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President Biden should use his powers, which protects him from doing anything he wants, and shoot the orange turd...

Already pushing back.

A world without seed oils and pesticides? The food industry braces for RFK Jr. era.

Kennedy has promised to take aim at the food and pharmaceutical industries in a Trump administration. Interest groups are already pushing back.

By Marcia Brown, Grace Yarrow and Brittany Gibson

Donald Trump’s embrace of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his fringe health theories is triggering a flurry of outreach in Washington and beyond, with powerful ag interests rushing to defend their industries from Kennedy’s threats.

Trade groups representing farmers say they’re pushing the Trump campaign over concerns about Kennedy’s rhetoric on American agriculture. And lobbyists for packaged food companies and other major industry players are rushing to defend their use of additives and other ingredients under fire in the heat of the campaign.

The reaction to RFK Jr.’s agenda marks one of countless ways the business world is bracing for the possibility of a disruptive return of Trump. While many businesses achieved their aims during Trump’s first term, the latest rhetoric on the campaign trail is spurring a wave of concern about a more radical set of changes in a second Trump term.

As one food industry lobbyist put it, Kennedy has “taken on a whole life of his own in the last few weeks.”

Over the weekend, Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan he was 100 percent committed to including Kennedy in his administration, with a focus on health. On Monday, Kennedy claimed at a virtual event that Trump promised him “control of the public health agencies,” which he said included the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health. “And then also the USDA,” Kennedy continued, “which, you know, is key to making America healthy because we’ve got to get off of seed oils and we’ve got to get off of pesticide-intensive agriculture.”

Banning pesticides — not to mention food additives, seed oils or ultra-processed foods, as Kennedy has also advocated — would completely upend the existing U.S. food system. And if Trump truly lets Kennedy “go wild” on food and health, as he promised in remarks at a recent campaign rally, it would represent a 180 degree reversal from the agriculture agenda during his first term, which included rolling back pesticide restrictions and other food-related regulations.

Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick said on CNN Wednesday night that Kennedy “is not going to be in charge of HHS,” though he suggested the noted anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist could get a role examining health and vaccine data. People familiar with the transition conversations say Trump would be more likely to name Kennedy to some sort of food and health “czar” role that does not require Senate confirmation.

Kennedy declined to answer questions for this report, but said in a statement that he’s grateful to the former president for his commitment to end chronic disease.

The one-time independent presidential candidate has not been shy about campaigning for a senior role in a future Trump administration. After dropping his erstwhile bid and endorsing Trump in August, Kennedy and his allies launched a “Make America Healthy Again” Super PAC “to unite Robert Kennedy Jr. supporters in voting for Donald J. Trump to Make America Healthy Again.”

He has since used that MAHA initiative as a platform to promote himself and his food and health agenda — taking direct aim at the country’s powerful corporate agribusinesses and pharmaceutical companies, which he and his supporters blame for worsening rates of chronic disease and environmental abuse.

That broad critique of the American food system is shared by many on the left as well as the right. But Kennedy has gone further, embracing scientifically dubious theories about vitamins, chemicals and seed oils, which come on top of his notorious role fueling debunked anti-vaccine conspiracies.

While most in the agriculture and pharmaceutical industries remain skeptical that Trump would ultimately put Kennedy in a position of real power, conversations with more than half a dozen industry lobbyists and more than a dozen lawmakers and Hill aides indicate many are starting to prepare for that reality.

“All the ag groups are hearing from producers, and we are certainly expressing those concerns” to the Trump campaign, one agriculture industry lobbyist told POLITICO. “We’re certainly concerned and watching closely.”

Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said that “formal discussions of who will serve” in a Trump administration are “premature.” Cheung didn’t deny Trump promised Kennedy control of health and food agencies.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said Trump will work with “passionate voices” like Kennedy to “Make America Healthy Again by providing families with safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic plaguing our children.” Leavitt also said Trump will establish a presidential commission of “independent minds” who aren’t “bought and paid for by Big Pharma” to investigate a rise in chronic illnesses.

A former Trump HHS official cautioned that no one knows how much influence Kennedy would ultimately be able to wield if the former president wins another term. For now, the Trump team is engaging Kennedy on his “healthy living” aims rather than “aggressive FDA ideas,” the former official said.

“I think it’s serious, and they’re taking his advice, but I don’t think it’s a matter of” him being tapped as FDA commissioner, added the former official, who questioned whether Kennedy would be willing to disentangle his investments to comply with federal ethics rules.

Kennedy also has a history of touting partnerships with Trump that didn’t ultimately materialize — such as his January 2017 claim that the then-president-elect asked him to head a vaccine commission. And Trump, himself, is notoriously mercurial when it comes to personnel. Even if he sticks by his promise, the former president would need senators’ buy-in to confirm Kennedy to a Cabinet secretary post or commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. And many of the policies Kennedy is advocating for would likely get tied up in legal challenges, even if they were enacted.

Some industry groups are not taking any chances.

Earlier this month, dozens of the country’s most prominent farm groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, sent a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture Committee expressing concern about “significant misunderstandings” about common farming practices such as the use of pesticides and GMOs and defending the “existing risk- and science-based regulatory frameworks for these technologies.”

“Farm Bureau and other organizations sent the letter to combat misinformation that has been spread by several sources including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. regarding critical crop protection tools and agricultural practices,” John Walt Boatright, AFBF’s director of government affairs, wrote in a statement to POLITICO. Boatright added that AFBF does not endorse candidates or potential Cabinet picks, but communicates “directly with candidates” to recommend policy positions.

Sarah Gallo, senior vice president at the Consumer Brands Association, which represents packaged food companies, said that her organization had been meeting with members of Congress for “quite some time” to discuss policies on ultra-processed foods, food safety and dietary regulations, major areas RFK Jr. emphasizes in his rhetoric on healthy living.

“Anyone in the political sphere that is running for president that has a platform that includes making decisions about the food supply that are not based on science is something that’s going to be on our radar screen,” said Gallo.

Kennedy has been doing his own outreach to GOP lawmakers.

Just weeks after endorsing Trump and joining his transition team, Kennedy was making appointments with the help of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and former food and pharma lobbyist Calley Means, who has since morphed into a health care entrepreneur and popular alternative health advocate.

Kennedy met with about 10 GOP lawmakers in late September for a private two-hour lunch beforehand, including Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) and House Rep. Chip Roy, according to an interview with Roy and posts from lawmakers about the meeting on X.

And he was the marquee speaker at a nearly three-hour roundtable hosted by Johnson focused on alternative diets, the dangers of processed foods and why people shouldn’t trust food and drug regulatory agencies. Flanked by the Wisconsin senator, pop psychologist Jordan Peterson and several influencers, Kennedy’s event also drew the attention of GOP lawmakers who joined the audience.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, cited his nascent interest “in healthy eating and healthy dieting” to attending the Kennedy event, adding that he’s supportive of much of what was discussed in the meeting and would support the next administration taking up these issues, including potentially more regulation. Crapo conceded, however, that he’s not sure Kennedy could win enough support in the Senate to be confirmed for a top job. “I honestly don’t know the answer to that question,” Crapo said.

Some GOP insiders are privately dubious, citing Kennedy’s long record of false claims about vaccines and other controversial statements.

“I think Republicans are evenly divided about the Make America Healthy Again agenda,” said one Senate GOP aide. “Some people, I think, see RFK as a total hack. … Certain [other] people are like, ‘Well, we think all of FDA is a crock of shit and we think it needs to be reformed from the inside out.’”

There’s just not all that much there.

The disappointingly transparent truth at the heart of the Trump-Vance ticket

Melania, Donald, Usha and JD have had enough time to show the public exactly who they are. I suspect that what we see is unfortunately exactly what we get.

By Jill Filipovic

Who, exactly, is Melania Trump? Since the sphinx-eyed former model came onto the political scene alongside her husband, former President Donald Trump, she’s been something of an enigma: often seemingly apolitical and largely silent, with opaque motivations. She clearly doesn’t believe Trump’s politics were a deal-breaker — after all, she remains married to the guy. But she didn’t exactly seem enthusiastic about being in the political crosshairs, either. 

The former first lady’s very short memoir, with an all-black cover interrupted only by “MELANIA” printed in neat white block letters, promised to offer some insight “into the life of a remarkable woman who has navigated challenges with grace and determination.”

In fact, no such insight is offered. It is a difficult book to remark on, because it contains nothing remarkable. This is a book you can judge by its cover. “Melania” isn’t just boring; it’s a void. 

Perhaps Melania is, too. Journalists have tried to profile her, interviewing friends and family members and even people she grew up with, trying to find anyone who can help them decode this cipher. But Melania may be more stick figure than hieroglyphic; there seems to be no complex code to crack. 

Melania is exactly who she seems to be: a beautiful woman who has spent a long time trying to be beautiful, who found a rich man to take care of her. She loves her son, Barron, and her parents (her mother recently passed away). She likes expensive clothes and other luxuries. She may not be an aggressively cruel person like her husband, but she doesn’t seem to be an ardently compassionate one, either.  

And that would be all fine and good had she stayed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her wealthy if boorish and allegedly philandering husband. But Trump’s foray in politics has dragged her in, too, and her decision to stand by his side (even if she didn’t go to the trial stemming from his alleged dalliance with porn star Stormy Daniels during their marriage) is at the very least a symbol of her acceptance of his vulgarities and goals. 

She did get some headlines — good and bad — for using her memoir to voice public support for abortion rights just weeks before an election in which abortion is one of her husband’s weaker issues. But this, too, seems less a statement of true independence and more one of cynical political game-playing — her husband needs to rope in more female voters, and many women are angry that he appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. 

In this sense, perhaps Melania and Donald aren’t so different. Neither are politically sophisticated or particularly attentive to policy. Neither evince much in the way of compassion or even interest in other people. Trump is angry and vitriolic, while Melania is purse-lipped and stoic; he is emotionally incontinent, while she often appears to be in emotional rigor mortis; he is behaviorally uninhibited and says whatever he wants, while she is studiously reserved, perhaps because she has very little to say. But with both Trumps, what you see is what you get: There’s just not all that much there. 

The Vances — JD, who is running for vice president, and Usha, who would be the second lady — are far more fascinating. But they, too, may be more transparent than the public would hope.

Journalist Irin Carmon has a compelling profile of Usha Vance in The Cut, and it sketches out a woman who on her face seems ill-suited for the role of political spouse to a MAGA maniac. 

Usha is the high-achieving daughter of highly educated immigrant parents, who married a man whom she academically outperformed and who was attracted to her intelligence; JD even reportedly considered taking her last name and being the primary caregiver for their kids. Now, he’s a different kind of guy, one who rails against childless cat ladies and, as Carmon writes, “refer[s] to his children as belonging to Usha” (“She’s got three kids,” he recently said on a New York Times podcast).

Vance, Carmon writes, “often describes Usha as a ‘working mother’ without implying that he himself has anything to juggle. He has come a long way from the would-be stay-at-home dad who put his wife’s career first.”

Usha Vance has clerked for conservative judges, including federal appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, and Chief Justice John Roberts, but she doesn’t seem particularly conservative (or political) herself. JD Vance once compared Trump to Hitler and voiced his respect for ambitious women; now he’s Trump’s highest-level lackey and mocks professional women who delay or — for whatever reason — don’t end up giving birth.

After he graduated from law school, Vance did a little bit of time in the world of corporate law before moving into bigger-money venture capital. While there, he published a finger-wagging memoir about his working-class Appalachian roots, writing about rural America in a way that appealed to moneyed coastal conservatives who wanted to believe that the poor and miserable immiserated themselves. (While the book garnered plenty of bipartisan praise, leftists, it’s worth pointing out, were some of the harshest critics of “Hillbilly Elegy.”) When he decided to run for the Senate in Ohio, he was barely living in the state and had to quickly rebrand as a real working-class man — and one sympathetic to the MAGA movement. 

Usha hasn’t adopted many of the aesthetics of the MAGA female, but she has quit her job, joined her husband on the campaign and stood by her man even as he demeans the sort of smart, well-educated, ambitious female archetype she very recently embodied.

The public wants the people in high office — and most people in the public eye, whether they are in politics or are celebrities of another kind — to have depth. We want them to be decipherable, but we want to believe they are special. When they seem insubstantial or fueled by some silly and transparent motivation, we may assume there’s something they’re obscuring. If they’re at the top of their game, then there must be something there, right?

Maybe with these four — the Trumps and the Vances — that’s simply assuming too much. Perhaps they are exactly who they appear to be: The Trumps are superficial, intellectually shallow and money-obsessed; the Vances have principles that seemingly bend to their grand ambitions. All four of these people have had enough time to show the public who they are. I suspect that what we see is exactly what we get.

Ties to Jeffrey Epstein....

Trump’s Ties to Jeffrey Epstein: Everything We’ve Learned

(This is an edited version)

By Margaret Hartmann

hile Jeffrey Epstein’s black book contained a staggering number of A-listers and high-society pals, perhaps the biggest question surrounding this year’s release of a tranche of Epstein court documents was what they would reveal about Donald Trump.

The hype reached a fever pitch on January 3, 2024, when Mark Epstein claimed that before his brother died in jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, he told him he knew secrets that could blow up the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

“Here’s a direct quote: ‘If I said what I know about both candidates, they’d have to cancel the election.’ That’s what Jeffrey told me in 2016,” Mark Epstein told the New York Post.

Wild stuff! But Mark Epstein said he didn’t know what information his brother was referring to. And while Trump was mentioned in both old court documents and the batches released in 2024, there was no smoking gun.

Trump has repeatedly denied any Epstein-related wrongdoing. Yet questions about Trump’s ties to Epstein persist, as the convicted sex offender is a conspiracy-theory fixture and former model Stacey Williams recently claimed Trump groped her as his friend watched. Here’s a running list of everything we’ve learned about Trump’s relationship with Epstein.

Williams said that during a 1993 walk with Epstein, who she was dating, he suggested they stop into Trump Tower to visit Donald. She said on the call:

Moments later, Trump was greeting us. And he pulled me into him, and started groping me. He put his hands all over my breasts, my waist, my butt. And I froze. And I froze because I was so deeply confused about what was happening because the hands were moving all over me yet these two men were like smiling at one another and continuing on in their conversation. 

She said Epstein berated her afterward, and she came to feel that the groping was part of a “twisted game” between the two men. A short time later, Trump sent Williams a postcard from Mar-a-Lago via her agent. The Guardian published a photo of it on October 23.

Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the story, telling The Guardian: “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”

Trump began palling around with Epstein in the late ’80s, but the depth of their friendship is a subject of debate.

Footage unearthed by NBC News in 2019 shows the two men joking around and ogling women during a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 1992.

Williams said that she met Epstein in 1992 and it was clear that “he and Donald were really, really good friends.” She said that while she was dating Epstein, he “mentioned Trump frequently. He was clearly a close friend and they were spending a lot of time together.”

Trump and Epstein were also photographed together in 1992 and 1997. The now famous image below shows Trump and then-girlfriend Melania Knauss partying with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago on February 12, 2000.

In 2002, the mogul told New York, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

There is no evidence that Trump ever visited Little St. James, Epstein’s residence located in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Epstein allegedly trafficked and sexually abused women and girls there, which is why it was nicknamed “Orgy Island,” “Pedophile Island,” and “Island of Sin.”

Trump has denied that he ever visited Epstein’s island. But he’s been happy to fan similar unfounded conspiracy theories about about his political rivals. When asked in 2019 if he believes the Clintons were involved in Epstein’s death, Trump answered:

I have no idea. I know he was on his plane 27 times, and he said he was on the plane four times. But when they checked the plane logs, Bill Clinton, who was a very good friend of Epstein, he was on the plane about 27 or 28 times, so why did he say four times?

And then the question you have to ask is ‘Did Bill Clinton go to the island?’ because Epstein had an island that was not a good place as I understand it, and I was never there. So you have to ask, ‘Did Bill Clinton go to the island?’ If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.

Like Trump, Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane. But none of the Epstein flight logs list either former president as passengers on Virgin Islands-bound flights. A Clinton spokesman said the former president “has never been to Little St. James” and his office has repeatedly said he “knows nothing” about Epstein’s “terrible crimes.”

Trump has claimed that he and Epstein had a “falling out” years before the financier was first arrested in Palm Beach in 2005 after being accused of paying a 14-year-old girl for sex. (Though dozens of other underage girls accused Epstein of sexual abuse at the time, because of a 2008 plea deal, he served only 13 months in jail in a work-release program.)

There are reports that a battle over a choice Palm Beach property ended the Trump-Epstein friendship, but it’s unclear what exactly came between the two. Days after Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Trump downplayed their relationship while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. He said he merely “knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” adding, “I had a falling out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

Human trafficked by Musk

Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Workers Were Driven Around in Back of U-Haul Van and Tricked Into Helping Trump

Story by Charlie Nash

One of several Michigan door-knockers has claimed they were tricked into helping billionaire Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump’s get-out-the-vote efforts, and were driven door-to-door in the back of a U-Haul van.

According to a Wednesday report from Wired magazine, door-knockers contracted by a company associated with Musk’s America PAC were “subjected to poor working conditions,” including being “driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van,” and were “threatened that their lodging at a local motel wouldn’t be paid for if they didn’t meet canvassing quotas.”

In addition to threats about motel rooms, workers were also allegedly told they would have to pay for their own flights home.

Blitz Canvassing, a subcontractor, reportedly received more than $9 million from Musk’s PAC to operate the door-knocking campaign. However, workers were reportedly left unaware who exactly it was they were working for.

“I knew nothing of the job, or much of the job description, other than going door to door and asking the voters who are they voting for,” said one worker, who was photographed in the back of the U-Haul van. “Then, after I signed over an NDA, is when I found out we are for Republicans and with Trump.”

The van came as a surprise to door-knockers, the worker alleged, and they supposedly only knew of Musk’s involvement after they “overheard” several people mentioning the billionaire’s name.

“We were all told our transportation would be handled and we’d be in rental cars. It turned out to be U-Haul vans,” they said. “I felt embarrassed and played.”

According to Wired, the “mostly Black door knockers” experienced a bumpy ride in the back of the seatbelt-less van, separated from the driver by “a cage.”

“The driver also told the group of door knockers that he was in pain and had difficulty driving,” Wired reported, with the driver reportedly complaining, “I just had surgery, bro… Like half of my foot is cut off.”

The post Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Workers Were Driven Around in Back of U-Haul Van and Tricked Into Helping Trump: Report first appeared on Mediaite

The horror that would come... When you are satnding with your dick in one hand and thinking why things suck so bad....

Trump’s plan to radically remake government with RFK Jr. and Elon Musk is coming into view

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf

For much of the presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump worked to distance himself from Project 2025, the detailed game plan written by conservative activists for a second Trump term.

Whether or not his allies will try to implement portions of the controversial plan if he wins the 2024 election is still the topic of some debate.

But there is an equally radical and expansive government reformation plan coming out of Trump’s own mouth, in which heterodox figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be given free rein to “go wild” on the health safety system and Elon Musk would be enabled to, as the tech billionaire said, “start from scratch” with the federal workforce.

Separately, Trump’s transition co-chair appeared on CNN Wednesday night to argue Kennedy and Musk probably wouldn’t be given specific government jobs but that Kennedy would be given data in order to question vaccines.

So without getting bogged down in whether Trump does or does not support Project 2025, here’s a look at what the former president and the people he says he would empower have said they would do if he wins the White House.

‘Go wild’ with RFK Jr.

Trump has promised to give Kennedy leeway to remake the way the government health apparatus protects Americans.

“I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines,” Trump said during his closing argument rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

Much of what Kennedy pushes sounds positive. His “Make America Healthy Again” PAC promises to focus on “prioritizing regenerative agriculture, preserving natural habitats, and eliminating toxins from our food, water, and air.”

But those ideas are short on specifics, and there are personal issues that would impede anyone else from government service. Kennedy compared vaccine requirements with the Nazi Germany era, claiming Anne Frank was in a better situation; was once arrested for heroin possession; and has pushed wild conspiracy theories about chemicals in the water making children gay or transgender.

Kennedy’s own health has also been a concern. He once ate so much tuna and perch that he experienced “severe brain fog” from mercury poisoning, he told The New York Times.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former President Donald Trump shake hands during a campaign rally at Desert Diamond Arena on August 23, 2024 in Glendale, Arizona.

In video obtained by CNN, Kennedy told supporters on Monday that Trump had promised to give him sweeping power over multiple agencies if the former president wins the election.

“The key that I think I’m – you know, that President Trump has promised me is – is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) and its sub-agencies, CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), FDA (Food and Drug Administration), NIH (National Institutes of Health) and a few others, and then also the USDA (Department of Agriculture), which is – which, you know, is key to making America healthy. Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide intensive agriculture,” Kennedy said.

In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team, said Kennedy would not be in charge of HHS but would be given access to data about vaccines in order to check their safety. But vaccines that are currently approved and authorized for use in the US have been proven safe and effective. Lutnick also pushed unproven conspiracy theories that vaccines are behind autism in children. Although it is still unclear what causes autism, the scientific consensus is that vaccines do not.

“He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe.’ And then if you pull the product liability (protections), the companies will yank these vaccines right off, off of the market,” Lutnick said.

Meanwhile, “Trump’s plans have been met with alarm in the public health community, not so much for the specific policy proposals Kennedy has communicated as part of his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ platform as much as for the key issue he’s been leaving out: vaccines,” according to CNN’s Meg Tirrell. She wrote an in-depth review of Kennedy’s record on health issues.

Both Trump and Kennedy have expressed vaccine skepticism, and Kennedy has been a longtime activist pushing debunked theories about vaccines. During the campaign, Kennedy has deemphasized his views on vaccines, Tirrell notes. His push for more natural food does find support among some health experts.

‘Start from scratch’ with Musk

Musk, the superrich Trump supporter, would be given a much wider portfolio than Kennedy and be charged with a massive downsizing of the federal government.

It’s an even stickier situation since Musk’s many companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, have a profit-motivated interest in business with the government. The US government currently relies on SpaceX, which also owns the satellite internet provider Starlink.

If there’s any doubt that a Musk government role could be a risk for conflict of interest, simply look at the fact that he has said he could be in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency.” DOGE is the name of Musk’s cryptocurrency, an area the Trump family is also keen to enter.

Lutnick told Collins that Musk wouldn’t enter the government because he can’t sell SpaceX but would instead be writing software to give to the government.

Musk has been no stranger to making headlines as his support for Trump has been on full display this campaign season. He is currently trying to move a lawsuit over his $1 million giveaway to voters into federal court, potentially averting a hearing Thursday in Philadelphia state court that he was required to attend. At the center of the legal battle is a daily $1 million sweepstakes that Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, called America PAC, is offering to registered voters in battleground states.

His lawyers filed a “motion of removal” in federal court late Wednesday night. This typically pauses the state case and puts the matter in the hands of a federal judge – unless and until that judge decides to send the case back to state courts.

Musk is also constantly pushing out antisemitic things and has mused about how women shouldn’t vote. Not to mention reports of his meetings with hostile foreign leaders.

In a potential new Trump administration, Musk promises a reinvention of the federal bureaucracy.

“Let’s start from scratch,” Musk said at an event in October in Pittsburgh, suggesting a drastic remaking of the federal bureaucracy.

CNN’s David Goldman looked this month at what Trump and Musk have said about a potential Musk role in government, which would be focused on steep spending cuts – Musk has said he could trim $2 trillion, perhaps with help from artificial intelligence – and rolling back regulations. But he’d do it in a nice way, apparently.

“Musk has promised a gentle touch, offering generous severance packages to laid-off government workers, while at the same time proposing an assessment system that threatens layoffs to wasteful employees,” Goldman wrote.

The problem, according to the former Treasury Secretary Larry Summer, is that there’s not $2 trillion to be gained from massive government layoffs.

“Respectfully, I think it is idiotic,” Summers said on Fox News this week. “These people think it’s like some business. But here’s the problem: Only 15% of the federal budget is for payroll. So even if you took all the employees, every single person working for the federal government out, you couldn’t save anything like $2 trillion.”

Summers has a point about payroll. The government spent about $271 billion to compensate 2.3 million civilian employees in 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Summers said that to achieve trillions in cuts, Musk would have to look at Social Security and Medicare benefits, something Trump has promised not to do.

‘No Obamacare’

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a top Trump ally, said in Pennsylvania on Monday that if Trump wins and Republicans keep the House, there would be a “massive” overhaul of the health care system. “No Obamacare?” shouted an attendee at the campaign event. “No Obamacare,” Johnson said.

He added: “The ACA is so deeply ingrained; we need massive reform to make this work. And we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”

During a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in September, Trump did not give specifics, but he did say he had “concepts” of a plan. These have not been shared publicly.

Trump tried, and failed, during his time in White House to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but retooling the health care system is clearly still a priority for Republicans.

Drastic change won’t be easy

This is a good spot to point out that no matter what Trump is promising Kennedy and Musk, and no matter what Johnson hopes to do about health care, the realities of the US government make drastic change hard to achieve.

A minority in the Senate, assuming it’s larger than 40 senators, could block any attempt to really undo the Affordable Care Act. The Senate is supposed to confirm top officials like Cabinet secretaries, although Trump and other presidents found ways around that rule in the Constitution. It’s not clear if Kennedy could find the votes to be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services or if Trump would even nominate him. If Kennedy had a role in the White House, his ability to enact sweeping change would be limited.

While presidents have authority over the federal workforce and Trump was working to reclassify many federal employees to make them easier to fire when he was president, a “start from scratch” scenario would theoretically require congressional approval.

Not that we can say with any certainty what would require congressional approval since, unlike with the detailed Project 2025 plan, there are no specifics to match any of these big ideas. At least not yet. 

Have the National Guard on speed dial....

January 6th is going to be pretty fun’: How MAGA activists are preparing to undermine the election if Trump loses

By Curt Devine, Casey Tolan and Donie O'Sullivan

Before Election Day has even arrived, the “Stop the Steal” movement has reemerged in force, with some of the same activists who tried to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss outlining a step-by-step guide to undermine the results if he falls short again.

For months, those activists – who have been priming Trump supporters to believe the only way the former president can lose in 2024 is through fraud – have laid out proposals to thwart a potential Kamala Harris victory. Their plans include challenging results in court, pressuring lawmakers to block election certification, and encouraging protests – culminating on January 6, 2025, the day Congress will once again certify the results.

“I have a plan and strategy,” Ivan Raiklin, a former Green Beret and political operative who has close ties to associates of Trump, told a group of Pennsylvania activists earlier this month. “And then January 6th is going to be pretty fun.”

Trump’s allies – and the former president himself – are increasingly pushing debunked claims of voter fraud, spreading their rhetoric through podcasts with massive audiences, megachurch sermons and political rallies in key states. Some Trump backers, including pastors associated with Christian nationalist ideas, have described the election as a fight between good and evil, describing Harris as the antichrist or suggesting that God has anointed Trump as the victor.

Four years ago, Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden didn’t truly materialize until after the election. They were largely improvised and ad hoc, with a flurry of hastily filed lawsuits that went nowhere and efforts to convince state legislators to block certification that fell short.

But this time around, MAGA activists have been planning to undermine a potential Harris victory well in advance of the election, with some even arguing that state legislators should simply ignore the election results and award electoral votes to Trump by default.

Congress passed a measure in 2022 that makes it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, and with Trump now out of office, he and his allies cannot wield levers of the executive branch to try to influence the election. But experts say that the people involved in these conspiracy theory-driven efforts appear to be better organized, more determined and, in some cases, more extreme than four years ago.

Federal law enforcement officials are also ringing alarm bells. A bulletin put out earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence warned that extremist rhetoric about the election could motivate people to “engage in violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle.”

Marc Harris, a former investigator for the House select committee that investigated January 6, 2021, told CNN he’s concerned that the tactics to undermine the election have evolved since 2020, even with the safeguards put into place since then.

“Those looking to overturn the election are way ahead of where they were in 2020,” said Harris. “But on the flip side, the pro-democracy defenders are also more prepared. How that shakes out is not clear to me.”

Baseless fears of a ‘steal’

Unfounded claims about malign forces conspiring to cheat Trump out of an otherwise inevitable election win have been increasing in recent weeks from influential members of the MAGA movement.

“Yes, the steal is happening again,” Emerald Robinson, a right-wing broadcaster with nearly 800,000 followers on X, declared in a blog post earlier this month, criticizing the fact that votes may take days to count in some states. “It doesn’t take days to get election results. It takes days to cheat.”

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who donated millions of dollars to efforts investigating the 2020 election, warned on Telegram this week of a cyberattack that would rig the election and lead to imminent “death and cannibalism” unless Americans stand together.

And Greg Locke, a prominent Tennessee pastor who spoke near the Capitol the day before the January 6 riot, told his followers in a sermon earlier this month that the US would be hit with “a catastrophic storm that is going to be man-made” in the days before the election, as an apparent method of stealing the vote.

“If Kamala wins this election, hear me when I tell you, we will never have another one,” Locke predicted.

Some of the debunked ideas that surfaced after the 2020 election and sought to explain how Trump lost remain rampant, such as the notion that voting machines are flipping votes to favor Democrats or that election officials in swing states have been complicit in widespread voter fraud.

“The same systems are being used. Many of the same players are in place,” Joe Hoft, who has contributed to the conspiracy-theory-peddling website The Gateway Pundit, told CNN when asked about the 2024 election. “I don’t trust the process. The process is broken.”

In recent episodes of “War Room,” a prominent program airing election conspiracy theories started by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, guests have repeatedly suggested that Democratic governors in swing states or Democratic members of Congress could block certification of a legitimate Trump victory.

They’ve cited comments like Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin telling Axios earlier this month that he didn’t assume Trump would use “free, fair and honest” means to win – even though Raskin said he would “obviously accept” a Trump victory if it was honest.

“They call us election deniers all the time,” GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on a “War Room” episode last week, in which she raised concerns about overseas military voting. “But it looks, it appears to be that there is a big fight being set up over the certification of the election and the outcome of the election.”

Greene has also floated a conspiracy theory that recent US Capitol Police training exercises are connected to a plan by congressional Democrats to keep Trump out of power even if he wins.

Trump himself has echoed some of the conspiracy theories pushed by his supporters, suggesting that election fraud is rampant in 2024. But party officials have struck a different tone.

“You can trust American elections,” Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and the Republican National Committee co-chair, said on a call with reporters Wednesday. Touting her party’s election-integrity efforts, she said that “we want to make people all across this country feel good about the process of voting in the United States of America.”

“President Trump, Team Trump, and the RNC have been incredibly consistent and clear: we are actively working to protect the vote and all Americans must get out and vote to make this election TOO BIG TO RIG,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, told CNN.

Plans to block a Harris win

While some groups have been gathering supposed examples of election fraud for lawsuits to challenge a potential Harris win, other pro-Trump activists have coalesced around a plan to ensure Trump returns to the White House: state legislators can simply allocate their state’s electors for Trump regardless of vote counts.

The strategy generated headlines last week after Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said it “makes a lot of sense” to allocate electors that way in North Carolina, where he suggested damage from Hurricane Helene may disenfranchise some voters.

Harris, who later walked back his comments, initially voiced support for the proposal after hearing a presentation from Raiklin, who’s known for having posted a memo that argued then-Vice President Mike Pence could have blocked certification of the 2020 election results.

Raiklin has been espousing the plan for legislators to seize control of awarding electoral votes in various states in recent weeks and receiving support from other far-right figures. Mark Finchem, a Republican candidate for state senate in Arizona, wrote on X that the “extraordinary circumstances” in North Carolina – a reference to the hurricane damage – “provide a justifiable pathway for the legislature to take action.”

Noel Fritsch, publisher of the far-right online publication National File, has argued that the US Constitution gives all state legislatures the power to choose electoral college members, which he told CNN he believes could create more national stability.

“Any movement toward direct democracy is, of course, as history shows, a move toward chaos, and that’s what we’re seeing,” Fritsch said. He cited arguments from some Republican Florida legislators who claimed they had the power to a select a slate of electors during the razor-thin 2000 presidential race.

But the recent proposal from people like Fritsch and Raiklin is rife with flaws, according to legal experts and officials. Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of North Carolina’s election board, called the proposal a “violation of law,” and officials in the state have said that voting is proceeding without major issues despite the impact of the hurricane.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told CNN that state legislatures would have to first repeal their laws that dictate how elections operate before appointing electors directly.

“It’s too late for the legislatures to act,” Muller said. “You’d have to go through and remove all those laws on the books, and if you’re doing that in the middle of this moment when there’s already elections happening, then you’re going to risk due process violation of changing the rules arbitrarily.”

Concerns about violence

Incidents of political violence and threats have already occurred this year, including two apparent attempts to assassinate Trump, shootings involving a DNC office and suspicious packages mailed to election offices.

In the weeks ahead of the election, some pro-Trump activists have been openly alluding to more violent chaos that they say is on the horizon.

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn said on a program last week that he thought Trump would win all 50 states if there’s a fair election but offered a grim prediction if the winner remains unknown for days.

“I feel like people are going to go to those locations where there’s counting and there could actually be violence because people are going to be, people are so upset after 2020,” said Flynn, who four years ago drew comparisons to Civil War battlefields in a speech the day before the Capitol riot.

Some extremists are already preparing “violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war, raising the risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” according to a DHS memo from September obtained by the watchdog group Property of the People and shared with CNN.

Posts in recent months on the obscure message board 8kun, formerly 8chan, have called for violence against undocumented immigrants and urged “election steal defense prep,” while messages on a forum called “The Donald” encouraged violent shows of “force” to stop the “steal,” according to an October bulletin from Colorado’s Department of Public Safety also obtained by Property of the People.

On Telegram, violent rhetoric related to election denialism has more than quadrupled over the course of October, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks such content.

But unlike 2020, more extremist groups may have moved their discussions off public online forums and into private chats, hiding online conversations that may involve planning for the days after the election, said Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit that studies far-right movements.

Still others have cast the stakes of the election in foreboding, apocalyptic terms.

Speaking this month at a political rally known as the ReAwaken America Tour, Pastor Mark Burns of South Carolina called on supporters to keep Harris out of power by any means necessary.

“Is there anybody standing with me who would do whatever it takes to make sure she’s not the next president of the United States? Because we are at war,” Burns said. “This is about good versus evil, of a real enemy come from the gates of hell.”

Asked about his comments, Burns told CNN he was referring to spiritual war and that he condemns “talks of physical violence in any form if in the unlikely event that President Donald Trump loses the election.” 

IC 2118

By starlight, this eerie visage shines in the dark with a crooked profile evoking its popular name, the Witch Head Nebula. In fact, this entrancing telescopic portrait gives the impression that a witch has fixed her gaze on Orion's bright supergiant star Rigel. More formally known as IC 2118, the Witch Head Nebula spans about 50 light-years and is composed of interstellar dust grains reflecting Rigel's starlight. The color of the Witch Head Nebula is caused not only by Rigel's intense blue light, but because the dust grains scatter blue light more efficiently than red. The same physical process causes Earth's daytime sky to appear blue, although the scatterers in Earth's atmosphere are molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. Rigel and this dusty cosmic crone are about 800 light-years away. You may still see a few witches in your neighborhood tonight though, so have a safe and Happy Halloween!

Guilty of more than hypocrisy. And yes, THEY ARE FUCKING GARBAGE!

The big lie behind Biden’s “garbage” gaffe scandal

Only one presidential candidate is pledging to treat Americans who vote against him as enemies.

by Eric Levitz

Joe Biden is no longer competent at speaking in public. This makes him a poor surrogate for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is also the president, and therefore an extremely prominent surrogate for the Democratic nominee.

This generated a problem for Harris Tuesday night when Biden set out to criticize dehumanizing rhetoric at a recent Trump rally and ended up spouting a garbled stream of words that may or may not have dehumanized all Trump supporters as “garbage.”

Conservatives have thus expressed their collective horror at the spectacle of a US president disparaging Americans whose only sin was disagreeing with him politically. But even if one stipulates that Republicans’ tendentious reading of Biden is correct, their professed outrage is not merely hypocritical but perniciously misleading.

At worst, the president disparaged conservative voters momentarily, before disavowing that sentiment in his very next breath. During his time in office, meanwhile, Biden has showered federal resources on heavily Republican parts of the country. Trump, by contrast, derides progressives and immigrants as “enemies” and “vermin” without apology, and reportedly sought to block disaster aid to Democratic strongholds.

There is one candidate in the 2024 race who sees wide swaths of the American public as less than human, and it is not Kamala Harris. The furor over Biden’s disjointed remarks serves to obscure this reality.

Trump dehumanizes his political adversaries without apology or equivocation. Biden does not.

On Sunday, at a rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” During a video call with Latino supporters Tuesday night, Biden said of the incident:

And just the other day, a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something. I don’t — I — I don’t know the Puerto Rican that — that I know — or a Puerto Rico, where I’m fr— in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people.

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.

That is the official White House transcript of the remarks, at least. Republicans argue that what Biden actually said was, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [i.e., Trump’s] supporters.” In other words, Biden says he was calling Hinchcliffe’s demonization of Puerto Rico garbage, while Republicans say he was calling all Trump supporters trash.

It is impossible to distinguish “supporter’s” from “supporters” by ear. So, it cannot be known with certainty what Biden intended in the moment that those words escaped his lips. The surrounding context, however, undercuts the GOP’s interpretation. Immediately after uttering his controversial statement, the president said the following:

Now, Trump has di— tried to divide the country based on race, ethnicity, anything that does harm, to take their eye off the ball about what the terrible things he’s done and will do. But Kamala Harris has fought for all Americans and will be a president for all of America.

It is possible that Biden intended to 1) deride all Trump supporters as “garbage,” and then 2) immediately tout Harris’s commitment to fighting for human trash. But that strikes me as unlikely, particularly since the president has never said anything like that before during his half-century in public life.

Whatever Biden intended though, it is indisputable that his very next sentences disavowed the idea that Republican voters are “garbage” whose interests should be ignored. And after his event was over, Biden insisted that his intention had merely been to describe Hinchcliffe’s rhetoric as “garbage.”

Trump, meanwhile, is unequivocal in his belief that Democrats constitute “enemies from within” who must be vanquished.

On Fox News last weekend, Howard Kurtz told Trump that “enemies from within” is “a pretty ominous phrase, if you’re talking about other Americans.”

“I think it’s accurate,” Trump replied.

The Republican nominee has also suggested that some of these enemies might need to be “handled” by “the military,” likened his political opponents to “vermin,” and claimed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Just last week, Trump described America as “a garbage can for the world,” arguing that other nations deposit their human refuse into the United States through immigration.

Notably, Trump’s demonization of immigrants is not confined to those who lack legal status or even citizenship. He has baselessly accused legal US residents from Haiti of eating people’s pets and vowed to deport them. And he has described American citizens who came to this country through the diversity visa lottery as “horrendous” and “the worst of the worst.”

Trump did not feel compelled to disavow any of these statements after making them, nor to reassure the country that he wants to fight for every American. To the contrary, he is unabashedly committed to directing the power of the federal government against his political opponents and the millions of US residents whose presence in this country he abhors.

There isn’t the slightest equivalence between Biden’s rhetorical posture toward Republican voters and Trump’s toward Democrats and immigrants. And a similar gap surfaces when one examines each president’s actual governance.

Trump doesn’t just compare Americans he dislikes to garbage — he tries to treat them like it

During his time in office, Trump explicitly sought to aid Americans who’d voted for him while spurning those who dared to oppose him, multiple administration officials told Politico’s E&E News.

As deadly wildfires ripped through California, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid because the state had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, according to Mark Harvey, his administration’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. Harvey says that Trump only changed his mind after being shown vote totals demonstrating that there were more Trump supporters in Orange County, California, than in Iowa.

Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll, former homeland security officials in the Trump administration, both back up Harvey’s story.

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics — because they didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told The Guardian earlier this month. Carroll went on to say that his former boss, then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release federal funding to those areas following the wildfires and Hurricane Maria, respectively.

Trump also withheld millions in wildfire aid from Washington in September 2020 because the state’s governor had criticized him, and the aid ultimately was not approved until Biden took office.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s memoir lends further credence to these claims. In 2019, after Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle, DeSantis asked then-President Trump to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay 100 percent of the state’s recovery costs, instead of 75 percent, as was customary.

According to DeSantis’s book, Trump replied, “They love me in the Panhandle. I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”

Trump proceeded to order FEMA to pay 100 percent of Florida’s recovery costs. And yet, just two months earlier, he threatened to veto legislation that would have extended the same courtesy to Puerto Rico. And his administration proceeded to withhold $20 billion in hurricane relief from the island for a protracted period of time, while Trump reportedly told Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a “single dollar going to Puerto Rico.”

The Biden administration has shown no comparable favoritism. To the contrary, its response to Hurricane Helene — which ravaged many conservative communities on the East Coast — has earned plaudits from Republican officials.

Meanwhile, Biden’s signature piece of legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — has actually directed disproportionate funds to red states. And Biden has also directed considerable federal funds toward improving infrastructure in conservative-leaning rural areas.

Trump supporters who profess outrage at Biden’s words are guilty of more than hypocrisy

In sum, one presidential candidate is associated with a man who might have once referred to Republican voters as garbage momentarily — before immediately disavowing that idea, and after dutifully advancing the interests of conservative regions during his time as president. That candidate herself, meanwhile, has said, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for” and “I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not.”

The other presidential candidate has personally likened large swaths of the American public to “vermin” and “garbage” — repeatedly, and without apology — after seeking to choke off federal aid to Democratic victims of wildfires, and pledging to prosecute his political opponents the next chance he gets.

Any public official who condemns Harris for somehow abetting the dehumanization of ordinary Americans is not merely guilty of hypocrisy, but of wildly misleading voters about an issue of vital importance: which presidential hopeful would — and would not — treat their least favorite segments of the American public like trash.

Ominous plan.

Inside Trump’s ominous plan to turn civil rights law against vulnerable Americans

A look at Trump’s ideas for a key Justice Department division uncovers the potentially disastrous consequences of his assault on democracy.

by Zack Beauchamp

In 2016, Christy Lopez was living her dream. She was an attorney at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division working on policing where, among other things, she led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown. Lopez believes that her work spurred meaningful policing reforms, both in Ferguson and nationwide.

But when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Lopez quit. Trump, she thought, would block her team from doing any kind of worthwhile investigation into police use of force. Lopez was right. In Trump’s first year in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sharply restricted the use of consent decrees — the legal tool Lopez and her colleagues used to force change in Ferguson.

Today, she is sounding the alarm: Whatever the dangers of a first Trump term were, the risks of a second dwarf them.

“If Trump is elected, I would like to look back five years from now and say, ‘Oh, we were really alarmist,’” Lopez, now a law professor at Georgetown, told me.

“But I do worry that it’s actually going to be far worse.”

Many, many people have warned that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Many others have argued that these warnings are politically inert, that focusing on abstract concepts like “democracy” and “the rule of law” removes political debate from the concrete concerns people want addressed by government. Do people struggling to pay the bills have time to care about such matters of principle?

Yet in reality, the two things are inseparable. Trump’s plan to turn the government into a tool of his own personal will would have extraordinary consequences for Americans’ everyday lives. It would disrupt, or potentially even devastate, core functions of government that we’ve long taken for granted.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a case in point.

Founded by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Division is tasked with enforcing federal law regarding anti-discrimination and civil equality. This is a mammoth responsibility, covering areas of law that shape the fundamental experience of American democracy. Its attorneys launch hate crimes prosecutions, investigate discrimination in employment and housing, and sue states when their voting rules run afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Were Trump to return to power, the department could easily be turned from a tool for protecting civil rights into a means of undoing them. Trump and his allies have laid out fairly specific plans for doing just that — plans that, if enacted, would mean a far more radical and methodical transformation of the federal rights civil apparatus than what we saw in Trump’s shambolic first term.

The department’s Voting Section — which played a critical role in defending the integrity of the 2020 election — would be twisted, its attorneys replaced with cronies working to validate Trump’s lies and shield Republican-controlled states from federal scrutiny. Its anti-discrimination litigators would be tasked with investigating “anti-white” discrimination, effectively turning the Civil Rights Act on the minority citizens it was written to defend. And Lopez’s former colleagues working on policing would not only let abusive cops skate, but potentially even investigate local law enforcement Trump believed weren’t aggressive enough toward alleged criminals.

We can see here that a second Trump administration would likely mean the inversion of the traditional purpose of federal civil rights law. Its guardrails against authoritarianism, discrimination, and abuse of power will be twisted toward advancing them.

And it’s just one of many ways in which Trump’s pursuit of power at any cost would have tangible and direct consequences for ordinary Americans’ lives.

Trump’s plan to invert the Civil Rights Division, explained

Donald Trump has vowed to use a second term to enact “retribution” against his enemies. The Justice Department, and specifically the current Civil Rights Division staff, are at the very top of the list.

At the end of Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for civil service jobs — called Schedule F — that would have allowed him to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with handpicked allies.

While Trump left office before his team could implement Schedule F, Trump has promised to re-issue the order “immediately” upon returning to office. In anticipation, his allies have compiled long lists of civil servants they’d like to fire and loyalists they’d like to put in their place — preparations that have led one expert on federal administration to conclude that 50,000 firings is now “probably a floor rather than a ceiling.”

Trump’s allies have focused on the Civil Rights Division as one of their chief targets for Schedule F and other power grabs. Project 2025 — widely seen as the chief planning document for a Trump second term despite the campaign’s disavowals — has an explicit, detailed plan for taking it over.

The document calls on the next Republican president to “reorganize and refocus” the division, aiming to make it into “the vanguard” of the administration’s crusade against “an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left.” It is one of three DOJ divisions singled out in the document’s call for “a vast expansion of the number of [political] appointees” overseeing and directing its conduct.

This is all part of a broader plan for eroding the Justice Department’s traditional independence. While the attorney general is appointed by the president, their staff is given wide leeway to follow the law rather than the president’s dictates. Political personnel are strictly prohibited from interfering with specific investigations and cases. That’s why the current Justice Department could pursue a case against Hunter Biden with no fear of retaliation from his father.

Trump and top deputies have declared their intent to change this.

“The notion of an independent agency — whether that’s a flat-out independent agency like the FCC or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice — we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Russ Vought, a key second-term Trump planner, said in a 2023 interview.

When you put these three proposals together — seeding the Civil Rights Division with Trump political appointees, using Schedule F to replace career prosecutors with ideological allies, and ending department independence — the full picture becomes clear. If Trump has his way, a second term means a Civil Rights Division operating not as a (relatively) neutral division dedicated to enforcing civil rights law, but as a tool of the Trump agenda in all the areas it covers.

This is very threatening for government employees and obviously offensive to the notion of a neutral civil service. But what would this mean for most Americans in practice? What does it matter, really, if one bureaucrat is swapped out for another?

Election law politicized

On November 9, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Justice Department to investigate President Donald Trump’s allegations of fraud in the just-concluded presidential election.

The probe, announced after the election had been called for Joe Biden, was controversial inside the Department. It raised fears that Barr, no stranger to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, was trying to validate Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

Yet the professional probe, staffed by veteran investigators in the Civil Rights Division and elsewhere, found no evidence of mass fraud. On November 23, Barr told Trump the investigation was “not panning out.” The neutral, competent investigation gave the attorney general the ammunition he needed to stand up to the president.

Now imagine if things were different, if these career investigators had been Schedule F’d out, replaced instead with Trump-aligned attorneys.

What if they had come to Barr and said that, actually, the bogus statistical arguments that the election was stolen had merit? What would he have done then? How would reports of such findings, however bogus, influence the rest of the country — including Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress?

It’s an example that illustrates just how important the Civil Rights Division’s work is.

The American system is unusual, in global terms, by granting most power over election administration to state and local authorities. While this system makes it hard for the federal government to rig elections, it makes it comparatively easy for state-level officials to cheat and discriminate (Jim Crow being the signature example).

The Civil Rights Division’s election work is one of the primary checks on such abuses. It protects the right to vote, enforcing laws like the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It also works to protect the sanctity of the results after elections, identifying and investigating allegations of illegal conduct by state and local administrators during the voting process.

Its main area of responsibility is allegations of discrimination, but it also regularly cooperates with other divisions in investigating other kinds of allegations like voting fraud (as happened in November 2020). While the Supreme Court has significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division is still able to bring cases that matter.

In a second Trump term, this work could be turned on its head. Instead of trying to stop abuses at the state and local level, they might at best ignore them — and at worst try to force local officials to engage in them.

The chapter of Project 2025 on the Justice Department, authored by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton, sketches out how this would work in detail. It argues that Kathy Boockvar, who was Pennsylvania Secretary of State in 2020, “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” under a post-Civil War law called the Klan Act — designed, as you might guess, to break the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Boockvar’s crime, per Hamilton, was issuing a legal interpretation designed to address the unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots during the pandemic. The Secretary issued guidance to counties that if a provisional mail-in ballot were “spoiled” — meaning rendered defective through, for example, damage during the shipping process — that voters would have an opportunity to correct them. Hamilton calls this a “conspiracy against rights,” a crime laid out in the Klan Act.

When I spoke to Justin Levitt, an election law expert and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, he told me that “it’s difficult to convey how crazy” such a case would be.

The Pennsylvania rule is, in his mind, a very reasonable interpretation of a constitutional obligation to avoid disenfranchising people over minor ballot issues. Even if Boockvar’s interpretation were dubious, nothing in the Klan Act suggests that the Department of Justice would be empowered to prosecute her for it (as the law simply doesn’t cover good-faith mistakes by elected officials trying to count more ballots).

“I know an awful lot of federal prosecutors [and] I don’t know one who would bring this case,” he tells me.

Hence why Schedule F is so important. It’s almost certain that no experienced Justice Department prosecutor would bring this case, be they Democrat or Republican, because they would recognize that it’s an absurd reading of the law. But if Trump can put the Division under his thumb, inserting cronies in oversight positions and firing a huge swath of the career staff, he can get people like Hamilton in a position to do what they want.

Jake Grumbach, a political scientist who studies state-level voting laws, tells me that such politically motivated prosecutions of state officials is “the most dangerous thing [the Justice Department] can do.”

Even the threat of a civil rights investigation can scare state-level administrators into compliance with what the feds want. A weaponized Justice Department would mean these officials would feel significant pressure to twist their election administration systems into whatever contorted shape Trump was calling for at the moment — with potentially devastating consequences for electoral fairness.

Civil wrongs

While voting rights law is an especially significant area of the Civil Rights Division’s work, it’s far from the only one.

The Civil Rights Division’s raison d’etre, the entire point of it being a separate and distinct component of the federal government, is to enforce the modern consensus that discrimination on the basis of identity is a pervasive and systematic problem that requires significant federal resources to address.

Trump and his closest allies believe something more like the opposite, that federal civil rights law isn’t a solution to the problem of discrimination against minorities but an agent of discrimination against whites, men, and Christians. As such, they aim to flip the entire civil rights code on its head by using the Civil Rights Division as “the vanguard,” in Gene Hamilton’s language.

“Anything [in law] can be weaponized,” says Kristy Parker, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who worked on policing. “That’s the problem.”

Since the last Trump administration ended, top Trump aide Stephen Miller has worked with Hamilton at a new law firm — America First Legal — that focuses on “anti-white” discrimination in employment.

America First filed a suit that successfully blocked a pandemic-era program to distribute financial aid to minority- and woman-owned restaurants. It sued the NFL over the Rooney Rule, which requires that teams interview at least one nonwhite candidate for high-level coaching vacancies, and it went after Northwestern University for allegedly prioritizing hires of minority and non-male faculty members.

In April, Axios’ Alex Thompson reported that America First was “laying legal groundwork” for a full-court press against “anti-white racism” in the event that Trump retakes control of the Civil Rights Division.

This is something that Hamilton explicitly calls for in his Project 2025 chapter.

“The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” he writes.

In reality, what Hamilton calls “discrimination” are actually efforts to address discrimination. There is overwhelming evidence that American society continues to allocate resources unfairly on the basis of race. Without affirmative steps to rectify this situation, entrenched inequalities like the racial gap will never disappear. What Trump and his team call “anti-white discrimination” are efforts to close gaps between groups, not open them.

The Trump team aims to invert federal oversight over local prosecutors in a similar fashion.

In 2023, the campaign released a policy video in which the former president vows to task the Civil Rights Division with investigating “progressive prosecutors.” The basic argument is that these prosecutors, who see part of their mission as reducing the effects of mass incarceration on the Black community, are effectively engaging in race-based discrimination in favor of Black offenders.

“I will direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical left prosecutor’s offices, such as those in Chicago, LA, and San Francisco, to determine whether they have illegally engaged in race-based enforcement of the law,” Trump said.

Much like the attempt to prosecute Kathy Boockvar, trying to jail “progressive prosecutors” is not something the department’s professional staff would ordinarily contemplate doing. Even if Trump succeeded in replacing them via Schedule F, it’s hard to imagine any such investigation yielding charges that could stand up in court.

But the fact that such investigations would almost certainly fail to yield charges does not make them harmless. Even spurious investigations entail coercive measures — like subpoenas, searches, and audits — that can make it very difficult for “progressive prosecutors” to do their jobs.

There’s also a political aspect to the threat, as many of Trump’s proposed targets are in elected posts. Elected officials are generally responsive to threats to their reelection chances, and being a target of a Department of Justice civil rights probe looks really bad to prospective voters.

Consent decrees, the mechanism Christy Lopez used to deal with bias in Ferguson, are one of the most powerful tools available to federal prosecutors for addressing bias in policing — and another target in a second Trump term.

The process begins with a fact-finding investigation, uncovering evidence of systematic use-of-force problems and/or racial discrimination. The next stage involves lengthy negotiations with police departments that culminate in a tangible and enforceable set of reform benchmarks for the department. If the benchmarks aren’t being met to the Civil Rights Division’s satisfaction, its attorneys can haul cops in front of a judge and demand answers.

The previous Trump administration limited their use going forward, but a second one might roll them back.

The Obama administration negotiated a historic number of consent decrees, but these are approaching their negotiated sunset dates. The Biden administration has tried to bargain with departments for extensions, as well as implement new ones, but police departments have been dragging their feet. Lopez believes they are anticipating the possibility of a Trump victory.

“Almost any jurisdiction that is currently negotiating a consent decree is going to wait to see what happens in November,” she says.

If this delaying tactic works and Trump’s Civil Rights Division vacates consent decrees across the board, Lopez warns of aggressive police being unleashed across the country. Trump’s wild rhetoric about policing — his recent statement that cops should be permitted “one really violent day” to combat crime — would further encourage abuse.

The attorneys tasked with limiting police abuses would, in a second Trump administration, be responsible for encouraging them.

A government “for the people” — for now

As important as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is, it is far from the totality of government work.

The Justice Department has eight other litigating departments beyond the Civil Rights Division, where attorneys prosecute everyone from terrorists to tax cheats. It has five separate police agencies, including the FBI and US Marshals Service. It oversees all federal prisons and studies federal criminal convictions to see if any merit presidential pardons. It has nine separate grantmaking authorities, which provide funding for local authorities supporting everything from assisting sex trafficking victims to encouraging innovation in local alternatives to policing.

The Department of Justice is one of 15 federal departments, each of which has its own diverse and important set of responsibilities. There are also important agencies separate from the department structure, like the CIA and the EPA.

All of them perform critical work that contributes to the standard of living Americans have come to take for granted. This work depends on experienced, dedicated civil servants who know how to do the job, and all of it could be disrupted by Trump’s plans to give their jobs to partisan hacks.

Every day, the EPA works to monitor and address pollution poisoning our rivers and drinkable water. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is churning out job numbers and other reports that the Fed and other places depend on to make good economic policy. US Citizenship and Immigration Services helps keep families together, approving permanent residency and citizenship applications for foreign spouses of American citizens. The Department of Energy manages America’s nuclear weapons and power plants, making sure we don’t experience a Fukushima or Chernobyl-level disaster.

Now imagine the people who know how to do this routine stuff are either thrown out of office or put under the thumbs of political commissars. That’s the danger here.

Trump and his team have laid out their plans in detail, in official statements proposing a revival of Schedule F and semi-official documents like Project 2025. Even if you agree with many of their policy ideas, they need to be implemented competently and lawfully in order to work. Throughout history, in the United States and elsewhere, the imposition of political control on a civil service has been a recipe for incompetence and anti-democratic abuse.

The United States has a democratic government: a deeply flawed one, but one by the people and for the people. Trump’s plan is to make it for him and his alone, and he has a decent chance of succeeding if elected. We often take our relatively novel form of government for granted; if we lose it, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Voter Purge

In Turnaround, SCOTUS Legalizes Virginia Voter Purge

Trump’s Supreme Court just did him yet another big favor.

Arianna Coghill

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

He was an illegal alien....

Elon Musk’s Ironic Voter Fraud Obsession

The world’s richest man pushes spurious claims of illegal votes while facing prosecution over his own “illegal” election scheme.

Anna Merlan

In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump.

Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.

The lawsuit follows Musk’s unveiling of two election-related cash giveaways, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he committed to select one registered voter who signs the petition each day to receive $1 million.

While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that sidesteps such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia’s DA Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk calling the giveaway an “unlawful lottery.” Musk and America PAC haven’t responded publicly to the suit, and awarded another million dollar winner in North Carolina on Monday. 

At the same time Musk’s own actions to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny, he has been tweeting intently about supposed illegal voter fraud. Musk posted on X many times throughout October that voter ID “should be required nationwide” and claiming that “almost every country on Earth” requires it. On Wednesday, for instance, he proclaimed that new voter ID requirements “should be implemented.” (Thirty-six states already have some form of voter ID law on the books. But those laws have been found to disproportionately disenfranchise elderly, poor and non-white voters, and to be an ineffective means of reducing fraud. What’s more, concerns about voter fraud can lead to the suppression and disenfranchisement of qualified voters.) 

On Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support of Virginia winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling it “insane” that the “Democratic party”—which he put in scornful scare quotes—“was suing to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groups, who argued eligible voters were at risk of erroneously being kicked off the rolls.

As Musk continues making unfounded claims of voter fraud, X has established an “Election Integrity Community,” a crowd-generated feed sharing usually-unverified claims, reports, and complaints of purported election malfeasance. In all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to depict the United States as rife with a certain kind of fraud committed by a certain kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with the issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a student visa allowing him to work, in a 2013 joint interview, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants.”

You can see what is coming if the Nazi wins.......

Extremists Say the Military Authorized Lethal Force Against Americans Ahead of the Election

It didn’t.

Sonner Kehrt

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right. 

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01. 

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change meant Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there were to be unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against US citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. 

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got into the act in a tweet criticizing Kamala Harris’ response to a story that Trump wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had”:

“It’s particularly ironic since Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power—for the first time in history—to use lethal force to kill Americans on US soil who protest government policies.”

By that evening, his post on X had 5.6 million views.

Joseph Nunn, a lawyer with the Liberty & National Security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and a leading expert on domestic uses of the military, had a clear response to the social media storm.

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

Contrary to claims online, DOD Directive 5240.01, which last had been updated in 2020, does not grant any new powers to the military. That’s not how military directives work. Like them or not, all military policies are subject to US law; they do not create new legal authorities. 

Directive 5240.01 has a narrow focus: It only addresses military intelligence, and the section that has circulated online specifically deals with intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement. 

The paragraph that contains the term “lethal force” refers to a requirement that the Secretary of Defense—the highest level of the Defense Department—must now authorize military intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement when lethal force might be involved.

“This is not an independent source of authority,” Nunn said. “We really should look at this as an administrative safeguard that is being put in place.” 

Military intelligence has long been authorized to provide assistance to federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement when lives are endangered, under limited circumstances. That could include providing technical expertise or helping with international anti-terrorism or counter-narcotics operations, for instance.

“A reference to lethal force in a directive like this doesn’t mean they’re planning to have snipers on rooftops in covert ops,” said Nunn, who has written on limiting the role of the military in law enforcement. “The nature of law enforcement will sometimes involve the use of lethal force.” 

In its response to The War Horse, the Pentagon said the directive’s update was “in no way timed in relation to the election or any other event.” 

“Reissuing 5240.01 was part of normal business of the Department to periodically update guidance and policy,” the DOD’s Gough said.

The Defense Department has issued or revised 10 other directives and instructions since it updated “5240.01” at the end of September, ranging from a policy on space-related military activities to guidance on public affairs’ officers use of military vehicles.

“It’s not unusual to update DOD regulations,” says Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University and a former senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. “It doesn’t signal some nefarious agenda.”

The update to “5240.01” brings the policy in line with other Defense Department directives. One of those is known as DOD Directive 5210.56—an entirely different Defense Department directive than the one updated last month. It lays out rules when troops across the military can use lethal force outside of military operations, limiting it to “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm” or to protect critical national security assets. 

Posts online, including the one that Flynn shared, claim that Directive 5240.01 runs afoul of a legal statute known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act, which dates back to Reconstruction, generally forbids military troops from acting as domestic police. Civil liberty experts consider it an important civil rights protection against possible military overreach. 

Despite the conspiracy claims spreading online, the directive clearly states that military intelligence units assisting civilian police must consider the Posse Comitatus Act.

“The updated issuance remains consistent with DoD’s adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act, commitment to civil rights, and support of other safeguards in place for the protection of the American people,” Gough said.

Anti-government memes began spreading on alt-tech sites like Gab alongside posts about the updated directive.

Spreading misinformation about the military can be particularly damaging “to the relationship between the military and the public,” Brooks told The War Horse.

“This sort of politicization, this idea of sowing mistrust in the military in order to gain partisan advantage, is really corrosive,” Brooks said. “There’s a motive. There’s something to be gained by spreading these rumors.”

Ironically, however, Rep. Harris, the Republican congressman, was right about one thing when he claimed that if Kamala Harris wins, she “could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.” That’s because any president, regardless of party, has the power to mobilize military troops against American citizens in certain circumstances. Only one candidate—Trump—in this year’s presidential election has outright suggested it. 

But that presidential power isn’t granted by a random military policy. It’s granted by the Insurrection Act.

A law nearly as old as the country itself, the act gives a president essentially unilateral authority to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and call on military troops to suppress domestic rebellions. The law effectively leaves it up to the president to decide what constitutes a rebellion.

“There are essentially zero procedural safeguards in the Insurrection Act,” Nunn says.

During his first administration, Trump and his allies reportedly considered invoking the Insurrection Act both during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and again after he lost his re-election bid. And legal experts say that any follow through on Trump’s increasingly frequent threats to use the military domestically, including against “radical left lunatics,” would likely come through an invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Republicans are saying that the real misinformation is being peddled by Democrats. They claim the Harris-Walz campaign is taking out of context Trump’s comments from his October 13 interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo, with some suggesting he was referring to undocumented migrants or to only deploying the military in a national security crisis.

Here is the full quote from Trump when Bartiromo asked if he “expected chaos on election day” from “outside agitators,” including “Chinese nationals,” “people on terrorist watch lists,” “murderers,” and “rapists”:

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people who have come in, destroying our country—and by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated.

“But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.

“And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”