A Trump voter in Millersburg, Pennsylvania has a drastic change of mind about him.
Jonathan Allen (NBC senior national politics reporter): If you could say something to President Trump, he was going to hear you right now, what would it be?
Amanda Robbins (Pennsylvania resident): You are a worthless pile of shit.
Jonathan Allen: And you voted for him how many times?
Amanda Robbins: THREE times. That was my bad. Apparently I'm an idiot.
Source: NBC Meet the Press NOW...
Allen did speak with several other Trump voters who gave Fox News type of responses. But it doesn't take much erosion of the MAGA base for Trump's support to fall below a critical level.
Trump's popular vote margin over Kamala Harris in 2024 was under 1%. Republicans have a small majority in the Senate and a minuscule one in the House.
If just 5% of Trump voters cross over or just stay home on Election Day this November then Republicans are in HYŪGE trouble. Democrats are already far more fired up and enthusiastic about voting than Republicans. A blue wave is nice, but a blue tsunami would be better.
As of Friday, there are just 228 Days until Election Day. Try to do something every day to boost Democratic turnout. Even doing stuff like referring to "Trump gas prices" or "Trump's Iran war" when around low information voters can help.
BTW: Millersburg, Pennsylvania is in PA-10 which is a swing district. The incumbent US Representative is Republican Scott Perry. Perry won PA-10 in 2024 by a margin of just 1.26%. Replacing Trump supporters like Perry with Democrats in Congress is the only way to curb Trump during his last two years in office.
Private videos reveal Trump adviser Russ Vought’s “shadow” plans for using the military on protesters, defunding the EPA and villainizing ci
Molly Redden and Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey at Documented:
A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.
In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.
He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”
ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of the two speeches Vought delivered during events for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought. The think tank’s employees or fellows include Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department lawyer who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result; Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Mark Paoletta, a former senior budget official in the Trump administration. Other Trump allies such as former White House adviser Steve Bannon and U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Scott Perry either spoke at the conferences or appeared on promotional materials for the events.
Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements. As OMB director, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers. But he has never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs. He has spoken in broad terms about undercutting independent agencies but never spelled out sweeping plans to defund the EPA and other federal agencies.
Vought’s plans track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters or what Trump has called the “enemy within.” Trump’s desire to use the military on U.S. soil recently prompted his longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, to speak out, saying Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
Other policies mentioned by Vought dovetail with Trump’s plans, such as embracing a wartime footing on the southern border and rolling back transgender rights. Agenda 47, the campaign’s policy blueprint, calls for revoking President Joe Biden’s order expanding gender-affirming care for transgender people; Vought uses even more extreme language, decrying the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and referring to gender-affirming care as “chemical castration.”
[...]
As ProPublica and Documented reported, Project 2025 has launched a massive program to recruit, vet and train thousands of people to “be ready on day one” to serve in a future conservative administration. (Trump has repeatedly criticized Project 2025, and his top aides have said the effort has no connection to the official campaign despite the dozens of former Trump aides and advisers who contributed to Project 2025.)
Vought is widely expected to take a high-level government role if Trump wins a second term. His name has even been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff. The videos obtained by ProPublica and Documented offer an unfiltered look at Vought’s worldview, his plans for a Trump administration and his fusing of MAGA ideology and Christian nationalism.
[...]
A Shadow Government in Waiting
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
Vought’s preparations for a future Trump administration involve building a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel, he told the gathered supporters in May 2023. That office, part of the Justice Department, advises the president on the scope of their powers. Vought made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term.
[...]
“We Want the Bureaucrats to Be Traumatically Affected”
Vought also revealed the extent of the Center for Renewing America’s role in whipping up right-wing panic ahead of the 2022 midterms over an increase in asylum-seekers crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In February 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich released a legal opinion claiming the state was under “invasion” by violent cartels and could invoke war powers to deploy National Guard troops to its southern border. The legally dubious “invasion” theory became a potent Republican talking point.
Vought said in the 2023 speech that he and Cuccinelli, the former top Homeland Security official for Trump, personally lobbied Brnovich on the effort. “We said, ‘Look, you can write your own opinion, but here’s a draft opinion of what this should look like,’” Vought said.
The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight later obtained an email in which Vought pitched the “invasion” framework to Brnovich.
Brnovich wrote in an email to ProPublica that he recalled multiple discussions with Cuccinelli about border security. But he added that “the invasion opinion was the result of a formal request from a member of the Arizona legislature. And I can assure you it was drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”
In the event Trump loses, Vought called for Republican leaders of states such as Florida and Texas to “create red-state sanctuaries” by “kicking out all the feds as much as they possibly can.”
[...]
Vought referred to the people detained for alleged crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political prisoners” and defended the lawyers Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, who have both faced criminal charges for their role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Federal law enforcement agencies, he added, “are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that.”
The left, Vought continued, has the ultimate goal of ending representative democracy altogether. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said, “in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”
When Democrats called Trump an “existential threat to democracy,” they were not merely calling for his defeat at the ballot box, he said, but were using “coded language the national security state uses overseas when they are overthrowing other governments” to discourage the military from putting down anti-Trump protests should he win.
“They’re making Trump out to be a would-be dictator or an authoritarian,” he said. “So they’re actively working now to ensure, on a number of levels, that the military will perceive this as dictatorial and therefore not respond to any orders to quell any violence.”
ProPublica reports that Project 2025 co-author and MAGA apparatchik Russ Vought has plans to put civil servants “in trauma” as part of his fascistic agenda if it is implemented.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson appointed these two election-denying, uber-Trumpists to the House Intelligence Committee this week. Not a good development. I see it as a tiny foretaste of how critical jobs throughout the government will be filled with people whose greatest qualification will be their absolute, unhesitant sycophancy vis a vis Mango Mussolini, should he be reelected.
In addition to referring four criminal charges against Donald Trump to the Dept. of Justice, the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack Monday afternoon is also calling for House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and three others to appear in public to answer questions about what they knew and what role they …
From the December 19, 2022 article:
“The committee’s report also calls for the four members, as well as House Republicans who attended a Dec. 21 meeting at the White House on schemes to overturn the 2020 election, to testify publicly,” Axios adds. “They ‘should be questioned in a public forum about their advance knowledge of and role in President Trump’s plan to prevent the peaceful transition of power,’ it says.”
The other 3 are Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, and Andy Biggs.
By Sarah N. Lynch and Raphael Satter WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A prominent Republican whose phone was seized as part of the Justice Department'
A prominent Republican whose phone was seized as part of the Justice Department's probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election said on Sunday he may seek to participate on a new House of Representatives panel that will investigate those same federal investigators.
Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania is an ally of former President Donald Trump who helped spread Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. The FBI seized his phone in August, apparently as part of a probe into efforts to overturn the election.
But Perry told ABC News' "This Week" show on Sunday that he does not believe it would be a conflict of interest for him to participate in a congressional investigation of the FBI.
"I get accused of all kinds of things every single day, as does every member that serves in the public eye," he said. "But that doesn’t stop you from doing your job. It is our duty. And it is my duty."
Congressman Jim Jordan and other Republicans who now have a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives have said they intend to establish a special select committee that will probe the so-called "weaponization" of the federal government.
The creation of the committee is one of the many concessions that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to as part of a deal to end a week-long stalemate over his candidacy by a group of hard-liner lawmakers, including Perry, who leads the Freedom Caucus.
The Justice Department, which has two ongoing investigations into Trump's actions in the 2020 election and his retention of highly classified documents after departing the White House in 2021, will be a target of the new House committee's probe.
Both of the department's investigations involving Trump are being overseen by Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor and political independent, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November.
Trump has accused the FBI, without evidence, of launching the probes as political retribution again him.
One of the two probes involves Perry, who is likely a person of interest because he introduced Trump to former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark.
Clark sought to get himself installed as acting attorney general so he could launch an investigation into election fraud.
Trump ultimately decided against appointing Clark as acting attorney general. Clark's phone was also seized by federal agents last summer.
Perry's lawyer has previously said his client is not a target of the Justice Department investigation.
The Democratic-led House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol has said Perry and some other fellow Republicans later sought a pardon from the White House for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, though Perry has denied doing so.
