Trump Claims SPLC Lawsuit Is a Sign He Actually Won the 2020 Election

Donald Trump appears to believe that his administration’s targeting of an anti-extremism civil rights organization can be leveraged to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD,” Trump wrote on Truth Social very early Friday.

“This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others,” he continued, referring to the Democratic campaign fundraising platform. “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”

It is unclear how this lawsuit could have any retroactive impact on an election that Trump unequivocally lost.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gleefully announced the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday, claiming that the famed anti-racism group was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

The Montgomery-based SPLC was founded in 1971 in order to combat white supremacist groups after the Civil Rights Movement. Its activity was never a secret to the government—in fact, the SPLC frequently coordinated with local and federal law enforcement, sharing its findings in order to dismantle hateful institutions.

Yet in the decades since its founding, the nonprofit’s purview has been nationally perceived (at least on the right) as less and less acceptable. Conservative politicians and personalities have railed against the advocacy group, claiming that its work—which includes tracking extremist groups, promoting tolerance, and kneecapping bigotry through litigation—is inherently partisan and overly leftist.

Tuesday’s indictment includes 11 counts against the anti-extremism group related to its undercover activities. They include six counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to conceal money laundering, and charges related to allegedly falsified bank statements. (Observers have already noted that the charges appear, on their face, difficult to prove in court.)

In a statement released earlier this week, SPLC CEO Bryan Fair noted that while the SPLC had used informants to monitor the threat of violence inside extremist organizations, the information the public gleaned as a result was invaluable.

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

President Donald Trump claimed that former President Barack Obama blocked a merger with a defunct airline that hasn’t existed since the 1980s.

Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office Thursday, Trump appeared confused when he was asked whether the government planned to buy a stake in Spirit Airlines, the struggling discount carrier that has twice filed for bankruptcy.

“So, Spirit is, uh, an airline that’s had some trouble. They were going to merge with People Express, or one of them, a number of years ago and Barack Hussein Obama decided it was a bad idea,” Trump said. “How did that work out? It was bad for both of them. That would’ve been a natural merger.”

It would have been a distinctly unnatural merger, as People Express shuttered in 1987. Spirit Airlines as we know it didn’t formally exist until five years later.

It’s likely that Trump was referring to the Spirit’s attempted merger with JetBlue, which was successfully challenged in 2024 under Joe Biden’s administration over concerns that it would eliminate Spirit’s low-cost service, dull competition, and drive up prices.

The Trump administration reportedly neared a $500 million deal with Spirit Airlines Wednesday that would leave the federal government with a 90 percent stake in the company.

“We’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out or buying it. I think we just buy it. We’d be getting it virtually debt-free. They have some good aircraft, some good assets, and when the price of oil goes down, we’ll sell it for a profit,” Trump said.

“I’d love to be able to save those jobs, I’d love to be able to save an airline,” he added.

This decision further underscores Trump’s willingness to spend taxpayer dollars without congressional approval. And the president’s mistaking Jet Blue for People Express and Obama for Biden is just another instance of Trump’s apparent cognitive decline.

Lead Democrats on the House Oversight and Administration Committees are urging the U.S. Postal Service to refuse President Donald Trump’s executive order to illegally limit mail-in voting.

In a letter Friday to the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors, shared exclusively with The New Republic, Ranking Members Robert Garcia and Joe Morelle argued the agency should refuse to implement an executive order instructing the USPS to refuse to deliver ballots of anyone who is not on a federal voting list.

The lawmakers argue in the letter that Trump has no authority over the USPS, which is an independent agency only accountable to its own board of governors.

The USPS is specifically barred from making “any undue or unreasonable discrimination among users of the mails,” the letter noted, and Trump’s executive order would have the agency illegally perform election administration duties.

Trump’s order, signed in late March, directed that states could notify USPS whether they plan to allow mail-in or absentee ballots up to 90 days before a federal election, and “should” notify the agency whether they intend to supply a list of eligible voters within 60 days of the election.

The order also directed USPS to produce a set of mail-in and absentee participation lists for each state, and refuse to deliver ballots for anyone who is not on them. However, there is no law that requires states to provide this information to the USPS, or authorizes USPS to require states to provide that data.

The timeline presented by the EO could potentially leave millions of Americans disenfranchised. “All 50 states and the District of Columbia allow voters to register to vote and apply to vote by mail until and up to 60 days before an election, with some states setting vote by mail application deadlines much later than 60 days,” the letter said.

“In addition, it is not clear how the Postal Service would reconcile differences or verify the accuracy of state-supplied voter lists alongside a DHS State Citizenship List. This EO will quickly create a two-tiered voting system where some Americans’ right to vote would be denied,” the letter said.

The Democratic lawmakers requested to know whether the board of governors planned to implement Trump’s order, and which specific provisions it would attempt to satisfy. They also requested a staff-level briefing be held to explain how the agency plans to respond, and address the concerns outlined in the letter.

Officials from at least two dozen states have already sued the Trump administration to oppose this executive order, which threatens states’ constitutional right to oversee their own elections. The letter points to Trump’s threats to “nationalize” or “take over” federal elections, as well as his baseless claims of voter fraud.

Republicans are also still attempting to pass the SAVE America Act, which would prohibit universal mail-in voting, although Senate Majority Leader John Thune has indicated the measure is not his top priority. Under that legislation, voters would have to submit an application to receive a mail-in ballot.

President Trump went on a long, angry social media tirade Thursday night while the entire country was asleep, once again raising doubts about his mental fitness and temperament.

Just after midnight, Trump reposted a message from the Border Patrol union calling on “extreme leftist advocate” Senator Chuck Schumer to resign over his recent comments in which he said “nobody respects” ICE or Border Patrol. Just one minute after that, Trump delusionally reposted a random allegation that former President Obama staged a “seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the U.S. government in 2016. He then made four more posts about how Obama and Hillary Clinton should be charged with treason. This was all before 1:00 a.m.

After his Obama derangement syndrome subsided, he argued that the entire 2020 election—which he lost—should be “permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!” if the Southern Poverty Law Center loses the DOJ lawsuit against them. (The case is unrelated to the 2020 election.) Then that was followed by a post attributed to actor Clint Eastwood talking about how great Trump is. Eastwood never said that.

Rather than posting about midterms, the affordability crisis, the war on Iran, or just not at all, the president of the United States is crashing out in the middle of the night, attempting to attack political opponents on no real grounds and relitigating an election that every sensible person knows he lost.

The Department of Defense is brainstorming ways to punish NATO members that didn’t support President Donald Trump’s war with Iran.

Reuters, citing an unnamed U.S. government official, reports that the federal government is considering suspending Spain from the transatlantic alliance and reevaluating the United Kingdom’s claim to the Falkland Islands. The official told the news agency that these options were laid out in an internal Pentagon email.

The Trump administration is upset at NATO countries that have refused to grant the U.S. access to their bases or rights to their airspace for the Iran war. The email, circulating at the highest levels of the DOD, reportedly said that those rights are “just the absolute baseline for NATO.”

If the U.S. wants to suspend member countries like Spain, it will likely run into pushback from other NATO members. One NATO official told Reuters that “NATO’s Founding Treaty does not foresee any provision for suspension of NATO membership.”

When asked about the email, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, replied, “As President Trump has said, ​despite everything that the United States has done for our NATO allies, they were not there for us.

“The War Department will ensure that the President has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part. We have no further comment on any internal deliberations to that effect,” Wilson said.

Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO, even prior to the Iran war, repeatedly threatening to leave the alliance over petty grievances such as countries rebuffing his desire to “take” Greenland. In recent weeks, he has complained that NATO members won’t help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On April 1, he again told Reuters that he was “absolutely, without question” considering leaving the organization.

But that would likely require approval from Congress, and Trump would have to go around it and invoke presidential authority over foreign policy, which would face legal challenges. And taking punitive action against our own allies would result in backlash domestically and abroad. But Trump does not respect long-standing alliances, and if he feels slighted, blowing them up is a strong possibility.