As we move closer to mid-term elections, the Trump administration continues to lie about election integrity, sowing the seeds for bullshit “rigged election” claims should the GOP fail to win the elections Trump wants them to win.
There’s another reason this administration lies constantly about elections, voters, and anything related to it: Trump still thinks he won the 2020 election and won’t take facts for an answer. That’s why there have been so many efforts to re-litigate the 2020 election results by Trump and his party members. And this is something that continues despite this supposedly rigged system somehow managing to deliver an election win for Trump in 2024.
It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone believes Trump or his enablers. All that matters is that Trump believes it. And if he does then a whole lot of his voting base will be willing to do anything from raid the Capitol building in DC to ask ICE to engage in voter suppression this November.
Trump is leveraging the bigotry he’s stoked with his anti-migrant efforts and the billions his budget bill has added to the DHS’s bottom line to make the case (without any facts in evidence) that there are hundreds of thousands of non-citizens voting in every election.
So far, the administration has yet to demonstrate that the number of non-citizen voters is enough to be concerned about at all, much less evidence of a deliberately broken system the libs are using to keep the GOP out of office.
When facts aren’t conducive to the preferred narrative, the narrative takes the lead. That’s how things started in Nevada, when the DHS claimed thousands of illegal voters recently participated in elections. Here’s the current DHS boss making outlandish claims on X, which is where this government does most of its social media business:
Of that 250,000 total, Mullin and the DHS claimed more than 190,000 were detected in California. Nevada’s total came in as nearly 16,000 illegal voters, according to the DHS. Things have drastically changed in the last month, as NPR reports, based on public records it has obtained, including a recent video conference involving both DHS and Nevada state officials.
DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was “the ceiling” and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens.
Holy shit. That’s a false positive rate that puts Flock to shame. That means the DHS is about 99% wrong when it comes to “illegal” voters.
But even after admitting it could possibly only pinpoint 185 of the alleged 16,000 non-citizen voters, the DHS continues to pretend it will somehow get a lot closer to 16k than it is to zero at this point.
Nevada asked for more information on that smaller group of 185 voters, and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide that. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that “need additional review,” and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were “higher confidence” matches but had yet to be reviewed.
Read that through carefully. Not only is the DHS continuing to pretend it still needs to re-review 14,000 voters and claiming it may have located another 6,000 voters of dubious citizenship, it won’t even provide Nevada with information pertaining to the 185 voters it insists have actually voted illegally.
And there’s a good chance the DHS will never turn over any information to any of the states it has accused of permitting thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of non-citizens to vote. Doing so would mean undoing Trump’s narrative, so the DHS will maintain the upper hand by regularly “citing” its made-up number (250,000+ “illegal” voters) while stiff-arming, sand-bagging, and stonewalling any requests for data that might support these obvious lies.
What makes this even stupider, more corrupt, and more dangerous is that even if the DHS is right (it fucking isn’t) that there are 16,000 non-citizens casting votes in Nevada (and — in addition — only casting votes for Democrats), it still wouldn’t make up the difference in Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in that state. He lost that state by more than 35,000 votes in 2020, which means he still would have lost, even if every non-citizen had voted for Joe Biden.
What makes it even stupider is that Nevada flipped in 2024, giving Trump a win by 46,000 votes. Even if we assume — using the same bad faith arguments as Trump uses — that every “illegal” vote was cast against Trump, he still would have won by 30,000 votes.
This bitter husk of man still wants the entire nation to join him in his psychosis and firmly believe, with their entire American hearts, that the 2020 election was rigged, but the two elections he won were fair and square.
What follows from here will just be voter suppression in whatever form this administration thinks it can get away with. By pretending nearly 250,000 illegal voters are on the nation’s rolls, Trump can start prepping ICE deployments to “blue” states — something that’s going to be a lot easier to do since they’ve already been flooded with federal officers and National Guard units.
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Twenty-five years ago today I was woken up by a phone call from a close friend, who, like me, grew up in New York and, like me, was now living in California. She told me that something horrible had happened in New York and to turn on the TV. She said something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center, and I assumed it was a small Cessna or something that went horribly off-course. It was only once I turned on the TV news (and started searching the internet) that I began to comprehend what was happening.
I’m guessing there aren’t many Techdirt readers from back then still reading today, but after a few hours of staring blankly at the TV — scared by what had happened and already uneasy about what the world would do in response — I put up a post saying that I had nothing else to say and wouldn’t be posting (other than to link to some resources). The next day, I was already expressing concern about how the world would respond, and calling out the people rushing to play the blame game. I pointed to a quote from a New Yorker saying “we aren’t in a state of war, we’re in a state of mourning.” But it wasn’t difficult to see where things were heading. Late that night I warned (in a poorly written, rambling post) about how people blindly reacting via ignorance was going to lead to bad outcomes, and how mass surveillance of the internet was likely coming.
A few days later, I pointed to a satirical piece on a now defunct website, entitled: “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics,” which can be found here in the Internet Archive. It does a great job of showing how basically everyone saw the attack as a chance to push forward their own existing political views:
Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.
Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.
That satirical take turned out to have been pretty prescient, right? The politics that won out almost immediately was the pure politics of fear from power-hungry politicians, many of whom squeezed 9/11 for every political desire they had already wished for regarding surveillance, control, and expanded governmental powers. They had plans ready to go in a drawer, and pointed to 9/11 as the reason they had to be enacted. And quick. And much of that is still with us, leading to a much greater cynicism and distrust in government.
That alone helped the grievance politics of MAGA succeed — though, as I’ll get to below, the Mamdani administration in NYC is demonstrating something that’s been sorely lacking for years: a politics that doesn’t need you to be afraid of anything and is built on real love for the place and its inhabitants.
Still, it was obvious from the day it happened that the attacks were going to set in motion a bunch of horrible ideas from the political class. The always thoughtful Radley Balko has a piece in the NY Times looking back at the past 25 years, and noting that almost every prediction made by those warning about how the political reaction would erode our civil liberties turned out to be true.
Civil libertariansquestioned these new powers’ connection to the 2001 attacks. Some provisions had long beenon the wish listsof federal law enforcement agencies, and it was not clear that the new powers would have prevented the attacks. They also cautioned that if history was any indication, the government would use the new powers primarilyfor routine law enforcement. They urged Americans to imagine those powers in the hands not of an altruistic and conscientious president, but one with little respect for norms, institutions or democratic principles.
The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, “lone wolves” — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush andObamaadministrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters. With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens.
And, as he notes, we’ve arrived at the worst-case scenario: a president handed every one of those powers by a frightened nation, abusing them at every opportunity. Many of us who warned about the PATRIOT Act and the surveillance apparatus it made possible were dismissed and ignored. When we pushed back on centralized monitor and control points of the internet, the “adults in charge” mocked us as “internet shut-ins.” But, as Balko points out, the internet shut-ins had a point. As he says, “welcome to the worst-case scenario” that lots of us were, in fact, worried about.
The piece is long and thorough, and we’re only scratching the surface here. But Balko draws a straight line from the entirely predictable overreaction of September 2001 to today: the media and the political class sold a narrative of fear, Congress handed over a sweeping set of powers without even the slightest concern for potential risks, and those powers have since curdled into one abuse after another.
If the ratcheting diminishmentof our libertiescame slowly and sometimes without much outcry under Presidents Bush,Obamaand Joe Biden, the consequences of all those years of expanded presidential power are plainly visible now. Mr. Trump is using every authority we have given the president since Sept. 11, 2001, and some we haven’t, in ways the civil libertarians had tried to warn us about at the start.
Mr.Trump has usedthe president’s post-9/11 “national emergency” loopholes more than any other president. He claimed the country faced an emergency caused by crime to justify sending National Guard troops to Washington, and he used a 1903 law concerning “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” to deploy them to Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles. (He also sent active-duty Marines to Los Angeles.) It was the first time since the civil rights era that a president had sent troops over the objections of a state governor. When Mr. Trump tried to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants to a notoriously inhumane prison in El Salvador, a federal judge asked for information about deportation flights and Mr. Trumpinvoked the State Secrets Privilege.
Mr. Trump has tried to categorize leftist activists, as well as advocacy and funding groups, as terrorism supporters in an effort to use antiterror tools to shut them down, despite no evidence that those groups have any ties to terrorism. The administration has called Americans protesting against the deployment of militarized ICE officers “domestic terrorists.” It has claimed that activities protected by the First Amendment, including criticizing, naming and recording ICE officers, are acts of terrorism.
Mr. Trump and his team are taking full advantage of the immunity granted by the courts. The administration’s summary executions of suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean have been denounced by legal scholars as illegal under both domestic and international law, and as likely crimes against humanity. The strikes have not only continued; the administration celebrates them. Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, according to multiple reports, has openly encouraged immigration officers to use more violence and force more confrontation with protesters while regularlyreminding them of their “immunity,”evenafter the killing of Renee Goodin Minneapolis. After Ms. Good’s death the “border czar,” Tom Homan, went on Fox News to warn that “there’s still gonna be more bloodshed” unless ICE critics “shut their mouth,” a threat that’s likely a First Amendment violation in and of itself.
These are the abuses of post-9/11 powers we know about; there are almost certainly more that we don’t. The expanded surveillance authorities have such restrictive rules for disclosure that only a handful of people will know if they are being deployed against Americans. Mr. Trump’s handpicked prosecutors are going after the kinds of leaks that helped reveal abuses in prior administrations, which means more disclosure today is even less likely. And under Mr. Trump, the intelligence agencies have at times abandoned the post-Watergate practice of telling Congress what secret powers they are using.
The whole thing is worth reading, and it’s a good reminder of why we’ve spent so much of the last two and a half decades calling out these issues, and warning about further government control and intrusion into platforms and attacks on our privacy. It’s why we were concerned about draconian command-and-control copyright laws fifteen years ago just as much as we’re concerned about age verification laws today.
They’re all tools for control and surveillance, built to shrink what the public can do and expand what the government can get away with. And every single one of them was sold to the American public based on fear.
But there’s an important thing to understand about a ratchet built entirely out of fear: it only turns as long as people stay afraid. Which brings me back around to New York City. This past week there has been an entirely ridiculous and fabricated culture war-driven dispute regarding whether or not NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani should attend NYC’s commemorations of 9/11. There is no fathomable reason for him not to attend other than rank ignorance and bigotry against him for being Muslim.
For all the fuss and fear — much of it driven by a former NYC mayor who spent many years (including while mayor) leading by spreading fear across the city — the whole spectacle is the post-9/11 playbook running one more time, just scaled down: declare an out-group, never quite say that they did wrong, and insist that “they” are inherently opposed to “us.”
But also, Mamdani is running a fundamentally different kind of politics than the one 9/11 left us with. He has quite high approval ratings, in part because he is governing from a position of love for New York City and all its residents and visitors, rather than one of fear. This is what we saw during his campaign, when he did things like run a massive, fun, and educational scavenger hunt across NYC. But campaigning like that is one thing; carrying it into an actual administration is quite another — and somehow he’s done it.
Over and over again Mamdani has focused on what’s amazing about NYC and the ways he can and is improving it on a daily basis, from the little things to the big things. After years and years of expecting politicians to try to scare you into supporting them with “only I can protect you” rhetoric, it’s astounding to be reminded of what politics of love and community can actually be like. Sometimes it looks like this:
Parents, what would you do with four hours of child-free time? We launched a Parents’ Night Out program with NYC Parks to give NYC parents a little time back for themselves, because we’re committed to making it easier to raise a family in the greatest city in the world.
People come to New York City from all over the world to experience Broadway. The kids who grow up here should be able to do the same.We’re partnering with TDF to give away over 2,000 free Broadway tickets to NYC High School students at on.nyc.gov/broadway. Break a leg, high schoolers!
You can argue Mamdani is a once-in-a-generation political talent, and that what works for him won’t work for everyone. Fine. But plenty of what he’s doing is entirely replicable, and the rest of the political class should be taking notes. He clearly loves New York City and the people there, and still believes in ways to make it better, not through fearmongering and hate, but through putting in the hard work of actually listening to people and helping them with real problems. It’s also a reminder of what good government can look like.
Twenty-five years ago this morning, I had two fears: what had just happened in NY and DC, and what the world was going to do about it. The second one was the one that stuck. Over the past twenty-five years, that fear has helped write dangerous laws, many of which are still on the books, and drive more and more division in our society. And where we’re at now is that a uniquely dangerous president has all those tools at his disposal, and is using them to anger and divide us further.
NYC’s mayor can’t repeal those laws. He can’t stop a president hell-bent on rancid politics of hate and fear. But that ratchet only ever turned because enough Americans were scared enough to let it, and because no one was offering them anything else as an alternative. This week, in the very city that was the primary target that morning, the guy running the city isn’t telling anyone to be afraid of anything. He’s showing up, doing the work, and reminding us of what’s good.
Twenty-five years is a long time to be told that’s naive.
May the next twenty-five years be more the politics of community building and hope, over the politics of fear and division.
It says nothing good about America how easily Elon Musk convinced the press and public he was a supergenius engineer who could cobble together complicated rocket machinery wearing coveralls in his backyard shed.
Hindsight continues to illustrate how Elon Musk’s real skill sets are opportunism, taking singular credit for the innovations of real engineers, the manipulation of a very broken media, and taking legal, regulatory, environmental, labor, and consumer protection “shortcuts” wherever possible.
Enter the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is investigating Musk’s automated-taxi Cybercab deployments in Austin for violating public safety guidelines.
The Trump NHTSA is updating existing Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) to help companies speed toward automated cars and taxis. But until then our previous (already fairly lax) standards still apply. This being America, companies self-certify whether they’re adhering to the rules in order to get a two-year exemption (Amazon’s Zoox got approval last month).
“Ann Carlson, a former acting NHTSA administrator who is now a professor of environmental law at UCLA, says the investigation is likely “an indication that NHTSA is super frustrated with Tesla.” The agency made clear through the Zoox case that it expects driverless vehicle developers to go through the exemption process. “For Tesla to slap them in the face and ignore that—that is gobsmacking,” she says.”
It’s not really all that gobsmacking for a company run by a man who has been extremely proud about his clumsy role in fatally dismantling U.S. federal government functionality — particularly when it pertains to corporate oversight and public safety. This is always who he was. He has a twelve-year old libertarian boy’s understanding of what government does and why it’s necessary.
Of course, this isn’t the first time NHTSA has promised accountability and then delivered the policy equivalent of a wet farting sound. The agency announced it opened an inquiry last year into Musk robotaxis clearly failing to adhere to traffic laws and making constant navigation mistakes.
