Posts tagged with "Former President Donald Trump"

Trump campaign struggles to contain Puerto Rico October surprise

October 29, 2024

The Trump campaign is struggling to contain an October surprise of its own making, just one week from Election Day, reports The Hill.

A racist remark by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe—one of many warm-up speakers for former President Donald Trump at a rally held on Sunday, October 27 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden—is reverberating hard.

Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats are working to make sure the gibe reaches the ears of as many Latino voters as possible—especially in the swing states that will decide the election.

Republicans, including Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance (Ohio), are trying to minimize the damage—either by distancing themselves from what Hinchcliffe said or by suggesting that a remark made in jest should not spark such outrage.

At the rally, Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” He also used other racist tropes, including a reference to Black people and watermelons, and a crude reference linking procreation and immigration.

The comments were slammed as offensive in their own right. But they could also have serious electoral repercussions.

The state is essentially deadlocked, with Trump leading Harris by just four-tenths of a percentage point in the polling average maintained by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ.

There are also tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in other swing states, including Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

Democratic operative Chuck Rocha, an expert on the Latino vote, told this column that he and a super PAC he advises, Nuestro PAC, had sent clips of Hinchcliffe’s remarks “to every Puerto Rican voter in Pennsylvania” on Monday, October 28.

Referring to the uproar and its effect on Trump’s campaign, Rocha added, “It’s an unforced error from a campaign that has no strategic vision. Puerto Rican voters are very sensitive about their island and how you talk about their island—whether they, themselves, live on that island or in Allentown.”

Allentown, about 50 miles north of Philadelphia, is described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “a majority Latino city and home to 34,000 Puerto Ricans — the eighth-largest Puerto Rican community in America.”

Harris has been turning the screws on Trump over the remark. The vice president on Monday cited Trump’s New York event as having “highlighted a point that I’ve been making throughout this campaign. … He is focused and actually fixated on his grievances, on himself and on dividing our country.”

Her campaign also launched a digital ad aimed at Latino voters that began with Hinchcliffe’s words and asserted that “Puerto Ricans deserve better.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who is of Puerto Rican descent, described the Madison Square Garden rally as a “hate rally” during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday morning.

On social media, Ocasio-Cortez hit back at Hinchcliffe’s defense that “these people have no sense of humor” and that his joke had been “taken out of context to make it seem racist.”

The New York congresswoman accused the comic of “feeding red-meat racism alongside a throng of other bigots to a frothing crowd.”

The reaction from the Trump campaign—and from the GOP, more broadly—suggests they are well aware of the potential damage from the furor. Trump campaign Senior Adviser Danielle Alvarez told media outlets that the comic’s comments did not “reflect the views” of the former president or his campaign.

Research contact: @thehill

Decision on Georgia election board threatens Kemp’s détente with Trump

September 2, 2024

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R) has enjoyed an unusually friendly public rapport in recent days with former President Donald Trump, reports The Washington Post.

After years of heaping insults on Kemp for refusing to help reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, Trump praised the governor on Truth Social this month for his “help and support.” On Thursday, August 22, Kemp attended a fundraiser in Atlanta for the Republican presidential nominee, who is locked in a virtual tie with Vice President Kamala Harris in polling of the critical swing state.

But the détente might not last. Kemp is now weighing whether state law requires him to get involved in a simmering controversy around the Georgia State Election Board, whose conservative majority is under fire for approving new rules this month that Trump supports—but that state and local officials say will sow confusion, compromise ballot security, and potentially enable rogue county boards to block certification of election results in November.

This week, Kemp asked Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R) for an advisory opinion on what authority he has to address ethics complaints against the state board.

Those who filed the complaints have said that state law requires the governor to remove the members if he finds their actions were inappropriate.

The board’s pro-Trump majority has attracted attention in recent weeks for taking up new rules, including one that allows county election boards to make “reasonable inquiries” before certifying an election if they have questions about the outcome.

The rule does not specify what a “reasonable inquiry” is, and it places no limits on the time frame of such a probe or what documents a board can demand before certifying results. Election experts say delays could open the door to efforts to subvert the outcome along the lines of what Trump and his allies attempted in 2020.

Even more concerning to state and local election officials is a rule the board plans to take up on September 20 that would require all counties to conduct hand counts of ballots at the precinct level on election night. If approved, these officials say, the measure could lead to less accurate results and compromise ballot security by requiring more people to handle them.

“We have had so much security training. We have done so many tabletop exercises. We have been told that the number one priority is security,” said Christina Redden, the assistant election director in Glynn County, who along with hundreds of other election officials was gathered this week at an election-security training in Forsyth, about an hour south of Atlanta. “Ballots are going to be vulnerable while being handled by multiple people at the precinct level.”

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who also attended the training, called the state board “a mess.” “Legal precedent is pretty clear. You shouldn’t change rules in the middle of an election,” he added, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

State and national Democrats sued this week in state court over the certification rule, arguing that it is intended to allow delays despite statutory language requiring certification to happen within six days of an election.

“Allegations of fraud or election misconduct are then resolved by the courts in properly filed challenges, not by county boards in the counting process,” the suit states.

The State Election Board carries a wide range of responsibilities—but is role has typically been far less prominent than that of the secretary of state or others involved in administering Georgia’s vote.

Complicating Kemp’s involvement in the controversy is the fact that Trump has been cheering on the state board’s work, naming each of the three conservatives at his August 3 rally in Atlanta and calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” He criticized Kemp for not supporting the board’s work, suggesting without evidence that the governor might be opposed to Republicans winning.

Kemp has not said anything publicly in support of or in opposition to the state board’s actions.

Research contact: @washingtonpost

Trump falsely claims that the crowds seen at Harris rallies are fake

August 12, 2024

Former President Donald Trump has taken his obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heightsfalsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday, August 11, that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds, reports The New York Times.

The crowds at Harris’s events, including one in Detroit outside an airplane hangar, were witnessed by thousands of people and news outlets—including The New York Times—and the number of attendees claimed by her campaign is in line with what was visible on the ground. Trump falsely wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that “there was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it.”

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has struggled to find his political footing in the weeks since President Joe Biden decided to step aside and Ms. Harris replaced him atop the Democratic ticket: Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity at a conference for Black journalists, he later attacked Brian Kemp, the popular Republican governor in the key swing state of Georgia, and he has seen new polling that puts him behind Harris in several key states.

The Harris campaign has begun to mock Trump for his frustration over her crowds—one of which, it said, topped 15,000 people at an event in the Phoenix area on Friday, August 9.

“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’s running mate, said to the crowd, receiving a loud cheer.

In his posts on Sunday, Trump drew parallels between his false claims of fake crowds and his false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people!” Trump wrote. “Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”

Harris’s campaign went on Trump’s social network to mock his wild accusations, replying to one of his posts by sharing a video of Air Force Two arriving in Detroit to an enormous crowd and her exiting the plane with Walz.

“In case you forgot @realdonaldtrump: This is what a rally in a swing state looks like,” her campaign wrote.

Trump did not hold any events in a swing state last week. Instead, he held a rally in Montana, where there is a crucial Senate race; and a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.

Trump showed frustration with Harris’s crowds at that event, too, and even boasted about the crowd at his rally in Washington D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the riot at the Capitol, saying it was larger than the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump claimed.

Research contact: @nytimes

Trump again says that Christians ‘won’t have to vote anymore’ if they vote for him in November

July 31, 2024

Former President Donald Trump, in an interview broadcast on Monday night, July 29, repeated his recent assertion that Christians will never have to vote again if they cast their ballots for him this November, and brushed aside multiple requests to walk back or clarify the statement, reports The New York Times.

Trump said last Friday to a gathering of Christian conservatives: “I love you. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

His interviewer on Monday, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, noted that Democrats have highlighted that quote as evidence that Trump would end elections, and urged Trump to rebut what she called a “ridiculous” criticism.

But Trump declined to do so, repeating a pattern he frequently employs in which he makes a provocative statement that can be interpreted in varying ways, and makes no attempt to quiet the uproar. This comment was especially striking, given his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his shattering of other Democratic norms.

The exchange began when Ingraham told the former president: “They’re saying that you said to a crowd of Christians that they won’t have to vote in the future.”

Trump started off his response, saying: “Let me say what I mean by that. I had a tremendous crowd, speaking to Christians all in all—I mean, this was a crowd that liked me a lot.”

He added that Catholics are “treated very badly by this administration” and that “they’re like persecuted;” then digressed, saying that Jewish people who voted for Democrats “should have your head examined”—a sentiment he has expressed many times before, drawing criticism of antisemitism. He then reiterated his statement from Friday.

“I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true,” he said. “Because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote.”

Ingraham offered him an off-ramp: “You mean you don’t have to vote for you, because you’ll have four years in office.”

Trump then began talking about gun owners not voting, but. Ingraham interrupted him.

“It’s being interpreted, as you are not surprised to hear, by the left as, well, they’re never going to have another election,” she said. “So can you even just respond —”

Trup cut her off, claiming again that Christians “vote in very small percentages,” and digressing into how he would change voting practices.

He then repeated his statement from Friday once more, saying his message had been: “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

Democracy has been a major focus of President Joe Biden’s and now Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, as well as the campaigns of many Democratic candidates down-ballot, and Trump’s comments have bolstered that.

In one more exchange, Ingraham noted that Democrats were arguing that Trump might never leave office if elected again, and prompted, with a laugh, “But you will leave office after four years?”

Of course. By the way, and I did last time,” Trump said.

He left office in 2021 after his and his allies’ sweeping campaign to overturn the election failed, and after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to try to stop Congress from certifying the results.

Research contact: @nytimes

Nervous Hope Hicks takes the stand—and won’t even glance at Trump

May 3, 2024

Hope HicksDonald Trump’s first political PR guru and presumed holder of all his dirty secrets—testified at the former president’s New York criminal trial on Friday, May 3—and wouldn’t even throw a glance at her former boss during her first hour on the witness stand, reports The Daily Beast.

From the moment she walked into the courtroom at 11:30 a.m., the atmosphere immediately changed, the Beast notes. The 35-year-old publicist—who normally carries herself confidently and owns the room—slowly made her way into the courtroom through a side door that’s disguised as a wall panel and uneasily made her way past the red-velvet rope that separates the battle area from the public pews. She kept her head down, with her feathered blonde hair drooping over her eyes as she gripped a black purse in her left hand.

Once she sat down, Hicks barely squeaked out an introduction. “Hi, my name is Hope Charlotte Hicks, and my last name is spelled H-I-C-K-S,” she said, apologizing for being nervous.

But after a few minutes, she began to sit up straighter and speak more firmly as she began detailing the way she entered Trump’s orbit. She recalled landing a job at the Trump Organization as its communications director and how it slowly morphed into a PR role on his 2016 presidential campaign.

According to another report by The Hill, Hicks testified that she learned about ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal on November 4, 2016, via a press inquiry from The Wall Street Journal—just four days before the presidential election.

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels’ name came up a “year prior,” in November 2015, as Trump and his security discussed a celebrity golf tournament years earlier.

She learned about both women on one of Trump’s planes en route to a campaign stop, she said.

The Hill further reported that Hicks recalled that she learned about the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape via a request for comment from The Washington Post, which had obtained the recording.

In the tape, Trump is heard bragging about grabbing women inappropriately, seemingly without consent. In the tape, Trump says: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the p—-. You can do anything.”

Hicks said she forwarded the reporter’s email to other campaign leadership, which included an explanation of the tape, transcript and three questions asked of the campaign. The reporter also indicated that the Post planned to publish the video two hours later.

The subject of the email: “URGENT Wash Post query.”

“I was concerned,” Hicks said of her initial reaction. “I was very concerned.”

She said she forwarded the email to Trump aides Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, David Bossie, and Jason Miller.

The first time she actually saw the tape, itself, she said she was with Trump. “Was he upset?” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo asked the former Trump advisor.

“Yes,” she said with a pause. “Yeah, he was.”

She described her reaction as “just a little stunned” and said she had a “good sense” that the story would dominate the news for at least the next “several days.”

Hicks testified that Trump believed his remarks on the tape were “pretty standard stuff for two guys chatting.”

The Daily Beast added that, at the end of Trump’s term, Hicks “[was] burned by staying so close to Trump—evident by her private remarks after witnessing how Trump’s violent rhetoric and rejection of legitimate 2020 election results brought about the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.”

As the House of Representatives committee that investigated the January 6 riot eventually uncovered, Hicks texted Ivanka Trump’s then-chief of staff, “We all look like domestic terrorists now.”

She later added, “And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed.”

The Daily Beast notes that prosecutors hope to use Hicks as a witness who can add crucial details about Trump’s involvement in directing hush-money payments to former “playmate” Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.

Trump is currently on trial facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over the way he paid his consigliere Michael Cohen after the since-disgraced lawyer closed these deals.

Research contact: @thedailybeast

Trump says he’d disregard NATO treaty, urge Russian attacks on U.S. allies

February 13, 2024

Former president Donald Trump ramped up his attacks on NATO on Saturday, February 10—claiming he suggested to a foreign leader that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to member countries that he views as not spending enough on their own defense, reports The Washington Post.

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,’” Trump said during a rally at Coastal Carolina University. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

Trump’s remarks come as the GOP is debating whether to provide additional foreign aid to Ukraine, which is fighting a war with Russia after being invaded by Moscow in 2022. The Senate is considering legislation that would give $60 billion to Ukraine. House Republicans, however, have echoed Trump’s skepticism about doing so.

Trump has long been a fierce critic of U.S. participation in the alliance—frequently hammering European countries on their share of defense spending—and he appeared to be referring to indirect funding as part of participation in the alliance.

Since 2006, each NATO member has had a guideline of spending at least 2% of its gross domestic product on defense spending by 2024.

NATO countries were already increasing their funding substantially before Trump’s presidency, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. More than half had met or come close to that goal, as of 2023, and many member countries have increased their spending in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Under Article 5, if a NATO ally is attacked, other member countries of NATO consider it “an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.” Since NATO’s founding in 1949, the clause has been invoked only once: On Sept. 12, 2001, after the terrorist attacks in the United States the day before.

Several NATO partnership experts described Trump’s understanding of the financial obligations of NATO member countries as inaccurate and argued that his opposition to collective security as a member nation is misplaced.

“NATO isn’t a pay-to-play setup, as Trump seems to think. It’s an alliance that is first and foremost about U.S. national security interests to prevent another world war originating in Europe,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, in an email to the Post.

She added, “The U.S. investment in NATO is worth every dollar—the only time that the Article 5 collective defense clause was initiated was in response to 9/11. Our allies came to our aid then, and it would be shameful and misguided to not do the same.”

In May 2017, Trump initially did not affirm the United States’ commitment to Article 5, but then reversed course two weeks later. Trump broadly has expressed skepticism about NATO. His campaign website states: “We have to finish the process we began under my Administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”

The New York Times reported in 2019 that Trump discussed withdrawing from NATO. While he was in office, Trump repeatedly tried to claim credit for making NATO countries pay more, claiming that “hundreds of billions” of dollars came to NATO as a result of his complaints about other countries as “delinquent” members.

Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state for European Affairs and fellow at the Atlantic Council, said of Trump: “He seems to prefer a world based on pure power where other countries, where the United States intimidates or threatens other countries. The trouble with that is when we need them, those other countries won’t be there.”

“Encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged—and it endangers American national security, global stability, and our economy at home,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement.

Research contact: @washingtonpost

Appeals court judges are skeptical of Trump’s immunity appeal in election interference case

January 10, 2024

On Tuesday, January 9, federal appeals court judges questioned former President Donald Trump’s broad claim of immunity from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which resulted in a chain of events that culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, reports NBC News.

The all-woman three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said nothing to suggest they would embrace Trump’s immunity argument, although they raised several options on how they could rule.

The court could issue a ruling that decisively resolves the immunity question, allowing the trial to move quickly forward, or alight on a more narrow ruling that could leave some issues unresolved. They also could simply rule that Trump had no right to bring an appeal at this stage of the litigation.

Trump arrived at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., a few minutes before oral arguments began at 9:30 a.m. and sat at his lawyers’ table. He was mostly muted during his lawyers’ presentation, but grew flustered at points when the prosecution’s lawyer was speaking. He could be seen passing notes to his lawyers on a yellow legal pad.

Special Counsel Jack Smith also was present at the hearing, which lasted for a little over an hour.

The case is one of four criminal prosecutions Trump faces as he fights on multiple legal fronts while remaining the presumptive front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

With Trump running for office again, whether the Washington trial originally scheduled for March can take place ahead of the election continues to hang in the balance. Smith has asked the court to move quickly—a bid to keep the trial on schedule.

The appeals court is hearing the case on an expedited schedule, so a ruling could come quickly, possibly in time to allow Trump’s trial to begin as scheduled.

Judge Florence Pan immediately peppered Trump’s lawyer with hypothetical situations in which, under Trump’s theory, presidents could not be prosecuted.

Could a president, she asked, be prosecuted for selling pardons or military secrets, or by ordering the assassination of a political opponent?

“I understand your position to be that a president is immune from criminal prosecution for any official act that he takes as president even if that action is taken for an unlawful or unconstitutional purpose, is that correct?” Pan said.

Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer responded that such a prosecution can only take place if the president is impeached and convicted by the Senate first.

The position taken by prosecutors “would authorize for example, the indictment of President Biden in the Western District of Texas after he leaves office for mismanaging the border allegedly,” Sauer added.

Judge Karen Henderson cited another part of the Constitution—a provision that outlines that the president has a duty to ensure that laws are faithfully executed.

“I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law,” she said.

Later in the argument, Henderson expressed concern that a ruling saying the president does not have immunity would lead to politically-driven prosecutions of future presidents.

“How do we write an opinion that would stop the flood gates?’ she said.

The Justice Department has previously acknowledged that “criminal liability would be unavoidably political,” she added.

The Trump investigation “doesn’t reflect that we are going to see a sea change of vindictive tit for tat prosecutions in the future,” said James Pearce, the lawyer arguing on behalf of Smith.

“Never before have there been allegations that a sitting president has with private individuals and using the levers of power sought to fundamentally subvert the Democratic Republic and the electoral system,” he added.

Trump on Monday suggested that if the court does not rule in his favor and he wins the presidential election, he would have President Joe Biden indicted.

Whatever happens, the losing party is likely to immediately appeal to the Supreme Court. The justices would then face a decision on whether to take up the case and issue their own ruling, potentially also on a fast-tracked basis.

Trump’s appeal arises from the four-count indictment in Washington including charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan in December denied Trump’s attempt to dismiss the indictment on presidential immunity and other constitutional grounds. The case is on hold while the appeals process plays out.

Research contact: @NBCNews

Congress approves bill barring any president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO

Decembr 18, 2023

Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress, reports The Hill.

The measure, spearheaded by Senators Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday, December 14, and is expected to be signed by President Joe Biden.

The provision underscores Congress’s commitment to the NATO alliance—which was a target of former President Donald Trump’s ire during his term in office. The alliance has taken on revitalized importance under Biden, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“NATO has held strong in response to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said in a statement.

He added that the legislation “reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”

Rubio said the measure served as a critical tool for congressional oversight. “We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies,” he said in a statement.

Biden has invested deeply in the NATO alliance during his term, committing more troops and military resources to Europe as a show of force against Putin’s war. He also has overseen the expansion of the alliance, with the inclusion of Finland and ongoing efforts to secure Sweden’s full accession.

Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has sent mixed messages on the alliance ahead of 2024. The former president’s advocates say his tough talk and criticisms of the alliance served to inspire member-states to fulfill their obligations to reach 2% of defense spending, easing the burden on the United States.

But Trump’s critics say the former president’s rhetoric weakens the unity and force of purpose of the alliance. And they expressed concerns that Trump would abandon the U.S. commitment to the mutual defense pact of the alliance—or withdraw America completely.

Research contact: @thehill

Trump targets wife of New York judge overseeing civil fraud trial

December 1, 2023

The wife of the New York judge overseeing Donald Trump’s ongoing civil fraud trial is the latest target of the former president’s rage online, reports The Hill.

Trump took aim at Judge Arthur Engoron’s spouse in a series of posts on Tuesday afternoon, November 28, purporting that an account on X— formerly Twitter—that made several anti-Trump posts belongs to her.

The posts by “Dawn Marie,” which were first unearthed by conservative activist Laura Loomer, say Trump is “headed to the big house,” referring to prison, and remark on his ongoing trial. Two posts show what appears to be AI illustrations of the former president in an orange jumpsuit, and another depicts him as the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Judge Engoron’s Trump Hating wife, together with his very disturbed and angry law clerk, have taken over control of the New York State Witch Hunt Trial aimed at me, my family, and the Republican Party,” Trump wrote Wednesday, November 29, in a Truth Social post.

The Hill could not independently verify that the X account making anti-Trump posts belonged to the judge’s wife. The account appeared to be deactivated at the time of publication.

On a school alumni page run by Engoron, the judge previously wrote that his wife is a psychoanalyst named Dawn. The Hill attempted to reach her via numerous platforms, but she did not immediately return requests for comment.

The judge’s wife previously told Newsweek that the X account does not belong to her.

“I do not have a Twitter account. This is not me. I have not posted any anti Trump messages,” Dawn Engoron said.

Engoron and his principal law clerk have been frequent targets of the former president throughout his fraud trial.

The judge found Trump, the Trump Organization and several executives—including the former president’s adult sons—liable for fraud before the trial even began, ruling that New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) had proved the crux of her case that claims the Trumps falsely inflated and deflated the value of their business’s assets to receive lower taxes and better insurance coverage.

That ruling, plus Engoron’s interactive role in the bench trial, has placed him directly in Trump’s line of fire both in court and on social media.

When Trump testified earlier this month, he took shots at Engoron numerous times, calling him “Trump hating” and questioning his impartiality.

“Can you control your client?” Engoron asked Trump’s counsel at the time. “This is not a political rally.”

Trump’s attacks against the judge’s clerk resulted in a limited gag order issued against the former president and his attorneys—barring them from speaking about the judge’s staff. Trump previously testified that he thinks the clerk is “very biased against us.” The order is temporarily paused while it is being considered by an appeals court.

The purported bias of the trial judge and his principal law clerk against Trump was the basis for a mistrial motion earlier this month, asserting the pair have “tainted” the case. Trump’s legal team argued that the appearance of bias “threatens both Defendants’ rights and the integrity of the judiciary as an institution.”

Engoron denied the motion earlier this month, describing it as “utterly without merit.”

Research contact: @thehill

Trump parrots Hitler—calling foes ‘Vermin,’ saying critics will be ‘Crushed,’ envisioning ‘Detention Camps’

November 15, 2023

Former President Donald Trump said that his political opponents were the most pressing and pernicious threat facing America during a campaign event in New Hampshire on Saturday, November 12—and that he would root them out like vermin, reports The New York Times.

Trump’s campaign rejected criticism that he was echoing the language of fascist dictators Hitler and Mussolini—then doubled down: It said on Monday that the “sad, miserable existence” of those who made such comparisons would be “crushed” when Trump was back in the White House.

“Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, “and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

At the Saturday campaign event, Trump vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He then said his political opposition was the most pr

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within,” Trump said. “Our threat is from within.”

What’s more, Trump said he is planning a widespread expansion of his first administration’s hardline immigration policies if he is elected to a second term in 2024, including rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the United States and placing them in detention camps to await deportation, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to CNN.

An earlier version of Cheung’s statement—in which he said the “entire existence” of those critics would be crushed—was reported by The Washington Post on Sunday. Cheung said on Monday that he edited his initial statement “seconds” after sending it, and the Post amended its article to include both versions.

Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement that Trump at his Veterans Day speech had “parroted the autocratic language” of “dictators many U.S. veterans gave their lives fighting, in order to defeat exactly the kind of un-American ideas Trump now champions.”

Though violent language was a feature of Trump’s last two campaigns, his speeches have grown more extreme as he tries to win a second term.

At recent rallies and events, Trump has compared immigrants coming over the border to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from the horror movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”

He called on shoplifters to be shot in a speech in California and, over the weekend in New Hampshire, he again called for drug dealers to be subject to the death penalty. He has insinuated that a military general whom he appointed as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.

Last month, Trump told a right-wing website that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”—a phrase recalling white supremacist ideology and comments made by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf.”

Research contact: @nytimes