A MAGA congressman from Arizona is comparing GOP poll watchers being trained by the Trump campaign to SEAL Team 6 snipers, insisting that these “boots on the ground” must be prepared to counter a “desperate” opposition that will “do whatever it takes to hold on to power.”
The congressman, Eli Crane, represents a large swath of northern Arizona. He is a Navy veteran who was deployed with the SEALs, and later created a business selling bottle openers fashioned out of giant 50-caliber rifle shells, a company that was featured on Shark Tank.
A first term congressman, Crane is a member of the extreme-right Freedom Caucus, and was one of eight GOP members who precipitated the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House. He refers to Matt Gaetz as a “brother” and recently received Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total endorsement!”
Crane is also a conspiracy theorist. He is an avid election denier who has long refused to accept that Trump lost the 2020 election, claiming “massive amounts of fraud.” Crane has recently received national media attention for his baseless insinuation that the Trump assassination attempt may have been a plot orchestrated by “people in our government.” (Crane’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.)
Crane appeared on a July 28 video call organized by the Trump campaign to train volunteer “poll watchers”; video of the event was obtained exclusively by Rolling Stone. The Trump campaign is attempting to mobilize 100,000 MAGA volunteers to monitor polling locations around the country, supposedly to document irregularities.
Poll watching can be a routine part of a fair election. But it also has a dark history of crossing into voter intimidation. In Mesa, Arizona, in 2022, for example, masked vigilante poll watchers staked out ballot drop boxes, wearing tactical gear and toting guns. Marc Elias, a top Democratic elections lawyer, has warned that the Trump campaign is seeking to create a “massive voter suppression operation.”
The call was part of a “National Day of Election Integrity Virtual Training” organized by the Republican National Committee and attended by Trump campaign Arizona officials as well as dozens of MAGA activists. Crane touted the call as part of taking back “our country from the Radical Left!”
Far from attempting to lower the temperature of the political debate, Crane used incendiary language from the jump, warning the audience that “our opposition” would do “whatever it takes to hold on to power.” Crane pointed conspiratorially to the recent “assassination attempt on our president” as a sign of “just how desperate the opposition is becoming.”
The congressman spoke to the poll watcher trainees as if they were military recruits, calling them the new “boots on the ground.” Crane insisted the Trump campaign’s election integrity effort “reminds me so much of my old job when I was in Special Forces, in the SEAL teams,” citing the teamwork required.
“We had snipers. We had breachers,” Crane, said while also highlighting the behind-the-scenes support of communications technicians and surveillance drone pilots. “If everybody else didn’t do their job, you wouldn’t get to the proper target,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to hit it.”
Crane recalled that the stakes of such teamwork — “many different people with so many different skill sets, all contributing toward the same mission” — were life and death, and that failure meant “you wouldn’t be able to come home to your family.” Crane then declared, bizarrely, of the work of monitoring polling sites in November: “This is the same thing.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”