Republicans Are Desperate to Move on From Trump’s Favorite Topic

MAGA allies are trying to move on from their cataclysmic reaction to losing the 2020 presidential election—but that doesn’t mean that their leader is trying to do the same.

In an interview Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer brushed off concerns about the Republican reaction to the last election, claiming that no one but Collins was still focused on the election conspiracy.

“In 2020, you did sign onto that brief supporting a Texas lawsuit that would have invalidated the election results in four states,” Collins said. “But you ultimately chose to certify the election, you broke with some of your Republican colleagues, and you chose to certify.

“You said in a statement that ‘Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors certified by a state’s legislature in accordance with their Constitution,’” Collins continued. “And you yourself said, ‘Doing so sets a precedent that I believe undermines the state-based system of elections that defines our Republic.’ Do you still feel that way tonight?”

“Again, Kaitlan, we’re talking about an election that’s going to take place in 35 days,” Emmer responded. “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago? We can have this debate at some other time going forward, but the people are hurting.”

But Collins had a point.

“Donald Trump is still talking about it,” the CNN anchor threw back.

Trump was posting about the election he lost as recently as Wednesday night, writing on Truth Social that he “didn’t rig the 2020 Election, they did!”

Some of Trump’s closest allies have refused to admit that the former president lost the 2020 election, dodging direct questions about whether they plan to reenact the same political violence after November’s election results roll in.

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Ohio Senator JD Vance refused to concede that the Republican presidential nominee lost the last election before doubling down during a heated exchange with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, turning to face Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded, twisting his argument into a weird tie-in about Vice President Kamala Harris and Facebook’s content moderation policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That is a very damning nonanswer,” Walz said.

In a Virginia Senate debate Wednesday night, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine’s Trump-endorsed opponent Hung Cao took the stage with some unhinged remarks about drag queens, alpha males, and DEI.

Cao, a Navy veteran, was asked about his previous statements about what he sees as the “growing obsession” with diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military—and somehow answered with a cannibalistic rant.

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” said Cao. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”

It’s unclear what Cao meant in the cannibalistic part of the rant, beyond scorning drag queens and anyone he doesn’t see as “alpha.”When NBC News reached the Republican’s office for comment, he doubled down about his debate remarks: “I just said what everyone believes as fact.”

In the debate, he also parroted Trump’s lines about immigration and the so-called migrant crisis. Cao, whose family came to the U.S. from Vietnam, did not push back against the moderator’s question about deporting all undocumented immigrants. Instead, he made a call for assimilation. “Don’t ask for the American dream if you’re not willing to obey American laws and embrace the American culture.” On his campaign website, the candidate promises to “repel this invasion.”

According to the RealClearPolitics poll average, Kaine leads Cao by 10 points in the state.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page unsealed motion included revelations about Donald Trump in his January 6 election interference case and a plea for the judge overseeing it to carefully consider the boundaries of what constitutes an “official act” under the new, expanded definition of presidential immunity.

But it also included a jab at the nation’s highest court, using Trump’s private phone calls to underscore that the Supreme Court had extended its aid to a former president who had no appreciation for its labor.

In a section of the document outlining the similarities between Trump’s private rhetoric and that included in his January 6 Ellipse speech, Smith’s office highlighted how Trump, even then, was attacking the nation’s highest court for “not stepping up to the plate” in his legal woes.

“I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They are not stepping up to the plate. They’re not stepping up,” Trump said in a private conversation.

Then, at the Ellipse, he shared a near-verbatim gripe: “I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They love to rule against me.”

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when it ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law” and that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

It’s official: Donald Trump’s plan for massive deportations would apply to legal immigrants, as well as undocumented immigrants.

During an exclusive interview with NewsNation, Trump said he planned to strip the legal status of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been granted Temporary Protected Status.

“Springfield is such a beautiful place; have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. They have to be removed,” Trump said.

“So you would revoke the Temporary Protected Status?” asked the interviewer.

“Absolutely, I’d revoke it and I’d bring them back to their country,” Trump said.

During his first administration, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.

Now Trump plans to forcibly uproot this group of roughly 18,000 people who pay taxes, own homes, have jobs, and support their families. But that’s only the beginning: Up to 2.7 million people could lose protection from deportation if Trump allows immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, DACA, and humanitarian parole to lapse during a second term, according to Forbes.

It’s not surprising that Trump has gotten to this place. The former president has falsely claimed that Springfield suffered a “hostile takeover” by undocumented immigrants and that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield had begun eating their neighbors’ pets.

Last month, after practically admitting that he’d created the story about cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance also said that he doesn’t care about the legal status of immigrants.

“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said, during a campaign event in North Carolina. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

During the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Vance echoed this rhetoric when he was fact-checked about the Haitian immigrants’ legal status. He ranted that Harris could grant citizenship “at the wave of a Kamala-Harris-open-border wand.”

Both Trump’s and Vance’s statements demonstrate that under a second Trump administration, no legal immigrant will be safe in the United States because the president could always decide that there are too many of them, create some story, and then kick them out.

While Donald Trump and his allies pushed lies about widespread voter fraud following the 2020 election, his former Vice President Mike Pence apparently urged him to admit defeat.

Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Jack Smith’s 165-page motion pertaining to Trump’s January 6 trial Wednesday, which revealed details about the co-conspirators and specific allegations connected to the former president’s 2020 election subversion scheme. The details allege that Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the outcome or what anyone said to the contrary, including his own running mate.

Trump allegedly told his campaign advisers that he planned to take advantage of Democratic voters’ preference for mail-in ballots, which take longer to tabulate, and “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”

He then allegedly planted the seeds for such a plan by publicly undermining the results of the election before it had even taken place, claiming that all mail-in voting was inherently fraudulent.

In early November, Trump allegedly received an “honest assessment” stating that he “could not mount successful legal challenges to the election.” Trump was told by a White House aide who “served as a conduit of information from the campaign” that there was no way Rudy Giuliani would be successful in challenging the election results. Trump responded, “We’ll see.”

In a meeting with Trump and Giuliani, that staffer told them both that they would be unable to prove Giuliani’s “speculative” allegations of voter fraud in a courtroom. When the staffer privately repeated this concern to Trump later, Trump responded, “The details don’t matter.”

The filing detailed many conversations between Trump and Pence as running mates, “in which they discussed their shared electoral interests. This is distinct from conversations had between the two where they are acting in their official capacity as President and Vice President, which would be inadmissible as evidence, per the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States.”

As early as November 4, Trump allegedly asked Pence to “study up” on claims of voter fraud in the states that they had won in 2016. Pence said that Trump was already stating that the campaign was “going to fight.”

In the postelection period, Pence told Trump that “he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the election,” according to the filing, and repeatedly urged Trump to accept the results.

As media organizations began on November 7 to project that Joe Biden had won the election, Pence “tried to encourage” Trump to accept defeat, “as a friend.” Pence reminded him that he’d taken “a dying political party and given it a new lease on life.”

A few days later, on November 12, Pence said that Trump received a “sober and somewhat pessimistic report” on the status of his election challenges, and Pence urged Trump to give up. “Don’t concede, but recognize that the process is over,” Pence said, according to the filing.

In a conversation on December 21, Pence again “encouraged” Trump to “not look at the election ‘as a loss—just an intermission.’” Later in the day, Trump asked Pence what he thought they should do, and Pence replied, “After we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, Trump should ‘take a bow.’”

Special counsel Jack Smith plans to use Donald Trump’s 2020 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as evidence against the former president in his Washington, D.C., election fraud trial.

On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan released Smith’s findings in the case to the public, and within the redacted 165-page document is the prosecutor’s contention that Trump’s infamous phone call does not fall under presidential immunity as defined by the Supreme Court in its July 1 ruling.

The Supreme Court ruling contended that a U.S. president is immune from “official acts” conducted in their capacity as the nation’s chief executive, dealing a major obstacle to the multiple legal cases against Trump. The former president was initially indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election back in August 2023, but after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Smith filed a superseding indictment, over a year later, taking the expansion of immunity into account.

In his 2020 call to Raffensperger, Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” In his legal filing, Smith argues that the phone call “was purely a private one, which [Trump] undertook as a candidate and the plaintiff in a lawsuit,” noting that a federal district court already determined that it was a “campaign call rather than official business.”

Smith’s filing also points out, “Under the Constitution, the Executive Branch has no constitutionally assigned role in the state-electoral process. To the contrary, the constitutional framework excludes the president from that process to protect against electoral abuses.”

Smith is hoping that this case against the former president—arguably the most damning of the criminal charges against him—can withstand the Supreme Court’s constraints on what criminal charges a president can actually face. Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election in 2020 led to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and he has not faced any legal consequences for his involvement with the riot. He still refuses to commit to accepting the results of an election in which he loses.

There’s no telling what Trump will do if the 2024 election doesn’t go his way, and that is in part because he still has not faced legal consequences for his actions in the last presidential election. Smith is hoping that Trump can finally face accountability and to ensure that American elections are never threatened again.

A federal judge unsealed a 165-page motion pertaining to Donald Trump’s January 6 trial on Wednesday, revealing details and co-conspirators connected to the former president’s 2020 election subversion scheme.

The redacted filing from special counsel Jack Smith outlines what his office describes as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

”At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

The massive motion is broken into four separate sections: the first section outlines Smith’s offices case against Trump, while the second creates a roadmap to aid Judge Tanya Chutkan in determining which actions undertaken by Trump were considered “official,” due to a July Supreme Court ruling that redefined executive protections by expanding the definition of presidential immunity.

The third section of Smith’s motion ties in how the principles will apply to Trump’s case, and the fourth section features a conclusion requesting Chutkan to rule that the actions outlined in the entirety of the document do not fall within the fresh definition of immunity.

The document provides insight into some of the salacious details collected by prosecutors as they’ve built their case against Trump, including that the former president sidelined his 2020 campaign legal team that November in favor of Rudy Giuliani on the basis that the since-disbarred attorney was willing to lie about the election results.

At one point, Smith details how a Trump campaign employee was informed that a final batch of ballots at a Detroit vote-counting center would favor Joe Biden. “Find a reason it isn’t,” the staffer said. “Give me options to file litigation.”

When a colleague warned doing so could spark unrest, the staffer replied, “Make them riot.”

Smith’s motion also indicates that the special counsel intends to prove Trump and his allies baselessly invented claims that noncitizens were voting in U.S. elections, and ignored indications that their theory that dead Americans were casting their votes was flat-out wrong.

The motion further reveals that the MAGA politicos failed to deliver on their own election fraud theories. They promised to “package up” evidence of the election-stealing crime and then never delivered it to its intended recipients, namely former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, where two prongs of the scheme have resulted in sprawling election conspiracy cases.

This story has been updated.

Almost 100 health volunteers who worked in Gaza demanded a U.S. arms sales embargo to Israel Wednesday in a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“President Biden and Vice President Harris, we are 99 American physicians and nurses who have witnessed crimes beyond comprehension. Crimes that we cannot believe you wish to continue supporting,” stated the letter, which was obtained by HuffPost. 

The letter included first-hand accounts of the brutality that the doctors, nurses, midwives, surgeons, and other health care practitioners had seen during their collective 254 weeks serving in Gaza’ hospitals. The tragedy is a direct result of Israel’s nearly year-long military campaign in Gaza, which has reportedly killed more than 41,500 Palestinians, including at least 16,500 children.

The letter noted that the death toll is likely significantly higher than what is reported by the Gaza Health Ministry.

“I’ve never seen such horrific injuries, on such a massive scale, with so few resources. Our bombs are cutting down women and children by the thousands. Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty,” said Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California. Sidhwa spent two weeks volunteering in Khan Younis, where an Israeli strike killed 51 people just on Tuesday. 

“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child,” the letter said.

The letter urged Biden and Harris to “withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel and to participate in an international arms embargo of Israel and all Palestinian armed groups until a permanent ceasefire is established in Gaza.” 

“We appreciate that you are working on a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, but you have overlooked an obvious fact: the United States can impose a ceasefire on the warring parties by simply stopping arms shipments to Israel, and announcing that we will participate in an international arms embargo on both Israel and all Palestinian armed groups,” the letter said. “We stress what many others have repeatedly told you over the past year: American law is perfectly clear on this matter, continuing to arm Israel is illegal.”

Last month, a report found that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had received reports from USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration detailing how Israel had deliberately blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, but still told Congress the exact opposite. The State Department even recommended that shipments of nearly $830 million in weapons and bombs to Israel, paid by U.S. taxpayers, ought to be frozen under the Foreign Assistance Act.

Harris has not signaled a significant break with Biden on his policy of empowering Israel’s violence in the Middle East, as Israel has launched a ground offensive into Lebanon, sparking missile strikes from Iran and threatening to blossom into regional war.  

On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was confronted during a press conference over whether the United States was using leverage to rein in Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and Gaza.

BBC News reporter Tom Bateman cited a diary entry from Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1982, where Reagan phoned Israel’s prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, and told him to stop Israel’s shelling of Beirut. Bateman asked Miller if U.S. officials were similarly doing everything they could for a cease-fire.

Miller claimed in his reply that during the current conflict, U.S. intervention had led Israel “to take steps that they were not previously doing” regarding humanitarian access and “the shape of their military operations.”

“I do think it is often simplistic to reduce the … understanding of what’s happening to the bilateral relationship between two countries,” Miller added.

Bateman followed up, noting that Begin stopped bombing Lebanon 20 minutes after Reagan’s phone call. Miller deflected.

“I think we have made clear on a number of occasions with the government of Israel what we believe, and there have been times when our intervention has led to direct action by the government of Israel. There are times when they have disagreements with us,” Miller said. “And by the way, that was true in the Reagan administration too.”

Miller’s comments seem to show an unwillingness by President Biden and his administration to use any kind of leverage—such as the billions of dollars in weapons sales or the billions in foreign aid to Israel—to compel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curtail Israel’s military actions in Lebanon or Gaza.

In 1982, Reagan’s administration halted cluster-bomb shipments to Israel over their use on civilian areas in Lebanon. Reagan then followed with a phone call to Begin where he used language that would seem unfathomable by any American politician today.

“Here, on our television, night after night, our people are being shown the symbols of this war, and it is a holocaust,” Reagan told the Israeli prime minister, warning that it was endangering the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It had an immediate effect, with the bombing not only stopping but with Begin pleading with Reagan not to harm ties between the two countries.

Biden initially spurned months of calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, and still continues to back Israel in its brutal war that has claimed at least 41.000 Palestinian lives. Now Israel, thanks to a green light from the Biden administration, has expanded the war to Lebanon and killed hundreds of lives just in the past week. Biden can call for an arms embargo against Israel at any time, but as Miller’s comments illustrate, he won’t even touch the idea.

An Arizona judge torched a legal request by Rudy Giuliani in the fixer’s fake elector case Wednesday, ruling that the ex-Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.

Last month, Giuliani filed a request demanding information about the grand jury, alleging that the group was politically compromised and biased. But the judge overseeing the case, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce Cohen, wasn’t impressed by the conjecture-laden inquiry.

“The underlying claim that formulates the request is based upon pure speculation and abject conjecture,” Cohen wrote. “He alleges not one scintilla of information that would support this claim.”

Further still, Cohen noted that this particular grand jury was not specifically crafted to oversee Giuliani’s case but was rather a sitting grand jury, further shrinking the likelihood that it was arranged specifically to malign Giuliani and his co-defendants.

“There is therefore no reliable information to suggest that the empaneling of this grand jury occurred in contemplation of this case or with a political agenda in mind,” Cohen wrote.

Giuliani was one of nearly two dozen Trump allies indicted for their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and Christina Bobb.

The indictment charged 18 individuals, some of whose names have been redacted, with orchestrating a scheme to use fake electors to flip Arizona’s 2020 election results over to Donald Trump. It also names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. All of the indicted individuals face the same slew of charges, which includes counts for conspiracy, forgery, fraudulent schemes and practices, and fraudulent schemes and artifices—the last of which holds a potential sentence of up to five years in prison.