A new message from your friends at People For the American Way.
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Friend,

Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” email series, that will serve to
remind us all of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we
encountered during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others
in the MAGA movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our
memory as we fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming
elections.

This week’s recap brings into focus Trump’s attempts to promote the Big
Lie – at any cost – including by risking the safety of everyday private
citizens, putting his most loyal supporters in legal jeopardy, AND the
danger many former Trump administration officials still pose to our
democracy:

In late November of 2020, Donald Trump was scrambling to figure out ways
to stay in power after Americans voted to send him packing. Courts had
rejected dozens of Trump lawsuits, sometimes with [ [link removed] ]scathing commentary
from judges about the utter lack of evidence that was being offered to
justify the campaign lawyers’ extraordinary requests that courts toss out
election results and disenfranchise millions of voters.

But that didn’t deter Trump. He might not have been able to convince
judges to overturn the election, but he was intent on convincing
Americans—or at least his base—that the election was stolen. And he set
out to convince Republican election officials and state legislators to do
the disenfranchising.

First, the public. On Nov. 17, Trump fired Department of Homeland Security
official Chris Krebs, who had contradicted Trump’s false election fraud
narrative by saying there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted
or lost votes, changes votes, or was in any way compromised.” Krebs headed
the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency at DHS, which had enraged Trump
days earlier by releasing a statement calling the 2020 election “the most
secure in American history.” In classic Trump fashion, Krebs was fired by
Tweet, in which Trump insisted that “there were massive improprieties and
fraud.”

A few days after firing Krebs, Trump met with Michigan Republican leaders
he had summoned to the White House “as he continued his unprecedented
efforts to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election,” NPR [ [link removed] ]reported.
The meeting was just days before the Michigan canvassing board was
scheduled to meet to certify the election results.

As NPR noted, “There are two Republicans and two Democrats on the Michigan
canvassing board. If they deadlock, Trump apparently hopes the
GOP-controlled Legislature will appoint their own electors and overturn
the popular vote, a scenario election experts said is unlikely and
possibly illegal.” Trump didn’t get the results he wanted; the canvassing
board certified Biden’s victory, with one of the White House visitors
abstaining.

Here's what Trump’s firing of Krebs and Michigan machinations tell us
about the danger he poses to our democracy:

* Trump is not interested in truth and he doesn’t care about democracy.
His demand for personal loyalty requires that people who work for him
be willing to accept and promote his lies. Krebs’s comments threatened
to undermine Trump’s Big Lie by assuring Americans that they could
trust the election results. So, he was fired. CNN [ [link removed] ]noted at the time
of Krebs’s firing that his dismissal “underscores the lengths to which
Trump is willing to go to punish those who don’t adopt his
conspiratorial view of the election.”
* Trump’s lies ruin people’s lives, and not just those of the
insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from
affirming Joe Biden’s victory. In Michigan and other states, Trump’s
team convinced MAGA loyalists to create fake sets of electors in the
hope that would give Congress a reason to reject the real electors
earned by Biden’s victories in those states. Michigan’s fake electors,
who signed papers falsely claiming that they were “the duly elected
and qualified electors,” were [ [link removed] ]charged earlier this year with
multiple felony counts including forgery and conspiracy.
* Trump’s ability to pull off the coup that he and parts of his team
tried to engineer was ultimately stopped by people who worked for
Trump but who upheld their oath to the Constitution. Trump has made it
clear that he has learned his lesson; in a future Trump
administration, he will be sure that lawyers in the White House and
Justice Department would be willing to carry out his orders, the
Constitution and laws be damned. Unfortunately, in today’s MAGA
Republican Party, he won’t have a hard time finding these people.
* Consider Jeffrey Clark. He was the MAGA loyalist who [ [link removed] ]tried in the
last weeks of the administration to get the Justice Department to side
with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. When Clark was stymied
by his superiors, Trump wanted to make him acting attorney general, a
scheme that was only stopped by more principled leaders threatening
Trump with mass resignations and a public relations disaster. Clark,
who has been indicted with Trump in the Georgia case, has not been
disgraced by his efforts to overturn the election. Far from it. He’s
[ [link removed] ]considered a “rising legal star” in the GOP. He’s a fellow at a
MAGA-movement think tank that’s serving as a holding pen for former
Trump officials. And he’s part of the far-right [ [link removed] ]Project 2025 scheme
to impose total domination of the federal government if Trump gets
back to the White House. Clark, who had suggested in 2020 that Trump
could use the military to put down protests that would break out if he
refused to abide by the election results, is drafting plans for Trump
to “invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow
him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations,” the
Washington Post [ [link removed] ]reported this month.

These are just some of the reasons we need YOU in this
fight. So, find your
favorite way to unwind after reading through this week’s recap, and then
make a plan for how you will fight back THIS week, this MONTH, this
election cycle.

[ [link removed] ]If you’d like to opt-out of this series but still continue receiving
our other email content, you can do so here >>

Thanks for all that you do to defeat Republican extremism.

– People For the American Way

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