Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has been making headlines for his “rocky rollout” since being named former President Donald Trump’s running mate last month. The bad headlines and poll numbers have been driven by Vance’s extreme comments about “childless cat ladies,” abortion, and more. Well, along with extreme comments, Vance has some extreme investments.
Continue reading “JD Vance Is An Investor In A Far Right Video Platform Filled With Neo-Nazi Content”After Winning In Arizona, Election Deniers No Longer See A Problem With The Results
One of the predictable, yet striking, aspects of the right’s periodic embrace of election denialism is that those who espouse it only see problems when they lose. That dynamic played out again this week.
Election deniers such as former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and former secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem won big in Arizona’s Republican primaries on Tuesday night, and readily accepted the results of that election. Yet if things don’t go their way in November, experts told TPM, expect to see them unleash another torrent of conspiracy theories questioning the legitimacy and security of the state’s election system.
“‘Heads I win, tails you lose’ is a spoiled toddler’s mindset,” said Justin Levitt, an election law scholar and professor at LMU Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. “And anyone who’s not a toddler sees through the flawed logic pretty quickly.”
This week’s sudden embrace of a system that these same candidates had previously declared unsafe and marred by fraud is part of a pattern among election deniers that, experts warn, could continue in November: easily accept their victories if they win or cry fraud if they lose.
“It’s quite possible that Arizona will see further efforts to delegitimize their elections if some of these candidates lose,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told TPM. “We see the former president continuing to spread lies about our elections and election officials all over the country continue to prepare for the possibility that a secure, transparent, independently verified election will be attacked and that supporters of the loser will be incited.”
A number of election deniers won key GOP primary races. Most notably, Lake — who has continually questioned the integrity and legitimacy of the 2020 and 2022 elections and refused to concede her gubernatorial loss — was chosen as the Republican senate nominee.
Finchem, the failed secretary of state candidate and frequent purveyor of election conspiracy theories, defeated incumbent state Senator Ken Bennett for the Republican nomination. After his victory on Tuesday night, which he accepted readily, Finchem thanked his supporters on X, saying that it’s clear that they want “a leader who will fight for secure elections.”
Both Lake and Finchem have challenged Arizona’s use of electronic voting machines, falsely claiming that the machines are “inherently vulnerable to catastrophic cyberattacks.” And even though Tuesday’s primary races both used electronic voting machines to tabulate ballots, Lake and Finchem had no qualms about the results.
“The election denial movement is largely predicated on the false belief that any election not resulting in a certain Republican victory has somehow been stolen,” said David Levine, an election integrity consultant. “Lake continues to be a key cog in the movement.”
“Every time Lake has been presented with evidence to debunk her conspiracy views, she has opted to double down on them instead,” he added.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who has been a particular target of election denial ire and a fierce defender of the integrity of Maricopa County’s election system, lost his primary to Justin Heap, a member of the far-right Arizona freedom caucus.
“It’s very ironic that all of these people who question the results of the election when they lose don’t question the results of the election when they win,” said Mark Kokanovich, a former federal prosecutor in Arizona and attorney at Ballard Spahr. “The hypocrisy is beyond the pale and glaring.”
Even though election deniers did well in their Republican primary races, these and similar candidates underperformed in the 2022 election. It remains to be seen whether the seeming voter distaste for election denial continues in 2024.
“Past history seems to indicate that in a state as closely divided as Arizona, embracing lies about democracy and elections, attacking public servants throughout the state, has proven not to be a particularly effective general election campaign strategy,” said Becker.
If they lose, we may well see the election denial machine kick into gear again, with dangerous conspiracy theories that only serve to weaken trust in the system.
Why A Nerve Center for MAGA Intellectuals is ‘Jubilant’ About JD Vance
Weeks after Sen. JD Vance’s (R-OH) introduction at the Republican National Convention, few people seem excited about the would-be vice president. Liberals, arrayed around Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, are happy to dub him “weird;” Donald Trump himself downplayed the choice on Wednesday, saying that, historically, the vice presidential pick has “virtually no impact.”
Continue reading “Why A Nerve Center for MAGA Intellectuals is ‘Jubilant’ About JD Vance”Of Course Trump’s A Racist But It’s Worse Than That
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Let’s Be Clear About This
Again, it’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the last eight years.
Donald Trump, his campaign having lost its edge to Kamala Harris, predictably resorts to his well-used playbook of racism, white grievance, and othering. Major national news outlets fumble the coverage, unable or unwilling to call out the racism. The headlines are either too tepid or shift the focus to Harris. We should know by now that racist attacks are not about the victims of those attacks, they’re about the perpetrators. Putting the spotlight on Harris is a form of complicity.
But even well-meaning people stop at the incomplete conclusion that Trump himself is a racist. No doubt he is. But that fails to do justice to the toxicity he brings to the public square. Not since George Wallace has a national candidate exploited racism for personal political gain the way Trump has consistently now for going on a decade. It started with his embrace of Obama birtherism, continued throughout his term in the White House with, among many other things, virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, and is playing out exactly the way you would expect it to now that he’s facing a biracial opponent.
It takes a racist to exploit the kind of divisions that Trump traffics in, but focusing on his personal animosity toward people of color, his own retrograde 1950s attitudes, the darkness of his soul runs the risk of making this a psychological profile or a morality play or another in the long line of old white men stuck in the past. This isn’t your grandpa or your crazy uncle raving in the privacy of your holiday dinner.
It’s the former president of the United States turning his cult and his campaign’s hundreds of millions of dollars against people of color on a public stage in the middle of a presidential campaign. It’s a way of declaring open season on vulnerable minorities. It’s a rallying cry for every white extremist, fringe loner, and KKK wannabe out there looking for an excuse to act out their rage.
We talk a lot about how racism in the form practiced by Trump takes it upon itself to define what is white and what is not, mocks racial and gender distinctions it considers illegitimate, and reserves to itself an imagined gatekeeper role for what is acceptable. All true. But more relevant for our purposes is that the purpose of that kind of racism is to dehumanize people, reduce them to less than, marginalize them – and the net effect is to grant permission to inflict all manner of atrocities and degradations on people deemed less than people.
Just Watch
A lowlight reel of Trump’s NABJ appearance:
It’s Not Just Trump
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) is covering himself in racist glory, too:
A Telling Moment
Among the many indignities of Trump’s NABJ appearance was the moment he whiffed on a question about whether JD Vance will be ready on Day 1 to assume the presidency. The answer Trump gave received considerable attention because he minimized the effect of the veep choice on the outcome of the election, but he totally failed to affirm that Vance is ready for the presidency, the barest litmus test of a vice presidential candidate. That whiff did not go unnoticed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg:
In related news, Trump allies are accusing Kellyanne Conway of badmouthing Vance:
In interviews with The Bulwark, twenty Trump campaign staffers, allies, confidants, and advisers were quick to shoot down any notion that Trump was turning his back on Vance or was displeased with him amid his rocky rollout. But more than a dozen of those sources volunteered without prompting that they believed Conway, who initially opposed the selection of Vance, was undermining him through leaks to the press expressing doubts about his readiness and the campaign’s vetting.
Conway denies the allegation.
2024 Ephemera
- Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D) and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) have each met personally with the team vetting vice presidential contenders for Kamala Harris, Politico’s Playbook reports.
- AZ-08: Blake Masters lost in the GOP House primary to election denier Abraham Hamadeh.
- Maya Rudolph will appear as Kamala Harris On Saturday Night Live for the duration of the campaign.
Quick Reminder
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Big Lie II, The Sequel
Donald Trump is already delegitimizing the outcome of the 2024 election and any election Democrats win, repeatedly lying that Democrats can win only if they cheat:
Trump suggests that the only way Kamala Harris can beat him is by cheating pic.twitter.com/nPIUyP5p9l
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2024
Correcting Trump’s Jan. 6 Revisionism
It’s not just that Trump promises to pardon the Jan. 6 defendants – of which he is one – it’s the web of lies, deceits, and disinformation that he constructs to justify and defend pardons that is the most toxic element of his historical revisionism. My former colleague Ryan Reilly offers a comprehensive corrective to Trump’s comments to the NABJ on potential pardons.
Important Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020
Another Biskupic Excluive
CNN’s Joan Biskupic has another piece pulling the back the curtain on the recently completed Supreme Court term. This one is focused on Justice Samuel Alito losing the majority on not one but two cases he originally was assigned to write. His opinions were so strident that the majority abandoned him both times, exacerbating what she so richly calls Alito’s “air of vexation.”
9/11 Plotters Reach Plea Deal
A plea deal that spares the 9/11 plotters at Guantanamo the death penalty is probably the right thing to do, but the only authentic reaction to this news is immense sadness: about the attack itself, about how America lost its way in the aftermath and resorted to torture, about the use of extrajudicial means in contravention of the rule of law, about the Kafkaesque limbo in which the plotters have been held for more than two decades, and about how it ends with little in the way of real reckoning with ourselves over what we became.
Cornering The Market On Weird
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Please Give Me Two Minutes
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The False, Dark Allure of Trumpite 12-Dimensional Chess
Today Donald Trump appeared at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, attacked the organization, disrespected the journalists interviewing him and then proceeded to claim that Kamala Harris is in fact a fake Black person who only recently decided to become Black. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went — she became a Black person,” he said, “I think somebody should look into that too.”
Continue reading “The False, Dark Allure of Trumpite 12-Dimensional Chess”Trump Goes Full Racist In Front Of Black Journalists
Shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his pick for Democratic nominee, Republican leadership in Congress quickly put out some guidance to lawmakers about how to message around Harris, the first Black, Asian American, woman vice president.
Continue reading “Trump Goes Full Racist In Front Of Black Journalists”Blitz
I have various people I chat with through the day to compare notes about what’s in the news. I can’t remember who the conversation was with or whether it started with me or the other person. But in one of these conversations over the last few days I got to talking about the particular dynamics of a three-month campaign, something totally unheard of and unprecedented in modern American political history. American presidential campaigns last at least 18 months. In some ways they’re perpetual. But there’s nothing in recent American history to compare to what Kamala Harris is doing right now.
The Trump campaign is obviously furious about the switch. Vance called it a sucker punch. They essentially wasted their convention on the wrong candidate. You can understand why they’re mad.
Continue reading “Blitz”DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020
In June 2020, as demonstrations around the killing of George Floyd reached their peak, Trump administration officials did extensive work laying the groundwork for the President to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to quell the protests, an Inspector General report released on Wednesday found.
Continue reading “DOJ IG Details How Close Trump Came To Invoking Insurrection Act in 2020”No Podcast This Week
Kate Riga is on vacation this week. So no podcast this week. We’ll be back next week on the regular schedule.