<....3. The political impact

Trump won’t face trial before next month’s election, and it’s possible he never will if he wins. But the filing at the very least served as a late reminder of an ugly, Trump-inspired episode, with just more than a month to go before voters decided whether to return him to the White House.

Those reminders and new details have been few and far between since the Jan. 6 committee wrapped up its business nearly two years ago. Trump hasn’t appeared to pay any real political price for his four indictments, which include a financial fraud conviction in Manhattan. But many casual voters appear to be unfamiliar with these cases, and the race is looking extremely close. That makes the new disclosures untimely for Trump.

Trump posted repeatedly on Truth Social on Wednesday claiming that the filing was election interference.

“The DOJ pushed out this latest ‘hit job’ today because JD Vance humiliated Tim Walz last night in the Debate,” Trump said.

But the timing also owes to Trump’s lengthy legal challenges, which successfully delayed the trial past the election and gave Trump a significant degree of immunity but haven’t stopped the cases altogether.

And it’s worth noting that Trump’s claim about the vice-presidential debate is false. The Justice Department made its filing a week ago — long before the debate — and it didn’t unseal it; Chutkan did.

4. More evidence that Trump had nothing — and was told that

Another central question when it comes to proving Trump knew better is pointing to all the times he was told his theories were false. This is something the Jan. 6 committee also focused on, keying in on testimony from former attorney general William P. Barr and former deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, as well as former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and some Trump aides.

But the filing adds significant new detail.

It says then-Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel cited to Trump a comment from Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield (R) calling claims about voting machines in Antrim County, Mich., “f---ing nuts.”

It says the leader of the Michigan Senate, Mike Shirkey (R), told Trump he hadn’t lost because of fraud, but because he underperformed other Republicans and lost educated women. It adds that Shirkey “could tell by the defendant’s body language that he was not happy to hear” this.

The filing also lays out many details about Pence’s handling of the claims, making clear he consistently cast doubt on them — including in Trump’s presence. Many of the quotes are from Pence’s recent book, but the filing says Pence also urged Trump as early as Nov. 12: “don’t concede but recognize process is over.”

As notably, the filing makes clear that Trump’s campaign repeatedly failed to pony up evidence to Republicans it sought to recruit — then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) and then-Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R).

By Dec. 8, longtime Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller allegedly wrote a telling email.

“When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases,” Miller allegedly said. “I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy s--- beamed down from the mother ship.”

The quote was cited last year in Trump’s indictment, but without attribution. Now we learn it allegedly came from one of his closest aides — then and now.

5. A Trump quote to sum it up

In a filing full of juicy quotes, perhaps one ties it all together. It’s from Trump himself.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump allegedly told family members and others aboard Marine One. “You still have to fight like hell.”

The filing says the comment was overheard by the same aide who brought Trump news of Pence being moved to a secure location.

Trump allegedly echoed the comment when one of his election lawyers told him his claims would not hold up in court, telling them, “The details don’t matter.”

Trump has offered conflicting comments about whether he actually lost the 2020 election. He mostly says it was stolen, but he’ll sometimes talk about it as an actual loss — including recently. This could certainly be read as further proof that the evidence didn’t really matter to him. And that could help prosecutors prove corruption.>

<After Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presidents cannot be prosecuted for their official acts, it fell to special counsel Jack Smith to tweak one of his cases against Donald Trump. Specifically, the prosecutor and his team had to tell a federal court that the indictment against the former president for his alleged election-related crimes can continue, regardless of the high court’s controversial decision.

Last week, Smith’s office submitted a court filing, not only explaining why the criminal charges remain on firm ground, but also offering new details about the merits of the case. For obvious reasons, the Republican candidate, who has denied any wrongdoing, did not want this court filing to reach the public during the election season.

A federal judge unsealed it anyway.

Broadly speaking, there are a handful of angles to the story. The first is the legal dimension, as prosecutors take careful steps to protect their case and explain why Trump’s post-defeat plot must not be seen as an official presidential act.

The second angle is the scope of the new revelations. Politico had an excellent report chronicling some of the most notable details, though NBC News’ report highlighted an especially memorable quote from the former president, which helped summarize his post-defeat perspective in a tidy and important way.

Another piece of evidence Smith’s team plans to introduce is testimony from an unnamed assistant to the president who overheard a remark Trump made to family members aboard Marine One after the 2020 election. “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump allegedly said. “You still have to fight like hell.”

But the other angle to keep in mind is the timing of these developments. The Washington Post had a good report along these lines, noting that the court filing “at the very least served as a late reminder of an ugly, Trump-inspired episode, with just more than a month to go before voters decided whether to return him to the White House.”

Those reminders and new details have been few and far between since the Jan. 6 committee wrapped up its business nearly two years ago. Trump hasn’t appeared to pay any real political price for his four indictments, which include a financial fraud conviction in Manhattan. But many casual voters appear to be unfamiliar with these cases, and the race is looking extremely close. That makes the new disclosures untimely for Trump.

I can appreciate why this might seem difficult for well-informed news consumers to believe, but a significant chunk of the population no longer remembers Jan. 6 or the GOP nominee’s efforts to overturn the will of his own country’s voters.

I’m reminded of a report from Columbia Journalism Review, which spoke to Celinda Lake, one of the leading pollsters who worked on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, and who was stunned during a focus group session earlier this year with swing voters.

According to the report, Lake had asked how the voters felt about Trump’s indictment related to Jan. 6.

“They go, ‘What court case around Jan. 6?’” the pollster recalled. “These were swing voters, and about half of them weren’t sure what we were talking about. And I said, ‘Well, you know, the insurrection and that he was the one that provoked it.’ They go, ‘Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that.’”

A few months later, a national poll from Yahoo News and YouGov found an astonishing number of Americans were unfamiliar with the criminal cases against the former president.

Many voters don’t know a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies. They don’t know that a different jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse. They don’t know that a separate court found that Trump oversaw a business that engaged in systemic fraud.

And they don’t know that federal prosecutors have charged Trump with a variety of felonies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Election Day nears, and early voting gets underway across much of the country, Smith’s filing offers a timely reminder.>

<When it comes to election denialism, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio has not always been shy. The year after Donald Trump’s defeat, for example, ahead of his own first bid for elected office, Vance claimed, in reference to the 2020 election, “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis.”

That wasn’t even close to being true, but it was a sign of things to come. Indeed, in the months and years that followed, the Ohioan continued to publicly question — without, of course, presenting any evidence — the integrity of the last presidential race. As recently as last month, Vance admitted that had he been vice president in January 2021, he would’ve ignored the legal path that then-Vice President Mike Pence followed and instead “asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors.”

But at this week’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asked his GOP rival, “Did [Trump] lose the 2020 election?” Vance refused to answer — and the Harris campaign quickly turned his dodge into a campaign ad.

A day later, as NBC News reported, he dodged the question again.

At an event in Michigan, Vance was asked about his dodging questions last night about who won the 2020 election. He said didn’t answer because he’s focused on the current election.

As part of the same exchange, the GOP vice presidential nominee accused news organizations of being “obsessed“ with the election from four years ago.

I have a hunch the young senator is smart enough to know why his views on the 2020 race matter, and he’s only pretending to be confused, but just for the sake of conversation, let’s say Vance is genuinely baffled as to why his perspective matters. Maybe he sincerely has no idea why this question keeps coming up, and why people care about his refusal to answer.

So let’s explain it to him.

Part of the problem, of course, is Vance’s unexplained shift. He went from someone who was only too pleased to undermine public confidence in the integrity of the 2020 election to someone who no longer wants to talk about it. Why did he change his posture? As it turns out, he doesn’t want to talk about that, either.

Another piece of the puzzle is understanding the senator’s comfort levels with evidence and reality. Vance, by any fair measure, is still very new to politics, having only taken office last year. Before he’s elected to the nation’s second highest office, Americans deserve to know whether he values the rule of law and the will of the electorate.

These aren’t abstract concepts. Either he accepts election results, or he doesn’t. Either he believes Americans settle their differences at the ballot box, or he doesn’t. Either he's prepared to honor legal guardrails, or he isn't. Given the weight of these issues, “I’m focused on the future” isn’t a credible response.

But perhaps most important of all is his refusal to acknowledge the simple fact that these underlying questions are not entirely retrospective in nature. Donald Trump, right now, refuses to say whether he’ll accept the results of this year’s contest. On a routine basis, the former president falsely tells the public that his foes are cheaters and election results are suspect — unless he says otherwise.

Headed into Election Day 2020, Trump went to outrageous lengths to lay the groundwork to reject results he didn’t like, and four years later, he’s doing it again. This time, he has plenty of company: House Speaker Mike Johnson, as recently as last week, said he'll accept the 2024 results — but only if they meet his amorphous and undefined standards.

It’s against this backdrop that Trump's running mate refuses to acknowledge the obvious outcome of the 2020 race, pretending the past irrelevant.

But if you’ll forgive a cliché, I believe it was Faulkner who famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”>

<As the death toll from Hurricane Helene surpasses 200 people and the Southeast continues to reel from the disaster, Donald Trump is working overtime to politicize the tragedy into an attack against his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Despite governors from both political parties lauding of the Biden administration's response, Trump is insisting the federal government has abandoned affected communities.

Earlier this week, Trump baselessly claimed that "the Federal Government, and the Democrat [sic] Governor of [North Carolina are] going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas," ahead of a visit to a disaster zone in Valdosta, Georgia. But for all of the former president's posturing as a capable leader who would better handle the crisis, his record in the White House says otherwise.

According to a Thursday report from E&E News, in 2018 - as wildfires ravaged large swaths of California - Trump initially refused to approve aid to the state because he felt some of the affected regions didn't like him enough.

Mark Harvey, then Trump's Senior Director for Resilience Policy on the National Security Council Staff, told E&E News, a subset of Politico, that the former president only approved the aid after being shown data proving that the affected counties contained a sufficient amount of his supporters.

"We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you," Harvey recalled. His account was backed up by former Trump White House Homeland Security Adviser Olivia Troy.

It's not the only time Trump based his response to a national disaster on the politics of those caught in its wake. A 2021 report found that the Trump administration blocked nearly $20 billion in hurricane relief to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of 2017's Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico. Trump publicly bashed San Juan's mayor at the time - Carmen Yulín Cruz, who had been critical of Trump - as "incompetent," and downplayed the severity of the storm that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Last year, Florida Governor Ron Desantis in his memoir described speaking to Trump in 2019 after Hurricane Michael swept through northern Florida. DeSantis requested that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) foot the entire bill for recovery efforts instead of the standard 75%.

"This is Trump country - and they need your help," DeSantis pitched Trump.

"They love me in the Panhandle," the former president said. "I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?" Shortly after the conversation took place, Trump signed an executive order commanding the federal government to cover "100 percent of the total eligible costs" related to the hurricane response.

According to an analysis by E&E news, the decision resulted in FEMA paying "roughly $350 million more than it would have without Trump's intervention."

Trump's impulse to make his responsibilities to Americans contingent on their politics has not vanished since he left office. Shortly before he took it upon himself to politicize the response to Helene, the former president threatened to withhold aid for natural disasters from Democratic strongholds.

"We won't give him money to put out all his fires," Trump said of California Governor Gavin Newson, a Democrat, in September. "And, if we don't give him the money to put out his fires. He's got problems. He's a lousy governor."

Newsom countered that Trump had effectively threatened to "block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas."

"Today it's California's wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina," he added.

A hurricane in North Carolina is exactly what happened, and Trump's focus has not been on aiding the disaster response, but on (bashing) his political rivals.>

<Two U.S. senators have asked the Department of Justice to take tougher action against Boeing executives by holding them criminally accountable for safety issues that have impacted its airplanes.

In a letter dated Wednesday and sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said the department’s past efforts to effect change at Boeing have failed “because of its continued refusal to criminally prosecute responsible individuals.”

“For too long, corporate executives have routinely escaped prosecution for criminal misconduct. This coddling comes at the expense of customer and worker safety, and it must end,” the senators wrote. “We therefore urge you to carefully review the behavior and potential culpability of Boeing’s executives and hold criminally accountable any individuals that have promoted a culture at the company that disregards passenger safety in violation of federal laws and regulations.”

Boeing declined by email to comment.

The senators’ letter comes ahead of a federal hearing next week over Boeing’s agreement to plead guilty to conspiracy in connection with the 737 Max jetliner, two of which crashed, killing 346 people.

Families of some of the passengers killed in the crashes object to the agreement. They want to put Boeing on trial, where it could face tougher punishment.

The Justice Department argued in court filings that conspiracy to defraud the government is the most serious charge it can prove. Prosecutors said they lack evidence to show that Boeing’s actions caused the crashes in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia.

Relatives of victims and their lawyers have called the settlement a sweetheart deal that fails to consider the loss of so many lives. Some of the lawyers have argued that the Justice Department treated Boeing gently because the company is a big government contractor.

The agreement calls for Boeing to pay a fine of at least $243.6 million, invest $455 million in compliance and safety programs, and be placed on probation for three years.

Boeing — which is also grappling with a nearly three-week-long strike of 33,000 machinists — has faced a series of safety concerns in the past year.

Just last week, federal safety investigators issued urgent recommendations to Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration after determining pedals that pilots use to steer 737 Max jetliners on runways can become jammed because moisture can leak into a rudder assembly and freeze.

And earlier this year, a door plug blew off a 737 Max minutes after an Alaska Airlines flight took off from Portland, Ore., leaving a gaping hole in the plane and creating decompression so violent that it blew open the cockpit door and tore off the co-pilot’s headset. The plug had been opened at a Boeing factory to let workers fix damaged rivets, but bolts that help secure the panel were not replaced when the plug was closed.

There were no major injuries, and the pilots were able to return to Portland and land the plane safely.>

<With barely a month to go before the US presidential election, a trifecta of economic shocks is threatening to sap Vice President Kamala Harris’ momentum on voters’ No. 1 issue: a port strike, a hurricane and an escalation of fighting in the Middle East.

None of these developments are good news for the US economy, which, while strong on many levels, is in a bit of an awkward phase.

But all of them offer political ammunition to Republicans trying to cast the vice president as part of a failed administration that has left American consumers hobbled by years of high prices (while conveniently ignoring three-plus years of relentless job growth and consumer spending).

Former President Donald Trump hasn’t wasted any time trying to pin the sense of chaos on his rival, perhaps hoping that voters simply forget the chaos of his own presidency. “The world is on fire and spiraling out of control,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

Representatives for Harris, who met with first responders in Georgia on Wednesday, declined to comment.

Obviously, no single person or administration caused these events. But in an election in which the Republican and Democratic candidates are virtually tied and voters are fixated on the economy’s health, the optics of this week’s news look worse for the party in power.

Falling gas prices in the US should have been a wind at Harris’ back because voters, fairly or not, tend to associate the price at the pump with the party occupying the White House.

Prices have been on track to fall below $3 on average before the end of October. But the sudden escalation of fighting in the Middle East caused global oil prices to spike Tuesday and Wednesday, raising the prospect of higher prices for American drivers.

Price pain could crop up elsewhere if the East Coast port strike, which began Tuesday, drags on longer than a week.

The work stoppage is halting the flow of a wide variety of goods over the docks of almost all cargo ports from Maine to Texas. By some estimates, the strike could drain the economy of $5 billion a week. The longer it goes, the more likely it is that consumers will feel the impact through shortages at the grocery store and higher prices on some items.

“The last thing the supply chain, companies and employees … need is a strike or other disruptions,” business leaders wrote in a letter to the White House last week, urging the Biden administration to intervene.

Meanwhile, tragedies are piling up in the Southeast, where at least 180 people have died since Hurricane Helene struck the area last week. Roads remain closed, and power is off across swaths of the Carolinas, Florida and Tennessee as of Wednesday. While the economic hit to the region is hard to predict at this point, Moody’s said Monday it expects the figure to come in as high as $34 billion.

Almost certainly, the hurricane’s destruction will lead to temporary job losses and furloughs as businesses regroup. Those layoffs, combined with similar losses related to the Boeing and port strikes, could deliver a rather gloomy October jobs report — due the first Friday of November, aka four days before Election Day.

Every month for the past four years, the US has added jobs at an impressive rate, powering the economy out of its short-lived pandemic recession and giving the Biden administration an impressive record to hang its pro-labor message on.

But the shock of multiple strikes, plus Hurricane Helene, could end that streak.

“If the Boeing strike and the port strike … last through the second week of October, job growth for October could be negative,” researchers at Oxford Economics wrote Wednesday.

A negative jobs report hasn’t been seen in this country since December 2020, the last full month of the Trump administration. And while any October job losses would likely be temporary, the timing of the report — always the first Friday of the month — is especially inconvenient for the Harris camp.>

<A Republican sheriff in Maryland has told a county election board that it might not be complying with the state's law because of an "uneven representation" of political parties when it comes to election judges.

Writing to the Talbot County Board of Elections, Sheriff Joseph J. Gamble said residents had complained about the number of Democratic judges (62) compared to Republicans (50).

"Complaints received highlight a clear disparity among one party over another and in this current instance, registered Republican voters are not being equally represented," Sheriff Gamble wrote.

He said that this violated Maryland election laws, but local and state officials have denied these claims.

"Our election judges check politics at the door, and that the no-electioneering zone around a polling place applies to everyone inside it," State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis said in an emailed statement to Newsweek.

"It is imperative for the integrity of the electoral process and important to stress, election judges operate and are trained to conduct the election in a nonpartisan manner and fashion."

Newsweek also reached out to the Talbot County Board of Elections for comment via email Friday afternoon.

Election judges are responsible for administering the voting process in each precinct, with duties including making sure voters are registered and can cast their ballot in a trouble-free environment.

Maryland has often struggled to recruit election judges, who have to undergo training before starting work early on election day, working through polls closing.

In Talbot County, applicants are being offered $100 for those who attend training and go on to fulfill the role, with additional compensation for different jobs on election day—from Chief Judge ($300) to a standby ($100).

Maryland state law says that each polling place must have an equal number of judges from the majority party and the principal minority party. If needed, a local board can offer additional judges not affiliated to either party or a minor.

Those who complained to Sheriff Gamble were concerned about the imbalance between the two main parties, however.

"As you know, my office will be conducting security checks of the polling places and escorting ballots to your office to ensure we have a safe and fair election," the sheriff said in his letter. "I strongly urge you to comply with Maryland law. Talbot county citizens and election workers, need to feel safe and secure that the law is being followed."

DeMarinis disputed local law enforcement's role, saying that it was the election judge's job to ensure security in polling places and that law enforcement officers have to listen to them.

Sheriff Gamble told Newsweek via phone Friday that he was confused by DeMarinis' response, as he understood what was required of his office. Talbot County Sheriff's Office had been asked to help with security outside venues and with escorting ballots for the past five elections, he said.

The sheriff also said that any law enforcement officer in Maryland can investigate election law violations, and it was his job to act on reports made.

"Do I think there's anything nefarious going on, no," Gamble told Newsweek, adding that he was addressing issues raised by residents. "My concern is there are citizens who are frustrated, and they don't understand why there isn't a 50/50 split."

DeMarinis said in his statement that voters could be sure that their ballot would be counted, and that state and local election boards were complying with the law.>

<Former President Donald Trump has been accused of spreading falsehoods about the federal response to Hurricane Helene to benefit himself politically.

Trump and a number of his Republican allies have been pushing unsubstantiated claims this week concerning the response of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to Helene, which left over 200 people dead and dealt massive damage to infrastructure when it ripped through the Southeast last week.

The ex-president falsely claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was diverting disaster relief money to illegal migrants and made an evidence-free assertion that the Biden administration was denying relief to "Republican areas."

Trump also falsely claimed that Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, with whom he held a joint news conference concerning disaster relief efforts on Friday, was unable to speak with Biden about federal disaster assistance over the phone.

Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia who has endorsed Harris in this year's election, said during a CNN broadcast on Friday night that Trump's false hurricane claims acted as solemn evidence pertaining to the state of his party.

"It's a sobering reminder of where the Republican Party is at right now, and how deep in the gutter we truly are," Duncan told CNN's Kaitlan Collins. "To think that we're going to use this platform to politicize ... one of the worst storms to hit this region ever."

"Donald Trump is down in Georgia today only because he cares about trying to win Georgia," he added. "Because he's realized that if he loses Georgia, he's probably going to end up going to jail."

The cable news network's chief media analyst Brian Stelter then blasted Trump, accusing him of telling Americans "not to believe your eyes or your ears" and of spreading "lies" for "brazen political purposes."

"It's about saying, 'Biden and Harris are incompetent, don't trust them, they hate America,'" said Stelter. "That's the message from Republicans, it's so extreme though ... The problem with the hurricane is that the people who are being lied to now about Helene, they're actually going to suffer as a result."

"There are rescue workers, according to Huffington Post, that are being sent out to homes because of memes and then finding there's nobody there because the meme is a lie," he continued. "So, there's actual real world harm that's being caused in these cases."

Newsweek reached out for comment to Trump's office via email on Friday night.

Trump said during a rally in Michigan on Thursday that Harris, who has no direct control over FEMA or any other federal agencies, had spent "all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants."

In reality, some FEMA money has been spent to house migrants but the funds are part of a program that is entirely separate and unrelated to the FEMA disaster fund, which the agency says is fully funded to deal with the current crisis.

As Helene approached the U.S. last week, Congress passed an additional $20 billion in FEMA disaster relief funding. The only lawmakers to vote against the funding were Republicans.

While the Biden administration has not diverted any FEMA money to migrants, Trump himself faced criticism for diverting FEMA funds to detain migrants while he was president.

Trump was also denounced over his response to Hurricane Maria's devastating impact on Puerto Rico in 2017, including blocking relief funds to the U.S. territory.

In a Truth Social post this week, Trump claimed that the federal government and Democratic state officials were "going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas" in the aftermath of Helene.

There does not appear to be any credible evidence to support Trump's claim, with Republican governors in affected states having instead thanked the government for a prompt disaster response.

Trump on Monday said that Kemp was "having a hard time getting the president on the phone," with the former president adding that the federal government was "not being responsive" regarding the disaster.

The Georgia governor had directly contradicted Trump hours earlier, saying that he had spoken with Biden over the phone on Sunday, when the president pledged disaster assistance and told Kemp that he could "call him directly" for any additional help.>

<Late in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) dodged a question about whether he and running mate Donald Trump would accept the 2024 election results by pivoting to a favorite topic: what he called the “censorship” of Americans by social media companies, terming it “a much bigger threat to democracy.”

His statement drew on a years-long Republican contention that Silicon Valley tech giants have suppressed conservative views on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. That narrative has underpinned congressional hearings, Republican fundraising campaigns, the dismantling of academic research centers, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, state laws seeking to restrict online content moderation, and multiple lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court this year.

But is it true? Well, yes and no, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Conservatives and Trump supporters are indeed more likely to have their posts on major social media platforms taken down or their accounts suspended than are liberals and Joe Biden supporters, researchers from Oxford University, MIT and other institutions found. But that doesn’t necessarily mean content moderation is biased.

Rather, the study finds that conservative accounts may be more often sanctioned because they post more misinformation.

That might sound either obvious or disingenuous, depending on your point of view. But the study, whose lead author is Oxford Internet Institute professor Mohsen Mosleh, is actually neither.

The Nature paper is not the first to find that conservatives are more likely to share stories that have been debunked, or that originate from fake news sites or other sources deemed “low-quality.” One common objection to such studies is that defining what counts as misinformation can be subjective. For instance, if the fact-checkers skew liberal or the list of fake news sites skews conservative, that in itself could explain the discrepancy in sharing behavior.

But study co-author David G. Rand, an MIT computational social science professor, said his team found that conservatives share more falsehoods and low-quality information online even when you let groups of Republicans define what counts as false or low-quality.

A previous version of the study, which was published online in 2022 before undergoing peer review, focused largely on an analysis of 9,000 politically active Twitter users during the 2020 election. It found that accounts that shared pro-Trump hashtags were both more likely to post links to low-quality sites — including those purveying falsehoods about the election — and more likely to end up suspended than those that shared pro-Biden hashtags.

The study didn’t examine the reasons for suspension, so it’s not clear that the sharing of links to dubious sites was the cause — just that it was correlated. Social media companies can suspend accounts or take down posts for all sorts of reasons, including hate speech, targeted harassment of other users, or because they turn out to be bots.

Since then, Rand said the researchers have bolstered the core findings with seven other datasets examining Twitter users, Facebook users, and surveys from 16 countries spanning 2016 to 2023. Among other things, they found that conservatives from other countries also shared misinformation at higher rates than liberals in those counties.

The research doesn’t prove that social media companies are totally unbiased, Rand told Tech Brief.

What it shows is that conservatives would face more content moderation than liberals even if both the definition of misinformation and the enforcement of policies were politically neutral....>

<....The Nature study “totally makes sense” and dovetails with previous findings, said Filippo Menczer, a computer science professor and director of Indiana University’s Social Media Observatory. His own past work has found that extreme partisans on both the right and the left share more information from low-credibility sources than moderates, but that the phenomenon is much more pronounced on the right than the left.

Given the findings, Menczer said, social media companies would have to be biased in favor of conservatives to sanction liberals at an equal rate.

The study published Wednesday in Nature doesn’t seek to explain why conservatives are more prone to traffic in falsehoods. And to what extent its findings hold true in 2024 is unclear.

Much of the analysis relies on data from an era when Facebook and Twitter were on high alert for falsehoods about both elections and, starting in 2020, the covid-19 pandemic.

Both sites have since eased their misinformation policies, and Musk has welcomed back previously suspended accounts since buying Twitter in 2022 and rebranding it X. Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has spearheaded the Republican crusade against content moderation, blaming the Biden administration for leaning on his company to police covid-19 content.

Rand said his study suggests those reversals may rest on a false premise.

Where social media companies once faced an outcry over their role in fueling falsehoods, it’s now “a much bigger threat to be yelled at for being anti-conservative than it is to be yelled at for letting misinformation spread,” he said.

As a result, he added, “a lot of tech companies are scared to touch anything related to anti-misinformation in this election run-up” — a concern given the sheer volume of misinformation being peddled.>

<The September jobs report released Friday was so stunningly great one economist literally exclaimed “wowza.” Fox News was forced to praise the numbers, with one guest lamenting he had expected “more red flags than a communist parade in this report, and there’s not a single one,” then having to admit, “There’s not one data point in here that I can point to that is not good.”

But not according to U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who falsely declared Friday afternoon the report is “fake,” before also falsely claiming updates to the monthly reports across almost a year-and-a-half have all been revised down.

“Another fake jobs report out from Biden-Harris government today,” the Florida Republican wrote on social media. “16 of the last 17 reports have been significantly revised downwards after media helps them with their fake headlines.”

“But all the fake numbers in the world aren’t going to fool people dealing with the Biden-Harris economic disaster every day,” he declared.

Many experts on social media were stunned by a sitting U.S. Senator taking such a drastic and negative stand on an independent, nonpartisan government agency — one, most do not realize, for which he sits on a Senate subcommittee overseeing its work and is responsible for its funding.

“The data truthers are back. Conspiracy-mongering about federal statistics is bad and harmful. Measuring national stats is inherently difficult & subject to error. But the BLS is an independent statistical agency that produces accurate, high-quality data,” observed The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell.

Journalist Kai Ryssdal, host of public radio’s business program “Marketplace,” commented: “I honestly don’t know what to do with this except to point out that it’s a feeble lie and deeply corrosive.”

Media critic and former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob wrote: “Marco Rubio, a sitting U.S. senator, accuses nonpartisan government statisticians of fraud simply because good economic news is inconvenient to his fascist political party.”

“Rubio dishonestly claims that revisions in past months’ job numbers is a nefarious plot,” Jacob continued. “In fact, it’s normal and happened under Trump too. The revisions aren’t always downward. Today the feds revised July and August numbers *upward* – which blows up Rubio’s conspiracy theory.”

“The Dept. of Labor stats are the same for all presidents, including Trump. Rubio’s sleazy attack undermines public faith for the benefit of a criminal liar,” remarked journalist Chris Bury.

Glassdoor’s lead economist Daniel Zhao remarked: “Deeply disappointing to see Sen. Rubio joining the ranks of those endorsing a baseless conspiracy theory questioning the integrity of nonpartisan BLS employees.”

Jonathan Levin, who writes about markets for Bloomberg Opinion, observed, “America’s high-quality, nonpartisan economic statistics are the envy of world. Yes, the data is subject to revisions, and that’s why @BLS_gov publishes these confidence intervals. But I don’t see ‘economic disaster’ anywhere in this range of values, Senator @marcorubio.”

Professor of Economics, Public health, and Management Howard Forman commented: “Criticizing non-partisan federal workers/economists because they don’t tell you what you want to hear is Orwellian. You were once a man with huge promise. How low you have sunk. Truly ‘liddl Marco.'”

Professor of Law Darren Hutchinson, rebuking Senator Rubio, wrote: “The old southern church ladies would say ‘The Devil is a liar.'”

In a press briefing Friday afternoon President Joe Biden was asked about Rubio’s false claims. It appears he had the last laugh.

“Anything the MAGA Republicans don’t like they call fake,” Biden said. “The job numbers are what the job numbers are. They’re real. They’re sincere.”>

<False claims about the federal response to the historic devastation left by Hurricane Helene are spreading out of control on social media, hampering recovery efforts in hard-hit areas, according to local officials.

The secondary flood of misinformation targeting the Biden administration’s response to the destructive storm is an ominous sign for the coming election, with the presidential contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris sure to trigger further attacks on the truth.

“If you think the lies and distortions and know-nothing takes about FEMA are bad, just wait until this time next month,” Tim Alberta, The Atlantic staff writer and author, wrote on X, one of the primary platforms where falsehoods have spread faster than facts.

Elon Musk, the X owner who has endorsed Trump, has repeatedly posted rumors and innuendo denigrating the federal government’s response to Helene. Most of the misinformation is brazenly political, portraying President Joe Biden and Harris as incompetent in an attempt to help Trump win reelection.

Politicians and emergency responders in the disaster zone stretching from Georgia to North Carolina, including many Republican elected officials, have refuted the lies and urged people to stop sharing unsupported rumors on social media.

Kerry Giles, the public information officer for Rutherford County, NC, told CNN on Saturday that debunking the rumors “did consume resources that could have been more effectively utilized in the recovery efforts.”

Giles and her colleagues issued a statement on Friday shutting down several lies swirling online about the devastated towns of Lake Lure and Chimney Rock Village. No, they said, the government is not taking over Chimney Rock; no, there is no discussion about seizing property; no, there are not dead “bodies everywhere” as a result of the storm.

“Snopes.com and regional media outlets have covered much of the debunking, which has helped to reduce some of the misinformation circulating,” Giles told CNN.

Some of the most-shared lies on social media have involved FEMA’s response. Trump has falsely claimed that relief funds are being withheld from predominantly Republican areas after the agency directed relief money to help migrants.

“A billion dollars was stolen from FEMA to use it for illegal migrants,” Trump falsely claimed Friday in Georgia.

But Trump was actually accusing the Biden administration of an act very similar to something he did as president.

“Republican elected officials keep rebutting the BS, and MAGA does not care,” conservative columnist David French said in a social media post Saturday. “They follow liars, and when the liars lie, they believe them and hate anyone who tells the truth.”

Veteran users of X say the sheer amount of bogus and baseless information on the platform is getting worse – in part because Musk reversed efforts to reduce viral misinformation and reinstated accounts of conspiracy theorists.

Officials at FEMA have published a rumor control page to push back on bogus claims, including the assertion that it “is confiscating donations for survivors.” Mike Rothschild, a journalist who has written two books about conspiracy theory culture, called FEMA’s effort “noble but doomed.” He wrote on X that “nobody who wants to believe the lies will trust the source, and the denials will just be rolled into the conspiracy theories.”

Or, as the hosts of the progressive podcast Appodlachia commented, more bluntly, “the internet has broken peoples’ brains.”

Misleading AI-generated images purporting to be from the disaster zone have been proliferating on Facebook, leading one local news station to publish a “how to spot AI-generated Helene storm photos” explainer.

As North Carolina columnist Billy Ball wrote on Friday, “We have a lot of crises in the U.S., but few are as significant as the information crisis. People are lying to us to make us hate each other, to get our money, to boost some cause or another.”

And all signs point to an even uglier climate once votes start to be counted next month.>

<Mark Zuckerberg is done apologizing.

In September, the Meta CEO told the hosts of the “Acquired” podcast in front of a packed live audience at San Francisco’s Chase Center that he regrets taking responsibility in the past for issues out of his company’s control.

What might his vague comments refer to? Perhaps the Cambridge Analytica disaster of 2016, which gave Donald Trump an influential advantage on the back of Facebook user data? Or was it the platform’s dangerous proliferation of misinformation at the height of COVID in 2020? Both of these events were brought to light by in-depth reporting that harmed Zuckerberg’s reputation and made all that apologizing necessary to get back into the public’s good graces.

Today, freshly rehabbed with a Roman haircut and a cultivated wardrobe, Zuckerberg is stirring up new issues: Meta has removed Trump’s social media account restrictions, and the Meta CEO says he’ll push back on any pressure to get his platforms to take down potentially disruptive content. But who’s going to make him say sorry now?

It’s no secret that Meta, Google and other big tech giants have gutted the media industry; Google is currently facing an antitrust lawsuit for stealing millions in revenue from publications. Even just in the last few years, the critical pressure on public figures that journalism once provided has weakened to a light touch due to dwindling resources.

As an experienced communications professional for tech and other industries, what I’m seeing concerns me deeply. We’re quickly approaching a future where tech executives can spin stories and no newspapers exist anymore to provide an accurately fact-checked counter-narrative. Corporate whistleblowers won’t have any reporters to turn to. Consumers will never find out the truth. The most powerful voices will define right and wrong, and Zuckerberg and others like him won’t ever have to apologize again.

On second thought, maybe that future is already here.

An appearance like Zuckerberg’s at the Chase Center is part of a shiny new communication strategy for tech executives called “going direct.” The approach, coined by former Activision comms executive Lulu Cheng Meservey, is defined by a disregard for traditional media and its past influence on public perception. “There’s no longer a need to go through traditional gatekeepers of information and brokers of reputation,” Meservey’s manifesto declares.

In many ways, she’s correct. A decade ago, Zuckerberg would’ve taken his new messaging to a reputable reporter at a major newspaper to ensure that his story carried the weight of the outlet’s reputation into the homes of the outlet’s audience. Today, readership across all but the biggest journalistic institutions is way down, and even worse, so is public trust in them. Americans are getting their news from X, TikTok, and yes, Facebook. The market for podcasts like Acquired is exploding — it’s already a $25 billion industry — but the fact-checking and deep unbiased reporting that has historically been a requirement for traditional journalism hasn’t followed into these mediums.....>

<....Venture capital firms, tech companies and consultancies have built their own soapboxes too. Coinbase announced its controversial 2020 company policy to ban politics via its blog. Google CEO Sundar Pichai put out his own euphemistic “mission-first” policy on the company blog this year. LinkedIn has become a sea of CEO statements and product announcements from tech companies big and small. There are an almost uncountable number of platforms for the powerful to shout from.

It is no wonder Zuckerberg showed up on a stage. “Build your own platform, build your own audience, and build your own narrative” is the new way forward, according to the “Go Direct” playbook.

More voices isn’t necessarily the problem, although the ever-expanding sea of content makes discerning truth from fiction even harder. It’s the lack of accountability. Many of these platforms pride themselves on only lightly moderating content, if at all; fact-checks are few and far between.

Without independent institutions outside of the tech industry that can push back against false statements, take the time and resources required to investigate wrongdoing, carefully steward and publish whistleblower stories, and then hold the powerful to account — leading beyond apologies to new, more ethical behavior — we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past with far more dangerous results.

Without independent journalism, Theranos would have continued to peddle fraudulent healthcare, Juul would have continued to sell tobacco to kids, and maybe Zuckerberg wouldn’t have felt pressured to pull all that COVID misinformation from Facebook before it caused more harm.

In today’s world, where AI is being used as an excuse to lay off thousands of workers and the most powerful in tech are pouring millions into lobbying before a history-making election, the stakes for tech accountability could not be higher. If these current trends persist unchecked, we’re facing a future where the Zuckerbergs of the world will do whatever they like and tell us what to think about it too. Accountability will be dead, no more sorrys about it.>

<In a classic “Seinfeld” episode, George Costanza’s new girlfriend abbreviates her dialogue by saying “yada yada yada,” often eliding the most pertinent parts of a story. George adopts the habit, too, and he and his girlfriend end up yada yada-ing over “little” details like criminality and an untimely death. It’s hilarious and patently absurd — the conversational equivalent of burying the lede in journalism.

This is what a lot of self-identified heterodox political commentators do when they talk about former President Donald Trump. You can see it often on “Real Time With Bill Maher” panels, hear it on any number of “politically homeless” podcasts or read it daily on scores of Substack sites. These ostensible independents view “the establishment” — which includes everything from centrist Democrats to anti-Trump conservatives to non-right-wing media — as the true threat to freedom and the American way. They might concede Trump’s vulgarity is distasteful or that he’s sometimes incompetent and often incoherent, but when it comes to confronting his incorrigible criminality, corruption, racism and misogyny, and his relentless dishonesty on matters both trivial and existential, they typically yada yada past the gory details and pivot into pathological whataboutism and both-sidesism.

In just the past 30 days, Trump has helped whip up a racist, xenophobic furor against Haitian immigrants in Ohio based on lies; suggested that people who criticize Supreme Court justices should be imprisoned; and mused that police should be allowed free rein to commit wanton violence on retail thieves over the course of “one real rough, nasty” day. I could list so many more of his outrageous, inexcusable words and deeds, but it wouldn’t matter.

Yada yada to all that, Trump’s useful centrists will argue. Only the humorless, Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted could possibly take the former president’s rhetoric seriously: “That’s just Trump being Trump, shooting from the hip, flying off the handle, being funny in his uniquely Trumpian way that triggers the hated establishment.”

Last week, Judge Tanya Chutkan released special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page brief laying out evidence that he says shows Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was a private matter and not in the capacity of a sitting president. (The Supreme Court ruled this summer that a president acting in his or her capacity as president is essentially immune from prosecution.) It’s all there: Trump knew he lost the election very early, but Smith’s filing says he engaged in numerous criminal acts to overturn it anyway. Smith’s brief says he also encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, refused pleas from his own staff to call for calm, and after being told by an aide that Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger thanks to his own instigations, he reportedly replied, “So what?”

As I’ve previously written, if Trump hadn’t ever given his riot-inciting speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, he still attempted a self-coup through alleged fraud, intimidation and threats of violence. But high-profile MAGA-adjacent “independents” have spent the past four years yada yada-ing away the whole thing as an unfortunate and brief act of mob violence. Some have even suggested it might have actually been a trap laid by Democrats.

So don’t expect to hear anything louder than throat clearing about the Smith brief (if even that) from Trump’s useful centrists. They’re still having a fit over Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s stupid, discrediting lie about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests (he was most likely in Nebraska at the time).

As someone who is actually without a political tribe — in that I don’t neatly fit into any ideological box and feel no need to carry water for either party — I’ve concluded that Trump is, by leaps and bounds, the greater threat to American democracy and rationality.

And yet, I still say go ahead and nail Walz on his lies. Make him squirm. Hold Vice President Kamala Harris’ feet to the fire on any of her untrue or misleading statements, too. Make all power-hungry politicians feel uncomfortably accountable when they mislead the public.

And then look back at Trump. On the ledger of politicians’ falsehoods, do statements like Walz’s mistruths about whether he was in China 35 years ago (he claims he “misspoke”) even remotely measure up to Trump’s attempted self-coup or his racist incitements against immigrants?>

<....At the vice presidential debate last week, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, refused to answer the direct question of who won the 2020 election. You’d think a true political independent — no matter how much they’re triggered by the “woke” or the “establishment” — would see Vance’s nonanswer as a craven cop-out, given how thoroughly adjudicated the legitimacy of the 2020 election has already been. But not if you’re Free Press columnist Abigail Shrier, who lamented during the debate, “Dear Lord, more January 6 questions?!”

Heaven forfend a candidate for the second-highest office in the land, whose running mate tried to steal the previous election, be asked about it. We nonpartisans really ought to just move on, I guess.

Many anti-anti-Trumpers yada yada’d through 2022’s Jan. 6 Committee hearings — where remarkable video evidence and testimony from ex-Trump White House officials (including Trump’s own daughter) and other Republicans laid bare Trump’s grand conspiracy to overturn a free and fair election. Trump and his allies have also spent the past four years plotting to do it again — and thanks to state-level election overhauls and a sympathetic judiciary, they’re much better equipped to do so now. Also poisoning the discourse are pro-Trump billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who publicly spread the fiction that Democrats are cheating — already, they say — to win the 2024 election. Axios recently reported, “Through public remarks, Truth Social screeds and more than 100 preemptive lawsuits, Donald Trump is assembling a detailed catalog of excuses for rejecting the results of the 2024 election — if he loses.”

Yada yada yada, Walz lied about parts of his biography.

I used to think Trump-sympathetic nonpartisans suffered from a failure of imagination. Ever since Trump’s escalator descent in 2015, warnings that Trump could do unthinkable things (like try to steal an election he lost, then preemptively discredit the next one) have been dismissed as the panicked bleatings of basic establishment Chicken Littles.

But Trump is a known quantity in 2024. He was president. He’s been the GOP nominee three consecutive times. He’s been convicted of felonies and found liable for sexual abuse. He’s threatening to use the Department of Justice to jail his political rivals.

At what point do Trump-sympathetic independents think it’s OK to take Trump at his word when he promises to do horrible things — like once again pre-emptively attempting to overturn an election based on nothing?

To be clear, I’m not here to police anyone’s political preferences. It’s perfectly respectable to be a nonpartisan who thinks Harris and Democrats are worse. But you can’t credibly make the case that Dems are worse by blithely waving away Trump’s most egregious offenses.

I’ve unequivocally criticized left-wing excesses and liberal threats of censorship, as well as Biden’s and Harris’ records. And yet, I’m reminded of the late legendary libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who despite leaning right his entire adult life, explained his vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016 on the basis that “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

Yes, you can reject political tribalism and still choose a side in an election. But if your criticisms of Trump, MAGA and Republicans are rare, trivial and half-hearted — and you denounce Trump opponents (including those exiled from the center and the right) as TDS-afflicted liberals — you’re not politically tribeless and you’re not fearlessly independent. You’ve got a tribe; it’s Trump’s, and you’re a reputation sanitizer for his presidential campaign.>

<In a series of social media posts in August, former President Donald Trump called Vice President Kamala Harris “low IQ,” “dumb” and lacking “the mental capacity” to debate him. Although a substantial majority of Americans subsequently concluded that she beat him in their Sept. 10 face-off, Trump doubled down. “Kamala Harris is mentally impaired,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin last month. “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way.”

In contrast, Trump — who often boasts about his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, home of “super genius stuff” at the Wharton School, and the difficulty of getting admitted to that prestigious institution — maintains that “I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart.”

Trump did not graduate with honors from Penn. Nor has he authorized release of his college transcripts. And it wasn’t that difficult for a transfer student (in this case, from Fordham) to get in more than 50 years ago.

Innate and acquired intelligence is clearly not Trump’s long suit. He has demonstrated a staggering ignorance about American history. He has alleged that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer and that vaccines cause autism. He doesn’t understand that tariffs raise retail prices on imported goods, in essence imposing a national sales tax on all Americans, disproportionately affecting poor people and increasing inflation.

Trump’s public statements have also become increasingly incoherent. His explanation that he is not actually rambling (“You know, I swerve. You know what the swerve is. I’ll talk about like nine different things and they’ll come back brilliantly together, and it’s like friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen’”) does not pass the smell test.

Consider a few examples.

In January, in a speech about illegal drugs, Trump could not pronounce the word “smallest” and then said, “We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”

At a rally in March, he complained about a photograph of President Biden in a bathing suit; made comments about Michael Jackson and Cary Grant (who, he pointed out, wouldn’t look good in a bathing suit at age 81, either) and bragged that women love him. “But it was an amazing phenomenon,” he continued, “and I do protect women. Look, they talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well — you know, the polls are rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it. Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.”

Asked at the Economic Club of New York how he would reduce the cost of childcare and what specific legislation he’d propose on this subject, Trump replied: “Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was somebody, we have had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue, but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that, because, look childcare is childcare. It’s something you know you have to have it, in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s going to take care. We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about in waste and fraud and all the other things that are going on in this country.”

Trump’s incoherence should give voters pause. Especially when they also consider his fundamental character flaws.

Insisting that he is “entitled to personal attacks,” Trump has mocked Biden’s childhood stutter. He has reposted crude and vulgar sexual comments about Harris. And he lies about all things great and small. The size of his crowds. Crime rates, inflation rates and the number of immigrants illegally entering the country. The result of the 2020 election. Teachers deciding whether transgender students should get operations. Haitian immigrants kidnapping, killing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

In selecting a president of the United States, the most powerful political figure in the world, knowledge, intelligence, cognitive acuity and character matter — more than anything else.>

<Washington and Massachusetts are stockpiling abortion pills. California is cutting climate deals directly with automakers. Colorado is rushing to protect the right to same-sex marriage. And attorneys general across the country are marshaling legal resources and privately plotting courtroom strategies.

From the West Coast to the East, blue states are preparing for the possibility that former president Donald Trump wins reelection in November by attempting to shield their policy priorities from the reach of a future Trump administration.

This preemptive strategy — “Trump-proofing” — encompasses a wide range of issues and programs that Democratic leaders fear could be targeted in another Trump presidency, based on his previous actions and his current campaign promises.

Even as they pursue such safeguards, Democrats are projecting confidence in their nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, but they say it would be irresponsible to go into Election Day without a backup plan for their worst-case scenario.

The approach so far remains more concurrent than coordinated, with different states pursuing their own measures, but the country’s most liberal leaders forged close ties during Trump’s first term as they allied in opposition to him. Now they appear poised to unify again.

The effort provides a striking contrast to the 2016 election, when Trump’s victory took Democratic officials by surprise and sent them scrambling to respond. Much has changed in the eight years since, however, and experts say that even with the early Democratic organizing, the reach could be limited by the conservative transformation of the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court in Trump’s first term.

Still, leaders in blue state America believe the head start and hard-won experience will help them once again act as a bulwark against an agenda they deem dangerous.

“If Donald Trump should somehow be reelected, we’ll be ready from day one to respond,” said Robert Rivas, the speaker of the California Assembly and one of the top elected Democrats in a state that has styled itself as Trump’s fiercest sparring partner. “We’ve already stopped Trump once and we’re prepared to do so again.”

In the Biden administration and on the international stage, this work has been underway for months, as the president looks to lock in his legacy and alliances like NATO seek stability. But the preparations are especially pitched at the state level, where there’s a long tradition of conflict with the federal government, turbocharged by the moment’s hyper-partisanship.

“This has been the eternal battle,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. “And in our modern polarization, after every presidential contest, half the nation wants to move in the opposite direction of the president.”

States appear to be pursuing a three-pronged self-defense strategy, according to interviews with officials, advocates and experts, situated in governors’ mansions, state houses and courtrooms.

A spokesperson for the Harris campaign said a Trump presidency would “hurt every single American, no matter where they live,” and that the only way to stop him “is to elect Vice President Harris.”

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign accused Democrats of “fearmongering because they know the Trump-Vance ticket is winning on the issues that matter to voters,” and added that “Americans will ‘Kamala-proof’ our country” by reelecting Trump.

In shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes at an undisclosed government facility sits Washington state’s insurance policy against a future Trump administration. In them are 30,000 doses of mifepristone, the commonly used abortion pill that has become a flash point in the fight over reproductive rights.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) was one of several state leaders to order stockpiles of the medication last year, when a lawsuit threatened to limit access to the drug. The Supreme Court later rejected the challenge, but Inslee said last week that he would maintain the state’s stash — at least until the presidential race is decided.

Trump has suggested that he is open to using federal regulations to limit access to mifepristone, declining to rule out the move in a summer news conference. His campaign later said that “the Supreme Court unanimously decided on the issue and the matter is settled,” but the court’s ruling has no bearing on what his future administration could do and it left the drug vulnerable to additional legal challenges.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) is likewise preserving her state’s stockpile of 15,000 pills in case Trump returns to office.

“A Donald Trump presidency would be disastrous for states,” Healey said in a statement to The Washington Post, adding that “he would destroy reproductive freedom even more than he already has.”>

<....The moves from Inslee and Healey are just the most recent examples of governors wielding their executive authority in attempts to counter what they expect to be Trump’s agenda. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), probably MAGA’s most visible state-level foil, has been working to secure a lofty climate agenda.

Trump has long gleefully targeted California, and his campaign has told reporters that as president he would again revoke the state’s power to set its own pollution limits on cars and trucks, among other things. (In a September news conference in the state, he also threatened to block federal fire aid to California unless Newsom bowed to his agenda on taxes and other topics.)

To counter any Trump action on the pollution front, Newsom announced an agreement earlier this year with the automaker Stellantis, one of the world’s largest car manufacturers. The pact ensures that Stellantis will comply with California regulations even if the state is “unable to enforce its standards as a result of judicial or federal action,” an arrangement similar to one Newsom brokered during Trump’s first term.

The deals underscore California’s ability, rare among states, to use its formidable economy and market muscle to shape policy regardless of what happens at the federal level.

Similarly, Newsom has increasingly acted as an international negotiator, pursuing agreements with China, Australia and others on climate change, a trend that is likely to accelerate if Trump retakes office and once again pulls the United States out of the Paris climate treaty, as he has pledged.

“We’re definitely trying to future-proof California in every way, shape or form,” Newsom said at a February news conference when asked about what a Trump presidency would mean for his state. “We know the playbook.”

After Trump’s 2016 election, California’s rattled legislative leaders vowed to “lead the resistance” to his administration.

That defiant pledge kicked off years of policymaking as the legislature’s Democratic supermajority pushed dozens of bills designed to insulate California, such as the 2017 “sanctuary state” law that limited communication between local authorities and federal immigration officials amid Trump’s threats of mass deportations.

“Here in California, we are already battle-tested,” Rivas said.

On Sunday, Newsom signed a bill that requires insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization, citing GOP opposition to the treatment in explaining its urgency.

Trump has said his government would cover IVF, but he has offered few details to support the plan and advocates are skeptical, pointing to the way his views on reproductive issues have shifted over the years and to recent Republican votes against protecting the procedures.

State lawmakers have also sought to protect same-sex marriage, pushing onto the November ballot constitutional amendments securing it in California, Colorado and Hawaii.

While Trump has said he’s “fine” with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion that it should be reexamined has alarmed the LGBTQ+ community. Advocates fear that Trump, if reelected, would appoint more far-right judges who could then facilitate further attacks on gay rights.

“We had to really address that issue now while we could,” said Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, co-chair of the Democratic caucus and sponsor of the state’s amendment to remove the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. “A lot of basic protections people take for granted could be changed by a Trump administration.”

Titone said she plans to spend the next few weeks studying how a federal rollback of LGBTQ+ protections — like those the Trump campaign has already outlined — could harm Coloradans, and then prepare legislation that could fill the gaps....>

<....Titone, however, acknowledged that there are legal and practical limits to what state lawmakers can do.

“If the administration took a hatchet to a lot of the federal rules that offer protections to Coloradans,” she said, “there could be some people who are really harmed because we just don’t have the bandwidth to respond to all the issues that could potentially come up.”

Trump’s first term taught Democrats an important lesson: When lawmaking fails, try lawsuits.

State attorneys general are preparing to revive that strategy as early as Inauguration Day if Trump returns to office. Departments are war-gaming possible legal defenses and pledging to pick up where they left off in 2020.

“We’ll see what comes in November and beyond, but we won’t be caught flat-footed,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement to The Post. “Fortunately and unfortunately, we have four years of Trump 1.0 under our belt.”

Bonta’s office declined to discuss specific legal strategy, but a spokesperson said staffers are reviewing what Trump has described as his second-term agenda as they prepare for what they expect to be a wave of lawsuits in the environmental, immigration and civil rights spaces.

They and other elected officials have also been studying plans put forth by Trump allies, particularly Project 2025, whose far-right policy prescriptions have drawn sustained campaign attacks from his opponents.

The voluminous compendium was crafted by many veterans of Trump’s first administration. He has of late disavowed the document, even as he earlier praised it and pushed similar policies on some fronts.

Lawsuits against the federal government have been ticking up since former president Barack Obama’s second term, said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University and an attorneys general expert. But they skyrocketed during the Trump years, with Democratic states suing his administration more than 150 times, according to Nolette’s database of cases.

“It’s basically just exploded,” Nolette said. “Now it’s like everyone’s suing everyone over everything.”

Democrats were often successful, winning more than 80 percent of the cases against Trump, Nolette said, thus blocking some of the former president’s high-profile moves, like his push to include citizenship status on the Census and his attempt to cancel the program protecting undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, known as DACA.

But since many of those consequential cases were decided, the Supreme Court has shifted further to the right with Trump’s picks, mirroring a similar trend at the district level. And while Democrats have been planning ahead, Trump’s allies also have had years to fine-tune their own legal strategies.

“This isn’t a one-way ratchet,” Nolette said. “They’re both upping their game.”>

Remember, <otiose offal of oz>: help is available, even afflicted as you are by the need to relieve the tedium whilst you fulfil those inner cravings which drive you towards you-know-what.

<The unsealing last week of the government’s case against Donald Trump for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss was a gift to 2024 voters, reviving attention to perhaps the single biggest reason he shouldn’t be restored to office. New and sordid details, in particular from former Vice President Mike Pence, freshen what is mostly a familiar account of Trump’s post-election plotting to stay in power. It’s damning, if not so completely as a trial would have been (and, I’d wager, a conviction), had Trump not succeeded in his delaying tactics all the way to the oh-so-friendly Supreme Court.

But the filing made public Tuesday in Washington’s federal court is valuable, too, as a reminder of what Trump was doing in the months before the 2020 election. Chillingly, his activities back then — falsely alleging myriad ways Democrats would cheat, suggesting he’d challenge the result if he lost to Joe Biden — parallel to what he is doing now as he campaigns against Kamala Harris.

Here’s how special counsel Jack Smith opens the narrative against Trump: “Although his multiple conspiracies began after election day in 2020, the defendant laid the groundwork for his crimes well before then.” Smith goes on: “He refused to say whether he would accept the election results, insisted that he could lose the election only because of fraud, falsely claimed that mail-in ballots were inherently fraudulent, and asserted that only votes counted by election day were valid.”

Voters, be forewarned. We’re watching a sequel. And they’re usually worse than the original.

The government provides examples of Trump’s 2020 campaign antics that are all too familiar now. There was his response in a July 2020 interview, when Fox News’ Chris Wallace (now at CNN) repeatedly asked if he would accept the results of the election. He’d “have to see,” the then-president said. “It depends.”

Just last Tuesday, a reporter in battleground Wisconsin asked the election-denying candidate, “Do you trust the process this time around?” Trump: “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.” In his debate against Biden, Trump said, after the moderator’s third attempt at asking the question, that he’d accept the outcome if it were a "fair and legal and good election.”

Just as in 2020 and 2016, Trump always has an “if.” Translation: “If I win.”

Let’s pause to remember American Politics B.T. (Before Trump): We campaign reporters never thought to ask a presidential candidate, or a contender for any office, if they’d accept the election result. And if we had, I daresay no serious politician would have suggested they wouldn’t.

Back to the parallels between pre-election 2020 and 2024. Smith’s filing against Trump recalled that throughout his 2020 campaign, he told the MAGA faithful just what he told a national TV audience at the Republican National Convention that year: “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

Four years later, at a rally in Erie, Pa., last Sunday, Trump ranted that Democrats were like criminals in “the way they cheat at elections.” In a recent, and typical, fundraising email, he told backers, “Kamala ordered her Silicon Valley henchmen to censor free speech & rig the election.” And his response to the release of the government filing? “They rigged the election.”....>

<....Then there’s Trump’s lies about mail-in ballots. In July 2020, the Smith filing notes, “despite having voted by mail himself earlier that year,” he tweeted that because of mail-in votes, “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.”

Trump now echoes that lie at nearly every rally and in frequent social media posts, even as his party desperately tries to get its members to vote early by mail — including at rallies where Trump assails the practice. He recently told reporters that mail-in ballots are “a whole big scam,” and the same day posted that Democrats were (legally) getting Americans living overseas to vote by mail, adding, “Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!”

Trump repeatedly condemns Democrats for “election interference.” He lies that they’re getting noncitizen migrants to vote, a vanishingly rare occurrence that is against federal law. NBC News on Thursday reported more than a dozen examples of Trump’s evidence-free allegations of fraud before a single vote was cast.

Déjà vu all over again.

Thanks should go to Smith and to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who unsealed most of his filing. The revival of the story of Trump’s 2020 election subversion and incitement of a bloody insurrection underscores America’s predicament: Unless Trump is defeated in the 2024 election, not only will he likely never be held criminally accountable for his alleged crimes, but, restored to the presidency, he’d be more emboldened to ignore all guardrails of democracy and the rule of law.

On Thursday, Never Trump stalwart and exiled Republican royalty Rep. Liz Cheney appeared onstage with Harris in Ripon, Wis., the pre-Civil War birthplace of the antislavery Republican Party in 1854.

“In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump.”

I’m not so naive as to think any words will move Trump’s devoted followers. And yet we can hope that such sentiments as Cheney’s can influence others. Because Trump must not only be defeated, but beaten so decisively that he cannot plausibly contest the election’s outcome.>

<House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on Sunday that he does not intend to call Congress out of recess to vote on emergency funding for federal agencies assisting in Hurricane Helene recovery efforts.

Johnson told Fox News Sunday's Shannon Bream that lawmakers will be "back in session immediately after the election" to provide any funding needs for states hit hardest by the Category 4 storm that made its way through the southeastern United States late last month.

"That's 30 days from now," the Republican leader said. "The thing about these hurricanes and disasters at this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that."

A handful of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have asked Congress to return to Washington, D.C., before November 5 to vote on additional aid packages for Helene victims. Florida Senator Rick Scott, a Republican, said in a statement last Monday that his state is "resilient, but the response and recovery from this storm demands the full and immediate support of government at every level to get families and businesses back to normal."

Democratic Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz has also said he would support ending recess early to pass emergency funding.

"Congress must show that it can still deliver for the American people in their hour of greatest need," the lawmaker wrote in a statement on September 30.

The White House has asked lawmakers to pass additional funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other agencies tasked with assisting communities devastated by Helene. In a letter to congressional leadership on Friday, President Joe Biden specifically requested funding for the Small Business Administration (SBA), which he said will run out of money before lawmakers return to session as it supports small business owners recovering from the storm.

Biden did not explicitly call for lawmakers to return from recess early in order to meet the emergency funding needs.

Johnson said on Sunday that "Congress will provide" and called it "an appropriate role for the federal government" to assist in disaster relief efforts.

"You'll have bipartisan support for that, and it will all happen in due time, and we'll get that job done," he added.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that FEMA can meet the immediate needs of Helene relief but that the agency is being stretched thin, noting that another hurricane is expected to hit western Florida sometime next week. Biden wrote in his letter on Friday to Congress that while FEMA's "Disaster Relief Fund has the resources it requires right now to meet immediate needs, the fund does face a shortfall at the end of the year."

"Without additional funding, FEMA would be required to forego longer-term recovery activities in favor of meeting urgent needs," the president wrote. "The Congress should provide FEMA additional resources to avoid forcing that kind of unnecessary trade-off and to give the communities we serve the certainty of knowing that help will be ongoing, both for the short- and long-term."

Some Republicans have blamed the Biden-Harris administration for FEMA's shortfalls, claiming that the agency has diverted millions of dollars for services for migrants in the U.S. Federal officials have adamantly denied such claims, noting that the funding distributed by FEMA for migrant services does not come from the agency's budget for disaster relief.

Johnson said on Sunday that while the "streams of funding are different" under FEMA, he accused the agency of losing "sight of its core mission."

"What the American people see, and what they're frustrated by, is that FEMA should be involved," the House speaker said. "Their mission is to help people in times like this of natural disaster, not to be engaged in using any pool of funding from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border."....>

<....White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Newsweek via email on Sunday that "a wide range of leaders in both parties and from every affected state have praised the bipartisan response to Hurricane Helene." Republican governors from several hard-hit states have thanked the federal government's response to Helene, including South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, who said at a press conference last Tuesday that federal assistance had "been superb."

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin also said at a press conference last week that he is "incredibly appreciative of the rapid response and the cooperation from the federal team at FEMA." He also thanked Biden and Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine "for their support and continued coordination to provide assistance to Virginians in need" in a statement last Sunday.

Prior to heading to recess, Congress passed $20 billion for FEMA's disaster relief funding as part of a stopgap measure intended to fund the federal government until December. The agency, however, had requested a need for $33.1 billion in the new fiscal year, which began on October 1.

The stopgap measure was passed in the House with a 341-82 vote and in the Senate with a 78-18 vote. All no votes came from Republican members in both chambers.

Debates over hurricane relief efforts come just weeks before voters will cast their ballots in the 2024 presidential election on November 5. As Republican strategist John Feehery told The New York Times in a report published Friday, the issue of disaster relief funding has often become a political debate, especially so close to a tight election.

"It's simply too risky for Republicans to bring back members to vote on a package of spending that they haven't even seen yet, right before the election," Feehery said. "A partisan fight would be a disaster, but a bipartisan spendathon could deflate the base."

According to the Associated Press, the death toll from Helene has reached 227 as of Saturday across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas. It is the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katria [sic] in 2005.>

<Question: When did fact-checking become an outrageous abuse of debate moderators' power?

Answer: When MAGA Republicans decided they didn’t like anyone pointing out that they're lying.

In a perfect world, it might be enough for political opponents to correct each other’s prevarications and exaggerations. But Donald Trump’s entry into presidential politics, with his incessant flights of fancy and nonstop lying, have completely changed the dynamics. While other presidential candidates have stretched the truth, only one has kidnapped it, bound and gagged it, put it in a barrel and tossed it into the East River.

In the age of Trump, fact-checking has become a necessary service for moderators and other journalists to provide to voters.

Take the first and probably only presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, on Sept. 10.

Some Trumpers went bonkers after ABC News' David Muir corrected one of the former president’s most egregious and dangerous falsehoods — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting pets and eating them. Muir noted that Springfield’s city manager said there were no credible claims of pets being “harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

“But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” Trump insisted in the course of a rant that launched a kajillion memes.

There is not a single television interview of any Springfield pet owner claiming their cat or dog was stolen and eaten by immigrants. There was a news story about a woman killing and appearing to eat a cat, but she was born in and lived in Canton, about 175 miles away from Springfield. (She was reportedly charged with "disorderly conduct by reason of intoxication," among other offenses.)

In any case, Muir didn’t just have a journalistic obligation to call Trump on his race-baiting lie. He had a moral obligation to do so because that kind of incendiary claim can get people killed. Springfield has yet to recover from Trump’s collective character assassination.

In the first and only vice presidential debate last week, Ohio Sen. JD Vance picked up where Trump left off, blaming "illegal" immigrants in places such as Springfield for overwhelming schools and hospitals and driving up the price of real estate. Moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News correctly noted that the Haitian immigrants Vance was alluding to are, in fact, here legally. Most have what is called temporary protected status, a designation that the Biden administration has expanded.

“Margaret,” Vance complained, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you're fact-checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on.”

He went on for a moment, but what’s actually going on is far too complicated for a debate sound bite, and the moderators soon cut both candidates’ microphones, which was allowed by the rules.

Trump supporters blew their lids.

“F you CBS — how DARE YOU,” posted the conservative firebrand Megyn Kelly, who was axed by NBC News in 2018 for suggesting that there was nothing wrong with white people wearing blackface for Halloween. Kelly, who herself famously tangled with Trump as a debate moderator for Fox News, also once insisted that Santa Claus cannot possibly be Black because he “just is white.”

The F-word, by the way, is apparently Kelly’s go-to response in defense of Trump. After the world’s most popular singer endorsed Harris, Kelly responded, “F you, Taylor Swift.” Elegant! I can’t wait to hear what she says about Bruce Springsteen's recent Harris endorsement.

"'Fact check’ has become just another word for censorship,” was the headline on a recent New York Post column by Douglas Murray, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

This makes no sense. Censorship implies suppression of speech before it is aired. In a broadcast debate, a candidate actually has to spout the lie before moderators can correct it....>