All posts tagged "george w bush"

Four presidents have tried Trump's favorite hardline tactic. It doesn't work

By Kevin Johnson, Dean and Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Davis.

All modern U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have attempted to reduce the population of millions of undocumented immigrants. But their various strategies have not had significant results, with the population hovering around 11 million from 2005 to 2022.

President Donald Trump seeks to change that.

With harsh rhetoric that has sowed fear in immigrant communities, and policies that ignore immigrants’ due process rights, Trump has pursued deportation tactics that differ dramatically from those of any other modern U.S. president.

As a scholar who examines the history of U.S. immigration law and enforcement, I believe that it remains far from clear whether the Trump White House will significantly reduce the undocumented population. But even if the administration’s efforts fail, the fear and damage to the U.S. immigrant community will remain.

Bush and Obama

To increase deportations, in 2006 President George W. Bush began using workplace raids. Among these sweeps was the then-largest immigration workplace operation in U.S. history at a meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa in 2008.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deployed 900 agents in Postville and arrested 398 employees, 98% of whom were Latino. They were chained together and arraigned in groups of 10 for felony criminal charges of aggravated identity theft, document fraud and use of stolen Social Security numbers. Some 300 were convicted, and 297 of them served jail sentences before being deported.

In 2008, Bush also initiated Secure Communities, a policy that sought to deport noncitizens — both lawful permanent residents as well as undocumented immigrants — who had been arrested for crimes. Some 2 million immigrants were deported during Bush’s two terms in office.

The Obama administration limited Secure Communities to focus on the removal of noncitizens convicted of felonies. It deported a record 400,000 noncitizens in fiscal year 2013, which led detractors to refer to President Barack Obama as the “Deporter in Chief.”

Obama also targeted recent entrants and national security threats and pursued criminal prosecutions for illegal reentry to the U.S. Almost all of these policies built on Bush’s, although Obama virtually abandoned workplace raids.

Despite these enforcement measures, Obama also initiated Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2012. The policy provided relief from deportation and gave work authorization to more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.

Obama deported about 3 million noncitizens, but the size of the undocumented population did not decrease dramatically.

Trump and Biden

Trump’s first administration broke new immigration enforcement ground in several ways.

He began his presidency by issuing what was called a “Muslim ban” to restrict the entry into the U.S. of noncitizens from predominantly Muslim nations.

Early in Trump’s first administration, federal agents expanded immigration operations to include raids at courthouses, which previously had been off-limits.

In 2017, Trump tried to rescind DACA, but the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s effort in 2020.

In 2019, Trump implemented the Remain in Mexico policy that for the first time forced noncitizens who came to the U.S. border seeking asylum to wait in Mexico while their claims were being decided. He also invoked Title 42 in 2020 to close U.S. borders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump succeeded in reducing legal immigration numbers during his first term. However, there is no evidence that his enforcement policies reduced the size of the overall undocumented population.

President Joe Biden sought to relax — although not abandon — some immigration enforcement measures implemented during Trump’s first term.

His administration slowed construction of the border wall championed by Trump. Biden also stopped workplace raids in 2021, and in 2023, he ended Title 42.

In 2023, Biden sought to respond to migration surges in a measured fashion, by temporarily closing ports of entry and increasing arrests.

In attempting to enforce the borders, his administration at times pursued tough measures. Biden continued deportation efforts directed at criminal noncitizens. Immigrant rights groups criticized his administration when armed Border Patrol officers on horseback were videotaped chasing Haitian migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

As of 2022, the middle of the Biden’s term, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S.

Trump's second chance

Since his second inauguration, Trump has pursued a mass deportation campaign through executive orders that are unprecedented in their scope.

In January 2025, he announced an expanded, expedited removal process for any noncitizen apprehended anywhere in the country — not just the border region, as had been U.S. practice since 1996.

In March, Trump issued a presidential proclamation to deport Venezuelan nationals who were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In doing so, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an act used three times in U.S. history during declared wars that empowers presidents to remove foreign nationals from countries at war with the U.S.

Declaring an “invasion” of migrants into the U.S. in June, Trump deployed the military to assist in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.

Trump also sought to dramatically upend birthright citizenship, the Constitutional provision that guarantees citizenship to any person born in the U.S. He issued an executive order in January that would bar citizenship to people born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.

The birthright executive order has been challenged in federal court and is mostly likely working its way up to the Supreme Court.

Under the second Trump administration, immigration arrests are up, but actual deportation numbers are in flux.

ICE in June arrested the most people in a month in at least five years, roughly 30,000 immigrants. But deportations of noncitizens — roughly 18,000 — lagged behind those during the Obama administration’s record-setting year of 2013 in which more than 400,000 noncitizens were deported.

The gap between arrests and deportations shows the challenges the Trump administration faces in making good on his promised mass deportation campaign.

Undocumented immigrants often come to the U.S. to work or seek safety from natural disasters and mass violence.

These issues have not been seriously addressed by any modern U.S. president. Until it is, we can expect the undocumented population to remain in the millions.

Trump is cornered — and it could be catastrophic

Trump is starting to lose big, from courtrooms to the press increasingly calling him out, to millions of Americans showing up in the streets every few weeks. As anybody who’s ever lived or worked in an autocratic state (I have) can tell you, a strongman or wannabe dictator is most dangerous when he’s on his back foot.

Trump’s tariffs have put America on the verge of a serious inflationary recession, the Supreme Court and multiple lower courts have repeatedly ruled against him, his public approval polling is in the crapper, and even conservative publications and former Republican politicians (free from the strictures of an upcoming primary) are openly calling him out (including in Murdoch publications).

The first lesson they teach in dictator school is that “there must be an enemy within.” Trump embraced this from the first day of his campaign for president when he attacked “Mexican rapists and murderers” he said were “invading” America.

In the years since, his enemies list has grown to include trans students, drag queens, Black protesters, Black legislators, majority-Black “s---hole countries,” teachers, colleges, scientists, public health officials, Democrats, and NATO.

The second is that “big, splashy attacks on the country are excellent opportunities to gain popularity and seize more power.”

Just ask George W. Bush.

After his brother Jeb, then governor of Florida, purged 57,000 Black voters from that state’s voter rolls, George “won” the 2000 election in that state by a mere 537 votes, which was immediately challenged in court by Al Gore's campaign. The state Supreme Court ordered a recount that, according to The New York Times, would have led to a clear Gore victory.

Meanwhile, the story of Jeb’s massive voter purge was being shared around the world by the BBC, as people realized George was an illegitimate president. His poll numbers were about as bad as they could get.

And then came 9/11. The attack on America brought the country together to support the unpopular president, kicking his popularity as measured by Gallup above 90 percent, higher than any other president in the history of polling.

Similarly, after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, then-President Bill Clinton’s approval rating jumped from below 50 percent all the way up into the 80 percent range.

And, while there wasn’t polling at the time, it’s safe to assume the same thing happened to FDR after Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Which is why the following stories, each reported independently but in aggregate reflecting a dangerous trend, are so alarming:

— Although the first two months of 2025 showed a shocking 25 percent increase in terrorism and politically-targeted violent attacks, with an average of 3 attacks a day and more than 400 people murdered by domestic terrorists during the past two years, Trump shut down 24 different projects tracking terrorist threats in the US.
— As Trump is deploying more and more federal law enforcement officers (particularly ICE) and they’re often hiding their identities and faces, he killed off the federal database that tracked federal police misconduct.
— Almost half of the nation’s FBI agents who’d been available to work on counterterrorism efforts have been ordered to drop their investigations and, instead, pursue undocumented aliens.
— The anti-terrorism Center for Prevention Programs in DHS, set up after 9/11 to prevent future terror attacks, has lost 20% of its staff and seen its mission radically scaled back.
— Multiple state-based anti-terrorism programs, funded by DHS, have been gutted or ended entirely.
— The DHS’s Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism Research Center has been shut down altogether.
— The CIA is laying off at least 1,200 positions, many monitoring foreign terroristic threats, “along with thousands more [employees] from other parts of the US intelligence community.”
— Trump’s proposed $545 million cut to the FBI’s budget sparked warnings that such reductions would “cripple core operations, including counterterrorism and intelligence work.”
— Trump defunded the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) program, which since 1996 had trained more than 427,000 law enforcement and justice system practitioners to identify, investigate, and interdict domestic and international terrorism.
— Just last month, Trump terminated 373 different antiterrorism grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, rescinding about $500 million in remaining balances. The cuts affected antiterrorism operations in 37 states.
— Open apologists for Vladimir Putin and authoritarianism in the US are now in charge of our intelligence agencies and FBI.

At the same time, Trump appears to be preparing for the type of authoritarian crackdown Germany saw after the Reichstag fire that propelled Hitler to power in 1933.

His “Strengthening and unleashing America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens” Executive Order explicitly lays the foundation to use our military for law enforcement operations in defiance of the Posse Comitatus laws:

“[T]he Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.”

In 2002, Putin was facing a similar unpopularity problem in Russia; it was solved by “Chechen rebels” seizing a Moscow theater, justifying a massive crackdown that led to a massive series of arrests of dissidents, a year-long bombing campaign, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Chechens. Multiple scholars believe Putin set up the attack himself to rescue his political fortunes.

Strongman leaders are dangerous in general, but they’re particularly dangerous when their grip on popularity and thus power begins to slip.

Trump’s there now, which should put us all on high alert. And, to compound the alarm, he’s firing the people responsible for early warnings and investigations that could prevent another 9/11 or Oklahoma City-style attack.

So, if Trump is doing something similar to what it appears Benjamin Netanyahu did — ignoring multiple warnings that a massive attack was on its way in the hopes the attack will rescue his failing polling numbers and distract people from his multiple alleged crimes — how should America react if/when it happens here?

History has shown us that when autocratic leaders are cornered, they often resort to drastic measures to retain control. As we watch these ominous signs unfold, it’s imperative that we stay vigilant because, just like in other dark chapters of history, the consequences of underestimating a weakened strongman could be catastrophic for democracy itself.

Now more than ever, we must protect the institutions that hold power in check before it’s too late. And prepare ourselves for a sudden, shocking worst-case scenario.

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.

Donald Trump and a portrait of Ronald Reagan Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, with a portrait of Ronald Reagan. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

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.

Donald Trump and Kris Kobach (Screengrab)

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.

'Freaked out' Trump backed off tariff plan after seeing markets tank: MSNBC analyst

President Donald Trump is less concerned about how the American people are faring from his back-and-forth on tariffs than he is on how the stock market is reacting, according to an MSNBC political analyst.

During a Thursday broadcast that aired shortly after Trump reversed course on Mexico tariffs, anchor Chris Jansing asked, "Is there any consideration at all for the people whose lives, livelihoods, jobs, depend on all of this?"

"That seems to be less a consideration than what the markets are doing," answered analyst Elise Jordan, who worked in the George W. Bush White House. "And you had heard so many of Donald Trump's associates and business leaders say that when the markets start to go down, Donald Trump is going to get freaked out and he's going to reverse course. And we're seeing that happen a bit."

Trump announced on social media Thursday morning that he was pausing tariffs on Mexico for one month "as an accommodation, and out of respect for, President Sheinbaum."

ALSO READ: 'Absolutely unconscionable': Ex-Republican demands Trump removed from office after fight

According to The New York Times, "Uncertainty stemming from the Trump administration’s mixed messages on tariffs on the country’s biggest trading partners is weighing on Wall Street," with stock indices continuing to plummet even after Trump's announcement on Mexico.

Jordan claimed Trump's chaotic method of imposing then rescinding tariffs "is just a disgusting exercise in power at the end of the day, to keep everyone around the world on the edge of their seats and living in this uncertainty."

She continued, "It's about more than just, you know, the stock market dropping. It's about people who are living paycheck to paycheck and wondering if they're going to still have a job to pay their rent, and if they're going to have food for their children. And, so, when someone like Donald Trump has ultimate power, we have seen he likes to have this cat and mouse, bait and switch."

Watch the video below or at this link.

'Wow!' Onlookers stunned as Biden 'slyly roasts' Trump during Jimmy Carter funeral

President Joe Biden appeared to throw shade at Donald Trump while eulogizing the late Jimmy Carter at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday.

Biden took to the pulpit to laud Carter's "character" before a congregation of dignitaries, including former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

Biden said that, as a 31-year-old senator, he endorsed Carter's candidacy for the 1976 presidential race.

"It was an endorsement based on what I believe is Jimmy Carter's enduring attribute: character, character, character," Biden said. "Because of that character, I believe is destiny. Destiny in our lives, and, quite frankly, destiny in the life of the nation. It's an accumulation of a million things built on character that leads to a good life and a decent country. Life of purpose, life of meaning. Now, how do we find that good life? What does it look like? What does it take to build character? Do the ends justify the means? Jimmy Carter's friendship taught me, and through his life, taught me, that strength of character is more than title or the power we hold. It's the strength to understand that everyone should be treated with dignity, respect. That everyone -- and I mean everyone, deserves an even shot -- not a guarantee, but just a shot."

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"You know, we have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor. And to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all: the abuse of power. That's not about being perfect, because none of us are perfect. We're all fallible. But it's about asking ourselves, are we striving to do things, the right things? What values? What are the values that animate our spirit. Do we operate from fear or hope, ego or generosity? Do we show grace? Do we keep the faith when it's most tested for keeping the faith with the best of humankind and the best of America is a story, in my view, from my perspective, Jimmy Carter's life."

Biden's words caused Democratic politician Chris D. Jackson to exclaim on X, "Wow! During President Biden's eulogy for President Carter, he appeared to lock eyes in Trump's direction as he declared that leaders must give hate no safe harbor—and that the greatest sin of all is the abuse of power."

Journalist Aaron Rupar posted on Threads, "Biden subtweets Trump during his eulogy for Jimmy Carter."

One person responded, "Thanks for the (shade) cutaway and split screen, CNN," while another wrote, "Biden slyly roasting Trump at Carter’s funeral is the political nesting doll with a spicy chef’s kiss we all need."

Watch the clip below via CNN or click the link.

'Turn to religion': George W. Bush shrugs off 'division' following Trump's election

George W. Bush in a recent interview downplayed the division in the United States, simply telling citizens that they should "turn to religion."

Former President Bush, who has criticized Donald Trump in the past but stopped short of endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, has come under fire for staying out of the limelight and not making his thoughts more clear.

In an interview played on Fox News, the ex-president said that America "will be fine."

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When asked his "message to America" to encourage kindness, Bush said, "Turn to religion."

"Religion is love. I'm not sure how else you do it," he said. "America is going to be fine."

He added, "I think there's more kind than not kind in our country."

Watch below or click the link.

History shows presidential debate victors often win the battle but lose the war

Donald Trump has to feel pretty good, as he bested — some might say obliterated — a stammering, low-energy President Joe Biden in their first debate of 2024. A CNN poll declared Trump the hands-down winner, 67 percent to 33 percent.

But are those who win that first debate more likely to take the election?

In short: no.

During the television era, history indicates that the winners of first general election presidential debates went on to win the election only five out of 13 times.

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So at a moment when some Democrats are questioning Biden’s fitness for the presidency, and wondering aloud whether Biden should exit the race altogether, this is a bit of bad news for Trump.

Let’s run the numbers:

In 2020, Biden won 60 percent to 28 percent for Trump in the first debate, according to CNN’s poll. Then Biden went on to win the election in November 2020.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was judged to have won the first debate, according to CNN’s poll that had her winning 62 percent to 27 percent for Trump. But she lost the 2016 election.

In 2012, Mitt Romney won the first debate easily. According to Gallup, the Republican and former Massachusetts governor prevailed 72 percent to 20 percent for President Barack Obama. But it was Obama, the Democrat, who easily won reelection in 2012.

In 2008, Obama took the first debate from Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, 51 percent to 38 percent in the first debate according to CNN. This served as a good launching point for Obama’s victory in the election later that year.

In 2004, Democratic Sen. John Kerry won the first debate against George W. Bush. Newsweek’s poll revealed that Kerry won 61 percent to 19 percent for Bush. But it was Bush who narrowly won the election.

In 2000, Gallup polling had Vice President Al Gore winning the first debate (48 percent to 41 percent), which may surprise people, as the media criticized Gore’s audible sighs. But Bush won the 2000 election.

In 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton outperformed Republican Sen. Bob Dole, in the first debate (51 percent to 31 percent) according to Gallup polling. And Clinton was reelected in 1996.

In 1992, Reform Party nominee Ross Perot won the first debate 47 percent to 30 percent for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and 16 percent for President George H. W. Bush, according to Gallup. But Perot finished third in the election, behind Clinton and Bush, and didn’t earn a single electoral vote despite winning about 19 percent of the popular vote.

In 1988, Democrat and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was judged the winner of the first debate in two polls, but lost the election, by a wide margin, to Bush.

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale handily defeated Republican President Ronald Reagan 54 percent to 36 percent in their first debate. Yet Reagan won 49 of 50 states during the general election — one of the most notable landslide victories in U.S. History.

In 1980, Reagan also won the only debate against Democratic President Jimmy Carter and independent John Anderson, according to surveys from Gallup. Reagan also won the election.

Data from Gallup surveys showed that President Gerald Ford drastically reduced Carter’s big lead in 1976 but lost the election, while John F. Kennedy overtook Richard Nixon in the polls after their first debate in 1960 and ultimately won the ultra-close contest, according to Gallup.

That means that in 13 elections, the first debate winners have won five of these contests (1960, 1980, 1996, 2008, 2020). In the other eight cases, the first debate winners went on to lose at the ballot box (1976, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004, 2012, 2016). That’s a 38 percent success rate for winners of the first debate.

No televised debates were conducted in 1964, 1968 or 1972.

Why do winners of the first presidential debate often come up short in the election?

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It could be because the first debate serves as a wake-up call for the first debate loser, as it did for Reagan in 1984, and Obama in 2012; each had to answer questions about their poor debate performance.

It could be that taking the first debate puts pressure on the winner to make a repeat performance.

Or, perhaps, the first debate winner could become overconfident in his or her chances of winning the election.

Whatever the case may be, Trump may find that history is not on his side just because he dominated Biden in the first debate.

A second debate between Trump and Biden is scheduled for Sept. 10.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.

A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election

The 2024 election is heating up, and Donald Trump is back to using his number one political strategy to grab Americans’ attention and galvanize his base: fear.

And why wouldn’t he? It worked for him in the past, and a social psychology concept called terror management theory suggests it will work for him again.

Trump is in the news this week for making two inflammatory statements designed to stoke existential fear, and the rhetoric is of the type that peer-reviewed research indicates has a psychological effect on the minds of voters.

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On Tuesday, in a campaign speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Trump said, “If we don’t win on November 5th, I think our country is going to cease to exist.” In no way holding back on the heavy fearmongering, Trump continued, “This could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that. That’s where our country is going.”

In the same speech, he addressed immigration in a way that could conceivably cause dangerous paranoia among the public, claiming that countries were sending “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists — the worst they have.”

To dial up the doomsday rhetoric even further, he is repeatedly using the word “bloodbath” to describe the state of affairs that will ensue due to the border crisis should President Joe Biden win a second term. A website, BidenBloodBath.com was even launched by the Republican National Committee, which The New York Times says the Trump campaign now effectively controls.

“A vote for Biden is a vote for an invasion,” the site says in large red letters.

Source: Republican National Committee

We must become cognizant of the psychological tactic that Trump is using here, because science suggests it is potentially powerful and plays to our subconscious fear. Terror management theory studies the effects of mortality salience — which refers to thoughts of death or existential threat becoming more pronounced or salient in one’s mind.

The theory maintains that when we are made to feel fearful for our lives, we cling more strongly to things that make us feel safe, such as our ideologies and leaders vowing to protect us from the danger.

This suggests that Trump’s fear mongering tactics push Republican voters toward the extreme end of the right wing, while bolstering their support for Trump — no matter that Trump himself faces 88 felony counts across four criminal cases involving all manner of alleged misdeeds.

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I believe the ex-president, who also last year warned of “death and destruction” if charged with a crime, is knowingly using this tactic. He does so despite the obvious downside for our nation as a whole — increased political polarization, social division and potential violence or terrorism. It is one thing to speak passionately about the broken immigration system, which the right and the left at some level agree is a problem that must be addressed, but it is another thing altogether to try and send people into a state of panic and rage for one’s self-serving political ambitions.

A study conducted in 2004, titled “American Roulette: The Effect of Reminders of Death on Support for George W. Bush in the Presidential Election,” demonstrated that the effects of mortality salience could have a measurable effect on presidential election outcomes.

It is worth mentioning that this experiment took place not long after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, so this event was in the minds of voters, at least at a subconscious level. Additionally, George W. Bush had made fighting terrorism the central theme of his campaign, and he raised the nation’s terror alert level while warning that the country would be in danger should Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry be elected.

To test the hypothesis that making mortality salient would shift voters toward Bush over Kerry, 184 students were broken into two groups: a control condition which received a neutral writing exercise, and an experimental condition that entailed exercises designed to make participants think about death.

The results found that the control group supported Kerry on average, while those in the mortality salience condition favored Bush.

A 2017 study by the same group titled, “You’re Hired! Mortality Salience Increases Americans’ Support for Donald Trump,” set out to directly test whether existential fear increased support for the then-president. The study design was similar to the previous study, and the results found that those participants who were primed to think about death showed a subtle yet statistically significant shift toward Trump and away from 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The study also found that asking people to think about immigrants moving into their neighborhood increased the accessibility of death-related thoughts. This suggests that Trump's immigrant-focused fear mongering specifically triggers existential anxiety.

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From these results, it is clear that fear mongering during an election year can have real effects on a nation’s voter base. With the kind of fiery and panic-inducing rhetoric Trump is strategically using at his rally speeches, we can imagine that the psychological consequences are greater than simple writing exercises designed to conjure up threats about death.

So, what can we do about it?

The authors of these studies, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszcynski, have this advice:

“The best antidote to this problem may be to monitor and take pains to resist any efforts by candidates to capitalize on fear-mongering … As a culture, we should also work to teach our children and encourage our citizens to vote with their ‘heads’ rather than their ‘hearts,’ as research has demonstrated that mortality salience effects are attenuated when people are asked to think rationally.”

The proverbial clock is ticking.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

Meet the Republican deadbeat dads

Recently, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos used in in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have the same legal rights as living, breathing, flesh-and-blood children.

Concerned about the impact of the ruling, Alabama Republicans scrambled to pass a law giving legal immunity to IVF providers in the state.

The immediate problem was resolved, but the theocratic thinking behind the court decision is widely shared in conservative areas of the United States.

One in four states have fetal personhood laws. Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina and Alabama incarcerate women who are found to have used illegal substances while pregnant.

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Roughly two-thirds of American women between the ages of 14 and 49 use birth control, but six Republican states — Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Wyoming — have laws that limit contraception.

The 15 states with the most restrictions on reproductive freedom all voted for Trump by double-digit margins in 2020, except for Texas, which has a ban on abortion after six weeks.

The rationalization for these laws is the belief that life begins at conception.

But federal-level Republican officials — most of whom are men — consistently prioritize forced births over opportunities for children outside the womb.

This is the case despite clear evidence that investment in children pays for itself.

This turn to cruelty began when Republican Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981. Armed with the simplistic slogans of a former ad man (“government is the problem, not the solution”), Reagan proposed steep cuts to social services in his first budget — in the midst of high unemployment and a grinding recession. He even precipitated a government shutdown in 1982 when Democrats wouldn’t go along with the cuts.

While sticking it to the poor, Reagan increased defense spending to unprecedented levels and brought the top tax rate down from 70 percent to 28 percent.

This template — fiscal austerity for the poor (poor children especially) alongside lavish, taxpayer-funded subsidies for defense contractors and the wealthy — has been standard Republican fare ever since.

Upon taking control of Congress in 1995, Republicans pushed big cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other programs designed to help the poor and vulnerable. When President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, refused to sign the budget, Republicans shut down the government.

Republican President George W. Bush signed tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, which gave $570,000 windfalls to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, while the Republican house in 2003 voted for steep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that help disadvantaged children.

In his 2014 budget, 69 percent of Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s proposed budget cuts targeted low-income Americans. His 2018 budget — drawn up when Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress — took the same tack.

Decades of Republican indifference shows. A 2021 UNICEF study, for example, placed the U.S. 40th in the world in childcare policies, based on measures of paid parental leave, quality, affordability and access.

So much for “America First.”

Failing our children

Prodded by Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. addressed this shortcoming with COVID-era funding, which lowered the child poverty by 40 percent — only to lose that progress when Senate Republicans (and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin) blocked increased childcare funding during the 2021-2022 American Families Plan negotiations. (This move also torpedoed universal preschool, paid leave for parents with infants, and funding for low-wage childcare workers.)

House Republicans recently signed on to a bipartisan bill that reduces the child tax credit, but it has far less effect than Pelosi’s measures. There’s also no guarantee it will overcome a potential Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Lack of childcare assistance is just one of many ways in which America fails its children.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist reveals how Trump and Biden's cognitive impairments are different

Child poverty rates in the U.S. are twice those of Canada, higher than every Western European country except Spain, and two-to-six times higher than Scandinavian countries.

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, one in six American children under five years old lives in poverty, the highest ratio of any age bracket in the United States. Poverty rates for Black, Hispanic and Native American children are far higher.

Of the 11 million American children living in poverty, 5 percent have no healthcare coverage, with Texas leading the way at 11 percent.

Nine million American children struggle with hunger. The key federal programs serving this population are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC) — frequent targets of congressional Republicans.

According to the World Bank, the U.S. was 43rd in infant mortality rates in 2021 and didn’t make the top 50 in under-five mortality rates.

America’s broadscale ratings are the shame of the developed world.

The UN development report from 2022, described as “a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development,” ranked the U.S. at No. 20, behind Canada, Singapore, the U.K/Ireland and most of Western Europe.

America finished 35th in a 2020 World Bank study of the Human Capital Index, described as the measure of “the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect to acquire by age 18, given the risks of poor health and poor education that prevail in the country where she lives.”

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A 2020 UNICEF report card on well-being outcomes for children listed the U.S. as 32nd in mental health, 38th in physical health and 36th overall, placing us behind former Soviet satellite states such as Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia and Romania.

With some of the worst results for children among advanced economies, one might think that America would consider investing in future generations.

If Democrats hold the Senate, the White House, and win the House back, President Joe Biden is highly likely to do just that with increases in Medicaid funding and eligibility, increases in prenatal care, early childhood education, WIC, SNAP and childcare subsidies for struggling families.

By contrast, child poverty appears nowhere in the “Agenda47” tab or the “Issues” tab on Donald Trump’s campaign website.

There is a page about fighting chronic childhood illnesses, but Trump has lately veered into the realm of vaccine skepticism.

Biden, meanwhile, has already funded children’s healthcare at high levels and nothing concrete is being proposed by Trump other than a commission — which is a common D.C. tactic to pay lip service to an issue.

Given this absence, the GOP’s history, and the 2025 House Republican Study Committee budget, if Trump wins the presidency and Republicans take control of Congress, it’s likely that funding for most (or all) of these programs will be on the chopping block.

Multiple emails (soliciting information about any GOP proposals to address child poverty in 2025) to Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung, Trump’s press office, the Republican Study Committee and the Republican Senate policy committee went unanswered.

This ghosting is representative of the GOP’s neglect of our most vulnerable citizens for the past four decades.

The 2024 presidential election will determine if America tries to fulfill its moral obligation to coming generations, or becomes a deadbeat dad rolling the dice with our future.

Dan Benbow has been an online political features writer since 2003. His work has appeared at Raw Story, the Miami Herald, the New York Daily News, Salon, Truthout and the Progressive. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel and can be reached at benbowauthor@gmail.comor followed @danbenbow on X.

Trump will be convicted before GOP convention: former George W. Bush strategist

Former President Donald Trump is looking at criminal conviction in at least one of his cases next year, argued former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd on MSNBC Tuesday — and it will likely happen after Trump has secured the nomination, but before he can formally accept it at the Republican National Convention.

"How bad is it going to get next year, in your view?" asked anchor Joy Reid. "I think it's going to be rough, but Matthew, how bad do you think it's going to get?"

"You mean for you, me, and [fellow panelist] Barbara [McQuade]?" asked Dowd.

"Just for us, make it about us," laughed Reid. "No, for the country. It's hard for me to imagine having all of these things happening at once. How bad do you think it will get for the country?"

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"Awful," said Dowd. "I don't think we have ever seen this kind of convergence between a former president running for office again in the midst of multiple trials held simultaneously while he wins primaries and caucuses. The people running against him, Nikki Haley and whatever, I think what's going to end up happening is he's going to have momentum. He'll win Iowa, win New Hampshire, win South Carolina, and he'll basically all but be the nominee, and basically be there, and then he's going to get convicted before he goes to the RNC Convention in July. So he'll be the nominee, but be a convicted nominee in the midst of this, and then we'll be headed to a general election with the nominee of a major political party convicted, at least in one court, if not in two different courts in this time."

"A convicted felon running for president under the Republican Party," added Down. "We have never in my life have ever seen a calendar that will unfold in that manner. But it also is — it's going to be so weird while this is going on, Republican voters voting for him to be the nominee of the party as he's convicted."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

Matt Dowd says Trump will be convicted before he can have his conventionwww.youtube.com