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Trump’s incendiary rhetoric continues to stir fears of violence
- Washington Post: Trump warns of ‘potential death & destruction’ if he’s charged in hush-money case: Former president Donald Trump warned early Friday of “potential death & destruction” if he is charged in Manhattan in a criminal case related to alleged hush-money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels to conceal an affair. The posting after midnight on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, was his latest — and most explicit — allusion to violence that could follow an indictment stemming from an investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), whom Trump called a “degenerate psychopath.” Trump wrote: “What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country?”
- CNBC: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg gets death threat with powder after Trump warns of probe-related violence: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was threatened with assassination in a letter containing powder, hours after former President Donald Trump warned Friday of “potential death & destruction” if he is indicted by a grand jury in a criminal case led by Bragg. “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!”″ said the typewritten note in a letter contained in an envelope addressed to Bragg, WNBC reported, citing law enforcement sources. The letter, containing an Orlando, Florida, postmark from Tuesday, was found in the DA’s mail room in a lower Manhattan building after being received at 11:40 a.m. ET on Friday. The white powder in the envelope was found to be non-hazardous, the New York Police Department told CNBC. A DA spokeswoman said, “The D.A. has informed the office that it was immediately contained and that the NYPD Emergency Service Unit and the NYC Department of Environmental Protection determined there was no dangerous substance.”
- Washington Post: Trump extends election-rigging myth to his potential criminal charges: Former president Donald Trump opened the first mega-rally of his 2024 campaign by playing a recording of the national anthem sung by inmates charged in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the 90-minute remarks that followed on Saturday, Trump repeatedly emphasized — even more than in last year’s rallies for the midterms — his false insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. But he added a new twist: that his political opponents were now bent on rigging the next election against him through the prospect of criminal charges. “This is their new form of trying to beat people at the polls,” Trump elaborated to reporters on his flight home from the rally, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. “This is worse than stuffing the ballot boxes, which they did.”
Tour of DC jail holding Jan. 6 defendants attempts to rewrite history
- NBC: House lawmakers tour D.C. jail holding Jan. 6 defendants to inspect conditions: Members of the House Oversight Committee on Friday toured a Washington, D.C., jail where some Jan. 6 defendants are being held and offered contrasting descriptions of conditions inside the facility. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spearheaded the visit, painted a picture of constitutional violations and overall mistreatment, while her Democratic counterparts said the defendants were being treated fairly with nothing out of the ordinary. “Their due process rights are being violated. And they have been mistreated and treated as political prisoners,” Greene, R-Ga., told reporters after the tour, flanked by fellow Republicans on the committee, including Reps. Byron Donalds of Florida, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Mike Collins of Georgia.
- New York Times: Lawmakers Tour D.C. Jail Where Jan. 6 Defendants Are Held: When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, arranged a tour of the D.C. jail to inspect the conditions of defendants charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Democrats faced a choice: Boycott or participate. House Democrats had watched last Congress as the Republican leader Kevin McCarthy pulled his members from a Democratic-led select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, and then found themselves without a voice in the nationally televised hearings. After debating the matter internally, the Democrats were determined not to make that same mistake. So, after a roughly two-hour tour of the jail Friday, when Ms. Greene finished her remarks to news reporters gathered outside, Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, stepped up to the microphones. “Somebody’s got to be here to tell the truth,” said Ms. Crockett, a first-term member of Congress and a former public defender. “If we weren’t here, there would be no check for whatever it was that they said.”
In The States
WISCONSIN: Wisconsin Supreme Court race touted as most consequential race of 2023
- NBC: Eric Holder to campaign for Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin Supreme Court race: Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will campaign for Janet Protasiewicz in the final days of the closely watched Wisconsin Supreme Court race, a spokesperson for Holder’s group, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told NBC News. Holder, whose group pushes for congressional and legislative maps that favor Democrats and tackles gerrymandered maps that favor Republicans, will travel to Wisconsin “in the days leading up to” the April 4 election “to help get out the vote for” Protasiewicz, Brooke Lillard, a spokesperson for the group, said. The Protasiewicz campaign and Holder, who served as former President Barack Obama’s attorney general for most of his eight years in office, are still finalizing specific venues and dates for the appearances, Lillard said. A spokesperson for the Protasiewicz campaign directed questions from NBC News to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
- Associated Press: Disabled Wisconsin voters say absentee law not followed: Disabled voters say local election leaders across Wisconsin are not following federal law during early voting in the high-stakes race for state Supreme Court, incorrectly telling them they can’t have another person return their absentee ballot for them. Absentee ballots, and who can return them, has been a political flashpoint in battleground Wisconsin, known for razor-thin margins in statewide races. The April 4 election will determine majority control of the state Supreme Court, with abortion access and the fate of Republican-drawn legislative maps on the line. Challenges to laws and practices in at least eight states that make it difficult or impossible for people with certain disabilities to vote have also arisen in the past two years. At the same time, there has been a push in many states to restrict rules affecting who can return absentee ballots. Wisconsin Republicans successfully sued last year to ban absentee ballot drop boxes, and the conservative-controlled state Supreme Court ruled that only the voter can return their ballot in person or place it in the mail.
- WPR: Special election in Wisconsin’s 8th Senate District will decide fate of Senate’s two-thirds majority: Under the shadow of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a special election that will determine whether Republicans secure a two-thirds majority in one house of the state Legislature. The 8th District seat in southeastern Wisconsin was held for three decades by Republican state Sen. Alberta Darling. With Darling’s retirement, the seat is up for grabs. While the district has long been dominated by Republicans and still favors the GOP, Democrats hope growing support in Milwaukee’s suburbs gives their candidate an opportunity to flip the seat. Republican state Rep. Dan Knodl of Germantown won his party’s primary in February and goes up against Democrat Jodi Habush Sinykin on April 4. Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School poll, said while the district leans Republican by 1-to-4 points, it’s become more competitive in recent years. I think it’s clear that the Democratic candidate will need an unusually good turnout and vote margin in order to win that district. It can be done, but it’s a bit of a challenge”I think it’s clear that the Democratic candidate will need an unusually good turnout and vote margin in order to win that district. It can be done, but it’s a bit of a challenge,” he said.
ARIZONA: Kari Lake election challenge rejected by Arizona Supreme Court
- New York Times: Arizona Supreme Court Turns Down Kari Lake’s Appeal in Her Election Lawsuit: Arizona’s Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request from Kari Lake to hear her lawsuit disputing her loss last year in the governor’s race. The lawsuit was based on what the court said was a false claim by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that more than 35,000 unaccounted ballots were accepted. In a five-page order written by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, the court determined that a vast majority of Ms. Lake’s legal claims, which had earlier been dismissed by lower courts, lacked merit. “The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues,” Chief Justice Brutinel wrote, adding that the “petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law.” But the justices on Wednesday ordered a trial court in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to conduct an additional review of that county’s procedures for verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, keeping one part of her lawsuit alive.
- Tucson Sentinel: GOP bill would remove Arizona from ERIC, the database designed to combat voter fraud: Following in the footsteps of six conservative-led states, Senate Republicans want to pull Arizona’s membership from a multistate coalition that aids in cleaning voter rolls, following false claims that the coalition is part of a liberal conspiracy to rig elections. The Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, is a nonprofit formed in 2012 that aims to assist states in improving the accuracy of their voter rolls and increase access to voter registration information through the sharing of voter registration information among member states. It was created by seven states with a mixture of Republican and Democratic leadership, so that the states could assist each other in identifying voters who had moved or died. Since fringe conservative media, like The Gateway Pundit, began last year to publish stories falsely accusing ERIC of involvement in a liberal conspiracy to steal elections, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Ohio and West Virginia have all either pulled out of ERIC or announced plans to do so.
GEORGIA: GOP Lawmakers are pushing for rules that make voting less accessible
- Bloomberg: Georgia Republicans Spin ‘Voting Rights’ Language in Secession Push: A few days before civil rights leaders led President Joe Biden on a march to call for expanded voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, earlier this month, state senators in Georgia engaged in a heated debate about their own voting rights. “I have heard nothing but people crying out for the right to vote,” said State Senator Carden Summers, during debates on a bill that would allow residents of Atlanta’s wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods to vote by referendum to secede from the city and create Buckhead City. “We’re doing something that we’ve often been accused of and that’s suppressing and disenfranchising voters by not giving them the right to vote. When we can give someone the right to vote, we have done our job.” Summers was one of several Republican state senators at the hearing who couched arguments for the referendum in the language of “voting rights,” which has become the lingua franca for advocates pushing to form new cities around metro Atlanta.
What Experts Are Saying
Kathleen Belew, historian at Northwestern University: “As a historian of the white power movement and Waco, this is the most blatant I’ve ever seen this rhetoric and ideology at a Trump rally, and that includes “Stand Back and Stand By” and the Jan 6 speech. This continues to escalate. We aren’t through yet.” Tweet
Nicholas Grossman, political scientist at the University of Illinois: “[T]he possibility of violence from lone actors, including deranged individuals, cannot be discounted. Individuals are inherently harder than groups to identify and stop in advance. Trump’s calls for protests and warnings of death and destruction may be heard by some individuals as a call to action. If 99.9 percent of Trump supporters would never commit political violence, that still leaves thousands who might.” The Bulwark Op-Ed: Trump and the Violence Next Time
Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “None of it is [normal]—the forgetfulness about the insurrection, the calls for violence, the lawlessness, the cult of personality, the elevation of party over country…Many people push aside concerns about Trump’s authoritarian streak as alarmist and the voices who encourage our fellow citizens to see him as a threat to democracy as emotional and overwrought. As someone who was professionally hardwired, through years at the Justice Department, to see issues from all sides and to act in a cautious fashion, designed to promote stability, I nonetheless find myself in the deeply concerned camp.” Civil Discourse
Headlines
The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections
Washington Post: How big is Trump’s true-believer base?
CNN: Fact check: Trump repeats false claims during rally in Waco, Texas
Washington Post: Indictment or no, Trump’s strategy is the same: Attack and threaten
Trump Investigations
NBC: In his return to Fox News, Trump labels the Manhattan DA’s probe a ‘new way of cheating in elections’
Washington Post: Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran appears before Mar-a-Lago grand jury in D.C.
Politico: Trump attorney says he will not ‘defend or condemn’ Trump’s rhetoric toward Manhattan DA
New York Times: Trump Puts His Legal Peril at Center of First Big Rally for 2024
Business Insider: Trump’s own attorney says the former president’s TruthSocial posts attacking Manhattan prosecutor ahead of possible indictment were ‘ill-advised’
PBS: DeSantis criticizes Trump, Manhattan DA’s handling of hush-money case
January 6 And The 2020 Election
NBC: Top Republicans balk at Trump highlighting Jan. 6 rioters, calling it politically unwise
NPR: 1,000 people have been charged for the Capitol riot. Here’s where their cases stand
New York Times: Former Trump Officials Must Testify in 2020 Election Inquiry, Judge Says
Kansas City Star: Video shows 3 police officers apparently join Jan. 6 protests, filing in Kansas case says
New York Times: In Proud Boys Jan. 6 Sedition Trial, F.B.I. Informants Abound
The Hill: Fox’s Kilmeade: ‘Insane’ for Trump to feature Jan. 6 footage at rally
News 3 Las Vegas: North Las Vegas man arrested for alleged role in Jan. 6 insurrection
Washingtonian Monthly: The Dangerous Journey of John Eastman
Opinion
Salon: Donald Trump wants to be the charismatic leader of an apocalyptic cult: Yeah, it’s an overreach
New York Times: Trump’s Rally Was Just What I Expected. He’s Stuck in a Rut.
Washington Post: Jim Jordan doesn’t understand his job
New York Times: MAGA, Not Trump, Controls the Movement Now
Washington Post: Why we’re still stuck in Trump’s world
In the States
News 13 Norfolk: Lawmakers, advocates question Youngkin’s policy affecting felons’ voting rights
Waco Tribune: Texas election bill likely to scare some voters
CNN: Supreme Court declines to hear Kansas racial gerrymandering case, leaves congressional map in force
