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 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 focuses on former President Trump’s repeated –
and ongoing – attempts to undermine our democracy:

On July 30, 2020, Trump [ [link removed] ]suggested in a series of tweets that the
presidential election should be delayed. Not coincidentally, “virtually
all public polling” at the time showed that Trump was “trailing by
significant margins nationally and in battleground states,” Politico
[ [link removed] ]reported.

“The president’s extraordinary proposal, which he is not constitutionally
empowered to enforce, represented his first attempt at floating a
suspension of the election less than 100 days away,” [ [link removed] ]noted Politico at
the time.

Then-candidate Joe Biden had [ [link removed] ]warned in April that Trump might try to
postpone the election if he thought he was going to lose: “Mark my words,
I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with
some rationale why it can’t be held.” Trump and his allies mocked Biden’s
warning at the time, but three months later Trump proved Biden right.

Trump’s tweets included multiple lies about mail balloting, which had been
used successfully by some states for years. As the BBC [ [link removed] ]noted, “Mr.
Trump appears to be doing everything in his power to undermine the
credibility of November's vote, in which a record number of Americans are
predicted to rely on mail-in voting to avoid the risk of exposure to the
coronavirus.” Trump claimed that an increase in mail-in voting would
result in the “most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history.”

Trump’s talk about delaying the election generated quick and nearly
universal bipartisan criticism. But that wasn’t enough for him to back
off. Later in the day he [ [link removed] ]repeated his charge that the 2020 election
would be “the most rigged election in history.”

“Critics warn,” the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher noted, “that he could be laying
the groundwork for contesting the results—although the purpose may be
simply to give him a scapegoat if he loses...Whatever the reason, tweeting
about an election delay is not the move of a candidate confident of
victory—and could be a sign of more desperate moves to come.”

And how. We all know what happened.

* Trump [ [link removed] ]falsely declared victory on election night, as political
operative Steve Bannon had urged him to do.
* Far-right activists like Ali Alexander and Nick Fuentes helped
mobilize a “Stop the Steal” movement to challenge election results.
* Trump’s dominionist religious-right supporters held a [ [link removed] ]series of
prayer calls and rallies waging "spiritual warfare" on Trump’s behalf
and insisting that he was the rightful president and that God would
intervene to keep him in the White House.
* Former national security adviser Michael Flynn and other loyalists
urged Trump to declare [ [link removed] ]martial law. At [ [link removed] ]a rally on the national
mall, Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war
if Trump didn’t use his powers as commander-in-chief to keep himself
in the White House.
* Trump campaign operatives and MAGA Republican leaders in multiple
states conspired to create and “certify” false slates of pro-Trump
electors to try to disrupt the Electoral College vote and give
Congress an excuse to discard the actual electors.
* Behind the scenes, Trump lawyers concocted and
[ [link removed] ]promoted bogus constitutional theories and pressured Vice
President Mike Pence to wrongly assert that he could unilaterally
refuse to accept Electoral College votes that had been certified by
battleground states Trump lost.
* Meanwhile, Trump urged his supporters to descend on Washington on
January 6, the day Congress was set to confirm the Electoral College
results. Trump promised it would be “[ [link removed] ]wild.”
* On January 5, Stop the Steal organizers, Trump-supporting preachers
and “prophets,” and far-right activists whipped up the crowd at [ [link removed] ]an
hours-long rally mixing Christian nationalism, conspiracy theories,
and calls for violence.
* And of course, on Jan. 6, Trump’s troops attacked Capitol Police and
the U.S. Congress to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
That violence should [ [link removed] ]not have come as a surprise, given that Right
Wing Watch and other researchers repeatedly [ [link removed] ]sounded the
alarm about [ [link removed] ]far-right calls for [ [link removed] ]violence.

We later found out, thanks to [ [link removed] ]footage taken by a documentary crew that
was [ [link removed] ]shared with the congressional committee investigating the
insurrection, that Trump ally and political dirty trickster Roger Stone
had said [ [link removed] ]the day before the 2020 election, “F**ck the voting, let’s
get right to the violence.”

All this is a reminder that Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to
democracy itself.

In the years since Trump lost, and the attempted coup and violent
insurrection failed, Trump’s allies have continued to [ [link removed] ]promote his
[ [link removed] ]false claims about election fraud to [ [link removed] ]justify new voting
[ [link removed] ]restrictions put into law by Republican legislators and governors. put
into law by Republican legislators and governors.

And they are scheming to make it more likely that they can succeed in
overturning this year’s election if Trump loses. Stone and other Trump
operatives at the RNC are on an “[ [link removed] ]offensive footing” for this year’s
elections. Rolling Stone has [ [link removed] ]reported on the “vast amount of time,
money, and logistical energy” that Trump allies are devoting to
preparations to challenge this year’s election results.

“In Georgia, where Trump lost by a single percentage point — and whose
governorship and legislature are controlled by the GOP — Republicans have
turned the state into a sandbox for potential mechanisms to wrest
electoral outcomes from the hands of voters,” Rolling Stone reported. One
Trump ally working on “election integrity” efforts told the magazine,
“Everybody is gearing up for full-blown warfare.”

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

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