Trump’s Tales of Voter Fraud have gone waaaaay out there!…Yep, they’re crazy! We have some of the most preposterous claims of voter fraud in the history of American elections here in this part 2 section, but first let’s try exploring why Trump has been in such a foul mood lately. This is more of the Trump meltdown episodes that are a carryover from part 1. The first & last part to the-white-house-is-in-meltdown are posted below, which in between that article discusses such Trump recent fails as his debacle in France, purging of more White House staff, the controversy over the Whitaker appointment, & his losing the midterm which will precipitate endless House investigations, including a deep dive into everything Russia & his tax returns/tax fraud:
Every White House experiences tension and turnover; it’s a stressful environment where punishingly long hours are the norm, everyone has his or her own ambitions, and the stakes are extremely high. A certain amount of controlled chaos is inevitable. But there’s ordinary White House chaos, and then there’s Trump White House chaos. New reporting paints a picture of the administration descending into a thunderdome of backstabbing and resentment as staffers jockey for position or wonder whether they should get the heck out, all presided over by an erratic, unhappy president. This might sound like a familiar story, but if it isn’t already worse than it has been before, it soon will be, especially now that the midterm elections have cast a cloud over the remaining two years of President Trump’s term.
So you go to work every day wondering when the hammer is going to fall on you. Is one of your colleagues plotting against you? Are you going to get a congressional subpoena? Is today the day that the president turns his wrath on you in his endless search for others to blame for his problems and his mistakes? When everyone around you feels that way, too, things get a little uneasy. Describing the White House right now, one former Trump aide told Politico, “It’s like an episode of ‘Maury,’” referencing the daytime TV show famous for bitter family arguments. “The only thing that’s missing is a paternity test.” But there’s no mystery about who the father of this mess is. He’s sitting in the Oval Office, scared and angry that the accountability he has outrun his entire life might actually catch up to him.
The Joke’s On Us
More reports of the Trump meltdown from inside the White House are seen in trumps-post-midterms-blues-roil-the-white-house & also White-House-insiders-leak-disturbing-reports-of-Trump-s-increasingly-erratic-rage-fueled-behavior. Somebody should get this spoiled brat a babysitter: president-trump-rage-midterms-emmanuel-macron-france. This entire presidency has become a sick joke, with these excerpts seen from Trump-is-finally-revealing-himself-as-the-sick-incompetent-joke-we-all-knew-he-was:
The measure of someone’s character is best taken not in the times of success, but in times of adversity. Since Donald Trump’s life took a pronounced turn for the worse after the November 6th elections, Americans have been afforded their first real opportunity to assess his performance in the face of such adversity. He’s failed the test. And he continues to fail. Having just lost his Party’s smothering dominance of the U.S. House of Representatives, and as a consequence, facing the certain prospect of prolonged—and pitiless—investigations into his own criminal acts and those of his immediate and extended family, Trump’s behavior over the last few days confirms everything many of us have always known: This so-called President and his presidency are nothing more than a sick and dangerous joke, riven with gross incompetence and gone badly awry. Retreating into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment is how it’s being described. But the truth may be even simpler than that. This is how incompetents behave when they are not up to whatever task they’ve taken on.
Donald Trump has not one iota of civic involvement in his entire life. He has never pursued any activity that was not geared, directly or indirectly, for his own benefit. The concept of public service is a wholly alien concept to him. So, when called upon to perform a simple human gesture, such as standing in a memorial to fallen soldiers at Belleau Wood, or laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns, he balks. He shakes his head in puzzlement. He doesn’t get it. There is no sense of obligation on his part, because there is no sense of shared humanity. He simply doesn’t care. But his actions in Europe and at home this week are just symptomatic of a deeper problem—the same dearth of feeling and empathy he brings to issues involving human contact render him wholly unfit to the tasks associated with the U.S. presidency. Someone with no real sense of obligation to his fellow countrymen cannot pretend to have any real policy goals.
The “policies”—such as they are—that Trump has followed have been spoon-fed to him by the far right wing of the Republican Party, which understood that he would swallow whatever they plated before him—as long as it satisfied his one real, wholly narcissistic goal, which was to be perceived as “powerful.” Trump is acutely aware that these people are the ones who keep him in power, so he caters to their every wish. That is why Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and others of their ilk—themselves outliers even from the worst fringes of American politics—continue to dominate the tenor of this Administration’s “policies.” Trump simply doesn’t care who is harmed by those policies, which is why everything he does is typically at the extreme end of outrageousness. Kidnapping children? Check. Threatening allies with senseless tariffs? Check. Sidling up to Russia and North Korea? Not a problem. It’s what “his people” want, and that’s all that matters.
This was all so easy for Trump with a compliant Republican Congress, only concerned about getting big tax cuts for their corporate masters. Nobody important to him really cared about what he did or said, and as far as the Democrats and the media were concerned, well, they could chase his Twitter feed day after day. There were some setbacks, like his failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but they could be blamed on someone else. Not him. Never him. But now Trump has a real big problem. He’s lost his Congressional lapdogs, and they’ve been replaced with snarling, unmuzzled hounds, about to bite him from a hundred different directions. They are going to be looking into everything that he does from this point forward. So what does he do? He has no idea. It’s all self-defense and self-preservation at this point. He’s looking on helplessly, lashing out indiscriminately, as his people jump ship. They see what’s going to happen, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s never had an agenda, beyond preserving his own “entitlement” to power. Remember, this is a President who barely “works” two hours a day. He spends the bulk of his time watching TV or playing on Twitter. It’s not that he’s abandoning his day job—he never worked the job to begin with.
Where’s the Proof of Voter Fraud?
The only proof we’ve been able to uncover about Trump’s claim of voter fraud is in a video at the bottom of part 3 where the songs are. The video does actually show people changing outfits in their cars, presumably so they can go back into their polling station to vote again. Other than that, there is no other evidence of voter fraud! But that doesn’t stop the prez from making some rather bizarre claims, seen in this posting taken from trump-claims-an-id-is-needed-buy-cereal-that-fraudulent-voters-simply-switch-hats
There’s no good argument underlying President Trump’s insistences that U.S. elections are undermined by rampant voter fraud. There’s no evidence at all that they are, despite years of looking and years of rhetoric like Trump’s. There’s no evidence of rampant voter fraud in Florida in the wake of last week’s midterm elections, either, despite Trump’s tweets and commentary. But there are particularly bad arguments for the existence of voter fraud, two of which Trump offered in an interview with the Daily Caller on Wednesday afternoon. The outlet’s Benny Johnson and Saagar Enjeti interviewed Trump in the Oval Office and the conversation turned to the recount in that state. Here’s the first claim Trump made, hoping to bolster his assertion that fraud is rampant: “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”
Here’s the second claim he made, hoping to bolster the idea that photo ID should be required at polling places: “If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID. They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.” Let’s start with that second claim, because it’s funnier. Amazingly, Trump has made this very odd assertion about needing an ID to buy groceries before. He said something similar in August and, at the time, the media assessed the validity of the claim. It is, uh, not valid. Maybe if you’re paying with a check, if people still do that? But if you want to go into a grocery store and buy some Cheerios using cash or a debit card, go nuts. This is a good example of Trump’s imperviousness to being corrected.
The latter half of the comment is also true. Voter ID laws disproportionately make it more difficult for people of color to vote. The laws are usually passed by Republican legislatures in part because they tamp down a voting base assumed to support Democrats. In the past, courts have explicitly called voter-ID laws in Texas and North Carolina discriminatory. What’s more, voter ID is not generally an important thing because incidents of in-person voter fraud, the type of fraud that such laws are meant to prevent, are so rare. There have been a lot of efforts to sniff out fraudulent votes, including by Trump. None have found any significant, organized voter fraud.
Which brings us back to Trump’s first claim, about people voting, leaving the polling place, changing hats and coming back in. If you have ever voted, you know how ridiculous this is. While you don’t always need a photo ID to vote, you do need to be registered (in nearly every state) and somehow verify your identity, often by matching your signature against one on file. Or, maybe, Trump thinks these things are true. They aren’t, but, as mentioned above, he’s impervious to fact-checking. One can picture Trump being told that changing hats won’t fool a poll worker and him waving dismissively. You can probably hear his voice in your head: “Eh, it happens, believe me.” It doesn’t. Vote fraud almost never happens. You don’t need an ID to buy cereal. You can’t swap hats and magically become another legal voter. But here we are talking about it yet again.
More Crazy Details on some Crazy Allegations
Trump’s assault on the First Amendment/free press is very dangerous: trumps-orwellian-argument-for-violating-cnns-first-amendment-rights. At least a court order restored the White House clearance for CNN’s Jim Acosta for now. This is also quite a dangerous dance the GOP is engaged in: will-the-republican-party-keep-dancing-with-autocracy. And the excerpts below are from another article detailing voter fraud & breakfast cereal pulled from donald-trump-voter-fraud-disguises-cereal-the-daily-caller-florida. Is this really our American leader, or king of the distant planet Zordolium?:
President Donald Trump has made a series of bizarre claims about voter fraud over the years, but his latest might take the cake. Despite receiving nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Trump insisted that he would have won the popular vote if not for millions of illegal ballots which didn’t exist. As president, Trump continues to claim that Democrats are trying to “steal” elections in Florida by attempting to ensure that all proper votes are counted, and he floated the wildly dictatorial notion of holding an entirely new election after mail-in and provisional ballots put Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic Senator-elect, over the top for good in the Arizona Senate race.
So we already knew the president of the United States had little to no grasp of the realities of elections and vote-counting well before he spoke with the conservative Daily Caller on Wednesday at the White House. But buried among his numerous lies about Florida’s still-too-close-to call elections, Trump made an illuminating remark regarding his thought-process on voter fraud: “The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes. When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”
The leader of the free world, who has thousands of nuclear weapons at his disposal, then explained how Froot Loops means we should have voter ID: “If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID. They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.” So to recap, Donald Trump believes people wear secret disguises so that they can vote illegally, and are asked for photo identification when buying a box of Cocoa Puffs. This is not the first time Trump has indicated he has no idea how grocery stores work. At a July rally in Florida, the president also mentioned grocery shopping to make a case for voter ID.
An exhaustive ThinkProgress investigation reveals that you do not, in fact, need photo identification in order to buy cereal. Cash is still a widely accepted form of payment across the United States, and many stores do not ask for photo identification when using a credit or debit card. Trump has previously claimed, without evidence, that “the same person votes many times,” but this appears to be the first time the president of the United States has invoked costumes to explain his theory on voter fraud. Trump’s voter ID proposal is one of many ideas Republicans have introduced as a means to stop the imaginary scourge of voter fraud and/or breakfast fraud.
The president disbanded his own voter fraud commission after it was unable to find any evidence to substantiate his claims of irregularities in the 2016 election. The White House also admitted it had found no evidence of voter fraud in a January court filing. The “expert witness” brought forward by failed Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach (R), the vice chair of Trump’s defunct voter fraud commission, also admitted there was no evidence of voter fraud in a lawsuit filed over the voter ID law that Kobach oversaw while he served as Kansas’s Secretary of State. The trial turned out to be a disaster for the Trump-endorsed Kansas Republican, who was held in contempt of court for disobeying the judge’s orders, ordered to attend remedial classes for failing to comprehend basic legal concepts, and criticized for plagiarizing the ACLU, before his law was ultimately struck down.
As ThinkProgress has explained, voter fraud is extremely rare: Shark attacks and lightning strikes are more common occurrences than instances of voter fraud in which a person impersonates another voter and casts a fraudulent ballot under their name. There were just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election. Two were Trump supporters who voted for Trump twice, one was a Republican who voted for her dead husband, and the fourth was an election worker in Florida who tampered with absentee ballots.
This Can’t Be Real, Can It?
All the corruption & voter suppression is taking place on the GOP side: gop-senator-voting-should-be-a-little-more-difficult-if-youre-a-democrat & also judge-slams-rick-scott-for-attacking-elections.
By discrediting elections that don’t go their way in the minds of Trump’s supporters, the prez & his party may be laying the groundwork for a Trumpeter army wired to go into a civil war: right-wing-extremists-are-already-threatening-violence-over-democratic-house.
Getting back to our morning cuisine again, Rubin discusses breakfast cereals inside trumps-nutty-but-whats-everyone-elses-excuse-for-voting-fraud-delusions. Another link talking voter fraud, this is a crackup: msnbcs-morning-joe-panel-cracks-up-over-trumps-cereal-conspiracy. Click on the next link & scroll down to see the funny graphics people posted on Twitter, with the opening to donald-trump-voter-fraud-cereal-id-disguises posted here:
President Trump, who has already displayed a knack for not understanding how normal people buy groceries, is back on his bullshit again about voter fraud. In a week where he’s repeatedly tweeted attacks on the perfectly legal and democratic recount process currently taking place in Florida, Trump talked to conservative outlet The Daily Caller and spouted a number of outlandish lies about the current state of voting in America:
“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes,” Trump complained. “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”
“If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID,” Trump continued. “They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.”
Sigh. There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, the part where he implies that election workers across the country are morons who are unable to detect the same person voting multiple times is just not true. As we’ve established before when Trump railed about this during the 2016 election, actual cases of voter fraud in the United States are incredibly rare. And as for the cereal tangent, the only possible explanation is that he is echoing his previous sentiment that you have to show ID to buy groceries which — and I can’t believe I have to say this — is not true. So, essentially, the president of the United States, whose party has been actively championing widespread voter suppression, has no idea what is required to actually vote. This is even more horrific when you consider that Georgia’s suppressive voter ID laws are at the center of the debate at this very moment. This is both terrifying and absolutely deserving of ridicule, which Twitter users were quick to do.
Fox Lies from their Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-Players
As millions of Americans settle in during the evenings exposing their minds to 3 straight hours of pure brain rot, we know the worst of the worst in all of the echo is the guy in the middle, insanity Hannity. Surrounding him are unprincipled show hosts who regularly blow their bigoted/racist dog whistles, as revealed in fox-news-tucker-carlson-accountability-twitter-talker & also laura_ingraham_newly_elected_women_color_four_horsewomen_apocalypse.
Let’s hope this slight crack turns into a big split! The phrase united we stand, divided we fall hopefully happens to a corrupt president & his normally-subservient state-run TV network. America needs for both of them to fall! Fox fake news has gone so far off the rails in recent years, especially the evening prime-time shows, they’ve become a complete disgrace to rational conservative doctrine. They’ve also picked up Trump’s proclivity to always lie! Here are some Fox articles from this week:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/14/fox-news-to-file-amicus-brief-on-cnn-case-990070
Evangelical Decline starts with Hypocrisy & Moral Duplicity
I have to admit, it’s gotten a lot tougher to walk through those doors of such a church, when many in the congregation don’t seem to share as high of a moral code. Could it be they’re getting their God’s confused?: psychiatrist-justin-frank-on-trumps-god-complex-he-is-erotically-attached-to-violence. It’s just so bizarre that evangelicals favored the Trumpian party in last week’s election by 53 points, whereas everyone else voted only 1/3 for the GOP. Yes, that’s right, it wasn’t 53% of this group who voted GOP, but the margin was 53 points! 75 to 22!!! Putting faith in an unethical earthly leader over a holy heavenly father is a bad bargain. I’ve been constantly predicting & urging on the downfall of Trump. But unfortunately, I believe this strange marriage between evangelicals & the demonstrably immoral Trump could lead to the downfall of the church. See excerpts from inside white-evangelicals-will-never-dump-trump-but-those-who-leave-the-churches-will:
It’s time for journalists and pundits to get over their fantasy that white evangelicals will someday grow a conscience, stop voting for Republicans, and start voting for the ostensible Christian values of charity and love. This contradiction, between the supposed white evangelical commitment to morality and their tendency to vote for politicians who snatch food from the hungry and wreck the planet for future generations, has long bedeviled many political observers. But this collision between stated values and actual values grew even more ridiculous when white evangelicals flocked to chronic adulterer Donald Trump, despite spending decades piously declaring that they had to vote Republican because of their views on sexual morality and marriage. Despite all the hype, exit polling now indicates that 75 percent of self-identified white evangelicals voted Republican in 2018, while only 22 percent voted for Democrats. Yes, that undeniably represents a shift from 2016, when 80 percent voted for Trump and only 16 percent for Hillary Clinton, but it’s a pretty underwhelming shift in the face of all this hype. Nor were these voters so disheartened that they stayed home. White evangelicals had high turnout this year, and those Republicans who held onto their seats, or won Senate races in red states, owe that bloc for their victories.
Going into 2018, we were once again subject to the hope that white evangelicals — especially younger folks and women — would be disgusted after two years of Trump’s corruption and brazen immorality. This hope led, unfortunately, to misleading articles that used anecdotal evidence to suggest that a significant number of conservative Christians would turn against Republicans at the polls. The New York Times was especially invested in this idea that there was likely to be a major shift in the voting behavior of self-identified white evangelicals. “Young evangelicals are questioning the typical ties between evangelicalism and Republican politics,” Elizabeth Dias wrote in the New York Times before the election. Research shows that the real trend is not in young white evangelicals who choose to stay in their churches but leave the Republican Party. Instead, the trend is young white evangelicals leaving the church altogether, and often leaving the GOP at the same time. Research shows a “backlash effect,” in which the more the religious right gets involved in politics, the more younger congregants are likely to throw in the towel and leave both the church and conservative politics behind. The number of white evangelicals is shrinking, while the number of religiously disaffiliated people is growing. This suggesting that many people are simply quitting organized religion altogether, even if they may maintain some private spiritual practice or beliefs. The upside of this is that young people who leave the church are far more likely to end up voting for Democrats.
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