"He’s either lying to himself or to the rest of us," said one law professor.
Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:
In his opinion in Callais v. Louisiana, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito claimed the majority was merely modernizing the Voting Rights Act (VRA), not killing the landmark civil rights law outright.
“We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text,” Alito wrote about the VRA’s Section 2, which Congress enacted to ban racially discriminatory voting laws.
But legal experts, voting rights advocates, and even the VRA’s loudest foes all agree with Justice Elena Kagan: “[I]n fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”
“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systemically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”
Harvard University law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos went further, writing on X: “Sure, Section 2 wasn’t officially struck down. But it might as well have been. It’s now useless to minority voters under virtually all circumstances.”
Some of the loudest backers of the redistricting war launched by President Donald Trump last year seemed to agree.
“While not overturning section 2 of the VRA, [Callais] construes it into near-irrelevance. All minority voters are entitled to is that the map drawers NOT use race as a metric in drawing their maps,” wrote Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the far-right Article III Project. “No more majority-minority districts.”
“You have to understand how brilliant Alito is,” Chamberlain added. “This is actually *better* than getting rid of section 2 outright, because it means section 2 can be used to CHALLENGE majority-minority districts (for impermissibly using race).”
“This is huge,” Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Pascale, wrote on X. “If states are aggressive, we could see a healthy majority in the House perpetually.”
Election law experts and civil rights leaders said the exact same thing, only in mournful notes.
“Today’s decision is a bullet in the heart of the voting rights movement,” Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has not just weakened a law, it has humiliated and dismantled the life’s work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and every man and woman who marched, bled, and died for Black Americans to have an equal voice at the ballot box.”
In the decades before Congress enacted the VRA in 1965, lawmakers would draw maps that split or “cracked” minority — mostly Black — voters across multiple districts, all but ensuring that they would be unable to elect someone who would represent their interests. Congress sought to ban that practice with Section 2 of the VRA. And when the Supreme Court in 1980 ruled that plaintiffs suing under Section 2 had to show discriminatory intent, Congress amended the law two years later to ban any voting “standard, practice, or procedure… which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
[...]
Now those gains are at risk. Following Callais, Republican lawmakers in Alabama and Louisiana are now sprinting to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate all of the two states’ majority-minority districts, which are currently held by four Black Democrats.
“This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation,” Hasen wrote. “It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation.”
Hasen wondered why Alito obscured the real impact of his ruling behind reams of legal sophistry, calling him a “coward.”
“[H]e’s either lying to himself or to the rest of us about the future of the Voting Rights Act,” he wrote in a separate piece for Slate.
Kagan noted that Alito turned the link between race and party preference — what used to be “practically an element of a vote-dilution claim” — into an excuse. And relying on the Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that even though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it’s a nonjusticiable political question beyond the courts’ abilities to resolve, Alito said VRA plaintiffs need to “disentangle race from politics” by proving that race inspired the line drawing, not partisanship.
Good luck with that, said Kagan.
“But under the majority’s new test, when those two facts coexist — which is almost everywhere Section 2 has purchase — a plaintiff will have to show — contrary to Section 2’s clear text and design — that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” Kagan wrote. “And that, as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible.”
Under the new standards —which Alito cast as minor tweaks to the 40 years of jurisprudence built on the court’s 1982 decision, Thornburg v. Gingles — minority voters challenging a racially gerrymandered map will need to provide an alternate version that still accomplishes the mapdrawers’ original partisan goals. In other words, plaintiffs lose unless they can come up with another map that maintains the status quo, i.e. a new map that still favors Republicans.
SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Louisiana v. Callais contained loads of Orwellian lies, such as falsely claiming that the ruling merely updates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Fellow SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan has it correct in her dissent: Callais pretty much erodes VRA Section 2.
Prominent organizations accuse network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting Chinese communist party
Jeremy Barr at The Guardian:
A group of prominent conservative organizations has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny license renewal requests from the eight local television stations owned and operated by ABC, accusing the network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting the Chinese communist party.
The petitions come after the commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, took the nearly unprecedented step of requiring the network, a frequent recipient of attacks from Donald Trump, to apply several years early to maintain its ability to broadcast in markets around the country.
While Carr has said the early license renewal process stems from an FCC investigation into ABC’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, petitioners are free to include a variety of grievances against the network and concerns about whether ABC is operating in the public interest.
[...]
“ABC ignores long-standing Commission precedents and principles protecting the integrity of the news,” the group wrote. “ABC engages in explicit racial and gender discrimination. ABC cozies up to the Communist Chinese Party and airbrushes over religious and ethnic cleansing. ABC fails to respect this Commission’s rules.”
The organization lobbied the FCC to deny ABC’s renewal requests and to call the matter for a hearing, “because the Petition and accompanying materials raise sufficient questions [about] whether ABC is operating in the public interest or remains worthy of the public trust”.
The Media Research Center, a non-profit conservative media watchdog group, filed a petition to deny the network’s license renewal requests “because of ABC’s continued and sustained abuse of the licenses subject to the current review, its notorious efforts to improperly influence national elections, and its willful engagement in misinformation and the promotion of violence”.
The group claimed that ABC-owned and -operated television stations, in markets such as New York City and Los Angeles, “have used public spectrum to suppress news coverage of the most critical stories of our day; to engage in electioneering and relentless political bias; to excuse, minimize, and even justify the epidemic of political violence; and to peddle misinformation and defamation”.
The Article III Project, a legal group started by the conservative, Trump-aligned activist Mike Davis, focused its petition to deny on ABC parent company Disney’s employment practices and efforts to hire a more diverse workforce.
“The Commission should deny renewal of ABC’s television licenses,” wrote William Chamberlain, senior counsel for the organization. “The record demonstrates consistent and serious violations of federal [Equal Employment Opportunity] law. In the alternative, any renewal must include sweeping terms and conditions sufficient to eliminate all discriminatory practices and ensure future compliance.”
Another petition was filed by the Trump-affiliated conservative advocacy organization America First Legal, which was co-founded by the longtime Trump aide Stephen Miller. The group claimed that ABC’s stations “demonstrated a lack of the character qualifications necessary to hold broadcast licenses”.
Various right-wing groups, including the Media Research Center (MRC) and Article III Project (A3P), have petitioned the FCC to deny license renewals from the 8 ABC owned-and-operated stations for partisan political reasons, and the reasons for the petitions: content on The View and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “support” for the CCP, and engages in “explicit racial and gender discrimination”.
See Also:
Streamline: Conservative Groups Petition FCC to Revoke ABC Broadcast Licenses Over Bias Allegations
President Joe Biden rescinded U.S. District Judge Raúl Arias-Marxuach's nomination for a federal appeals court late Thursday, scrapping a Hispanic nominee initially put forward by former president Donald Trump.
Trump nominated Arias-Marxuach, a federal trial judge in Puerto Rico, for a vacancy that opened on the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 26. Senate Republicans were unable to get him to the floor before Trump left office but hoped Biden would renominate him as a courtesy in light of his qualifications.
The ill-fated nomination provoked comparisons to another rising Hispanic judicial star, Miguel Estrada, who was tapped for the Washington, D.C., federal appeals court during the George W. Bush administration. Democrats killed the nomination for fear that Estrada, widely seen as a Supreme Court contender, would become the first Hispanic on the nation's highest judicial tribunal. The episode remains a cri du coeur in Republican judicial circles.
"President Joe Biden just yanked the nomination of a Hispanic federal judge with stellar qualifications," Article III Project president Mike Davis told the Washington Free Beacon. "Democrats claim they want more diversity on the federal bench, yet they have largely voted against women and minority judicial nominees put forward by Republican presidents going back to Clarence Thomas."
Two recent clips from high-profile MAGA media podcasters suggest that a new effort by President Donald Trump to ramp up denaturalizations is driven largely by anti-Muslim bigotry.
According to The New York Times, the Trump administration is setting a goal of bringing 100-200 denaturalization cases per month in fiscal year 2026, up from just over 120 cases in total brought between 2017 and the present.
In segments on War Room, hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Human Events Daily, hosted by Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, guests with close ties to the White House made it clear that they would want Trump’s denaturalization ramp-up to target Muslims specifically.
On December 15, Posobiec interviewed the Article III Project’s Will Chamberlain about immigration in general. Article III is headed by Mike Davis, a close ally of Trump’s who presents himself as the administration’s outside enforcer.
“Islam is not compatible with Western civilization, and mass Muslim migration is not compatible with Western societies, and it’s time to say this experiment has run its course and it needs to stop,” Chamberlain said.
Chamberlain added that “we're not going to, you know, denaturalize unless we have legal reason to do so” but that “we want there to be net-negative Muslim migration to the United States.”
Chamberlain’s legalistic caveat aside, achieving “net-negative Muslim migration” would likely require finding a “legal reason” to bring many more denaturalization cases. Chamberlain, for example, called for journalist Mehdi Hasan to be denaturalized and deported in response to Hasan posting “Abolish ICE” on social media.
Days earlier, Bannon interviewed Wade Miller of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-affiliated think tank. CRA was founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist currently reprising his role as the head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
“I'm not saying that there's no such thing as a nice and decent Muslim — those exist in our country,” Miller said. “But nowhere in the world do those people manifest themselves in majorities. And there's a reason for that, and at the center of it is radical Islam.”
The Trump Regime’s push for denaturalization is fueled by pure Islamophobia.
Mike Davis, an adviser to Donald Trump who is said to be in the running to serve as his U.S. attorney general, has issued a violent threat a
Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:
Mike Davis, an adviser to Donald Trump who is said to be in the running to serve as his U.S. attorney general, has issued a violent threat against New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In an appearance on conservative pundit Benny Johnson’s podcast, Davis said, “Let me just say this to big Tish James: I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump in his second term.”
He added, “Listen here, sweetheart: We’re not messing around this time, and we will put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy against rights, and I promise you that.”
James is best known for successfully filing a civil lawsuit against Trump for financial fraud. Trump lost the case and received a judgment of $355 million after it was determined that he lied for years about his financial status to secure loans.
On Tuesday, James was reelected to her position and in a press conference yesterday she said her office was “prepared to fight back” against any abuse of the law from the incoming Trump administration.
Davis is the founder of the Article III Project, an advocacy group that wants to make the judiciary more conservative, or rather “a hell of a lot more conservative,” Davis told Politico. He also has a history of incendiary, threatening remarks. Speaking last month about legal proceedings that have occurred involving Trump, Davis said “retribution is a key component of justice.”
MAGA fascist c-sucker Mike Davis threatened New York AG Letitia James (D) with prison time for her prosecutions of Criminal-Elect Donald Trump.
See Also:
HuffPost: Trump AG Prospect Warns Letitia James: 'We Will Put Your Fat Ass In Prison'
Right-wing media figures are escalating a long-running campaign to give the president vast powers to denaturalize and deport naturalized citizens, a generally rare occurrence that would represent a significant new front in President Donald Trump’s campaign to restrict immigration and limit citizenship in the United States.
On March 19, Article III Project founder and MAGA media influencer Mike Davis told Axios: “What's going to be on the horizon are denaturalization cases.”
“You're going to have Hamas supporters who have been naturalized within the last 10 years, and they are eligible to lose their status as citizens and get deported,” he added. “It's worth it."
The article reported that Trump’s campaign to restrict immigration through the Supreme Court is being “spearheaded” by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
Naturalized U.S. citizens are people born outside of the United States who have gone through a lengthy process to secure the rights and privileges of somebody born in the country. Since the end of the Cold War it has been unusual for the U.S. to denaturalize citizens, with only about 11 instances per year between 1990 and 2017, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
In recent years, conservative pundits and think tanks have sought to drastically increase those numbers. MAGA media figures have targeted pro-Palestinian organizers, a high-profile journalist, and, in at least one instance, a sitting member of Congress in their campaigns to denaturalize citizens, which are frequently directed at people who are (or are perceived to be) Muslim. These threats are extreme, even by right-wing media standards — and where MAGA punditry often falls light on specifics, white papers from conservative think tanks look to offer a veneer of policy respectability to the calls for ramping up denaturalization.
[...]
MAGA media goes all in on denaturalization
The Article III Project’s Mike Davis is perhaps the loudest voice in MAGA media pushing for Trump to ramp up denaturalization efforts, which he frequently directs at pro-Palestinian activists. The calls for denaturalization are part of a larger right-wing media campaign to smear pro-Palestinian protests, Palestinians being considered for refugee relocation, and Palestinian activists like Mahmoud Khalil — a green card holder arrested and detained by ICE.
[...]
Denaturalization as a tool for political oppression
The premise underlying the right’s anti-immigration arguments — sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit — is that certain categories of people don’t have fundamental civil rights and their entire life is contingent on the whims of an increasingly fascistic federal government. These efforts are about reproducing a social hierarchy where some individuals are protected less than others in the eyes of the law based on their religion, national origins, or political beliefs.
Now, as right-wing media and their allies in the Trump administration wage an all-out campaign against immigrants — both inside the United States and at border crossings, directed at those with and without legal authorization to live in the country — their attacks targeting naturalized citizens are poised to open the latest front in that war.
The right-wing media’s war on naturalized US citizens has ramped up as part of Donald Trump’s xenophobic immigration restrictionism campaign, as it seeks the denaturalization and deportation of those who support or attend pro-Palestine protests under the wafer thin guise of “supporting Hamas”.
See Also:
The Guardian: ‘A warning for students of color’: Ice agents are targeting certain protesters, say experts
Mike Davis could be Trump’s attorney general, and he says he wants to put journalists in gulags and kids in cages. He also says he’s trollin
Adam Wren at Politico Magazine:
Mike Davis was steamed.
The frenetic Republican lawyer and former Senate aide — currently Trump’s most fanatical defender on X and conservative media — had been in the middle of one of his near-daily appearances on the “War Room” with Steve Bannon when a protester materialized over his shoulder and began screaming into his ear.
From his makeshift TV-hit setup outside the Supreme Court, Davis tried to continue to explain to Bannon and his audience the legal intricacies going on inside the building behind him. There, nine justices were hearing oral arguments over whether Trump was immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“They must have let people out of the mental health asylum for today’s Supreme Court hearing,” Davis said, grinning, but only for the camera. “We have our friend here — it looks like an MSNBC correspondent behind me.”
Bannon chimed in from the cozy confines of his studio with a warning for the protester.
“Mike Davis is gonna punch your lights out,” he said.
Davis is, at least according to Donald Trump Jr. and Bannon, a possible attorney general in a second Trump administration. But today, he was feeling powerless. After the “War Room” hit was over, Davis bolted off his set and zipped toward the Supreme Court Police nearby to complain about the protester. “You do not have a First Amendment right to scream in someone’s ear,” Davis argued to an officer. “I used to work in this building — I know what the fucking law is.”
The officer took off his sunglasses. Recognition passed over Davis’ face. He knew this guy. “I remember you,” the officer told Davis. They both agreed he needed to talk to Patricia, the Supreme Court press wrangler. Davis knew exactly who she was; he called her and asked for access to the press corral.
Patricia, who also remembered Davis, granted him special access inside, marking the first time Bannon’s show had a credentialed Supreme Court correspondent.
That day outside the Supreme Court, Davis showed the full, often at-odds, range of his roles in Trump world. He is the former president’s troll-in-chief, a frequent talking head in MAGA-aligned media known for his provocative, no-holds-barred defense of the president and crusade against Trump’s perceived enemies, especially in his legal battles. He rages against the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. He has promised to “rain hell” on Washington from a Trump administration perch come January 2025 and to eviscerate institutions that he says treat Trump unfairly. He calls Democrats “Marxists” and “evil” and has joked — in ways that many others don’t always take jokingly — that he would send journalists and former GOP personalities including George Conway and Tim Miller to “the gulag” and would put migrant kids in “cages.” “My goal,” he once told me, “is for the Supreme Court to dismantle most of the federal government.”
Davis, 46, also happens to have a deep familiarity with and understanding of those same institutions, which often works to his and Trump’s benefit.
He did once work at the Supreme Court, as a clerk in 2017. He was also the chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley during the Trump administration and, as an outside adviser, led confirmation battles for two of those justices hearing oral arguments inside the building that spring day: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
“Mike Davis was a standard-stock Republican, Federalist Society lawyer, right? Standard stuff. Played by the rules. Helped get guys confirmed, could play tough, but painted inside the lines,” Bannon told me.
Now, though? “He’s a full fucking MAGA warrior.”
Davis, a stocky, redheaded lapsed Irish Catholic who calls himself Trump’s “viceroy,” is not officially affiliated with the Trump campaign. But he is undoubtedly close to Trump. In addition to being openly discussed as a candidate for attorney general, or acting attorney general, there is the more likely possibility of a position as White House counsel, chief of staff at the Department of Justice or as an outside adviser to Trump to select a candidate for any of those roles.
[...]
Even less clear than what role Davis will fill in a potential Trump administration, though, is what he’d actually do in that role — and how much of what he proposes is, as he says, just “trolling.” In this way, Davis encapsulates a defining feature of conservatives in the Trump era: the dissolving barrier between reality and trolling, between serious political ideas and winking provocation. He seems to relish keeping people guessing about who he really is, what he really wants and what he will really help Trump accomplish.
I’ve had hours of conversations with Davis dating back to December from time I spent with him in Washington, Milwaukee and Manhattan. Davis is more cooperative with mainstream journalists than his rhetoric and his appearances on “War Room” would lead one to believe, but he was also unusually open with me, perhaps because I’m a national reporter who still lives in flyover country. In those conversations, along with those with nearly two dozen people who have intersected with his life, it became clear to me that even Davis isn’t always sure about when he’s being serious.
That guessing only begins with the question of where Trump will put him if he wins in November — and whether the idea of Attorney General Mike Davis is the biggest troll of all.
[...]
In the beginning, Davis wasn’t with Trump on every issue. Not on trade. Not on immigration. “I used to be much more globalist on trade and on immigration,” he said. He was, he said, “very Chamber of Cuck.” But he says he saw NAFTA destroy Midwestern manufacturing and send jobs to Mexico. He saw the middle class he grew up in hollow out. “The uni-party does not care about real Americans — Flyover Country, working class Americans in Iowa and Indiana and Ohio,” he told me. “That’s a problem.” He voted for Trump in 2016.
In 2017, Davis reunited with Gorsuch, who would take him to the Supreme Court as his law clerk, a role he served in for four months — a stub term through the final months of the court’s 2016-2017 run. Then, from July 2017 to January 2019, he worked for Grassley as chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.
There, Davis was at the center of what is arguably Trump’s most significant conservative victory: remaking the judiciary. Davis oversaw the floor votes for 278 federal judges and senior executive branch appointees, including Amy Coney Barrett to the Seventh Circuit. In 2019, Davis left the Senate and launched the Article III project, which he described to The New York Times as a “brass knuckles” advocacy group to remake the judiciary into a tougher, more conservative version of itself — “a hell of a lot more conservative,” he told me. Article III, which has a staff of eight and a slew of volunteers, also operates as a legal think tank committed to defending Trump in the courtroom and media. The organization, which runs entirely on donations, has no offices; Davis works mostly out of Colorado and makes periodic trips to Washington, where he also has a house.
It was when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 that Davis says he began to think the forces of the DOJ and what he calls the Democratic “regime” were fully aligned against Trump. He was suddenly everywhere, on X and Fox News and Bannon’s War Room, framing the Democratic case against Trump as “lawfare” — a phrase he popularized among MAGA supporters. Since then, he estimates, he has racked up more than 4,000 hits defending Trump since August of 2022, meaning he has done an average of more than five a day — though it’s often been more like 10. “It was pretty lonely around Trump world after the Mar-a-Lago raid. Trump’s going to remember who ran to him and who ran from him,” he told me.
As much as conservative media and Trump allies thrill to his most outrageous statements, it’s his establishment cred that gives the conservative intelligentsia ammunition to fight Trump’s convictions.
[...]
Last September, Davis made headlines for an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s show in which he outlined a dystopian agenda for what he would do during a “three-week reign of terror” as Trump’s “acting attorney general before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon.” His list included firing “deep state” employees, indicting Joe Biden, deporting millions of immigrants and putting “kids in cages,” detaining people in the “D.C. gulag” and pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, “especially my hero, horn man.”
“It’s going to be glorious,” he said.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Davis becomes Trump’s Senate-confirmed attorney general. Even Davis himself thinks it is far-fetched: “It would require 100 Republican senators to get me confirmed,” he once told me. Still, those close to the former president, including Bannon and Trump Jr., have mentioned his name to me as a possible acting attorney general and White House counsel or high-level DOJ appointee. “That’s Attorney General Mike Davis,” Bannon first responded when I asked him if he could talk about Davis for this piece earlier this year, not long before he reported to a prison for blowing off a House subpoena.
Democrats appear concerned about the possibility — or, at least, have deemed it a fruitful possibility to raise money off of. The Biden campaign in April posted the clip of Davis on Johnson’s show to social media. “Trump’s potential Attorney General pick Mike Davis: Trump’s going to make me Attorney General and it will be a reign of terror.”
[...]
Inside the 9th floor bar at The Trade Hotel, the unofficial watering hole of the Trump family during the Republican National Convention, victory was in the air. The Trump entourage, including Donald Trump Jr., his fiance Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric Trump and Eric’s wife Lara, held court on one side of the bar, while I stood off to the other side.
An hour earlier, I had been with Davis on the convention floor as Trump gave his speech. Davis had marveled to me about what then seemed like the former president’s amazing week, not only surviving the assassination attempt and coming to the convention like a kind of caesar, but also a judge’s dismissal of his classified documents case.
“Trump dodged the real bullet,” he said of the dismissal as Trump’s speech to delegates wore on.
Now, Davis entered the bar, where he was greeted by Republican revelers like a caesar himself. He told one to see him about a judgeship in January 2025. (Davis later told me he was joking.) He bragged to another that he had helped Trump get “six votes” on the Supreme Court.
“The viceroy is fucking coming,” Davis said to David Bossie, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager. “[Democrats] don’t know what’s coming in January 2025.”
Davis made his way over to Trump Jr. I trailed, hoping for a quote, but stood a few feet away to give them some space.
A tall, thick man standing beside Trump Jr. began eyeing me and my yellow media lanyard. I retreated to the other side of the bar. A woman with the man who later identified herself as doing work for Guilfoyle came over to me and two other reporters and chastised us for gawking. (Caroline Wren, speaking for Guilfoyle, later denied this woman did work for Guilfoyle.)
A few minutes later, close to closing time, Trump Jr. and his entourage started to leave. They passed behind me and Davis, who had come back over to talk to me, but not before Trump Jr. could give him a message.
“I want you to be my father’s attorney general for all four years,” he told Davis, grinning. Davis said he would give Trump three weeks as his viceroy. “All four years,” Trump Jr. said.
As I pecked notes on my phone, the woman who had told us to stop staring scolded me for chronicling the exchange and began recording me. She demanded that I delete the notes or give her my phone. When I tried to leave, she recruited four men to block the elevators. They stared menacingly at me and demanded I turn over my phone or delete my notes.
I was trapped. I wouldn’t delete my notes, and I was getting nervous. I called Davis, who had disappeared. He asked me where I was, and I told him.
I explained to the woman I had to catch a flight to go home to my family in the next few hours.
“You should have thought about your kids before you did what you did,” she replied.
After roughly 15 minutes of this standoff, I searched for another exit. I ran down a hallway into a stairwell. Two people followed me.
When I was out on the street, Davis called me. By this point, Davis had confronted the aide near the elevators and dressed her down.
You don’t ask a reporter to delete their notes, he told her, according to both Davis and a second person he recounted his remarks to briefly after. This isn’t North Korea.
Davis had sworn to me he was not really serious about retaliating against journalists and throwing them in “gulags.” Now, he seemed rattled that others in Trump world might not be in on the joke.
He told me he had never seen anything like that in his career. “Fucking shocking,” he said.
Over the next few days, Davis checked in on me at least a couple of times a day, asking me if I was “OK.” He spoke with my editor. He called an adviser for Trump Jr., who then called me to express displeasure and say that the person responsible was not affiliated with Trump Jr. or the Trump campaign.
Politico Magazine’s Adam Wren has a detailed scoop on MAGA fascist Mike Davis, who is in line for a plum spot in a potential 2nd Trump Administration.
See Also:
MMFA: Politico journalist Adam Wren describes how he was threatened while reporting on Trump ally Mike Davis
MMFA: Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously
The Impact of Judicial Appointments on American Democracy
In July, the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution regarding their official actions. However, this does not imply that such actions are invariably lawful or constitutional. In the months and years to come, many of the most radical proposals that Donald Trump has put forth — including deploying military forces to deport immigrants, politicizing the Justice Department…
