — despite the mountains of evidence of guilt — by claiming that Trump had learned his lesson. 

“I believe that the president has learned from this case,” Collins told CBS news anchor Norah O’Donnell at the time. “The president has been impeached — that’s a pretty big lesson.”

That excuse was preposterous at the time, making it sound like Trump was a child who had his hand in the cookie jar, not a 73-year-old man caught abusing his powers of office to blackmail the Ukrainian president into propping up conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. But it was also hilariously predictable that Trump, who is incapable of learning or growing as a person, would absorb any moral lessons from being impeached. Continue reading.

GOP growing more indifferent to Trump controversies as election nears

Washington (CNN)Public health experts reacted with alarm after President Donald Trump held an indoor rally with thousands of maskless supporters at a packed arena in Nevada amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic. 

But many Republicans on Capitol Hill had a different view.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, when asked if the rally troubled him at all. Continue reading.

Instead of Evolving as President, Trump Has Bent the Job to His Will

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In a 40-minute phone call this week, Mr. Trump struggled to describe how he has changed in office. “I think I’ve just become more guarded than I was four years ago,” he said.

WASHINGTON — For a man on the edge of history, President Trump sounded calm and relaxed. If he believes that he is on the verge of losing, he betrayed no sign of it. Instead, he trotted out one of his favorite polls, boasted about his popularity with Republican voters and talked about his convention’s television ratings.

His presidency, he declared in an interview this week, has produced “an incredible result.” The stock markets are “pretty amazing,” the Republican National Convention has been “very successful,” and he has “done a very good job” of handling the coronavirus pandemic even though more than 180,000 Americans are dead. At the same time, he said, he has endured “terrible things” by his “maniac” opponents.

After nearly four years in office, Mr. Trump heads into the fall campaign with a striking blend of braggadocio and grievance, a man of extremes who claims one moment to have accomplished more than virtually any other president even as he complains moments later that he has also suffered more than any of them. He inhabits a world of his own making, sometimes untethered from the reality recognized by others. He has imposed his will on Washington and the world like no one else. Continue reading.