This Trump trick should have damned the GOP long ago

Trump is an illegitimate president, but he’s not the first. The last Republican who was elected president without fraud or naked treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And it’s damn well past time that Democrats started telling the story.

But let’s start with Trump, and then go to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

The investigative reporter Greg Palast recently did the math, and it’s now irrefutable: the only reason Trump is in the White House is because over 4 million Americans were either denied their right to vote or their votes were discarded.

The US Elections Assistance Commission data tells the damning story: a staggering 4.7 million voters were wrongfully purged from voter rolls before the election. By August 2024, self-proclaimed “vigilante” vote fraud hunters had challenged the eligibility of 317,886 voters across multiple states. When Election Day arrived, the Georgia NAACP estimated challenges had exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.

This wasn’t just a few isolated incidents. It was a coordinated national strategy:

• Over 2.1 million mail-in ballots disqualified for minor clerical errors
• 585,000 in-person ballots thrown out
• 1.2 million “provisional” (what I call “placebo”) ballots rejected without being counted
• 3.2 million new voter registrations rejected or not processed in time

But here’s the kicker that the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you: these rejections weren’t random. A state audit in Washington found Black voters were four times more likely than white voters to have their mail-in ballots rejected.And that pattern repeated nationwide. In Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia, analyses showed that officials flagged Black voters’ mail ballots at more than twice the rate of white voters’ ballots.

The KKK Playbook, Updated for the Digital Age

Georgia became the test kitchen for the new Jim Crow cooking, with Gov. Brian Kemp as head chef. First, they used what Palast calls “Poison Postcards”: sending official-looking mail to targeted voters. When people (especially young, poor, and minority voters) didn’t return these postcards that looked like junk mail, they were purged from voter rolls. In Georgia, the response rate to these cards was barely above 1%.

Then came the “vigilante” challenges. In 2020, my old friend Greg uncovered a scheme where Republican operatives challenged the voting eligibility of 180,000 Georgians. Deeper investigation revealed this tactic was based on a program first deployed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1946. For 2024, the Georgia legislature changed state law to make it nearly impossible for election officials to deny these challenges, and the program went nationwide.

By August 2024, True the Vote and similar organizations had signed up 40,000 volunteer “vigilantes” who challenged nearly a million Democratic voters. A documentary film shows one Republican official, Pam Reardon, who personally challenged over 32,000 voters. When asked if she had verified any of the challenges, she admitted on camera, “I can’t go through 32,000 people. I was handed the list by True the Vote.”

The Mail-In Ballot Attack

Republicans spent four years demonizing mail-in voting after the 2020 election, and it paid off. In Georgia, SB 202 slashed the number of ballot drop boxes by 75% — but only in Black-majority counties — and locked them away at night.These moves reduced mail-in and drop-box balloting (used by the majority of Democrats in 2020) by nearly 90%.

The attacks on mail ballots were particularly devastating because research consistently shows racial disparities in rejection rates. In North Carolina, multiple analyses found Black voters’ mail ballots were rejected at more than twice the rate of white voters’ ballots. In Texas, after new ID requirements were enacted, the rejection rate jumped from 1.7% to 12% during the March 2022 primary, with minority voters bearing the brunt.

Provisional Ballots: The Ultimate Scam

Perhaps the cruelest trick was the “provisional” ballot, legalized by George W. Bush’s Help America Vote Act. If you showed up to vote and found you’d been challenged or purged, you were offered one of these ballots and told your registration would be checked. What they didn’t tell you is that unless you personally went to your county clerk’s office with ID and proof of address afterward, your ballot was likely trashed.

According to the US Elections Assistance Commission, in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast nationwide, a breathtaking 42.3% were never counted. And Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters — Democratic constituencies — were 300% more likely than white voters to be shunted to these “placebo” ballots.

The Deadly Math

When we apply the most conservative calculation to these numbers, the suppression factor in 2024 was at least 2.3% of the vote. That translates to approximately 3,565,000 votes that could have gone to Kamala Harris. With those ballots properly counted, she would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million and won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College with 286 votes.

This isn’t speculative: it’s the cold, hard math based on documented evidence. And it’s exactly what Republican officials designed their laws to do. As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton proudly stated on Steve Bannon’s podcast after blocking Houston from sending mail ballots during COVID, “Had we not done that, Donald Trump would’ve lost the [Texas] election.”

Nixon’s treason to win the 1968 election

This Republican tradition of stealing presidential elections through fraud or treason started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then (just like Reagan would later do with the Iranians).

The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s US agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.
Sen. Dirksen: I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional 22,000 American soldiers and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate American soldiers.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason. He pardoned Nixon.

Next up for treasonous election interference was Ronald Reagan

The New York Times published a bombshell report — which sadly only became a one-day story — that former Texas Speaker of the House of Representatives and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes has confirmed that he and former Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally told the Iranians in 1980s if they held onto the American hostages until after the election, they’d be rewarded by Reagan with weapons and spare parts.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Jimmy Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the 52 hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.

This is the story that was finally confirmed with The New York Times’ reporting, so we now know how the deal was conveyed to the Ayatollah and by whom.

This was the second act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages.

As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran Contra” scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

George HW Bush covers up his and Reagan’s deal with the Iranians

After Reagan, Bush senior was elected but, like Jerry Ford, Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped boost him into office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Caspar Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation, which Bush did.

The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all:

“THE PARDONS; BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”

And if the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

George W Bush’s brother purged 57,000 Black people to make George president

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court and his own brother’s crime against democracy.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount — and thus handed Bush the presidency — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife was paid to work on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election. Thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida that Bush “won” by fewer than 600 votes.

So, for the third time in four decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one and told me, on the air, that Bush had rigged the election in Florida. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.*

Bush lies us into war to get re-elected

To get re-elected in 2004, Bush used an old trick: become a “wartime president.” In 1999, when George W. Bush’s family decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his parents hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little three-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected and have a two-term presidency.

“I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”

Bush lying us into that war was a moral act of treason against America that cost 900,000 Iraqi lives, over 4,000 American lives (on the battlefield: veterans are still committing suicide daily), and over $8 trillion added to the national debt.

Which brings us to Trump’s first election in 2016

In 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican secretaries of state across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Hillary Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

It was so blatant that it provoked the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of their similar actions during the 2020 election (done while Trump was still president but released in March, 2021) pretty much declaring him a “Russian asset.”

It was a repeat, in many ways (albeit unsuccessful this time) of the Russian efforts in 2016. Then, you’ll remember, Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which people in swing states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

Trump had recently been wounded politically by the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment he’d made on the Access Hollywood videotape, and if the Stormy Daniels affair (just 4 months after Melania had given birth to Barron) had become public Hillary Clinton would have wiped the floor with him.

But he paid Stormy off to keep quiet, a check delivered by Michael Cohen who was then sentenced to three years in prison (and served one) for corruptly violating campaign finance and tax laws with that check to help Trump get into the White House.

Donald Trump still lost the national vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power in 2016 through the electoral college loophole designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.

If the news about Stormy Daniels had gotten out in the weeks before the election (it didn’t come out for another two years), there never would have been a January 6; 400,000 Americans wouldn’t have died unnecessarily from Covid; Iran would still be in compliance with the nuclear deal; Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine; and our country wouldn’t have given the morbidly rich another $2 trillion in tax cuts while gutting the social safety net.

One can only wonder how much better off America would be if six Republican Presidents hadn’t stolen or inherited a stolen White House and used it to put rightwing cranks on the Supreme Court and other federal benches while cutting taxes on the morbidly rich (creating a $34 trillion national debt), destroying unions, and offshoring over 50,000 factories and 25 million good-paying union jobs.

America has ignored GOP crimes to seize and hold the White House long enough. The immunity Ford gave Nixon has echoed down through the decades, leading to a packed Supreme Court that gave new immunity to Trump and two unnecessary and illegal wars (not to mention tax cuts for billionaires that have gutted our middle class).

It’s time, at long last, to tell America the true story of Republican electoral crimes.

*For more detail, this is extensively documented and footnoted in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

**This is covered in depth in my book The Hidden History of the War On Voting.