Donald Trump boasted about MAGA supporters taking over Georgia’s State Election Board, part of his team’s efforts to corrupt future elections.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way … They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said Saturday night at a rally in Atlanta.
The former president went on to name the three MAGA Republicans currently on the five-person board — Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King — calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
According to the State Election Board’s website, their charge is not fighting for “victory” for Trump. The board is “entrusted with a variety of responsibilities and authority to protect all Georgians’ right to cast a ballot.”
At the rally, Trump also pushed his big lie of election fraud, claiming, “I won this state twice, in my opinion.”
As Rolling Stone previously reported, Team Trump is behind efforts to undermine voter integrity in Georgia, and Trump privately pushed state lawmakers to remove a Republican from the State Election Board who was not MAGA enough. The official resigned and was replaced with King.
Trump’s allies have also worked in the state to purge voter rolls and put into place policies that make it easier to challenge election results. A source close to Trump told Rolling Stone that “Georgia is our laboratory.”
“If you can get this up and running in Georgia,” the source continued, “you get a road map for other states, maybe the country as a whole.”
Trump on Saturday applauded a rule requiring hand counting to validate the number of vote totals calculated by machines has not been finalized. It is currently up for public comment.
“[The State Election Board] just passed a rule for Georgia elections requiring that three people at each precinct independently count the total number of ballots before certification,” Trump said Saturday. “Who could be against that?”
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the only appointed Democrat on the State Election Board, opposed the rule. “The reason that this was not put into place is because when it was tested in 2019, it failed … Other counties tried and failed,” she said. “And I don’t want to be setting up our counties for failure.”
Trump also bashed Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, as “a bad guy, a disloyal guy, and a very average governor — Gov. Little Brian.” Kemp, along with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, refused Trump’s demand that they “find 11,780 votes” for him after he lost the state in 2020. In other words, they blocked Trump’s demands to illegally overturn the free and fair election — something the former president has clearly not forgiven them for.
“Your Gov. Kemp and Raffensperger are doing everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win,” Trump whined.
Trump also called Kemp “very bad for the Republican Party” because “he wouldn’t do anything” to establish a special legislative session to “go over” the 2020 election results. “We want to go over the election. We want to look because there’s too many things,” Trump said, blaming Kemp for refusing to sign Trump-backed legislation that would examine the 2020 votes.
“The governor wouldn’t sign it, and I knew he would because I got him elected,” Trump said. “I sent a young guy over to his office. … The kid came back. He said, ‘Sir, he won’t sign it.’ … Then I said, ‘Go back over. Tell him it’s for me.’ It’s a good thing, not a bad thing. They want to look into possible election fraud.”
Kemp did not sign the legislation, so Trump and his allies have plotted in the state to set up an end run around Kemp and Raffensperger for 2024.
Regardless of the electoral outcome in Georgia, Trump allies are prepping to claim voter fraud, Rolling Stone has reported. And Trump’s work in the state could provide him an advantage, especially if its election results are particularly close. The most recent Georgia polls show Trump and Harris even or just one to two points apart.
Trump isn’t only focusing his efforts on Georgia. Almost 70 pro-Trump election officials are in place in important battleground counties across the country, according to Rolling Stone and American Doom.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias told Rolling Stone and American Doom. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
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.”