Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Trump allies file emergency petition at Supreme Court over 2020 election

Lawsuit seeks to throw out all mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania in 2020 election

Weeks after President Donald Trump said the Supreme Court should decide whether to throw out millions of ballots in what he dubbed a fraudulent election, and with state and federal courts rejecting nearly all his legal team’s lawsuits in multiple states, a case from Pennsylvania has limped meekly to the nation’s highest court.

The emergency petition filed Thursday is no Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case about the disputed Florida recount that determined who won the state’s electoral votes and therefore the White House. The dispute about Pennsylvania’s election results could not by itself change the outcome of the presidential race.

Instead, the appeal comes from Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly and other Trump allies, in a lawsuit they filed after the election to challenge a 2019 state law that allowed voters to cast mail-in ballots for any reason. Continue reading.

Trump aide banned from Justice after trying to get case info

WASHINGTON — The official serving as President Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.

Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said.

Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter. Continue reading.

Fox News Lets Trump Spew Lies Unchecked In First Interview Since Election Day

Maria Bartiromo sat back and let the president push disinformation to her hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Fox News on Sunday offered President Donald Trump a platform to spew lies about voter fraud unchecked for nearly 45 minutes in his first interview since Election Day.

Trump joined “Sunday Morning Futures” by phone, where he ranted about the election results and pushed unsubstantiated allegations of ballot-counting irregularities and a “rigged” election in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.

Host Maria Bartiromo, one of Trump’s most fawning cable news allies, mostly sat back and let the president peddle baseless conspiracy theories to her hundreds of thousands of viewers. When she did chime in, it was to encourage his defiance and sow doubt about the electoral process. Continue reading.

Expert breaks down the ultimate goal of Trump’s ‘classic Russian-style disinformation campaign’

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Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, spoke with CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday to explain the ultimate goal of President Donald Trump’s false accusations of a rigged and stolen election.

Rauch was asked by Stelter if the issue is Trump is simply trapped in the delusion that he actually beat President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

“Is delusion a fair word for these election lies?” Stelter wondered.

“No, actually, I don’t think it is,” Rauch replied. “It’s hard to know what’s going on in the mind of the president, but you don’t really need to. What you need to know is that what he is running right now is a classic Russian-style disinformation campaign of a type known as the firehose of falsehood. That’s when you utilize every channel, not just media, but also the bully pulpit, even litigation to push out as many different stories and conspiracy theories and lies and half-truths as you possibly can in order to flood the zone if with disinformation.” Continue reading.

Federal appeals court panel rejects Trump request to block certification of Pennsylvania’s election results

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A federal appeals court on Friday rejected President Trump’s request for an emergency injunction to overturn the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results, delivering another defeat to the president’s attempts to reverse the outcome in a state that has already formalized President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.

Trump’s campaign had filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit after a U.S. district court last weekend dismissed its federal lawsuit against Pennsylvania election authorities and rejected the campaign’s request to be allowed to revise the suit to include more allegations.

The lawsuit sought to halt certification of Pennsylvania’s results on the grounds that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning areas allowed voters to correct administrative errors on their mail ballots. Continue reading.

Biden won — but Trump gave authoritarians a disturbing lesson on ‘how to steal an election’: political analyst

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During the 2020 presidential election, many of President Donald Trump’s critics — from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives — warned that democracy itself was on the line in the United States and that Trump would become even more dangerously authoritarian during a second term. Trump was defeated by President-elect Joe Biden, but journalist Jeff Greenfield — in an op-ed published in Politico this week — isn’t so sure that U.S. democracy came out of the election unscathed.

“That breeze you felt recently was a national sigh of relief that the 2020 election might finally, at long last, be over,” Greenfield writes. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the other close states have, or soon will have, certified the results. Judges have unceremoniously thrown out the dubious legal claims that thousands, or hundreds of thousands or millions of votes should be disallowed….. The guardrails held, right?”

But Greenfield isn’t so sure. Continue reading.

America just dodged the Trump bullet — but what did we really learn so that it doesn’t happen again?

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More than 80 million Americans helped the country dodge the bullet of a potential second Trump term, but has one Trump presidency been enough of a lesson for the American people? 

An editorial published by USA Today stresses the importance of remaining vigilant even during the post-Trump era. He warned that the American people must never lose sight of their responsibility to learn how Trump’s behavior was allowed for an entire four years. There should also be accountability for the administrative officials who waged war on America’s democracy.

The favorable outcome of the election does not relieve us from the obligation to try to determine how we allowed the outrageousness of the past four years to take place — how we let our basic institutions of government and society itself to be shaken to a frightful degree. Public accountability, the legislative power of the purse, judicial independence, the United States Department of Justice’s commitment to the law, a respect for a free press, three equal independent branches of government — all being challenged by an administration bent on creating chaos throwing aside democratic norms. Continue reading.

Trump Flips Out At Reporter: ‘Don’t Ever Talk To The President That Way’

Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason pushed back on Trump’s election fraud claims, prompting an outburst.

Donald Trump lashed out during a Thanksgiving press conference at a reporter who pushed back against his false claims of election fraud, calling the journalist a “lightweight” and telling him, “I’m the president of the United States.”

Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason asked Trump if he will concede when the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. 

“Well if they do, they made a mistake, because this election was a fraud,” Trump replied, before launching into a tirade about the number of votes Biden got compared to former President Barack Obama. Continue reading.

The Memo: Trump plows ahead with efforts to overturn election

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A full two weeks after President-elect Joe Biden was projected as the clear winner of the 2020 election, the nation is steaming toward a collision.

President Trump, far from moving toward an acceptance of his defeat, has intensified his efforts to overturn the results.

But that effort is running up against the clock — and against legal and political realities. Continue reading.

Anger builds in Black community over Trump’s claims of voter fraud in big cities

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When Wisconsin Republicans opened an office earlier this year in the historical Bronzeville neighborhood, it was meant to be a physical symbol of President Trump’s commitment to urban voters. Signs on the window declared “Black Voices Matter,” and the address was on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

But on Friday, as state officials began recounting ballots in Milwaukee County at the request of Trump’s failed reelection campaign, the office had become, for many residents, a symbol of Republican hypocrisy. 

“The president kept talking about Black voices mattering when he attempted to make inroads with the African American community,” said Cavalier Johnson, president of the Milwaukee Common Council. “Then he loses the election, and turns right around and targets the same communities that these Black folks came from.” Continue reading.