“Special counsel Jack Smith has outlined new details of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ sweeping and “increasingly desperate” efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, in a blockbuster court filing Wednesday aimed at defending Smith’s prosecution of Trump following the Supreme Court’s July immunity ruling.
Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials, and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the claims of election fraud as “crazy,” prosecutors alleged in the 165-page filing.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing said. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”
When Trump’s effort to overturn the election through lawsuits and fraudulent electors failed to change the outcome of the election, prosecutors allege that the former president fomented violence, with prosecutors describing Trump as directly responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6.”
“The defendant also knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him. So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol,” Smith wrote.
The lengthy filing — which includes an 80-page summary of the evidence gathered by investigators — outlines multiple instances in which Trump allegedly heard from advisers who disproved his allegations, yet continued to spread his claims of outcome-determinative voter fraud, prosecutors said.
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,” Trump allegedly told members of his family following the 2020 election, the filing said.”
“Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.”
The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.”
“In 2020, three political scientists studied how location and income affected white voters’ voting decisions. They found that, on a national level, poorer white people were indeed more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones.
But when you factored in local conditions — the fact that your dollar can buy more in Biloxi than Boston — the relationship reverses. “Locally rich” white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.
Put those two results together, and you get a picture that aligns precisely with Hochschild’s observations. Trump’s strongest support comes from people who live in poorer parts of the country, like KY-5, but are still able to live a relatively comfortable life there.
So what does this mean for how we understand the Trump-era right? It cuts through the seemingly interminable debate about Trump’s appeal to “left behind” voters and helps us understand the actual complexity of the right’s appeals to region and class in the United States. America’s divisions are rooted in less income inequality per se than is widely appreciated, and often tied to divisions inside of communities and social groups.
In Stolen Pride, Hochschild locates the heart of Trump’s appeal to rural voters in emotions of pride and shame — including pride in their region’s traditions and shame in what it’s become in an era of declining coal jobs and rising drug addiction.
For Roger Ford, a KY-5 entrepreneur and Republican activist who serves as Hochschild’s exemplar of Trump’s “locally rich” base, Trump helps resolve those emotions by offering someone to blame. Ford may not be suffering personally, but his region is — and Trump’s rage at liberal coastal elites helps him locate a villain outside of his own community.
“He based his deepest sense of pride, it seemed, on his role of defender of his imperiled rural homeland from which so much had been lost — or, as it could feel, ‘stolen,’” she writes.
Ford’s comments to Hochschild shift seamlessly between economic and cultural grievances. In discussing his opposition to transgender rights, he situates it as the latest in a long line of dislocations that people in his region faced.
“With all we’re coping with here, we’re having a hard enough time,” he tells Hochschild. “Then you make it fashionable to choose your gender? Where are we going?”
This comment might make it seem as if economic concerns are somehow prior to cultural ones, and people like Ford are angry at transgender people because of economic deprivation in coal country. But high-quality research tells a different, more complicated story.
In 2022, scholars Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley examined the political consequences of what they call “rural consciousness” for politics. They divide this consciousness into three component parts: “a feeling that ruralites are underrepresented in decision-making (‘Representation’) and that their way of life is disrespected (‘Way of Life’) — both symbolic concerns — and a more materialistic concern that rural areas receive less resources (‘Resources’).”
When they tried to use these different “subdimensions” of rural consciousness to predict Trump support among rural voters, they found something interesting. People who saw the plight of ruralities in cultural and political terms were most likely to support Trump, while those primarily concerned about rural poverty were, if anything, less likely to support him than their neighbors.
Taken together, these findings suggest that the story isn’t simply that economic deprivation breeds cultural resentment. Trump’s strongest supporters in rural areas tend to be angry that their regions don’t set the social terms of American life: that they don’t control the halls of power and that, as a consequence, both political and cultural life is moving away from what they’re comfortable with. Economic decline surely exacerbates this sense of alienation, but it isn’t at the heart of it.”
“Loomer has been a quasi-journalist on the fringe right for about a decade, with a penchant for saying things that make even hardened MAGA types recoil. She is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has cheered the deaths of migrants and called for Muslims to be banned from driving for ride-hail apps. She ran for Congress twice, in 2020 and 2022, and failed both times. More recently, Loomer has called Kamala Harris a “drug-using prostitute” and warned that, if she wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”
Despite all of this, Trump has long displayed a soft spot for Loomer. He endorsed her House bid in 2020 and, in 2023, tried to offer her a spot on his campaign — only to back down after aides revolted. Undeterred, he hosted her at Mar-a-Lago afterward, repeatedly boosted her content on Truth Social, and traveled with her on the 2024 campaign trail.
It’s not clear what Trump gets out of this relationship. But his ties to Loomer have become a major controversy since the 9/11 event, with some of the former president’s closest allies speaking publicly against Loomer.
“The history of this person is just really toxic,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the HuffPost. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — who claimed a Jewish family was using space lasers to start wildfires! — thinks Loomer is a bridge too far, calling Loomer’s tweet about Harris and curry “appalling and extremely racist.” (Loomer responded by accusing Greene of sleeping with a “Zangief cosplayer.”)
It’s hard to take these condemnations all that seriously. Trump and his vice presidential pick have spent this week pushing a nasty conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets that appears to have inspired real-world hate crimes. If you’re worried about racism and conspiracy theorizing, maybe take a look at the top of the ticket.
But what makes Loomer different from Trump is that she has literally no filter. She says the quiet part out loud, every single time. The more time Trump spends with her, the harder it is to deny that his thinly veiled bigotry is anything but the genuine article. And that, for the Republican Party, is a very big problem indeed.”
Trump supporters thrive in falsity and anti-democratic attitudes.
“If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll.”
“among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results.”
“Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.”
“”Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump’s campaign avers in a statement issued on Monday. Like Trump’s assertion that “our crime rate is going up,” this claim is completely at odds with reality.
According to FBI data, the homicide rate jumped by more than 27 percent in 2020, when Trump was president; rose slightly in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration; and fell by 7 percent in 2022. Preliminary FBI numbers show bigger drops in 2023 (about 13 percent) and this year (26 percent for the first quarter). So far this year, according to data from 277 cities, homicides are down by about 17 percent.”
“trade policy. Trump’s protectionist stance is well-known, with his administration imposing tariffs on a wide range of goods, particularly from China. He has since announced that he would like to impose an across-the-board 10 percent and then 20 percent tariff on imports to the U.S., on top of the those already in place.
But Harris’ stance is hardly better. She has embraced a “worker-centered” trade policy that looks suspiciously similar to Trump’s “America First” approach. Both emphasize protecting existing American jobs and industries, even at the cost of higher prices for beleaguered consumers, fewer resources to start new firms that will lead to more opportunity for the next generation of workers, and reduced economic efficiency. And let’s not forget that during the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration has imposed its fair share of tariffs while keeping many of Trump’s.”
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“Both sides want to subsidize homeownership. The Republican platform advocates for the government to “promote homeownership through Tax Incentives.” The Harris campaign has announced a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers. Both plans would subsidize housing demand, thus putting upward pressure on housing prices. Great for people who already own homes; not so great for the new homebuyers themselves.”
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“Both Harris and Trump represent variations on a theme of big, fiscally irresponsible, hyper-interventionist government.”
“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”
Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””
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“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.
Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.
You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”
“”Six years after then-President Donald Trump signed the first tariffs and began a costly U.S.-China trade war, it’s become clear that these tariffs are an abject policy and economic failure,” wrote Jay Derr of the Reason Foundation (the organization that publishes this website) earlier this year. “These tariffs have negatively impacted trade between the U.S. and China, leading importers to shift toward Mexico’s west coast instead of shipping directly to the United States. As a result, trade between Mexico and China has grown by 60% in one year.”
They also, on net, failed to protect American jobs: The U.S.-China Business Council found in 2021, that some 245,000 American jobs were lost as a result of the tariffs. And despite the Trump team’s hopes, U.S. Steel may in fact get sold to Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation after all (though pulling the deal off is proving complicated).
“The entire purpose of a tariff is to shift consumer behavior away from politically disfavored goods—such as imports from China—toward domestic-made items that would otherwise lose out in a free market of price competition,” wrote Reason’s Eric Boehm last month. If reimposed and broadened, “Trump’s proposed 10 percent tariff would be equivalent to a $300 billion tax increase,” reports Boehm. “Assuming other countries would also raise trade barriers in retaliation, the final toll would be more than 825,000 jobs lost, according to Tax Foundation Senior Economist Erica York.” For the typical American household, Trump’s round two would impose costs of an additional $1,500 annually.”
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“If we get more tariffs, it’s American consumers who will have to bear the consequences—after suffering through several years of high inflation that have already taken a big chunk out of their budgets.”