Former President Donald Trump used to be a Swiftie. More recently, there is trouble between the two of them.
On Sunday, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to issue an all caps declaration: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Continue reading “Before He Hated Her, Donald Trump Thought Taylor Swift Was ‘Terrific’ “When a young man took a shot at Donald Trump in July it was the first time political assassination, attempted or otherwise, had intruded into presidential politics in more than 40 years. Now it appears to have happened a second time in two months. What’s going on here? It comes almost a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance began a campaign of racist anti-immigrant incitement focused on Springfield, Ohio, an effort so destructive and reckless that the Republican mayor and at least two of the three Republican County supervisors have either begged Trump to stop or publicly questioned whether they will even vote for him because they’re so upset about it. The city has been rocked over the last week by repeated bomb threats, school evacuations, the shuttering of one local college which has moved to remote study. This isn’t even counting the experience of Haitian migrants who are being terrorized by the pro-Trump extremists Trump and Vance have incited against them.
Continue reading “Yes. Trump Started The Fire. And Everyone Knows It.”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Mail-in voting in Pennsylvania will not begin on Sept. 16, 2024, as was previously slated. Due to ongoing court cases, the past is poised to repeat itself in the commonwealth in the upcoming presidential election.
Legal battles over Pennsylvania’s election system drew national attention in 2020 as former President Donald Trump and his allies in the state leveraged quirks of the system to sow doubt about the results of the election.
Trump is setting the stage to do the same in 2024. On Sept. 8, 2024, he posted to Truth Social declaring that a Tucker Carlson interview revealed that “20% of the Mail-in Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent.” He called for the U.S. attorney general, the FBI and Pennsylvania Republicans to do something about it.
Given the decentralized nature of elections administration in the United States, every state — and even county — has its own rules for ballot counting and voting.
As an associate professor of public policy who closely follows Pennsylvania politics, I have been watching the situation with mail-in ballots over the past four years. Here’s why I expect the same problems to rear their heads again this November.
For much of its history, Pennsylvania allowed mail-in absentee voting for only a very specific set of voters, such as those traveling out of state on Election Day.
In 2019, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed Act 77, which made wide-ranging reforms to the state’s election system.
Each party got something big.
Democrats got no-excuse, mail-in voting, meaning anyone can request to vote by mail. Mail-in voting has been used far more by Democratic than Republican voters in Pennsylvania, though this has been driven in part by misinformation surrounding the security of mail voting.
Republicans, meanwhile, got rid of straight-ticket voting that had hurt them in down-ballot races. Straight-ticket voting is when voters are able to pick an entire slate of Democrats or Republicans with just one mark rather than having to vote in every single race.
No-excuse, mail-in voting in Pennsylvania was road tested amid a global pandemic.
During the Pennsylvania primary in June 2020, there were significant delays in processing a surge of mail-in ballots. For context, only 4% of votes cast in Pennsylvania in the 2016 presidential election — before Act 77 — were sent by mail. That share ballooned to 39% in the 2020 election.
Of course, the increase was not driven solely by Act 77 but also the COVID-19 pandemic. Mail voting was popular because it allowed people to vote from their homes without risking possible exposure to the virus. Alarm bells sounded among county officials, though, when some Pennsylvania counties took more than a week to finish their counts and certify results in the primary.
Over the summer of 2020, experts began to talk of a “red mirage” or “blue shift” in states such as Pennsylvania. The expressions describe the phenomenon when in-person votes counted on Election Day favor Republicans but then Democrats take the lead in the days after as mail-in votes, which tend to favor Democrats, are counted.
Trump claimed that such a phenomenon was evidence of a “stolen election.”
One reason it is so easy to contest election results in Pennsylvania is that the state is among the very few — others include Alabama, Mississippi and North Dakota — that do not allow preprocessing of mail-in ballots.
Preprocessing refers to removing mail ballots from their envelopes, checking whether the ballots are valid, flattening them and setting them aside to be counted on Election Day.
The process sounds simple, but it is time-consuming when done tens of thousands of times by county election officials.
Some states, such as Oregon, allow election workers to start this process right away, as ballots come in. Others, such as Arkansas, allow preprocessing to start only five to seven days before Election Day. Some states also allow voters to “cure,” or fix minor mistakes on their ballots — such as a missed signature or other field — if election officials spot an error.
Pennsylvania, however, does not allow ballot processing to start until 7 a.m. on Election Day, when polls open. This is a major reason for the significant delays in counting ballots in the state.
And it is a quirk that Trump and his allies exploited in 2020 to cast doubt on the results.
The warning of delays in the 2020 primary and growing rhetoric from Trump around a stolen election almost pushed the Pennsylvania General Assembly to fix the problem in September 2020. However, a deal fell apart over other proposed changes such as banning ballot drop boxes.
House Democrats have attempted to pass a stand-alone preprocessing bill, including one earlier this year. It would allow counties to begin processing – but not counting – ballots seven days before Election Day.
But the fallout of the 2020 election seems to have poisoned the well on election law compromise, even when it comes to preprocessing, which is widely supported by election experts and does not confer a particular advantage to either party. Also, not all counties want to preprocess. For example, less populated counties do not want to use the extra personnel and financial resources, as it doesn’t save them much time.
While Sept. 16 is the first date that counties in Pennsylvania must begin processing mail-in voting applications, multiple court cases surrounding the commonwealth’s ballot and when and how they should be counted are still pending.
This means that while Pennsylvanians will have their applications processed in September, they likely will not receive a mail-in ballot until October.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly is unlikely to change rules against preprocessing before the 2024 election.
Mail-in voting has not faded with the pandemic. During the 2022 midterm election, 1.4 million Pennsylvanians requested to vote by mail. Given voter turnout is much higher during presidential election years, Pennsylvania can expect that number to rise in 2024.
Pennsylvania has redesigned its mail-in ballot, which has resulted in fewer rejected ballots. Still, the Trump campaign is already working to exploit technicalities to reject mail-in ballots in the crucial swing state.
Ongoing lawsuits on top of ballot-counting delays may well delay certification of the commonwealth’s results in November. Given its emerging status as the must-win state in the 2024 election, Pennsylvania will once again have the eyes of the nation on its election system.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
Continue reading “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Everything that will confound historians about 2024 was distilled, bottled up, and thrown back in one big shot this weekend. It burned all the way down the gullet.
Former President Trump appears to have been the victim of a foiled assassination attempt on one of his golf courses in Florida. A suspect is in custody.
Trump and his running mate continued to target immigrants for abuse and reprisals, directing their invective against Haitians in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, which is now under siege from threats of violence. Or to put it another way, JD Vance, the state’s junior senator, has spent days stoking an anti-immigrant fervor against his own constituents that is crippling the functioning of a city he represents.
When pressed, Trump refused to denounce the bomb threats in Springfield, but he did manage to declare his “hate” for the world’s biggest pop star, who endorsed his opponent. A WSJ headline was a reminder that sometimes saying exactly what happened is the best way to capture the inanity of the moment: “Trump Posts Disdain for Taylor Swift, Vance Defends Pet-Eating Claims.”
In the midst of the simmering political violence, we got a glimpse of the internal workings of a deeply corrupted Supreme Court that in its last term handed Trump unprecedented victories against the rule of law and a gave him an endlessly long leash with the promise of wide-ranging immunity from prosecution if he were to be re-elected.
Amid the chaos, the slo-mo deterioration of civic order, and the erosion of democratic institutions, there is an impending national election that remains far too close to call and upon which almost everything we take for granted in American public life depends.
Quite a weekend.
A sampling of some of the real-world impacts of the Trump-Vance racist vitriol:
Reporter: Do you denounce the bomb threats in Springfield?
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 14, 2024
Trump: I don't know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it's been taken over by illegal migrants, and that's a terrible thing that happened. pic.twitter.com/1PnnSAhujK
JD Vance protests that he didn’t say what he said and tries to re-craft his own words:
Vance claims he and Trump have to "create stories" about migrants eating cats and dogs "so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2024
There is then some awkward dead air as Bash tries to highlight the absurdity of what he just said pic.twitter.com/IN26ZGYsvE
The Secret Service opened fire on a gunman on the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the former president was playing. It’s not clear if the gunman got off any shots before he fled the scene. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, of Hawaii has been identified in news reports as the man later detained as a suspect in the incident. The New York Times interviewed Routh back in 2023 as part of a story about Americans volunteering to help Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. He has no military experience but he told the Times that he had traveled to Ukraine and was willing to fight and die to help Ukraine.
Trump, who was uninjured, was evacuated from the course.
Vice President Kamala Harris posted on X Sunday afternoon expressing her relief that Trump was not harmed.
Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak have extensive new behind-the-curtain reporting on the Roberts court this term in “How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak.”
The NYT was among those to catch Trump’s “slip” during the debate last week: “He used the pronoun ‘we’ to describe some of the rioters, grammatically placing himself among those who have been charged with storming into the Capitol.”
A judge cleared the way for Smartmatic’s giant defamation lawsuit against Newsmax to go to trial later this month over its bogus claim that the the voting machine company was involved in rigging the 2020 presidential election.
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It’s odd to be in a lull amid a campaign as truncated and breakneck as this one.
Continue reading “The Wait-And-See Time In A Sprint Of A Campaign Cycle”TPM Reader DB pressed me yesterday to connect the dots. Because of JD Vance’s racist incitements to violence, now joined by Donald Trump, immigrants from Haiti in Springfield, Ohio, are cowering in their homes, holding their children back from school. Bomb threats have forced evacuations of the town municipal buildings and schools. We can only hope that it doesn’t escalate from here to assaults and murders. But there’s no question this is a community under siege. Vance says full speed ahead, tweeting to his supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing” or, in other words, keep pushing the story.
Continue reading “Public Menace: How Trump Mobilizes the Violent Extremists in His Midst for Political Ends”It was one of the most shocking and disturbing lines in the modern history of presidential politics: During his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump made a wild assertion about a small city in Ohio that has recently seen an influx of migrants.
Continue reading “How JD Vance And A Virulent Neo-Nazi Group Inflamed Tensions Over Migrants In Springfield”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Days of xenophobic rhetoric from the Republican ticket for president toward Haitian immigrants have produced exactly the kind of threats, intimidation, and disruption you would expect.
Here’s the lede from the Springfield News-Sun in Ohio, which has been ground zero for the baseless and comical claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets:
Several city, county and school buildings around Springfield were closed Thursday because of a bomb threat “to multiple facilities throughout Springfield,” according to a city statement released Thursday morning. Springfield City Hall was evacuated around 8:30 a.m.
Springfield Police Chief Allison Elliott said at a Thursday afternoon press conference that City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Springfield Driver’s Exam Station, Ohio License Bureau on the south side, Springfield Academy of Excellence and Fulton Elementary School were all named in the threat and were cleared using explosive-detecting canines.
Real world effects from virulent political rhetoric.
The bomb threat in question included “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community,” Springfield’s mayor told the WaPo.
The racist attacks from the Trump-Vance ticket have left Haitian immigrants under siege and scared. Here’s a report from Wednesday on the ground in Springfield:
My story for @nbcnightlynews from Springfield, Ohio where Haitian immigrants told me they are hurt and scared because of the baseless claims being spread about them by former President Trump and Senator JD Vance. pic.twitter.com/0gkEOHg4mD
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) September 12, 2024
We know exactly where this kind of rhetoric leads. We’ve seen it over and over in the Trump era. It incites those already vulnerable to persuasion to take action and it always ends with Trump protesting that he can’t possibly be responsible for what other people did. The only thing new about any of this is which particular group or subset of society is the target.
Trump: Springfield, Ohio, 20,000 Haitian immigrants have descended upon the town of 58,000 people, destroying their entire way of life. This was a beautiful community and now it’s horrible pic.twitter.com/bFx1IdSbqp
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 12, 2024
Chief Wiggum, Springfield PD, here… they’re doing WHAT? pic.twitter.com/KiK3srkb0i
— Hank Azaria (@HankAzaria) September 12, 2024
Attorney General Merrick Garland addressed Justice Department employees Thursday, decrying “an unprecedented spike” in threats against them and seeming to fortify them for the possibility of Trump misusing the department if he were to win in November:
Our norms are a promise that we will not allow this department to be used as a political weapon. And our norms are a promise that we will not allow this nation to become a country where law enforcement is treated as an apparatus of politics.
State Judge Scott McAfee threw out three of the charges in the sprawling RICO case against Donald Trump and several co-defendants. Two of the charges involved the former president. McAfee relied on an 1890 Supreme Court decision in ruling that precludes states from prosecuting perjury and false filings made in federal court. The core of the case, including the most serious charges, remain intact.
Brothers Philip and David Walker were hit with federal charges for allegedly assaulting NYT photographer Erin Schaff inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Schaff’s account of the assault, published the next day, remains among the most poignant recollections of the Jan. 6 attack.
A convicted Jan. 6 rioter who likes to cosplay as Adolf Hitler gave speeches at two separate events this summer hosted by Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, NPR reports. The Trump campaign said Trump did not attend either event, but NPR noted that one of the events “was personally endorsed by Trump himself in a video message that was played for the room.” More on the Nazi sympathizer here and here.
Adam Klasfeld at Just Security: “Emboldened by Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential contest, once-modest public servants tasked with a clerical yet crucial role in election administration have tried to anoint themselves as the arbiters of the races within their jurisdictions — and grown into a national movement.”
After 9/11 conspiracist Laura Loomer, 31, accompanied Donald Trump, 78, to his debate with Kamala Harris and gobsmackingly to a 9/11 anniversary event, the story spilled over into Day 2 coverage by the bigs:
Michael Hirschorn: How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity
Federal criminal charges are expected in a matter of days in the Iranian hack-and-leak scheme that targeted the Trump campaign. “The FBI investigation has focused on an online persona named ‘Robert’ who contacted American reporters, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe details of an ongoing investigation,” the WaPo first reported.
The AP subsequently ran a similar report that suggested a criminal case already exists under seal: “The two people who discussed the looming criminal charges spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press because they were not authorized to speak publicly about a case that had not yet been unsealed.”
Following Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris, there has been a "400% or 500% increase" in voter registration — between 9,000-10,000 people per hour, according to data firm TargetSmart.
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 12, 2024
"It's really unlike anything I've seen," says TargetSmart senior adviser Tom Bonier. pic.twitter.com/4wC4ejdfaX
TPM Cafe: The Skyscraper-Sized Tsunami That Vibrated Through The Entire Planet And No One Saw
My morning got off to a rough start when I realized it’s been … 35 years … since the release of James McMurtry’s perfect little debut album. Enjoy:
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In Donald Trump’s desperate bid to win over voters who are, justifiably, concerned about the perilous position into which the Dobbs ruling has placed access to crucial fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization, the former president tried to cast himself as a “leader” on IVF during Tuesday night’s debate.
Continue reading “On IVF, Schumer Dares Senate GOP To Put Their Money Where Trump’s Mouth Is”
