War On Terror, Redux

Hello, It’s The Weekend. This Is The Weekender ☕

Trump’s basic continuity with the GOP that preceded him gets lost in all of his bluster and lack of self-control. Sure, cheating on his wife with a pornstar and trying to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, among other things, get attention. But in some sense, they’re the exception to the rule. On the majority of issues, the same tendencies that existed under the Bush Administration, remain.

Take the War on Terror. Over the past month, I’ve been covering the Trump campaign’s policy thinking on some of the issues that define this election: immigration and, in Trump’s view, law enforcement. On both, there’s strong evidence that a lot of what prompts Trump critics to call him an authoritarian is a throwback to some of the worst excesses of the War on Terror.

I wrote on Friday, for example, about denaturalization. Trump and those around him have been promising, if elected, to strip the citizenship of people who attend pro-Palestine rallies, painting them all with the extremely broad brush of supporting Hamas, the terrorist organization. Trump tried to effect a wave of denaturalizations during his first term; it was extremely costly, and very ineffective. But even then, that push toward denaturalizations focused on people who had lied to the government in the process of receiving citizenship.

What Trump is now proposing is different, and hearkens back to Bush-era proposals: stripping the citizenship of people deemed “terrorists” or terrorist supporters. In the Bush era, there were cases in which reviews of recently naturalized citizens who contributed money to Islamic charities that had later been found to support terrorist organizations led to their denaturalizations. These peoples’ citizenships were revoked because they were found to have misled the government while receiving a passport, but the initial review began because of what was regarded as a sinister ideological affiliation.

You see it in greater resolution with Trumpian legal planning around the domestic use of the military. For that, Trump allies have turned to work from Bush DOJ official John Yoo in 2001, in which he laid the legal groundwork for deploying the military domestically against terrorists. Trump allies have resurrected this work in the context of border enforcement, but the precedent they’re seeking to will into being would be incredibly broad.

The issue in all of this is that nothing prompts it. There isn’t a Fifth Column of supposed “terrorists” milling around major cities, universities, and the countryside. There’s no existential crisis, though there is a reaction which treats it as such.

— Josh Kovensky

Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend

• Hunter Walker walks us through some of the most cartoonishly anti-Ukraine “articles” included in a recent attempt by Russian operatives to clumsily masquerade as an American news outlet.
• Khaya Himmelman reports on the ways in which Republicans, Trump allies and election deniers have seized on standard voter roll maintenance practices this cycle and spun them up into fodder for their election fraud conspiracy theories.
• Emine Yücel checks in on former First Lady Melania Trump, who has been relatively MIA this campaign season. That is, until she reemerged this week to cast her husband as the ultimate “family man.”
• Emine Yücel unpacks why, it seems, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) doesn’t actually have regrets about that racist tweet he posted and deleted this week.

— Nicole Lafond

Inside The Bizzarro Kremlin-Backed Washington Post 

The article that appeared on a website designed to look like the Washington Post outlined a terrifying, apocalyptic vision of “nuclear strikes on New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco” occurring at the same time warheads rained down on Russia. However, according to the author of the piece, there were people in Washington who might enjoy the mutually assured destruction, Democrats who had worked to “plunge the world into nuclear war” and at least one Republican, “the absolutely insane Lindsey Graham.”

“Lindsey Graham will probably die with a smile – because at the same time Russians in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg will be dying,” the article said. 

Despite all appearances, this wild editorializing and catastrophizing did not actually occur in the Washington Post. Instead, it was a scene in one of the stories published on “WashingtonPost.pm,” a website that, according to the FBI, is part of a sprawling Russian propaganda campaign designed to influence American voters. TPM dove into the FBI files and managed to unearth some of the content that appeared on this extraordinary and elaborate forgery. Our investigation found that the site echoed Republican election conspiracies in keeping with what documents uncovered by the FBI describe as the Kremlin’s desire to boost former President Trump in this year’s election.

Along with Republican talking points, the fake newspaper site had other preoccupations that were far more distinctly Russian — and just plain weird. 

While the people behind the website managed to make a complete visual copy of the Washington Post, their language was far less convincing and often featured broken English or unusual turns of phrase.

For example, in one piece where the fake Washington Post suggested President Joe Biden might be ousted, the writer mistakenly referred to the U.S. Congress as a “parliament” with upper and lower houses. Another article focused on urging the U.S. to say, “Goodbye Ukraine!” and cease support for the country in its ongoing war with Russia. That story described Ukraine, which was invaded by Russian troops in 2022, as an “ultra-nationalist project” rather than a country. It went on to encourage American leaders to recognize this in … distinctly un-American terms.

“In order to succeed in the international arena, you need to clearly understand who you are dealing with, and not try to pull white clothes over Ukrainian nationalists with the help of propaganda,” the article said. 

The WashingtonPost.pm domain was seized by the Justice Department earlier this month. An FBI affidavit unsealed in federal court earlier this month described the content as “Russian government messaging falsely presented as content from legitimate news media organizations.” To impersonate the real Washington Post, the authors of the fake site used the byline of a legitimate reporter, the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief Loveday Morris, for all the stories. They also embellished the articles with largely made up quotes and magazine-style illustrations that, based on Google news search results, appeared nowhere else and seem to have been specifically made for the page. 

Morris and spokespeople for the Washington Post did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

This zombie news site scheme is bizarre because it was simultaneously massive and ambitious while also being incredibly hamfisted. The articles unearthed by TPM are interesting both because they provide a window into the Kremlin’s priorities. They also demonstrate incredibly poor execution. 

One story, which painted Ukraine as a backward and struggling place, simply declared America should let Russia have it.

“In the end you can punish Russia by simply giving it Ukraine in its current form,” the subheadline declared, before the piece went on to argue, “If Ukraine ceases to exist as a state, it would immediately save the U.S. and Europe serious problems and expense.“

Another article histrionically claimed there were “no supporters of war with Russia in Ukraine other than neo-Nazis.”

“Support for today’s Ukraine is, if not a direct betrayal of the memory of our heroic guys who together with the Russians defeated Nazism in Europe,” the piece said. 

Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky that Russian operatives are clumsily masquerading as American media outlets so that we can be reminded of our “heroic guys” who fought in the second World War. That article concluded with a reference to one of the most heroic guys of them all. 

“I wonder what one of the victors of Nazism, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, would have said about this?” the writer asked. 

I wonder too. 

— Hunter Walker

The Routine Voter Roll Maintenance ➡️ Conspiracy Theory Pipeline

The routine voter roll maintenance to election misinformation pipeline has reached new lows in 2024.

Most recently, the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced that since the start of 2023, it has removed 750,000 ineligible voters from the voter rolls. And although this is standard practice voter roll maintenance for election officials in states across the nation — and mostly involves the removal of inactive records — conspiracy theorists have seized on the announcement as some sort of evidence of widespread voter fraud. 

One viral tweet, which has been viewed over a million times, reads: “North Carolina just removed almost 750,000 NAMES from the voter rolls – 290,000 duplicates and 130,000 dəad people.. Read that twice.. HOW DID THIS EFFECT THE LAST ELECTION?”

The tweet, of course, never mentions a key fact, which is that this routine list maintenance was conducted over the course of almost two years. Instead, it implies that this is evidence of fraud from the last presidential election. 

But as David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, pointed out on X, the number of people removed over the course of 20 months is both expected and normal. 

“This is normal list maintenance, conducted over nearly 2 years. This is mostly removal of inactive records, not voters who still live in NC. This is the number we’d expect, reflecting people who have died or moved out of NC in the last 20 months,” he wrote. 

“The process evolves over time as election officials identify new ways of identifying potentially invalid or inaccurate registrations with available resources,” the North Carolina State Board of Elections said in a statement on Thursday.

“However, due to several factors, there will always be such registrations that are not initially identified for removal or correction. For example, voters die every day, but official death records may not reach election officials until weeks later. And people move out of the state every day without canceling their North Carolina registration. Eventually, list maintenance processes catch up with those individuals, and they are removed from the rolls.”

The North Carolina board’s announcement comes against the backdrop of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee, which is suing the board over the state’s voter list maintenance practices. 

While North Carolina officials tried to get out ahead of conspiracy theorists and make it clear the routine maintenance is normal, especially for a presidential election year, when announcing the removals, some red state officials have actually done conspiracy theorists and election deniers’ work for them this cycle.

Last month, Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed an executive order noting that officials had found over 3,000 alleged non-citizens on the voter rolls. But, similar to the misinformation spreaders perpetuating lies about the state of North Carolina’s voter rolls, the news coverage about these 3,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls never mentioned a key detail: the state removed these 3,000 people over the course of the last two years as routine maintenance, as well. 

— Khaya Himmelman

Donald Trump: The Ultimate Family Man (According To … Melania)

Melania Trump has been largely MIA during the former president’s third try for the Oval Office. We haven’t seen or heard much from the former first lady this year on the campaign trail, even though partner’s of candidates typically play a pretty big role in helping to get out the vote. In some ways, it lines up with her relatively disinterested demeanor as a first lady. 

But this week, she resurfaced on two separate occasions.

First, she made news when it was reported that, out of the few times she’s appeared at a political event in recent months, Melania Trump received a highly unusual six-figure paycheck. Former President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure form showed she was paid $237,500 for an April Republican Party event.

Later in the week, Fox News aired a rare interview the network had conducted with the former first lady.

She was asked by “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt: “When people say they don’t like him, what do you wish people knew about him?”

“That he’s really a family man,” Melania Trump answered. “He loves his family.”

Donald Trump is a lot of things, but a “family man” well… that might be a stretch. 

The internet agreed. Social media users jumped on the opportunity to point out the irony in Melania Trump’s comments. 

Some mentioned the fact that Trump is on his third marriage. Others mentioned that he cheated on his first wife with his eventual second wife and that he was recently convicted on charges related to his payment to a porn star for her silence, while married to Melania. There were even posts about reporting that the couple slept in different rooms during their time at the White House.

During a CNBC interview this week, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, might have unintentionally helped explain what exactly Melania Trump meant by the term “family man.”

“All we’ve seen Donald Trump do is hire his relatives,” Cuban said. “RNC? Here comes the daughter in law. Who’s gonna speak for him? His two sons … ‘Hey, we’ve got a new silver coin!’ Here come the sons … The family business is now the Republican Party.”

— Emine Yücel

Words Of Wisdom

“It’s all true. I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want … It’s not a big deal to me. It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”

That’s Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) after he was shamed by colleagues into deleting an extremely racist social media post he tweeted this week.

“Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP,” Higgins’ since-deleted post read. “All these thugs better get their mind right and their a– out of our country before January 20th.”

As you can imagine, that post received swift condemnation from his Democratic colleagues and at least one Republican, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL). The Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford (D-NV) and other Democrats took to the House floor on Wednesday to call for a censure of the Louisiana Republican.

Meanwhile, MAGA House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) downplayed Higgins’ racist tweet and defended him amid the backlash.

“Look, he was approached on the floor by colleagues who said that was offensive. He went to the back – I just talked to him about it – he said he went to the back, and he prayed about it and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down,” Johnson said Wednesday. “That’s what you want the gentleman to do. I’m sure he probably regrets some of the language he used. But you know, we move forward. We believe in redemption around here.”

It’s difficult to sense even an ounce of regret from the congressman who dismissed his racism as “freedom of speech” and equated the pushback he received for putting the safety of Haitians immigrants, not only in Springfield but all across the country, to gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

— Emine Yücel