The Dangling Tactic

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

Donald Trump has been slowly torturing four (at least, as far as we know) Republican men — one of whom he might soon, eventually select as his running mate — for months. While some news outlets are reporting that the former president is loathe to announce his VP at the moment, with no interest in disrupting the truly abysmal news cycle for President Biden, it’s also safe to assume Trump is getting some sick pleasure out of dangling the veepship in front of GOP Sens. Marco Rubio (FL), Tim Scott (SC), J.D. Vance (OH) and North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum.

It’s his favorite loyalty test — forcing those who wish to secure his good graces to publicly grovel at his feet until they’ve somehow demonstrated proper fealty. And he’s gotten lots of use out of this foursome in recent months — enlisting his shortlist to help him do everything from skirting court-imposed gag orders, spreading lies on his behalf during his recent trial in Manhattan, to shirking their legislative duties so he has something to attack President Biden with on the campaign trail.

He’s also been using the VP announcement as a back-pocket distraction token to deploy at any moment he might need it during this campaign cycle. Ahead of the first presidential debate a few weeks ago, his campaign floated the idea that he might announce his vice president from the debate stage. He didn’t end up doing that, clearly not in need of a distraction that might spin the news cycle in his favor.

Now, ahead of next week’s Republican National Convention, he’s teasing out when exactly that announcement will come, without actually offering any specifics or making any commitments.

“I’d love to do it during the convention, which would be you know, or just slightly before the convention, like Monday, love to do it on Tuesday or Wednesday, actually, but for a lot of complex reasons that you people understand, pretty much don’t do that,” Trump said on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. “We have a very good bench.”

It appears he will drag things out as long as he possibly can, enjoying the company of the knee-benders.

Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:

• Hunter Walker updates us on his reporting on “Pence Card” author Ivan Raiklin, now dubbed the “secretary of retribution.”
• Josh Kovensky reflects on Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán’s recent field trip to Mar-a-Lago.
• Khaya Himmelman checks in on Michigan Clerk Tina Barton after the sentencing of Andrew Nickels, the man who left a voicemail threatening her life and the life of her family after the 2020 election.
• Khaya also digs in on the Heritage Foundation’s most recent Trumpian move: declaring the 2024 general election fraudulent before the voting has even begun.
• Emine Yücel unpacks Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) latest pandemic propaganda.

Let’s dig in.

— Nicole Lafond

The ‘Secretary of Retribution’

A story that TPM first reported back in April now has the attention of a Democratic member of Congress.

Ivan Raiklin is a former Green Beret and close associate of ex-Trump White House adviser Michael Flynn. He is perhaps best known as the author of the “Pence Card” memo that outlined a strategy to have then-Vice President Mike Pence overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. Back in April, we wrote about how Raiklin had put together a “Deep State Target List” featuring over 350 institutions, officials, politicians, and media figures that he wanted to see exposed for a supposed plot against Trump. 

Raiklin had presented a convoluted plan involving getting the billionaire Elon Musk, who now owns the site once known as Twitter, to publish direct messages exchanged by his targets. We also noted that Raiklin had reached out to the far right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in an effort to get those law enforcement officers to go “to the maximum level” to punish the targets on his list for unspecified crimes. 

In the months since we published our piece, Raiklin, who has appointed himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” noted that several other media organizations followed the story. Raiklin initially responded to the coverage by encouraging his followers to dig for dirt on TPM, your humble correspondent, and my “friends and family.” He also kept up his efforts to get Musk and far right sheriffs to take on his targets and warned their “last chance for amnesty” is September 3.

On Wednesday, Raw Story joined the list of outlets that have followed our reporting on Raiklin with a piece that their editor-in-chief Dave Levinthal billed as an “EXCLUSIVE.” While the story didn’t break much new ground, it did highlight more recent comments Raiklin has made calling for his targets to be jailed. It also included a response to the list from Rep. Jamie Raskin (R-MD), who described Raiklin’s “Deep State Target List” as “a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”

We are happy to see this story get more attention. As we have repeatedly noted on this page, Trump allies are getting louder and louder about their desire to seek revenge on political enemies if he wins a second term. It is, as Raskin said in his comment, a “deadly serious” issue.

The recent report sparked a wave of headlines including in fringe far right media. Podcaster Tim Pool elicited a delighted reaction from Raiklin with his segment on the story, which provided yet another example of why this matters and why we at TPM will stay ahead of the story. Pool made perfectly clear how eager he, Raiklin and other right wingers are to see their enemies targeted. 

“Donald Trump’s ‘Secretary of Retribution’ has a target list. … OK. I’m excited for this. I like it,” Pool said, before adding, “Why should I be mad about retribution?” 

— Hunter Walker

Making Europe Great Again

Let’s play devil’s advocate: it’s not necessarily a bad idea for Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán to travel to Kyiv, Moscow, and Beijing in search of a peace deal that might bring an end to the war in Ukraine. Russia’s cruel invasion has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. At the same time, western experts seem to be reaching a consensus that any further, significant changes of territory — in either direction — are unlikely to take place due to action on the battlefield so long as the West continues to support Ukraine and Russia remains committed to prosecuting the war.

At the same time, Donald Trump is increasingly favored to win the November election. That puts continued U.S. aid to Ukraine in jeopardy, raising the prospect that Ukraine could find itself in a far more precarious position next year.

It makes sense that Ukrainian officials might be more open to a deal this summer with all that as the backdrop. But is that what Orbán was pushing?

As I wrote this week, not really. Orbán said publicly and privately that he’s shooting for a deal in late 2024 — saying explicitly at one point that he envisions a peace deal taking place during a potential transition. That is, while Biden may still be in office, with Trump gearing up to reenter the White House.

For Ukraine, the question would be whether any deal prevents a war like this from ever happening again. That is, whether they receive a security guarantee of some sort that forecloses any invasion. Russia’s position on that has not changed, Putin reportedly told Orbán: it is against any such guarantee. What kind of deal could they cut without Ukraine?

— Josh Kovensky

‘His Words Are Forever Seared Into My Memory’

Earlier this week, a U.S. District judge sentenced Andrew Nickels, who threatened the life of former Rochester Hills, Michigan Clerk Tina Barton, to 14 months in federal prison. 

Following the 2020 election, Nickels called Barton and left a voicemail threatening her life and the life of her family. He pled guilty in a federal Detroit court in February, as reported by TPM. The case is one of many brought by the Department of Justice’s Election Threats Task Force, established in 2021 to specifically address violence against election workers.

“The defendant repeatedly threatened the life of a Michigan election worker because she publicly defended the integrity of the 2020 election that she helped administer,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri said in a statement in response to the sentencing this week. 

She added: “Our democracy depends on the willingness of election workers to do their jobs without having to live in fear. Today’s sentence should serve as yet another reminder that the Justice Department will not hesitate to prosecute those who threaten violence to influence how our public servants administer elections.”

In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Barton wrote about the lasting effects the threats have had on her life: “While it has been more than 1,300 days since Andrew Nickels threatened my life and the lives of my family members, his words are forever seared into my memory and continue to repeatedly play in my mind.”

Election workers are still reeling from the torrent of violence that followed the 2020 election, even as justice slowly but surely prevails. Experts have previously told TPM that threats and intimidation will be an inevitable part of the 2024 election.

“I think there’s going to be this push just like we saw in 2020 against the system and against officials,” former registrar of voters for Orange County, California Neal Kelley told TPM. 

Heritage Foundation Already Declares 2024 Election Fraudulent

In a presentation on Thursday night, conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation preemptively declared the 2024 election to be fraudulent, claiming without evidence that Joe Biden is already attempting to fraudulently sway the results of the upcoming election, the Washington Post reported. 

According to the Associated Press, the think tank’s presentation reads as follows: “The lawlessness of the Biden Administration — at the border, in staffing considerations, and in routine defiance of court rulings — makes clear that the current president and his administration not only possesses the means, but perhaps also the intent, to circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president.”

And in a press conference about the report, per the AP, the executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project executive Mike Howell said: “As things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America.”

We have previously seen a much more subtle version of Republicans attempting to get ahead of a possible defeat in 2024, setting themselves up to declare mass voter fraud in the fall with messaging around the false narrative of noncitizens voting in elections.

In May of this year, election deniers and Republican members of Congress promoted a redundant piece of legislation known as the SAVE ACT, which would make it illegal for non citizens to vote in federal elections. It’s already illegal for non citizens to vote in federal elections, and, as previously reported for TPM, it’s a provably false narrative. 

But, it’s a more subtle way for Trump and his allies to keep election denialism and invented instances of election fraud at the forefront of the campaign, in the case of a possible loss come November. 

Alongside Thursday’s presentation, the Heritage Foundation is also promoting Project 2025 — the “presidential transition project,” which has laid out a blueprint for how another Trump presidency might drastically alter the executive branch power and reshape the federal workforce, among other things. Trump, as previously reported, has recently distanced himself from this initiative in an apparent attempt to appear less extreme during a moment when President Biden’s abilities have come into question.

— Khaya Himmelman

Words Of Wisdom

That’s MAGA Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), seemingly suggesting that President Biden’s recent public struggles have been caused by the COVID vaccines and boosters he received over the past couple of years. 

Normally I wouldn’t even dignify such a tweet but this one is so ridiculous it had to make it into the Words of Wisdom archives. 

May I remind Rep. Boebert that millions and millions of people received those same vaccines… Might be a good idea for the congresswoman to ease up on the vaping. It might be taking a toll on her cognition!

Jokes aside, Boebert, of course, already knows the vaccine has nothing to do with what’s going on here. But I must say, it is a peak cheap move to take advantage of an aging politician to try and sprinkle some pandemic propaganda into the news cycle. 

— Emine Yücel