Opinion

Days before the 2016 election, candidate Donald Trump stood before a throng of ecstatic followers and said, "I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win." Indeed he did pull out a narrow electoral victory, even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. There was plenty of carping. There were street protests. But nobody stormed the U.S. Capitol or enlisted Democratic officials in various states to sign fraudulent elector statements in the hopes of getting Congress to overturn the result in defiance of the Constitution. Clinton conceded the next day, although no one's pretending she was happy about it. Democrats grumbled about the antiquated system that elected the last two Republican presidents with a minority of the popular vote, but everyone moved on.

There's no need to recapitulate what happened in 2020. We are all too aware of it, mostly because Trump and his allies won't let anyone forget it. He made it clear from the beginning that it was simply not possible for him to lose and now we can see that he's convinced a large number of candidates for office, as well as their voters, that it holds true for them too. The Big Lie is alive and well.

America's democracy crisis will not end anytime soon. Donald Trump and his acolytes in the Republican-fascist party continue to incite acts of right-wing violence, including terrorism, on a nationwide scale as part of their plan to end American democracy and replace it with authoritarianism and one-party rule.

The Big Lie continues to spread across the United States. A majority of Republicans now subscribe to the repeatedly disproven theory that the 2020 Election was somehow illegitimate, that Trump is the "real" president and Joe Biden is a pretender and usurper. "MAGA" is American neofascism; it has fully conquered the Republican Party.

I voted for Donald Trump four times and Ron DeSantis twice, counting Republican primaries and general elections. I used to be an in-demand political pundit for Republican/conservative media; my work and writing appeared on sites and radio shows listened to or read by millions of Americans: Fox News, the Federalist, Real Clear Politics and elsewhere. I had frequent public speaking engagements. I was writing the obligatory hyper-partisan, fire-breathing book that was expected of somebody in my position. It was going to get me my own prime-time TV opinion show and professional podcast. I had a publisher interested in my manuscript.

This article first appeared in Salon.

As I spoke with historian and journalist Phyllis Vine, I kept thinking of Howard Zinn.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Get ready. If you’re a Democratic voter, there’s a chance you’ll show up to vote this November and discover you can’t because you’re no longer registered. Millions will be blindsided this way, and it could turn elections toward Republicans across the nation.

America hates GOP policies of banning abortion, gifting the morbidly rich with trillions in tax cuts, denying climate change and blocking any remedies to it, and filling our cities with guns. So, Republicans know, the only way they can win in many places is to simply prevent people from voting.

It is often said that history is a story told by the winners. It might be more accurate to say that those who tell their story as history and get others to believe it thereby make themselves the winners. That happened on a grand scale in the United States from the late 19th century into the 1960s. That fact is essential for us to understand as right-wing extremists again seek to dictate that a fraudulent version of the American past be taught in schools.

This article first appeared in Salon.

If you just count the number of cellphones seized over the past few months from Trump cronies, you would have to conclude he's in deep doo-doo. Trump is known for eschewing emails and texts — and fuhgeddaboudit when it comes to putting his name on actual sheets of paper, unless they're executive orders banning Muslims and ripping immigrant children from the arms of their mothers.

Trump is a phone guy, and his favorite thing to do as president was to get on the phone and swap gossip and plot with his close associates. One of them was My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell, a frequent visitor to the Trump White House and a longtime supporter. Lindell's cellphone was seized by the FBI on Wednesday. Lindell appeared at Trump's Jan. 6, 2021, rally on the Ellipse and has been used regularly this year to warm up crowds at Trump rallies in Illinois, Florida, Arizona and other states. Lindell's phone was taken as part of a DOJ probe into the theft of voting data and voting machines in several states, including Michigan, Georgia and Colorado. Lindell published private voter data stolen from a voting machine in Colorado on his website, Frank Speech.

For months, Republican governors eager to get a piece of Donald Trump's ability to get attention through race-baiting have engaged in a bizarre and dehumanizing stunt: Sending busloads of often deeply confused refugees to places perceived as "liberal enclaves." Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sent buses of immigrants to Washington D.C. and New York City, claiming that he's somehow exposing the hypocrisy of Democratic leaders who have said immigrants are welcome. In April, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans to use taxpayer funds to bus migrants to blue states, saying, "if you sent them to Delaware or Martha's Vineyard or some of these places, that border would be secure the next day."

The ugly troll leveled up this week, when DeSantis did just that, chartering planes to Martha's Vineyard carrying about 50 people who recently arrived from Colombia and Venezuela. Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, is known as a vacation spot for wealthy East Coast types. It's clear DeSantis was hoping to elicit an outraged reaction from residents that would "prove" his point about blue state liberals. That ended up backfiring, as the migrants received a warm welcome instead of a hostile reaction. As Heather "Digby" Parton wrote at Salon, the locals at Martha's Vineyard offered "the new arrivals food and shelter, along with legal advice and emotional support." Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., responded by tweeting that "Massachusetts is fully capable of handling asylum seekers." It was soon revealed that the refugees had been recruited to get on the planes with lies about how they were going to Boston to find jobs.

Originally published by The 19th

Senate Republicans quickly distanced themselves from a national abortion ban introduced Tuesday by South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. The bill, which seems unlikely to become law, would ban abortions across the country for people beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy.

There were so many scandals during the Trump years that it's hard to remember all. Some stand out, of course, like his blatant obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation and his attempted extortion against the Ukrainian government in hopes of smearing Joe Biden. And of course Trump went out with a bang, attempting a coup and inciting an insurrection. Those things got him impeached — and may end up getting him indicted. But there was so much more.

You certainly recall the horrific family separation policy at the border, which caused an international outcry and was finally reversed under pressure. Trump eventually did build segments of his silly wall, but did not get the sharp spikes on top or the alligator moat, ideas he actually raised at various points. He asked whether the Border Patrol or National Guard could shoot undocumented immigrants at border crossings (OK, maybe just in the leg) and he campaigned on the idea of reviving the hideous 1950s policy "Operation Wetback," which rounded up immigrants (and sometimes U.S. citizens as well) and dropped them off in the Mexican desert with no food, water or money. Luckily, American law has evolved enough to prevent such inhumane practices, which I'm sure disappointed him. (These days he's proposing a similar approach with unhoused citizens in American cities, so the idea has stuck with him.)