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.”
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.