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 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 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,” noted Politico at the time.
Then-candidate Joe Biden had 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 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 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 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 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 martial law. At 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 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 “wild.”
- On January 5, Stop the Steal organizers, Trump-supporting preachers and “prophets,” and far-right activists whipped up the crowd at 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 not have come as a surprise, given that Right Wing Watch and other researchers repeatedly sounded the alarm about far-right calls for violence.
We later found out, thanks to footage taken by a documentary crew that was shared with the congressional committee investigating the insurrection, that Trump ally and political dirty trickster Roger Stone had said 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 promote his false claims about election fraud to justify new voting 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 “offensive footing” for this year’s elections. Rolling Stone has 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, 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.
Thanks for all that you do to defeat Republican extremism.
– People For the American Way
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