Trump Doubles Down on Fascism with New Campaign Partner

The GOP’s junior ranks are increasingly being staffed by open racists, in what some commentators have called the “groyperfication” of the party. And Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is no exception.

Last week, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk announced that his organization would be officially partnering with the campaign to get out the vote.

“Breaking right here on this show: Turning Point Action’s ballot chase initiative, and remind you, we are working directly in coordination with the Trump campaign, that’s the new FEC rule and regulation. Charlie, I don’t want to get over my skis there,” Kirk’s podcast co-host, Andrew Kolvet, announced.

“We’re allowed to work in harmony on doors and canvassing, that’s what the law says,” Kirk said.

Turning Point USA has been a force in right-wing media and campus conservative organizing, and has held events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound. But the organization has previously been mostly limited to maintaining a watch list of supposedly subversive leftist professors, encouraging followers to violate Covid-19 masking regulations, and enriching its brass, and has never officially partnered with a campaign.

Kirk, the group’s founder and apparently the Trump campaign’s newest canvasser, is a model of the new student conservativism: He has impugned the character of Martin Luther King Jr. and questioned whether MLK Day should be a federal holiday, implied that affirmative action is allowing unqualified Black pilots to fly planes, and expressed “impatience for American Jews that have put up with the anti-white sentiments the last decade.”

Turning Point USA’s national field director was fired after texting another TPUSA employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all.… I hate blacks. End of story.” The organization also has been accused of organizing bus trips to the Capitol on January 6.

The Trump campaign has already proven it will go to any lengths and partner with any group, no matter how unsavory, to gain an edge against Joe Biden. That it’s partnering with bigots such as Kirk, then, isn’t surprising, but it provides a harrowing preview of the future of Republican Party organizing. The fever doesn’t appear to be breaking anytime soon.

Representative Byron Donalds attempted to skewer Democrats, but his tirade dipped into the uncanny valley and ended up looking a lot more like his own party.

During an interview Tuesday on Newsmax, Donalds lamented Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony earlier this week in front of a GOP-led subcommittee on the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the hearing quickly go off the rails, but Fauci made it through without validating any of the bonkers Republican claims about him. Donalds seemed incensed, but his argument sounded all too familiar.

“We have people in this government, Tony Fauci is a part of that ilk, that truly believe that they are omnipotent, that they are never wrong,” the Florida Republican said. “And when you catch them in their lies, then they try to gaslight you, gaslight the American people, and say, ‘No, no, no, we agreed with you the entire time,’ or, ‘There simply is no evidence to support your conspiratorial claims.’

“These people are gone, they have lost it, so there is no reasoning with them, they simply have to be defeated,” said Donalds, who is reportedly on Donald Trump’s short list of vice presidential contenders.

The inconsistent but dogmatic attitude to which Donalds alluded sounds all too akin to his Republican counterparts, who break their backs daily to stay in Trump’s good graces as he flits between different stances on a number of issues, including immigration, abortion, and of course, criminal justice.

Increasingly, it appears that Republicans are disappointed with the outcome of Fauci’s hearing, as they were pitifully unable to pin their grievances on one man. In front of Congress, Fauci has called the GOP conspiracies about his leadership of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases “seriously distorted.”

Protest votes have continued to dog Biden and Trump, both presumptive nominees, eating a chunk of their leads in New Mexico in Tuesday night’s primary results.

Trump saw yuge losses in the New Mexico Republican primary, with nearly 12 percent of votes going to anyone but him. Nikki Haley’s zombie campaign pulled 8.6 percent of Republican primary voters, and uncommitted votes took another 3.3 percent. In total, he pulled just 78,716 votes in the state—84.5 percent.

In 2016, Trump faced off in a much more crowded field of dead campaigns in New Mexico, collecting just over 70 percent of the vote against five other zombie candidates. Trump lost the battleground state in that year’s general election to Hillary Clinton and again to Joe Biden in 2020. Tuesday night’s showing suggests Trump may lose the state’s general election again, as Biden picked up over 31,000 votes more than Trump.

Turnout was sluggish overall in the land of enchantment for the newly convicted Trump: New Mexico’s Republican primary on Tuesday turned out nearly half as many votes for Trump as he received in the 2020 primary—78,716 down from 144,067.

Meanwhile, an ongoing primary protest against Biden’s support of Israel and handling of Israel’s unconstrained devastation of Gaza continues to sink its teeth into Biden’s primary numbers.

In New Mexico, the uncommitted campaign pulled over 12,000 votes—taking nearly a tenth of the vote from Biden. The protest vote was aided by another 6.7 percent of voters choosing Marianne Williamson, for a whopping 16.4 percent of votes yanked from Biden.

In New Jersey, uncommitted protest votes pulled an astonishing 41,415 votes from Biden, or 8.7 percent. The gimmick campaign of an anti-abortion extremist also took votes away from Biden, bringing in just 2.8 percent but pulling Biden’s overall vote tally down to 88.5 percent. In 2020, protest votes for Bernie Sanders’s dead campaign stole 14.6 percent from Biden who, in total, collected 814,188 votes. This year’s New Jersey primary, Biden collected half that—just 419,020 votes in total.

Upset over being convicted on 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial, Donald Trump is floating the idea of imprisoning his enemies if he’s elected to the White House.

The Republican presidential nominee brought up the idea during a rambling phone interview with Newsmax on Tuesday. Host Greg Kelly asked whether the trial and guilty verdict were a net positive for Trump, who didn’t even answer the question.

“Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question,” Trump replied. He went off on a tangent, discussing the “Lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and how terrible it would be to put her in jail.

“I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country,” Trump said about locking up Clinton. “And now, whoever it may be, you’re gonna have to view it very much differently. This is a bad, bad road that they’re leading us down to as a country.

“And it’s very possible that it’s gonna have to happen to them,” Trump added.

The former president’s allies have regularly mentioned jailing their opponents. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, recently told Axios that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who led the prosecution of Trump’s hush-money trial, “should be—and will be—jailed.”

Bannon added that he wants “investigations to include [Democrats’] media allies.”

If elected president, Trump will have the full force of the Justice Department to use at his disposal, and could put a more dangerous attorney general than the likes of Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr in power, who acts on Trump’s election conspiracies and prosecutes his enemies. Trump could also have the federal cases against him dismissed, whether they’re about his mishandling of classified documents or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With these cases currently stalled, the only way to keep Trump from carrying out his plans may be to defeat him in November.

President Joe Biden just made it a little easier to deport migrants from custody—and he’s proud of it.

The president’s new immigration policy changed critical language that was introduced during the Trump administration, swapping the “reasonable possibility” standard for deportation to an even higher “reasonable probability” standard, according to a Department of Homeland Security asylum fact sheet released Tuesday.

It also changed other processing standards in Title 8 immigration procedures, including making those who illegally crossed the border no longer eligible for asylum (except in the event of “exceptionally compelling” circumstances) and further tightening the eligibility guidelines for deportees who fear returning to their home countries.

The reasoning behind the timing of the change is a little transparent. Although poll predictions so far away from Election Day have proven to be historically unreliable, Biden has trailed behind Trump, despite the presumptive GOP presidential nominee being a convicted felon. On top of that, voters have resoundingly picked immigration as the number one issue fueling their decisions this election cycle.

“I would have preferred to address our issues at the border through bipartisan legislation because that’s the only way to actually fix our broken system,” Biden wrote in a statement. “But Republicans in Congress have left me no choice. So today, I’m announcing actions that bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum—unless they seek it after entering through established lawful processes.”

As shocking as Biden’s change is, Donald Trump could make things even worse if he is elected in November. Trump has promised to bring back President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” which used military tactics to conduct massive roundups of some 1.3 million immigrants, legal or otherwise, across the country, packing them into trucks and shipping them to locations without food or water, resulting in tragic and unnecessary deaths.

Trump is also expected to bring his former adviser Stephen Miller back to the West Wing as the leading expert on “America First” immigration policy. Miller has been vocal about a forthcoming reality of “large-scale raids” and “throughput facilities.”

Behind the scenes, Trump has played a big part in why immigration has become a focal point in the first place. He strong-armed Republican lawmakers into refusing bipartisan border deals to avoid giving Biden a win on the issue. He also stoked the flames of a standoff between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the federal government over lengths of concertina wire erected by the state that have prevented federal border agents from doing their jobs along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have grasped the obvious: The Republican Party is going nowhere.

The far-right congresswoman complained to Steve Bannon on Real America’s Voice that her colleagues wouldn’t support her quest to impeach Joe Biden.

“Republicans continually have their head up their ass and can’t figure out how to actually use the power that the people gave us,” Greene ranted.

“People are sick and tired of a feckless and useless Republican Party that never does a damn thing to stop any of this,” the far-right congresswoman added, referring to mass immigration from the southern U.S. border.

While Democrats would agree with the wording of her criticisms of the GOP, if not the substance, Greene still doesn’t realize that she is as much responsible for her party’s dysfunction as anyone. She tried and failed to oust Speaker Mike Johnson over Ukraine aid funding, earning her several enemies among her fellow Republicans in Congress. She hijacked a hearing about the Justice Department to insult Representative Jasmine Crockett, only to be turned into a trademarked meme for her efforts.

Instead of proposing any meaningful legislation herself, she is now working to defund the state of New York after Donald Trump’s felony conviction in his hush-money trial.

Green also tried to grandstand by attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci in a subcommittee hearing on Monday, only to be reprimanded by the Republican chair and thoroughly discredited by Fauci. Even her criticisms of Biden’s immigration policy may be unfounded: His latest executive order restricting asylum has been criticized as a Trump-like policy by Democrats.

Maybe one day it will dawn on Greene that she contributes to the many problems with the Republican Party. Or she’ll face electoral consequences from her fed-up constituents. But, in a district as red as the Georgia 14th, that’s not likely this November.

The Colorado Republican Party rang in the start of Pride month in ultra-fascist fashion, invoking a hateful slur used by the extremist Westboro Baptist Church and calling for people to burn all Pride flags.

In addition to the post on X (formerly Twitter), the Colorado Republican Party sent an email blast to its followers, heinously—and falsely—accusing queer people of being “godless groomers,” a bigoted conspiracy popularized by far-right extremists in recent years.

The email blast incomprehensibly claims “progressivism is a demonic lie” and links to a YouTube video from disgraced megachurch leader Mark Driscoll, who espouses homophobic propaganda in line with Christian extremists and has been repeatedly accused of “cultlike” abusive behavior toward other church leaders.

As Colorado’s 9News notes, the email also included a direct reference to 9News reporter Kyle Clark, who first reported news of the email and is frequently harassed by far-right extremists for his tireless work disassembling and rebutting far-right propaganda.

As Clark notes, “The [Colorado Republican Party]’s call to burn all Pride Flags reflects that the state party’s allegiance is to the values of state chairman Dave Williams, even more so than those of Donald Trump.” Williams, like Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert, is a far-right politician who’s taken to inflammatory rhetoric to make a name for himself.

“In 2020, Williams proposed a same-sex marriage ban that the [Colorado Republican Party] and [Republican] legislative leaders wouldn’t back,” Clark added, citing the failed legislation.

In November 2022, an anti-LGBTQ extremist opened fire on patrons of a queer nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding 25 others. The Club Q shooting marked a peak in anti-LGBTQ hate that had begun ramping up in mid-2022 after Proud Boys attacked a children’s literacy event in California, inspired by the bigoted conspiracy that drag performers are “groomers.”

Extremist harassment and violence toward LGBTQ people exploded in 2023, fueled by far-right propagandists launching inflammatory accusations toward queer educators, Drag Story Hour events, internet darling Dylan Mulvaney, and corporations like Target for carrying Pride merchandise. The far-right outrage manifested in widespread legislative attacks on gender-affirming health care and violently harmful disinformation.

Elon Musk’s X Corp. has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in its ongoing retaliation against special counsel Jack Smith, who was able to take a deep dive into Donald Trump’s social media account without the former president even knowing it was happening.

In a new filing, the company asked the Supreme Court to determine under what circumstances a tech company can be compelled to turn over information on its users, while being prevented from alerting those users that they’re being investigated.

Last year, Smith’s team was able to use a search warrant to obtain private communications from Trump’s X (formerly Twitter) account, including direct messages, location data, and his drafts from the weeks leading up to the January 6 insurrection. Smith was also able to issue a “nondisclosure order,” which prevented the company from notifying Trump.

X initially delayed responding to this request for information, and shortly afterward challenged the order in U.S. District Court, on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.

Instead of blocking the warrant as the company had hoped, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell found X in contempt, and as a result, the company was hit by hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

Prosecutors had presented evidence to Howell demonstrating that alerting Trump to their investigation would likely endanger the evidence and interfere with Smith’s probe.

X tried to appeal Howell’s decision last July, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the initial ruling. Clearly dissatisfied, the company is taking its troubles to the highest court in the land.

“Dismissing these requests, the courts below diminished the constitutional interests at stake,” the petition said of the decisions of the lower courts. In the filing, X Corp. argued that the information in Trump’s social media account may have been subject to executive privilege. The petition argues that investigatory methods that do not offer the opportunity for a user to assert their privacy privileges may violate other privileged relationships, such as attorney-client, doctor-patient, and journalist-source.

The company is asking the high court to consider whether electronic service providers can be compelled by search warrants before the constitutionality of nondisclosure orders are decided, and whether the First Amendment allows for the “gagging” of such providers “in a highly public investigation” in which the government does not “demonstrate that disclosure would jeopardize the investigation’s integrity” or “disprove the workability of a less-restrictive alternative.”

You might assume that members of Congress, whose job it is to craft legislation, would be the preeminent obeyers of the rule of law. But you’d be incorrect.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville made that abundantly clear Tuesday, telling Newsmax that Americans should prepare for a civil war following Donald Trump’s conviction by a New York jury.

“People in our caucus … to me, they’re not really taking this as serious as we should,” Tuberville said. “American people need to wake up. This is a war; this is a war on our constitutional rights, our constitutional republic. This is not as much about Donald Trump as it is about the people in this country.”

Tuberville also claimed that Democrats were “anti”-American, insisting that the liberal party was looking to strip citizens of their privacy and censorship rights while conveniently forgetting that it was Republican leadership who pushed through the reauthorization of a domestic spy program in April and who are continuing to press for literary censorship in majority-conservative states such as Florida.

A jury found Trump guilty Thursday on 34 counts of falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in relation to hush-money payments dished out to porn star Stormy Daniels in an effort to hide information during the 2016 presidential election. It marked the first time in U.S. history that a former president had been convicted of a felony.

Trump is scheduled to be sentenced mere days before the Republican National Convention, which has already crafted a contingency plan for nominating the felon even if he’s already behind bars.

Donald Trump’s foot soldiers are trying to set the stage to rig the 2024 election in his favor.

The America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank, is backing the lawsuit of an election official in Fulton County, Georgia, who wants to be able to refuse to certify election results.

Julie Adams filed her lawsuit May 22, hoping to access voting records that she claims she was barred from seeing by Fulton County’s election director, Nadine Williams. Adams is also seeking a court ruling on whether her duty to certify election results is up to her discretion.

Adams has long been an election denier. She was a director for the Tea Party Patriots, which organized the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, and also was “southeast regional coordinator” for the Election Integrity Network, according to Rolling Stone. The EIN was founded by a lawyer for the Trump campaign, Cleta Mitchell, who also is a prominent election denier.

It’s an early attempt by Trump’s allies to make sure he wins Georgia in November. In 2020, Trump lost Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes—a margin of just 0.23 percent. Fulton County is a Democratic stronghold in the state, home to the city of Atlanta.

As November nears, this lawsuit foreshadows dangerous actions by Trump and his allies to ensure that he returns to the White House. He is more desperate this time to exact revenge and escape legal consequences, and has yet to face any repercussions for attempting to overturn the results in 2020. Trump himself has warned that “it’s gonna be a bloodbath” if he loses in November (he later claimed he was talking about the automotive industry) and said that 2024 could be the “last election we ever have.”

Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted last year for attempting to overturn Georgia’s election results, and the convicted felon and presumptive Republican presidential nominee has fought the charges every step of the way, most notably trying to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis removed from the case. Trump’s trial over the Capitol insurrection has also been held up by the Supreme Court, sending the message that his attempts to fix election results in his favor don’t carry any real consequences.