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 serves 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 Trumptastrophe brings into focus how Trump and his MAGA
Republican allies have fought to make it increasingly difficult for
eligible voters to cast their ballot and how they continue their crusade
to make it even harder ahead of the 2024 election:

On February 28, 2017, just over a month after Trump was sworn in as
president, the Department of Justice [ [link removed] ]abandoned a six-year legal fight
against a Texas voter ID law that a federal judge [ [link removed] ]ruled in 2016
illegally discriminated against minority voters. The Justice Department
had been arguing that the law was written with the intention of
discriminating against minority voters, but switched its position amid
“unverified—and widely discredited—claims by Trump that millions of people
voted illegally in November,” as NPR [ [link removed] ]reported at the time.

“This signals to voters that they will not be protected under this
administration,” [ [link removed] ]said Danielle Lang, deputy director of voting rights
at the Campaign Legal Center, which was challenging the Texas law in
court.

As voting rights activists feared, the reversal in the Texas case was a
clear sign of what was to come. Trump named a number of voter-suppression
advocates to a fortunately [ [link removed] ]short-lived “[ [link removed] ]commission on election
integrity” that was designed to prove his false claims that he lost the
popular vote in 2016 due to voter fraud, and to manufacture justification
for voter suppression efforts.

Trump and his allies repeatedly fought and [ [link removed] ]undermined efforts to make
sure that all eligible voters had a chance to vote, and that all votes
were counted. In 2020, the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court
let Florida Republicans get away with [ [link removed] ]gutting a voter-approved
constitutional amendment and imposing a de facto poll tax on people who
had been convicted of crimes and completed their sentences.

In 2020, after Trump refused to acknowledge his election defeat and
instead tried to overturn the results of the election in key battleground
states, respected Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic [ [link removed] ]noted that
Trump’s attacks on the election results—specifically his teams’ charges
that illegitimate Black and Latino voters stole the election from him and
his supporters—amounted to an effort to disenfranchise millions of those
voters. “Trump’s disregard for the franchise, particularly when it comes
to that for Blacks and Latinos, culminated a pattern of scorning
democratic norms that began four years ago,” Biskupic wrote.

That disregard didn’t end when Trump boarded a helicopter and fled D.C.
rather than attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Trump attorney
Cleta Mitchell, who took part in the notorious call on which Trump tried
to bully Georgia election officials into “finding” the votes he needed to
overturn the election, was [ [link removed] ]put in charge of right-wing “election
integrity” efforts. Indeed, even though some of Trump’s own officials
called the 2020 elections “[ [link removed] ]the most secure in American
history,” pretty much the entire MAGA movement teamed up with Republican
legislators and governors to continue Trump’s assault on voting rights,
using his discredited claims of voting fraud to justify passage of
restrictive [ [link removed] ]legislation that they hope will help Trump reclaim the
presidency in 2024.

Longtime democracy advocate Fred Wertheimer [ [link removed] ]wrote in 2022 that Trump’s
false claims about the stolen election “set off a disastrous domino effect
at the federal, state and local levels,” leading to passage of “voter
suppression and election sabotage laws.”

In response to those laws, People For the American Way, other voting
rights advocates, congressional Democrats, and the Biden administration
pushed for passage of stronger federal voting rights protections, but were
thwarted by stubborn resistance from MAGA Republicans.

Years after Trump left office, the hundreds of Trump judges sitting on the
federal courts have [ [link removed] ]continued to undermine voting rights. In November
2023, legal analyst Ian Millhiser wrote about a couple of recent Trump
judge rulings, including an appeals court decision written by Trump Judge
David Stras that Millhiser wrote would “virtually destroy the Voting
Rights Act” by stripping private parties like voting rights groups from
their ability to file lawsuits to enforce the law. People For the American
Way’s Paul Gordon called the ruling a “[ [link removed] ]devastating blow” against the
VRA.

Speaking to the possibility of another Trump term—and hundreds more Trump
judges—Millhiser wrote that “even if this Supreme Court resists these new
efforts to destroy the one federal law that likely did more than any other
to end Jim Crow, there is a serious risk that the entire law could fall if
Republicans — such as Trump himself — get to appoint more judges to the
Supreme Court.”

That’s a sobering reminder that as bad as the current Supreme Court
majority has been on voting rights, it would certainly get worse if Trump
has a chance to add to the Court’s MAGA majority.

People For the American Way is a member of the Declaration for American
Democracy coalition, which has identified five types of executive orders
that President Biden could issue now to protect this year’s elections from
threats including voter suppression and intimidation. People For president
Svante Myrick outlined in a [ [link removed] ]recent op ed for The Hill newspaper,
writing, “As someone who has run for and held office and believes deeply
in the good that government can do for real people, I desperately want our
democracy to survive this next election. President Biden needs to act now
to shore up our democratic institutions because we can’t afford to leave
any options on the table.”

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.

For members who are interested in sharing the weekly Trumptastrophe
series, you can [ [link removed] ]find all previous editions on our website! This post
will be published by Thursday so you can share with your friends and
family and remind them of the importance of ensuring that Trump is
defeated again this November.

[ [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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Thanks for your support.

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