Sheriff Has Pathetic Defense for Using Trump Lies to Threaten People

An Ohio sheriff who threatened local supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris is doubling down on his dangerous rhetoric, insisting that people need to “accept responsibility” for their political leanings.

Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski took to Facebook on Tuesday to elaborate on his controversial remarks that spurred the sudden, protesting resignation of a county commissioner from the local Republican committee.

“As the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of Portage County, I have sworn to protect ALL citizens of my County. Recently, I placed a post on my personal facebook page that may have been a little misinterpreted??” Zuchowski wrote on his official page.

“I … as the elected sheriff, do have a First Amendment right as do all citizens. If the citizens of Portage County want to elect an individual who has supported open borders (which I’ve personally visited Twice!) and neglected to enforce the laws of our Country … then that is their prerogative,” Zuchowski continued. “With elections, there are consequences. That being said … I believe that those who vote for individuals with liberal policies have to accept responsibility for their actions! I am a Law Man … Not a Politician!”

The warning came days after Zuchowski willingly threw himself into electoral politics in their yards in a Facebook post that referred to the vice president as a “Flip-Flopping, Laughing Hyena.” He suggested Friday that his constituents send him the personal addresses of locals with Harris’s campaign signs in their yards.

“I say … write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards!” Zuchowski wrote on Friday. “Sooo … when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live … We’ll already have the addresses of their New families … who supported their arrival!”

The post was seemingly made in reference to a virulent conspiracy theory spread by top Republicans, including Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, about Haitian immigrants eating other residents’ pets in Springfield, Ohio—roughly 200 miles away from Zuchowski’s district.

Since Vance and Trump began elevating the myth last week, Springfield has received at least 33 bomb threats, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

Multiple city officials, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and even Vance himself have stated in no uncertain terms that the conspiracy is false.

The Trump campaign would rather sow more chaos in Springfield, Ohio, over the Haitian immigrant conspiracy than make it right.

The MAGA leadership is reportedly “not displeased” that its virulently racist pet-eating conspiracy has drawn widespread condemnation, according to The Bulwark. Instead, the campaign would seemingly rather keep the topic in the news, believing Trump could win big on immigration in November as opposed to thornier issues that Republicans have routinely lost over in recent elections, such as abortion.

“We talk about abortion, we lose. We talk about immigration, we win,” one Trump adviser told The Bulwark.

Multiple city officials and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine have categorically denied the conspiracy, and local authorities have said there were no reports or evidence of pets being stolen or eaten. On Sunday, Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance effectively admitted himself that the anti-immigration conspiracy was bogus.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

But having no evidence and, frankly, not believing the lie themselves doesn’t seem to matter to the Trump-Vance ticket.

“We’ll take the hit to prove the bigger point,” the adviser told The Bulwark.

Springfield, the epicenter of the conspiracy, is practically on its own with regard to the fallout of becoming a national punch line. Since Vance and Trump began elevating the myth last week, Springfield has received at least 33 bomb threats, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

Trump, meanwhile, will likely not be paying a visit to the location of his pet conspiracy, according to a source familiar with his travel who spoke with Columbia Journalism Review.

At a Tuesday night campaign rally in Michigan, Donald Trump briefly strayed from a point about international affairs to make an absurd remark about climate change.

Claiming that nuclear proliferation is the true “global warming” (even as the former president has faced criticism for accelerating the nuclear arms race), Trump said, “When I hear these people talking about global warming, that’s the global warming you have to worry about, not that the ocean’s going to rise in 400 years an eighth of an inch.”

Trump then went on to speak rosily about rising sea levels: “You’ll have more seafront property, right, if that happens. I said, is that good or bad? I said, isn’t that a good thing? If I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property—I have a little bit more ocean.”

According to a CNN fact-check of similar claims Trump has made in the past, his estimate is a severe lowball: “Sea level rise is already more than an eighth of an inch annually—and it is accelerating.” But perhaps more baffling is the idea that climate change will create more opportunities for real estate.

Shared on social media by the Kamala Harris campaign and other accounts, Trump’s comments immediately generated ridicule.

Users on X, for example, have pointed out that the Michiganders Trump was addressing would probably not “have more seafront property,” barring an impossible catastrophe in which oceans rose hundreds of feet. (In reality, climate change reportedly threatens the region in other ways, including rising lake levels.)

Reporter Tom McKay posted, “Won’t there actually be less ‘seafront’ property because the land area necessarily contracts when sea levels rise.” Jim Swift of The Bulwark shared a meme noting that rising sea levels could threaten Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Others criticized Trump’s comments for trivializing the grave threat climate change poses to human life. The youth climate group Climate Defiance, for example, cited the World Economic Forum’s estimate that 410 million people “could be displaced or harmed by sea level rise this century.”

Senator Bernie Sanders is attempting to block over $20 billion in arms sales to Israel through a series of resolutions.

The Associated Press reports that Sanders wrote a letter to his fellow senators Wednesday saying that “we must end complicity in Israel’s illegal and indiscriminate bombing campaign, which has caused mass civilian death.”

Sanders plans to introduce the resolutions next week under Senate rules that would quickly force a vote on stopping the weapons sales. The Vermont senator is using a joint resolution of disapproval of the sales, a means of congressional oversight of foreign issues.

Sanders said he has support for the proposal, which would halt the sale of missile systems, tank rounds, new fighter jets, and other weapons responsible for the destruction in Gaza. Israel’s war in the territory has killed more than 41,000 people, including nearly 16,500 children, and injured over 95,000, according to Al Jazeera, very likely an undercount.

“We cannot ignore what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza,” Sanders wrote, adding that “much of this carnage in Gaza has been carried out with U.S.-provided military equipment.”

“We cannot be complicit in this humanitarian disaster, we must act.”

It’s not the first effort from Sanders to halt weapons sales to Israel. In January, the Vermont senator sought to require the State Department to document human rights abuses committed by Israel after October 7, 2023. The Senate rejected that effort at the time 72–11. Similarly, this effort is a long shot and is likely to encounter significant opposition, not just in the Senate but in the Republican-controlled House.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions are considered war crimes by many experts, and the International Criminal Court is also seeking arrest warrants against him and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The response from the United States has been almost unequivocal support for Israel’s actions, and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hasn’t offered any new solutions to end the war, instead refusing to engage on the issue.

J.D. Vance attempted to fill in the gaps of Donald Trump’s health care “concepts of a plan” over the weekend, but buried behind his pledge to protect those with preexisting conditions came the promise of policies that would actually jeopardize their access to care. And Trump is doing nothing to deny that this would be the case.

During an appearance Sunday on Meet the Press, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Vance if he could assemble the breadcrumbs Trump has offered into an actual policy plan. Vance responded by pointing out that during Trump’s first term, he chose to build on the Affordable Care Act rather than destroy it.

The Ohio senator explained that this time around, Trump’s elusive health care plan was “actually quite straightforward” and said that the former president would “want to make sure that preexisting coverage conditions are covered.” Vance also said Trump would “want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them.” He criticized a “one-size-fits-all approach” that sorted people “into the same risk pools.”

However, the kind of deregulation Vance refers to is exactly the kind that would make it practically impossible for those with preexisting conditions to get affordable health care, according to Semafor.

When asked for clarification on this position, Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes declined to say whether Trump agreed with moving people with preexisting conditions into different “risk pools.”

“Senator Vance and President Trump share the underlying principles of using more choice in the marketplace and efficiency as tools for better, more affordable health care,” Hughes told Semafor.

In 2017, the GOP-led House passed the American Health Care Act, which included the proposal for a waiver that would do just what Vance had described: allow “insurers to set premiums on the basis of an individual’s health status,” including preexisting conditions. The opposite of a “one-size-fits-all” solution, right?

There’s only one problem: The Congressional House Budget Office issued a report analyzing the bill and predicting that the waiver would result in those with preexisting conditions inevitably being priced out of their insurance.

The report estimated that as a result of those waivers, “community-rated premiums would rise over time, and people who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.

“As a result, the nongroup markets in those states would become unstable for people with higher-than-average expected health care costs,” the report said. “That instability would cause some people who would have been insured in the nongroup market under current law to be uninsured.”

With the waiver, healthier people could opt for non-group insurance plans, which would remain inexpensive, while less healthy people were pushed toward pricey community-rated options. The report estimated that the price of community-rated options would rise until “those premiums would be so high in some areas that the plans would have no enrollment.”

The Senate rejected that waiver, and Trump was ultimately unable to make any substantial changes to the ACA. However, Vance has made clear that Trump would be willing to make the same mistakes all over again should he make it to the White House a second time.

It’s not yet clear what exactly the former president’s plan is. When asked, Trump said he didn’t know because he’s “not president right now.” But his refusal to flat-out reject the concept of separate risk pools should be a huge red flag.