Republicans Are Desperate to Move on From Trump’s Favorite Topic

MAGA allies are trying to move on from their cataclysmic reaction to losing the 2020 presidential election—but that doesn’t mean that their leader is trying to do the same.

In an interview Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer brushed off concerns about the Republican reaction to the last election, claiming that no one but Collins was still focused on the election conspiracy.

“In 2020, you did sign onto that brief supporting a Texas lawsuit that would have invalidated the election results in four states,” Collins said. “But you ultimately chose to certify the election, you broke with some of your Republican colleagues, and you chose to certify.

“You said in a statement that ‘Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors certified by a state’s legislature in accordance with their Constitution,’” Collins continued. “And you yourself said, ‘Doing so sets a precedent that I believe undermines the state-based system of elections that defines our Republic.’ Do you still feel that way tonight?”

“Again, Kaitlan, we’re talking about an election that’s going to take place in 35 days,” Emmer responded. “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago? We can have this debate at some other time going forward, but the people are hurting.”

But Collins had a point.

“Donald Trump is still talking about it,” the CNN anchor threw back.

Trump was posting about the election he lost as recently as Wednesday night, writing on Truth Social that he “didn’t rig the 2020 Election, they did!”

Some of Trump’s closest allies have refused to admit that the former president lost the 2020 election, dodging direct questions about whether they plan to reenact the same political violence after November’s election results roll in.

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Ohio Senator JD Vance refused to concede that the Republican presidential nominee lost the last election before doubling down during a heated exchange with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, turning to face Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded, twisting his argument into a weird tie-in about Vice President Kamala Harris and Facebook’s content moderation policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That is a very damning nonanswer,” Walz said.

In a Virginia Senate debate Wednesday night, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine’s Trump-endorsed opponent Hung Cao took the stage with some unhinged remarks about drag queens, alpha males, and DEI.

Cao, a Navy veteran, was asked about his previous statements about what he sees as the “growing obsession” with diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military—and somehow answered with a cannibalistic rant.

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” said Cao. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”

It’s unclear what Cao meant in the cannibalistic part of the rant, beyond scorning drag queens and anyone he doesn’t see as “alpha.”When NBC News reached the Republican’s office for comment, he doubled down about his debate remarks: “I just said what everyone believes as fact.”

In the debate, he also parroted Trump’s lines about immigration and the so-called migrant crisis. Cao, whose family came to the U.S. from Vietnam, did not push back against the moderator’s question about deporting all undocumented immigrants. Instead, he made a call for assimilation. “Don’t ask for the American dream if you’re not willing to obey American laws and embrace the American culture.” On his campaign website, the candidate promises to “repel this invasion.”

According to the RealClearPolitics poll average, Kaine leads Cao by 10 points in the state.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page unsealed motion included revelations about Donald Trump in his January 6 election interference case and a plea for the judge overseeing it to carefully consider the boundaries of what constitutes an “official act” under the new, expanded definition of presidential immunity.

But it also included a jab at the nation’s highest court, using Trump’s private phone calls to underscore that the Supreme Court had extended its aid to a former president who had no appreciation for its labor.

In a section of the document outlining the similarities between Trump’s private rhetoric and that included in his January 6 Ellipse speech, Smith’s office highlighted how Trump, even then, was attacking the nation’s highest court for “not stepping up to the plate” in his legal woes.

“I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They are not stepping up to the plate. They’re not stepping up,” Trump said in a private conversation.

Then, at the Ellipse, he shared a near-verbatim gripe: “I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They love to rule against me.”

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when it ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law” and that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

It’s official: Donald Trump’s plan for massive deportations would apply to legal immigrants, as well as undocumented immigrants.

During an exclusive interview with NewsNation, Trump said he planned to strip the legal status of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been granted Temporary Protected Status.

“Springfield is such a beautiful place; have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. They have to be removed,” Trump said.

“So you would revoke the Temporary Protected Status?” asked the interviewer.

“Absolutely, I’d revoke it and I’d bring them back to their country,” Trump said.

During his first administration, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.

Now Trump plans to forcibly uproot this group of roughly 18,000 people who pay taxes, own homes, have jobs, and support their families. But that’s only the beginning: Up to 2.7 million people could lose protection from deportation if Trump allows immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, DACA, and humanitarian parole to lapse during a second term, according to Forbes.

It’s not surprising that Trump has gotten to this place. The former president has falsely claimed that Springfield suffered a “hostile takeover” by undocumented immigrants and that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield had begun eating their neighbors’ pets.

Last month, after practically admitting that he’d created the story about cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance also said that he doesn’t care about the legal status of immigrants.

“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said, during a campaign event in North Carolina. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

During the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Vance echoed this rhetoric when he was fact-checked about the Haitian immigrants’ legal status. He ranted that Harris could grant citizenship “at the wave of a Kamala-Harris-open-border wand.”

Both Trump’s and Vance’s statements demonstrate that under a second Trump administration, no legal immigrant will be safe in the United States because the president could always decide that there are too many of them, create some story, and then kick them out.

While Donald Trump and his allies pushed lies about widespread voter fraud following the 2020 election, his former Vice President Mike Pence apparently urged him to admit defeat.

Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Jack Smith’s 165-page motion pertaining to Trump’s January 6 trial Wednesday, which revealed details about the co-conspirators and specific allegations connected to the former president’s 2020 election subversion scheme. The details allege that Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the outcome or what anyone said to the contrary, including his own running mate.

Trump allegedly told his campaign advisers that he planned to take advantage of Democratic voters’ preference for mail-in ballots, which take longer to tabulate, and “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”

He then allegedly planted the seeds for such a plan by publicly undermining the results of the election before it had even taken place, claiming that all mail-in voting was inherently fraudulent.

In early November, Trump allegedly received an “honest assessment” stating that he “could not mount successful legal challenges to the election.” Trump was told by a White House aide who “served as a conduit of information from the campaign” that there was no way Rudy Giuliani would be successful in challenging the election results. Trump responded, “We’ll see.”

In a meeting with Trump and Giuliani, that staffer told them both that they would be unable to prove Giuliani’s “speculative” allegations of voter fraud in a courtroom. When the staffer privately repeated this concern to Trump later, Trump responded, “The details don’t matter.”

The filing detailed many conversations between Trump and Pence as running mates, “in which they discussed their shared electoral interests. This is distinct from conversations had between the two where they are acting in their official capacity as President and Vice President, which would be inadmissible as evidence, per the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States.”

As early as November 4, Trump allegedly asked Pence to “study up” on claims of voter fraud in the states that they had won in 2016. Pence said that Trump was already stating that the campaign was “going to fight.”

In the postelection period, Pence told Trump that “he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the election,” according to the filing, and repeatedly urged Trump to accept the results.

As media organizations began on November 7 to project that Joe Biden had won the election, Pence “tried to encourage” Trump to accept defeat, “as a friend.” Pence reminded him that he’d taken “a dying political party and given it a new lease on life.”

A few days later, on November 12, Pence said that Trump received a “sober and somewhat pessimistic report” on the status of his election challenges, and Pence urged Trump to give up. “Don’t concede, but recognize that the process is over,” Pence said, according to the filing.

In a conversation on December 21, Pence again “encouraged” Trump to “not look at the election ‘as a loss—just an intermission.’” Later in the day, Trump asked Pence what he thought they should do, and Pence replied, “After we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, Trump should ‘take a bow.’”