Tag MAGA

Our elections ARE at risk, if you know who gets his way

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The most surprised I ever was about anything in my life was the day I watched on television as thousands of members of MAGA world rioted at the U.S. Capitol, physically assaulted the law officers on duty there and tried to illegally interfere with the peaceful transfer of presidential power, because they believed Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.  Ultimately they only delayed the work of Congress, and the fact that the criminal convictions of more than 1200 people for their actions that day were erased by TFG’s clemency doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; it did, and we all saw it.  He hasn’t stopped lying about that ever since; he’s now laying the groundwork to easily steal the next election.

Earlier this month the president repeated a call for the Republican Party to nationalize federal elections.  Despite the Constitutional provision that elections for federal office are to be run by the states (or perhaps just ignoring the Constitutional direction, as he often does), Trump appeared on a podcast and said he “believed the federal government should ‘get involved’ in elections that are riddled with ‘corruption,’ reiterating his position that the federal government should usurp state laws by exerting control over local elections.”  You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the places he believes to be “riddled with corruption” are places where Democrats do well.  Only  places where Democrats do well.

Mr. Trump’s comments and an intensifying Republican push in Congress to tighten voting laws — along with an F.B.I. move last week to seize ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election center in Fulton County, Ga., — suggests a broader drive by the president and his allies to sow distrust of American elections ahead of midterm balloting in November.

Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly forecast in recent months that Republicans would lose midterms, after the party was rattled by losing several local races last November, and a Democrat won a special election in Texas last week in a district that Mr. Trump had won by double digits.

Voting by noncitizens happens rarely, and it is already illegal in federal elections. But Mr. Trump and many of his allies repeatedly and baselessly insisted during the 2024 election that noncitizens were flooding to the polls — a campaign of misinformation that has ramped up in recent weeks as the election nears.

The Justice Department, which has been newly politicized under Mr. Trump, is demanding that numerous states, including Minnesota, turn over their full voter rolls as the Trump administration tries to build a national voter file.

You’ve got to give the Trumpers credit for being better organized about election rigging this time around: his new director of election security and integrity, “with the power to refer criminal investigations…into things that have been thoroughly debunked,” is “Kurt Olsen, a rather prominent character in Mr. Trump’s election denialism movement. Mr. Olsen, who is a lawyer, was considered by people in the first Trump administration to be a fringe menace.”  Fox, meet henhouse.  (No, not that Fox.)

No matter how many times the results of the 2020 election have been rehashed, Mr. Trump’s fixations have not abated. Mr. Olsen’s position is proof of that.

But he is not the only one. The president has installed proponents of his fraud claims all across his administration. And increasingly, he has started to cast doubts on the coming midterm elections as Republicans face potentially big losses in November.

(snip)

“Kurt Olsen has a history of abusing his law license to spread lies about our elections,” said Christine P. Sun, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works with state officials to bolster confidence in their elections. “Now, he’s using his role in the administration and the power of the federal government to take actions fueled by those same lies. It’s part of a multipronged approach that threatens state power over our elections.”

Mr. Olsen has said he began his career in the 1990s at the large corporate Washington firm Kirkland & Ellis. He went to Christmas parties at the home of Jeffrey A. Rosen, a partner in the law firm at the time who would go on to become the acting attorney general during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Olsen has said. Mr. Olsen has said that he never did any election legal work.

During the frantic weeks following the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and others immediately began claiming, without evidence, a wide variety of problems with election machines. Mr. Olsen, too, came to believe that “something was not right,” he said in a legal deposition in 2023.

(snip)

That started him on a path of taking on cases that many other Republican attorneys avoided putting their names on, including one brought before the Supreme Court in December 2020 seeking to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat at the polls. Mr. Olsen has said that the team worked “round the clock” to put the case together.

After the Supreme Court rejected the case, Mr. Olsen said he spoke to Mr. Trump and discussed a strategy to have a similar suit brought by the Justice Department. He also pressed his old colleague Mr. Rosen to bring the case on behalf of the country.

But Mr. Rosen told Mr. Trump in an Oval Office meeting that the case would not be accepted because of a lack of standing. Mr. Trump responded that Mr. Olsen had promised it was a “slam dunk,” according to a report from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Even after Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Olsen continued to press the false claims about election machines. He found a like-minded ally in February 2021 when, according to Mr. Olsen’s testimony, Mr. Trump introduced him to Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, who has become best known for promoting the falsehood that voting machines are often rigged and have flipped elections.

The two worked together for years with a movement of activists and cybersecurity experts around the country to promote conspiracy theories about election machines through lawsuits, media appearances and yearly conferences.

Mr. Lindell was a public face of the movement. With less bombast, Mr. Olsen served as the lawyer for many of the cases, including an attempt to overturn the 2022 election for Arizona governor. Mr. Olsen represented Kari Lake, an election denier who ran failed campaigns for statewide office in Arizona. (She was also rewarded with a role in the new Trump administration, one that allowed her to oversee the firing of most of the journalists at Voice of America.)

Repeatedly, though, Mr. Olsen faced resounding defeats. In Arizona, he was sanctioned in federal court for making false claims. In Georgia, a legal effort on behalf of the DeKalb County Republican Party challenging the state’s use of election machines failed.

Still, the movement’s proponents have survived despite those defeats.

Heather Honey, who was a witness for the unsuccessful lawsuit that Mr. Olsen brought on behalf of Ms. Lake, was given a position in the Department of Homeland Security overseeing election integrity. Marci McCarthy, who was the chairwoman of the DeKalb County Republican Party, now oversees public affairs at the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Clay Parikh, who served as an expert witness for Mr. Olsen in his cases in both Georgia and Arizona, is now a special government employee whose analysis was relied on in the F.B.I.’s Fulton County investigation, according to the affidavit.

And not least is Mr. Trump himself — the man who keeps trying to rewrite the country’s past and is now in charge of its future.

An important point to acknowledge here is that there may be  good reasons to have the federal government involved in running elections.  In a 2012 book UCLA law professor Richard Hasen argued that an independent, non-partisan body in charge of national elections “could decrease the amount of partisan fighting and litigation over election rules, increase the competence of election administration, and assure we have a system run with integrity and fair access to voting.”  But one thing has changed his mind…actually, one person:

Donald Trump has caused me to abandon this argument. As I wrote in the New York Times last summer, when the president tried to impose his authority over various aspects of American elections via an executive order: “What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles.”  At this point, American democracy is too weak and fragile to have centralized power over elections in the hands of a federal government that could be coerced or coopted by a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion. [emphasis added]  Courts have ruled that parts of Trump’s executive order are unconstitutional because the president has no role to play in the administration of elections.

Trump’s comments on nationalizing elections ironically prove the point that we should not nationalize elections. He apparently wants to target the administration at blue states, doing who-knows-what to make it harder for people to vote for Democrats. He desperately fears a Congress controlled by Democrats that could check his and his administration’s power. As he did in 2020, when he unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the results of the fair presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden, Trump hangs it all on voter fraud. His comments to [Dan] Bongino about noncitizens voting, just like his comments about mail-in balloting, show Trump as either a liar or delusional. The amount of election fraud of this type is extremely rare. We know it because states, including red ones like Georgia—where Trump’s administration recently raided election offices in a serious threat to the 2026 vote—have gone hunting for fraud and found very little.

(snip)

We should now look to states to step up the competence, integrity, and accessibility of their election systems. They serve as the front line against election subversion. Diffusion of power in the states makes it much harder for Trump to mess with the midterm elections. Whether or not the Framers intended it, our messy, decentralized, partly partisan, uneven system of administering elections turns out to be the best bulwark against would-be authoritarian presidents.

This is another example of an overworked Trump trick: telling lies to “create” a problem where none exists (massive election fraud) so he can suggest a “solution” (nationalizing elections) that would allow him to benefit…himself, in this case, to take official, legal control of elections so he can dictate the results.  If it works in the 2026 midterms – helping Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate – what might happen in the 2028 general election?

He’s daring us to stop him.

Another MAGA voice stands athwart history yelling Stop

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

From the midst of the gray cloud of politics and presidents, I found one brightly-colored flower this week.

Without getting into the gory details (again), my millimeter-deep analysis of how our president has done the job this year, and how he has upheld his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, is: this is even worse than the first term, right?  This Administration’s incessant lying, the historic self-dealing, the deliberate ignoring of – and demeaning of – the rule of law, the racism and cruelty, and the blatant and thorough obsequiousness of their apparently contractual requirement to overpraise Dear Leader at every turn fight against the flicker of hope I nurture that things will get better.  I think they will: doesn’t matter if our next president is a conservative – or even a MAGA Christian nationalist – things will have to be better once this man-baby leaves office, and when the U.S. House and Senate members of his party once again take seriously their responsibility for checks and balances on the co-equal Executive branch of our government.  Last month I wrote in praise when some of them seemed to be starting to do just that.   Now, here’s another one.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, “is widely considered to be a populist and far-right politician.”

Greene has promoted Islamophobic, antisemitic, and white supremacist views including the white genocide conspiracy theory, as well as QAnon, and Pizzagate. She has amplified conspiracy theories that allege government involvement in mass shootings in the United States, implicate the Clinton family in murder, and suggest the attacks of 9/11 were a hoax. Before running for Congress, Greene supported calls to execute prominent Democratic Party politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. As a congresswoman, she equated the Democratic Party with Nazis, and compared COVID-19 safety measures to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, later apologizing for this comparison. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Greene promoted Russian propaganda and praised its president Vladimir Putin. Greene identifies as a Christian nationalist.

So, yeah, a princess of MAGA America and an unflinching supporter of TFG.  Until suddenly she wasn’t anymore, and announced her resignation from Congress only halfway through her current term.  Can we get to the bottom of this huuuge change?

Yes, we can, thanks to Robert Draper in the New York Times Magazine this week.  The long-time magazine journalist (and long ago acquaintance of mine from the high school debate circuit in Houston) has a handy summary accompanying his full story this week; those free links are my gift to you.

When Marjorie Taylor Greene proclaimed in early 2021 that the Republican Party “belonged” to Donald Trump, I thought she sounded nuts. Not only did she turn out to be prescient, but the newly elected congresswoman also became a rising star in the MAGA ecosystem — and one of Trump’s most visible cheerleaders. To understand that ecosystem it was essential to understand this figure at the heart of it, so in 2022, I went to her hometown, Rome, Ga., to meet her, when the congresswoman, a prolific user of the term “fake news media,” had never spoken with a Times reporter before.

I have regularly interviewed Greene since then, and sat down with her in December for two lengthy interviews — in which she was remarkably reflective and forthcoming — after a spectacular break from the president, who called her a “traitor,” and her subsequent announcement that she would resign her House seat in January. “There’s a significant reason why women overwhelmingly don’t vote Republican,” she told me. “I think there’s a very big message here.” These interviews offer a window into Greene’s political journey — and the future of the movement she has long called her own.

Please take a few minutes to read the full story for the details behind what Draper calls the highlights:

–“Trump’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial was a clarifying moment for Greene”

“Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong. You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what. And as a Christian, I don’t believe in doing that. I agree with Erika Kirk, who did the hardest thing possible and said it out loud.”

–“Greene’s demands to release the Epstein files seemed to be the last straw for Trump”

After the hearing [with some Epstein victims], Greene held a news conference and threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women — names she says she didn’t know but could have gotten from the victims. Trump called Greene and yelled at her as she listened on speakerphone; the angered president was so loud that staff members throughout her Capitol office’s suite of rooms could hear him. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his resistance. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

–“Her disillusionment with Trump goes beyond the Epstein files”

Greene told me that she once believed that Trump wanted to help ordinary people but has since been disillusioned by his actions and statements on issues that include tariffs and Gaza. “I was so naïve,” she said.

Greene’s last exchange with the president was by text message on Nov. 16. That day, she received an anonymous email threatening her college-aged son: “Derek will have his life snuffed out soon. Better watch his back.” The email’s subject heading used the nickname Trump had given her the day before: “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

Greene texted that information to the president. According to a source familiar with the exchange, his long reply made no mention of her son. Instead, Trump insulted her in personal terms. When she replied that children should remain off-limits from their disagreements, Trump responded that she had only herself to blame. Greene texted a senior administration official that Trump had endangered her family.

–“Greene said she was wrong for accusing Democrats of treason in the past”

[On] Nov. 16, Greene appeared on the CNN program “State of the Union,” co-hosted by Dana Bash. The congresswoman was uncharacteristically somber, describing the threats she received. Bash referred to a recent post by Greene on X saying that Trump had unleashed a “hotbed of threats” against her. The CNN host then pointed out the long history of Trump’s attacks on others. “And with respect,” Bash said, “I haven’t heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you.”

“Dana, I think that’s fair criticism,” Greene replied. “And I would like to say, humbly, I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics.”

I asked Greene in December to specify what she was referring to. There was a manifestly pugnacious side to her, I said, and I referred her to the period when, just before running for office, she was a far-right social media influencer practicing what she called “confrontational politics.” She harassed the 18-year-old gun-control activist David Hogg on the street and roamed the halls of Congress, writing “You’re a traitor” in the guest book outside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office and barging into Pelosi’s office to chant “Lock her up!” “We were terrifying everyone,” she boasted at the time in a video she posted on Facebook. And she went further, posting more videos that called Pelosi a “traitor” who deserved to either face prison or “suffer death.”

Was that the toxic politics she meant? “Yeah!” she exclaimed. “I was an angry citizen. An angry American.” She thought, she continued, that “Americans have to go through all this crap, constantly being lied to.” She went on: “And when I got here to Congress, I was attacked relentlessly and was enduring real pain in my personal life” — referring to her father’s brain cancer, which proved fatal, followed by the dissolution of her marriage. “And my emotions were just really raw.”

“And so, when you were apologizing about your role in the toxic politics,” I asked, “you were thinking about the times when your anger got the better of you, like the stuff about A.O.C. and Pelosi?”

“Yeah!” she exclaimed again. “Because a Christian shouldn’t be that way. And I’m a Christian.”

I again urge you to read the full story.  In it, Draper does a great job of making more of a full human being out of the caricature that most of us see, and provides us detail and context to another story of cracks in the seemingly solid MAGA wall around TFG.  It’s another piece of evidence that, for some members of MAGA America, it is possible for you-know-who to go too far, to lead his followers where some of them, in good conscience, can not go.

Dear 1A,

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

I appreciate your coverage of the current redistricting fight in the Texas Legislature, another example of the on-going threat to democracy in my state and the rest of the U.S.  (There are so many threats to choose from, as you’ve demonstrated with your “If You Can Keep It” series!)  But your recorded interview with Texas state Representative Brian Harrison during your Aug. 11 program honestly made me shout at my radio.

To Jenn White’s follow-up question about Harrison’s position on the arrest warrants issued for the Democrats who left the state to deny the Republican majority a quorum to do any business in the state House, he unexpectedly blasted the GOP establishment.  From your online transcript at 00:18:46:

…if elected Republican leadership in Texas had been bolder or actually wanted to stop it, they had all the tools available to stop it, before they left or to have arrested them before they left the state.  [emphasis added]

FOR WHAT!?

At first I was just surprised that this political remora was paying so little attention to the circumstance of his interview that, as we now say so often, he said the quiet part out loud — we should just have arrested them because we knew they were going to oppose what we wanted to do.  No assertion of any kind that they had committed a crime that should lead to their arrests; just “we should have locked them up because it suited our purposes.”

A moment later I was more surprised that the interviewer let him get away with it.  I understand that this was a recorded interview dropped into the broadcast, but when it was still an interview in progress this assertion screamed for a follow-up: arrested for what?  The audacity to not follow Trump’s and Abbott’s orders?  No doubt he would have mumble/blurted the nonsense du jour from the MAGA talking points, but at least he would have been made to scramble for a minute.  And maybe that would have been the opportunity for the light bulb to go off above the head of some of your listeners.

As luck would have it, today I was catching up on the July 2025 issue of Texas Monthly magazine and its coverage of the just-concluded regular session of our state legislature, and I found out more about Rep. Harrison than I knew, and I’ll bet more than you knew, too.  You may have assumed he was, well, “representative” of the Texas GOP in the legislature, but that isn’t the case:

[Harrison] passed no bills and made about as many friends. But he forged something rare and inspiring in the House: bipartisan consensus. Most everyone agreed that Brian Harrison is unbearable.

As such, he is the successor to former state Representatives Jonathan Stickland and Bryan Slaton, past winners of our honorary title of “cockroach,” an old Lege term for a figure who mucks up lawmaking the same way vermin sully a kitchen. Even compared with the antics of his bomb-throwing predecessors, Harrison’s behavior was uniquely tailored to the X feeds of the Texas GOP’s most conspiratorial far-right voters.

Please click the link above for several examples of Harrison at work (sadly).

Thanks for your program and its thoughtful coverage of important issues we face in this historic era.

Petard, hoist away

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity.

Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, April 28, 2025

We can disagree about the goals of any president. In the before times, we all had some point of departure with what every president wanted to do. It was expected, frankly: any honest observer of and thinker about political issues disagreed with the current administration on something, even when it was a president you had voted for (or even a president you worked for!). That’s one reason why the slavish, Stepford Wives-ish acceptance of every grunt and string of incipid cliches out of TFG by MAGA nation is so hard for me to accept.

But whether or not we agree with the goals of a president, or the means by which he or she tries to accomplish them, we all should demand a president who respects the Constitution and the laws and who doesn’t make things worse while trying to implement his plans. And, as is the case with this president, is not blatantly using his office to enrich himself in so many ways “like you’ve never seen before.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank makes a strong case that “Across the executive branch, in agency after agency, it’s amateur hour under the Trump administration.” The unnerving of the world economy; the chaos at the Pentagon; the threat to Harvard that was sent by mistake; the deportation that was a mistake but we’re powerless to correct it so shut up you federal judges; the firing of thousands of government workers with no plan to pick up the workload — all these and more, and the cruelty inherent in so much of it, have made the whole world nervous about what he might do next.

And let’s not forget the hypocrisy so prominently displayed but never acknowledged at almost every step. Most obvious, at least to me, is the mountain of executive orders. Has this president even tried to get Congress to pass laws to do what he wants? (A Congress he controls, by the way.) I don’t think so. Many self-described conservatives have for years railed any time a Democratic executive implements policies through executive order, screaming about the abuse of power. In this case, both before and during his first term of office, the man who threw a clot over Barack Obama’s use of executive orders

“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”

has proudly done the same thing, but to a greater extent: Fox News reports (yes, that Fox News) that Trump has signed 135 executive orders so far in his second term, smashing the previous record of 99 by Franklin Roosevelt as he began implementing the New Deal. Trump doesn’t want to govern America, he wants to rule it. He wants to issue orders, edicts, diktats, whims-on-paper, and have his wishes carried out…no need to bother the Legislative Branch. (Don’t get me started on Congress’ abdication of its responsibilities.)

Will we get to a point where those who’ve drunk Trump’s Kool-Aid start to see the real world? Maybe: current polling indicates Trump’s approval rating at the end of his first 100 days — 39% — is lower than any president in 80 years, even beating his own record from 2017. Strong majorities believe his economic policies will cause a recession soon, that his administration is trying to avoid complying with court orders, doesn’t respect the rule of law and is going too far to expand presidential powers. As should be expected, “83% of Republicans said they approve of Trump’s work in office, while 93% of Democrats and 60% of independents said they disapprove.” Also to be expected, Trump’s reaction to his poor showing in the polls is to…call for an investigation of the pollsters for election fraud. (Election fraud? There’s no election.) Remember, nothing bad is ever his fault, there’s always some bad person trying to hurt him. So unfair.

What are we to do? Well, you know me — always looking for the positive. I found some in this column in The Guardian in which the foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall expresses confidence that Trump will fall victim to himself. (Remember: “I alone can fix it.”)

Policy failures and personal misconduct do not usually collapse a presidency. The US constitution is inflexible: incompetence is protected; cupidity has a fixed term. Trump is in power until 2029 unless impeached – third time lucky? – for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, or else deemed unfit under section 4 of the 25th amendment.

(snip)

This fight has moral and ethical aspects, too – and, given this is the US, prayer is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who would slay evil-doers. Of the seven deadly sins – vainglory or pride, greed or covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth – Trump is comprehensively, mortally guilty. In Isaiah (13,11), the Lord gives fair warning: “I will put an end to the pride of the arrogant and humiliate the insolence of tyrants.” God knows, maybe he’ll listen. Miracles do happen.

Of all the tools in the tyrant-toppling toolbox, none are so potentially decisive as those supplied by Trump’s own stupidity. Most people understand how worthless a surrender monkey “peace deal” is that rewards Putin and betrays Ukraine. Does Trump seriously believe his support for mass murder in Gaza, threats to attack Iran and reckless bombing of Yemen will end the Middle East conflict and win him a Nobel peace prize?

And then there’s his greed – the blatant, shameless money-grubbing that has already brought accusations of insider trading, oligarchic kleptocracy, and myriad conflicts of interest unpoliced by the 17 government oversight watchdogs Trump capriciously fired. His relatives and businesses are again pursuing foreign sweetheart deals. Corruption on this scale cannot pass unchallenged indefinitely. Avarice alone may be Trump’s undoing.

All this points to one conclusion: as a tyrant, let alone as president, Trump is actually pretty useless – and as his failures, frustrations and fantasies multiply, he will grow ever more dangerously unstable. Trump’s biggest enemy is Trump. Those who would save the US and themselves – at home and abroad – must employ all democratic means to contain, deter, defang and depose him. But right now, the best, brightest hope is that, drowning in hubris, Trump will destroy himself.

So keep a good thought. Meanwhile, we’ll have to put up with one of the most annoying aspects of anything that has to do with you know who: his insistence on being the center of attention in all things. As Tomasky puts it today in The New Republic:

Even the gross incompetencies take us into treacherous territory because they contribute to making this all about one man, the man who must be in front of the cameras every day. He doesn’t have policies so much as he has urges, which he must announce to the world on a constant basis in a desperate plea that we keep him front of mind at all times. Some of those urges are cruel; some of them are a joke. What unites them is that they make the story entirely about him.

That is not how it’s supposed to work in democracies. Which we still are, for now, as we reach this 100-day mark. Only 1,361 to go.