Trump Lays Groundwork for Election Chaos in Key Swing State

Donald Trump is already laying the groundwork for his claims of election fraud by elevating outlandish right-wing claims about Pennsylvania.

“An interview by Tucker Carlson of an election expert indicates that 20% of the Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent. Here we go again!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.

“Where is the U.S. Attorney General and FBI to INVESTIGATE? Where is the Pennsylvania Republican Party? We will WIN Pennsylvania by a lot, unless the Dems are allowed to CHEAT. THE RNC MUST ACTIVATE, NOW!!!”

In his post, Trump was seemingly referring to an April interview Carlson had done with Justin Haskins, the “Director of Socialism Research” at the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank linked to the Koch brothers and perhaps best known for cooking up virulent climate change denialism.

Earlier this year, the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports, the right-leaning polling group that regularly churns out the most favorable numbers for Trump, reported that one-fifth of those who cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 had committed some form of voter fraud, according to a survey of 1,085 “likely U.S. voters.”

Months later, Trump continues to boost this outlandish claim—but this time with a twist, aiming his ire at Pennsylvania, the most populous swing state and a crucial battleground for his presidential campaign. A CBS News poll released Sunday found that the former president was neck and neck with Kamala Harris among registered voters in Pennsylvania.

By claiming that the ballots “are” fraudulent, Trump is already setting to work fomenting claims of voter fraud in an election that has yet to take place.

Rasmussen’s poll results seemed less than credible, according to The Washington Post. While the survey found that “17% of mail-in voters admit that in 2020 they voted in a state where they are ‘no longer a permanent resident,’” about six in 10 Americans have never moved out of the state where they were born. That would mean that nearly half of the other voters had supposedly committed fraud.

The results also indicated that Republicans supposedly committed these federal crimes at an equal rate to Democrats, so the results don’t even serve Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

At the time this report was first released, Trump totally lost it. “THIS IS THE BIGGEST STORY OF THE YEAR,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “AND REPUBLICANS MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.”

He urged his party to “MAKE A MOVE NOW. GET TOUGH, GET SMART. OUR COUNTRY IS BEING STOLEN!”

Representative Lauren Boebert struggled to back up her extreme allegations about a Venezuelan gang’s alleged takeover of an apartment building in her home state of Colorado.

Last week, right-wing media and former President Donald Trump elevated claims that Tren de Aguas, a Venezuelan gang, had taken over The Edge, a residential building in Aurora, Colorado. After following up on the rumors, the Aurora Police Department determined that a gang had not taken over the complex.

At a press conference, Edge residents hit back at the right-wing claims and said that they were living in uninhabitable conditions as a result of neglect from CBZ Management, which was also responsible for another Aurora building where there was a mass eviction last month, according to Denver7.

Boebert held a community roundtable last week with Texas Representative Chip Roy to discuss the presence of gangs in Aurora, Colorado. While Boebert does not represent any of the residents of Aurora, the far-right anti-immigrant Republican took a special interest in the suddenly high-profile issue.

During the roundtable, Boebert discussed a recent report from Denver law firm Perkins Coie, which alleged that Tren de Aguas had a “stranglehold” on another apartment complex operated by CBZ Management, called Whispering Pines, five miles away from The Edge. According to CBS, the report was first sent to top Aurora administrators in early August.

The report, which had been made on behalf of a lender, alleged that gang members at Whispering Pines had committed several crimes including “flagrant trespass violations, assaults and battery, human trafficking and sexual abuse of minors, unlawful firearms possession, extortion, and other criminal activities, often targeting vulnerable Venezuelan and other immigrant populations.”

Boebert, Roy, and several other Republican lawmakers then sent a letter Friday to several U.S. officials, including Colorado Governor Jared Polis, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and FBI Director Christopher Wray, insisting that they had “confirmed” the report’s many claims.

However, as Kyle Clark of Next9 News pointed out, claims of sexual abuse of minors were seemingly new and unconnected to any recent arrests in the area. Clark explained that the report relied on a “third-hand anonymous claim” to make that allegation.

When asked how she had possibly confirmed the sexual abuse of minors by gang members in Aurora, Boebert couldn’t provide a coherent answer.

“This is a nonpartisan uh, law firm that has come out with this. This is information that is, is vetted. It is nonpartisan. And it is our most evident form of allegations that have been presented with ‘Tren de Aragua’ here in Aurora, Colorado,” Boebert said.

Boebert then claimed that being asked about this at all was tantamount to a media cover-up.

Trump campaign advisers aren’t distancing themselves from Tenet Media, the conservative media operation accused of taking millions of dollars from Russia to spread foreign propaganda. Instead, they’ve decided to defend it.

Trump campaign senior adviser Alina Habba attempted Sunday to brush off the Justice Department indictment, linking the scandal back to the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” in 2016.

“It’s so obvious,” Habba told Fox News Sunday morning. “The story is now that there’s a criminal investigation about a $10 million investigation into two individuals who had no idea they were being backed by a company that eventually, allegedly, had ties to Russia.”

“So in 2016 what happened? There was the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. The media peddled a story that we now know was funded by members of the DNC, their lawyers, Hillary Clinton was involved in all of this—we know that because she had to pay a fine for doing so,” Habba continued, referring to the DNC and the Clinton campaign’s failure to report the costs of the Trump-Russia dossier research to the Federal Election Commission in 2016.

Habba then went on to elevate the Durham report, an objective bust that failed to find any evidence that the FBI engaged in misconduct while investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, while damning the Mueller report—which left the possibility of Trump-Russia obstruction on the table—as a waste of “so much taxpayer dollars.”

“A $10 million payment to some podcasters who had no idea from some ties allegedly to Russia is now going to make a spin on Russia backing Trump,” Habba added.

The DOJ indictment accused Tenet and its founders of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

Other entities, even ones on the right, are not so quick to remain aligned with the allegedly compromised media personalities. The fallout from the alleged propaganda scheme lost Tenet’s co-founder Lauren Chen her broadcasting gig with another far-right media group, Blaze Media. Blaze wiped episodes of her podcast from Spotify and deleted her contributor page from its website shortly after the indictment was announced, with Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon telling Semafor that the conservative anchor had been “terminated.”

YouTube also wiped Tenet Media’s content from its platform “after careful review” following the indictment, telling NBC News that its decision to erase the channel and its affiliates was part of “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

The Russian funds paid for videos by popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. Pool described himself as a “victim” in the Tenet scandal.

“I have been contacted by the FBI as a potential victim of a crime,” Pool posted on X on Thursday. “The FBI believes I have information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and have requested a voluntary interview. I will be offering my assistance in this matter.”

In a new interview, Donald Trump claims Mark Zuckerberg promised him there’s no way he’ll vote for a Democrat this November.

In a New York magazine interview published on Monday, Trump said that after the assassination attempt against him, Zuckerberg gave him a call to say that he wouldn’t vote against him.

“‘I’ve never supported a Republican before, but there’s no way I can vote for a Democrat in this election,’” Trump recalled the Meta CEO saying. “He’s a guy that, his parents, everybody was always Democrat. He said, ‘I will never vote for the people running against you after watching what you did.’”

Zuckerberg did tell Bloomberg in July, “Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” But Trump’s new story follows a long-standing feud between the two men. Just last month, Trump re-upped his threat to send Zuckerberg to prison for life if he “does anything illegal” or “cheats” in the 2024 election.

And Trump’s latest claim about Zuckerberg hasn’t been confirmed by anyone but Trump himself. In response to the news, a spokesperson at Meta said, “As Mark has said publicly, he’s not endorsing anybody in this race and has not communicated to anybody how he intends to vote.”

In the same New York magazine interview, Trump also claimed he got kind words from another tech magnate that fateful week: He claims Jeff Bezos gave him a ring as well.

“You know, I got so many nice calls from people I really don’t know. Jeff Bezos called. He said, ‘It is the most incredible thing I’ve ever watched.’ And he appreciated what I did, in the sense of getting up and letting people know,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Despite the fact that you own The Washington Post, I appreciate it.’” Amazon did not respond to New York magazine’s request for comment.

Obviously, Trump could be making all of this up—or it could be the case that more and more tech CEOs really are turning rightward.

Shortly after Kamala Harris released her policy agenda on Sunday evening, users on X spotted something in the metadata: Much of the language appears to have been lifted from Joe Biden’s campaign website.

On Sunday night, X user Corinne Green pointed out that the issues section of Harris’s website contained metadata with language urging voters to reelect Joe Biden. This language was visible when links to the campaign site were shared, and in the website’s description on Google searches.

Sometime late on Sunday night or early Monday morning, the website’s metadata appears to have been changed, with the language asking for Biden to be reelected having been removed.

All of this creates the impression that at least some of the Harris campaign’s policy language was copied and pasted from Biden’s documents. That would be an embarrassing miscue from the Harris campaign, which partly came into being because of a perception that a refresh was needed to garner enthusiasm in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t help that the section on her website about her Israel-Palestine policy seems very similar to what Biden’s campaign was saying. 

Harris’s policy platform should be giving the public a view of the detailed plans her administration hopes to implement if she and Tim Walz win in November. The last thing her campaign needs is an embarrassing misstep, and while this one is relatively small, she’ll need to reassure voters on the fence that her campaign isn’t a retread of Biden’s with a new face.