A new message from your friends at People For the American Way.
[link removed]
***********************

Friend,

Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” email series that serves to remind
us 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.

Our weekly “Trumptastrophe” email series usually starts with a reminder of
one of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered
during the Trump presidency. The threats that Trump and others in the MAGA
movement pose were amplified by the Republican National Convention, so
this week we’re doing something a little different. We’re focusing on some
of the ways the recent Republican National Convention amplified the need
to defeat MAGA extremists in the upcoming elections.

We start with the party’s new platform—actually, with the
[ [link removed] ]authoritarian process by which Trump’s campaign forced the delegates
elected to the platform committee to accept his preferred language.

Normally the GOP platform process is quite democratic and transparent.
Each state party elects two representatives, subcommittees draft language
for various sections, and the committee hashes out final language over
days of debate in open meetings that are broadcast on C-SPAN. Not this
year.

This time Trump dictated the language. His henchmen at the RNC [ [link removed] ]closed
the meeting, took delegates’ phones from them, and [ [link removed] ]bullied them into
going along by taking pictures of the committee members as they voted. It
was the clearest evidence yet of the dictatorial way Trump will rule if he
gets power. If that’s how he treats his strongest allies, what will he do
to the rest of us?

Well, we have a pretty good idea, thanks to [ [link removed] ]Project 2025, the [ [link removed] ]agenda
for a new administration written by Trump aides and allies. It calls for
giving him unchecked power to fire tens of thousands of professional civil
servants, replace them with his loyalists, impose his will on independent
agencies, turn the FBI and Justice Department into weapons of his desired
“retribution,” and purge anyone who questions him.

The [ [link removed] ]new GOP platform, while much shorter than in the past, is filled
with divisive Trump rhetoric. It complains about “very corrupt elections.”
It promotes Moms for Liberty’s efforts to restrict teaching students about
race, sexuality, and gender. It calls for mass deportations. It vows to
reimpose his travel ban and keep “foreign Christian-hating Communists,
Marxists, and Socialists out of America.” It promotes Christian
nationalists’ agenda, promising to create a new federal task force to deal
with supposed “discrimination, harassment, and persecution against
Christians in America.”

A major theme of the convention was gaslighting—a way of manipulating
people by distorting reality to make them question what they are seeing
and feeling. Trump’s brazen lying is a form of that. At the RNC, Trump and
the MAGA Republicans tried to gaslight Americans over and over again:

* Project 2025? What Project 2025? Trump’s closest aides and allies, led
by Kevin Roberts, the MAGA president of the Heritage Foundation, have
created an agenda for a new Trump administration and a detailed
authoritarian plan to carry it out—including mass firings of federal
employees. As news coverage has exposed the many ways the plan would
harm Americans, Trump pretended to know nothing about it, even though
his closest advisers were behind it.

Virtually no one at the RNC mentioned this detailed plan for how the
right-wing movement would “take the reins of government” under a new Trump
administration. But the Heritage Foundation was a major sponsor of the
convention. Heritage President Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025,
was everywhere. And Heritage held a day-long “policy fest” to promote the
ideas in the agenda.

* The anti-freedom “party of freedom.” RNC speakers claimed that the
MAGA Republican Party is a party dedicated to freedom and free speech.
They wouldn’t even let their own platform committee engage in free
speech, as the delegates themselves complained!

The supposed party of freedom wants to eliminate access to abortion. They
want to reverse progress toward equality for LGBTQ people and criminalize
health care for trans youth. They want to ban “pornography”—which they
define in a way that would let them clear classrooms and libraries of
books. At a Moms for Liberty town hall meeting at the RNC, Florida Gov.
Ron DeSantis bragged that his state was not only dictating to K-12 schools
what they could teach, but was doing the same to public universities.

Project 2025 let the cat out of the bag in its policy agenda, saying that
freedom doesn’t mean the right to live as you want—how most people would
define it—but only the right to live as you ought to—as defined by Project
2025’s Christian nationalist authors. In his speech, Trump lauded
Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, who is praised by far-right activists
for crushing dissent, taking control of media and the judiciary, and
imposing ideological control over arts and education.

* Masking intentions to ban abortion. As much as Trump brags about his
Supreme Court justices overturning Roe v. Wade, his campaign
operatives know that most Americans oppose the abortion bans
Republicans are putting in place. So Trump’s team made the platform
language on abortion [ [link removed] ]deliberately vague and contradictory. That way
they could get headlines talking about a more “moderate” stance to
gaslight pro-choice voters, while at the same time expressing support
for one of the most extreme claims of the no-exceptions abortion-ban
movement, which is that fertilized eggs have constitutional rights as
persons from the moment of conception, an idea that would require
[ [link removed] ]criminalization of all abortion in every state.
* Talk of unity from the great dividers. During the convention, Trump’s
campaign repeatedly sent the message that Trump’s focus would be on
unifying Americans—as if division and gleeful cruelty were not the
hallmarks of Trump’s political persona and the MAGA movement in
general. On Thursday night, just minutes after a speaker praised Trump
as a promoter of unity, the RNC showed a video of Trump promising to
purge a long list of “villains,” including “globalists” and the “sick
political class.” At the convention and related events, speaker after
speaker described the election in terms of spiritual warfare, as a
battle between good and evil. Tucker Carlson told attendees at the
Heritage Foundation’s policy fest that they were in a “spiritual
battle” against people who wanted to “eliminate Christians.” Moms for
Liberty leaders [ [link removed] ]warned that “radical Marxists are trying to steal
our children’s future” and that “the enemy wants to come between us
and our children.”

Even as Trump took the stage for his acceptance speech, any attempts
at unity were quickly overshadowed by vitriolic rhetoric, angry
rebuttals, and attacks on Democrats for standing in the way of their
extreme and dangerous agenda.

The Republicans exuded confidence and tried to send the signal that the
election is over. But it’s not. Far from it. People For remains committed
to fighting with everything we have over the next several months to make
sure that the dangerous Donald Trump does not become our president, and
the brutally harmful Project 2025 agenda does not become our future.

Join us by [ [link removed] ]signing our pledge to oppose MAGA Republicans and their
extreme agenda and [ [link removed] ]rush a donation to empower our proven campaigns to
defeat Trump and his extremist allies this November.

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, [ [link removed] ]you can 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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ [link removed] ]DONATE NOW

 

 

 


***********************

Do not reply directly to this e-mail. Please use [email protected].

Trouble viewing the email?
VIEW AS WEB PAGE:
[link removed]

This email was sent to [email protected]. Reaching you over email
is the best way we have to let you know about the ways you can take
action to fight the Right Wing and defend our constitutional rights
and values. If you have any thoughts, comments, or criticisms, or if
there's a better email address at which to reach you, please
let us know. If you'd like to unsubscribe from our list, you
can do that here:

You can unsubscribe from this mailing list at any time:
[link removed]
. But know that if you leave, it will be harder for you to stay involved with People For the American Way and continue our
crucial work. PFAW is able to win policy battles and elections, and
counter the Right's extremism and hate, because of dedicated
activists like you, and we're always eager to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for your support.

[link removed]

CONTACT:
[link removed]

PRIVACY POLICY:
[link removed]

FACEBOOK:
[link removed]

TWITTER:
[link removed]

YOUTUBE:
[link removed]

1101 15th Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx-5002,
202-467-4999

You can unsubscribe from this mailing list at any time:
[link removed]