What did Donald Trump do today?

He got offered a particularly tempting bribe (and didn't turn it down).

Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator in the massive child sex trafficking operation they ran together. She was not a hands-off facilitator: rather, victims have testified that she groomed, seduced, threatened, and raped them personally.

Trump has shown extraordinary generosity towards Maxwell, who is currently serving a twenty-year federal prison sentence. He recently had her moved to a resort-style minimum-security facility where she can enjoy private visiting privileges (complete with complimentary snacks for her guests), unmonitored internet access, and sessions training puppies to work as therapy dogs. Under the Bureau of Prison's rules for any other convict, Maxwell—as a felon convicted of heinous sexual crimes against children—would never be permitted any of these perks, or to be transferred to a minimum security facility in the first place. But Trump, acting through his former defense attorney and current deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, made it happen after Maxwell gave a prison interview in which she declined to implicate Trump in criminal activity.

Trump—who has openly insulted literally thousands of Americans by name—is so considerate of Maxwell's feelings that he won't even publicly express any negative sentiments about her, not even after her convictions. Instead, he has only repeatedly said that he "wishes her well" and implied that the only real criminal was her "boyfriend" Epstein.

That much is old news. But today, there were two new developments. The first is that Maxwell escalated her campaign to get Trump to pardon her or commute her sentence, explicitly offering to testify to Trump's innocence if and only if he grants her clemency. 

Her lawyer made this statement today, after she invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a Congressional panel: "Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump."

She's chosen her moment strategically: Trump is desperate to get out from under the mounting scandal of his name appearing tens of thousands of times in the DOJ's investigative files. Worse for Trump, members of Congress are now getting access to the unredacted files, and some—including members of his own party—are threatening to expose Epstein and Maxwell's criminally implicated associates. 

This is the bind that Trump is in: even if he didn't personally rape or abuse children, he's admitted to his political allies that his "friends" are implicated, and that he's trying to protect their interests. But in doing so, he's made himself look incredibly suspicious. Maxwell's testimony clearing him of direct wrongdoing, however obvious bought-off, might help him in that regard. 

Under normal circumstances, any politician offered such an obviously corrupt bargain for a declaration of innocence about crimes they were actually innocent of would renounce it at full volume. Neither Trump nor any spokesperson has done anything today to even hint that they will be rejecting Maxwell's offer. In fact, he's always been very careful not to rule out the possibility that he might free her from prison.

The second new development comes from those files. It shows that in 2006, Trump was telling a very different story about Maxwell, calling her "evil" in a police report and saying that "everyone knew" what she and Epstein were up to. That makes the fact that his close association with both of them continued for years afterwards—and his sudden tenderness towards Maxwell—vastly more damning.

The result of that mid-2000s investigation, in which Trump played no significant part, was a scandalously lenient plea deal signed off on by then-District Attorney Alex Acosta. When Trump took office in 2017, he appointed Acosta his Secretary of Labor. 

 

Why does this matter?

• There is absolutely no reason to even consider this kind of naked corrupt bargain from a heinous criminal for an instant that doesn't involve Trump being guilty, complicit, blackmailed, or protecting people who are. 

• Nobody that Ghislaine Maxwell has anything to offer can be trusted with the power of the presidency.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He called for jailing journalists covering protests, spreading misinformation in the process.

This morning, demonstrators entered a church in St. Paul, Minnesota to protest the ongoing campaign of terror by ICE agents in the Twin Cities. For the most part, clergy have been leading anti-ICE protests—and getting shot, arrested, and gassed for their troubles—but this one was aimed at the pastor of Cities Church, David Easterwood, who is also an ICE agent.

The demonstrators had alerted media, and a number of reporters followed them in to cover the protest, including CNN's Don Lemon. Neither Lemon nor any other member of the press took part. The Trump administration responded today by calling for Lemon's prosecution as part of a "conspiracy" and said he was "on notice" for federal charges, including a violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act.

Lemon, who is Black, responded in a statement: 

It’s notable that I’ve been cast as the face of a protest I was covering as a journalist — especially since I wasn’t the only reporter there. That framing is telling. What’s even more telling is the barrage of violent threats, along with homophobic and racist slurs, directed at me online by MAGA supporters and amplified by parts of the right-wing press.

If this much time and energy is going to be spent manufacturing outrage, it would be far better used investigating the tragic death of Renee Nicole Good— the very issue that brought people into the streets in the first place. I stand by my reporting.

Conspiracy, which is one of the crimes Trump is still liable to be prosecuted for when he leaves office, involves making a plan to commit a crime and then taking an action in furtherance of that plan. It is not a crime to know that a nonviolent demonstration will take place, or to see it happening.

For his part, Trump reposted a tweet by a small-time "influencer" who goes by MoniFunGirl, in which she claimed that anti-abortion protestors had gotten "40 years" for violating the same law Trump's DOJ was threatening Lemon with. 

 

 

After Trump's repost, the original poster corrected herself to "40 months."  

 

Trump's post remains up and uncorrected. 

Why does this matter?

• It's not a crime to protest or report on protesting. 

• Threatening and prosecuting reporters is what dictators do.  

• Presidents shouldn't spread disinformation and should care if they get caught doing it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He spent Christmas as only he can, or would.

Trump usually celebrates holidays, including important religious ones like Christmas, by offering sarcastic "greetings" to the Americans he sees as his enemies. This year, he did it twice. The first message, posted at 7:02 p.m. on Christmas Eve, wished a "Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country." The second, at 5:51 p.m. today, offered a "Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein"—presumably not meaning to include himself, evidence of their intimate and long-lasting friendship notwithstanding.

In between, he posted more than 100 times to his private microblogging site. The binge of furious conspiracy theories and rants about his enemies took him to well past 1 a.m. this morning. Much of the content had to do with his bizarre fixation on his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. For example, he approvingly reposted a video about the comedian Roseanne Barr's belief that the COVID-19 pandemic had somehow been created by Democrats to force Americans to vote by mail. (No, really.)  

Trump remains cloistered at Mar-a-Lago, as he has for most of the period since the beginning of the Epstein document rollout and associated attempts at a cover-up.
 

Why does this matter?

• This is not how a mentally stable person behaves on any day, much less Christmas. 

• Shouting deranged conspiracy theories from the bully pulpit of the presidency is bad for the country.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He had a very, very bad day on the Epstein front.

For Trump, one of the fringe benefits to shutting the federal government down for a record 43 days was that he was able to pressure Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) to keep the House adjourned, and therefore to refuse to seat duly elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-NM). Grijalva, who was finally sworn in today, promptly became the last signature needed on a petition to force the House to take up a bill that would require the release of the Justice Department's massive troves of information on the sex trafficking ring run by Trump's friend and confidant Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump responded by launching a furious pressure campaign against the few Republicans who have signed the petition, including dragging Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) into the White House Situation Room. Most Americans are more familiar with the Situation Room as the place where then-President Obama and his cabinet observed the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, but there was one obvious advantage for Trump to try to force Boebert to withdraw her signature there: in that high-security environment, it would have been impossible for her to record what he said.

The other major development was the release of 20,000 Epstein e-mails and text messages obtained by the House Oversight Committee. These documents are not organized, and analysis has been ongoing all day, but they are shockingly damning for Trump. In the messages—many of which predate Trump's political career—Epstein discusses, among other things:

• how Trump "knew about the girls"
• Epstein's involvement in a complex real estate transaction in 2008 that amounted to a money laundering operation in which the Russian government sent about $100M to Trump 
• Trump spending "hours" at Epstein's house with one of his trafficking victims in particular 
• his admiration for Trump's ability to weather scandals, but also his concern over Trump's mental stability 
• how he helped the Putin regime manipulate Trump 

It will probably be weeks before the full picture of Trump's involvement in Epstein's life and activities that emerges from these documents is clear. 

Virtually all of the White House's comment came from press secretary Karolina Leavitt, who gamely insisted that e-mails in which Epstein and Maxwell discussed the fact of Trump's knowledge of their operation showed only that he "did nothing wrong." 

Trump himself did wade into the fray, but only on social media, safely away from reporters who might shout questions. He once again called Epstein and Maxwell's massive sex trafficking ring, for which both were criminally convicted, a "hoax." Trump also demanded that everyone stop talking about it—or, in his words, that there be "no deflections to Epstein."

In related news, Epstein's co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is reportedly planning to ask Trump to commute her sentence. After Trump sent his former defense lawyer to "interview" her about the extent of his relationship with Epstein, Maxwell was moved to a resort-style minimum security prison where she has been getting, among other perks, custom meals and access to puppies in training to become service dogs.

Trump has repeatedly refused all invitations to condemn Maxwell, who may be the only living witness who can testify to whether or how much he was involved in Epstein's trafficking ring. Instead, he has only said that he "wishes her well."

Why does this matter?

• Victims have died because of the horrible things Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did to them. 

• It is hard to imagine how Trump could act any guiltier. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He took down an obvious scam AI post he'd made to his social media account—or, at least, someone did.

Last night, Trump posted this video, in which an obviously AI-manipulated image of him promises to bring "medbed" technology to all American citizens.

Deep in the weirdest parts of online right-wing culture, "medbed" is the term for a science-fiction device that will supposedly cure diseases, leach "toxins" out of the body, and otherwise restore a patient to perfect health better than any human doctor. Sadly, they don't exist—but even more sadly, the belief that they do is very real. The mythology generally involves Trump's fight against a grand, shadowy conspiracy to keep these miracle devices out of reach for everyday Americans. Scammers have capitalized on this, selling desperate patients useless "treatments" in mockups of the beds for tens of thousands of dollars. 

It's not clear where Trump found the video, or whether someone in particular convinced him it was real or a good idea to post it, but it appears to have originated last week on an Instagram account connected to crypto scams. It's not impossible that Trump would have understood that it was fake but decided it was worth throwing some red meat to the cult-like conspiracy theorists who are an important part of his political base of support. 

But within hours, the general consensus was that Trump had just completely and uncritically accepted the video as real, and—as he had already done once that day—"announced" his new "policy" without checking with anybody actually running his government. 

Other scammers were quick to seize on the opportunity Trump created for them. Almost immediately, a website appeared at "medbedcard.com" selling early access to the "terahertz technology" of the fictional medbed for $447.

 

This morning, before Trump began his usual morning posting binge, the video was quietly deleted. The White House has not offered any explanation, but a number of Trump staffers (and the occasional hacker who guesses his passwords) have access to his social media accounts.

In short: the 79-year-old Trump appears to have fallen for an obvious AI scam, based on a QAnon conspiracy theory, featuring fake video that he believed were things he'd actually said. He then posted it to social media as though it were true, and created an opportunity for other scammers to fleece his supporters for hundreds of dollars before someone in his administration was finally able to take it down.

The web address where Trump's original post sat now returns the Orwellian error message "This Truth no longer exists."

 

 

Why does this matter?

• Usually, when someone's 79-year-old grandpa falls for a scam like this, the family takes away his credit cards and starts looking for a memory care unit to place him in.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to punish Americans living in Colorado if the state didn't free a supporter who committed crimes on his behalf.

Trump continued his attack against American election systems today, this time in the form of a threat to the state of Colorado if they didn't release a woman, Tina Peters, who committed election crimes on his behalf. She was convicted on ten counts, including four felonies, and is in the first year of a nine-year prison sentence.

In a post to his private microblogging site, Trump demanded that Peters be "let out of jail, RIGHT NOW" calling her an "old woman." (Peters, 69, is ten years younger than Trump—who is also a convicted felon.) He said that he would take "harsh measures" against the state of Colorado if she weren't freed.

Trump, who has no authority to demand that states ignore their own laws or jury verdicts, did not specify what "harsh measures" he had in mind. 

In her role as Mesa County clerk, Peters signed off on a routine post-election audit on November 19, 2020, certifying that a random check of paper ballots against vote tabulating machines had returned no errors. But she became convinced by the conspiracy theories about a stolen election that Trump and his other supporters were promoting in a desperate attempt to keep him in power. In May of 2021, she ordered surveillance cameras guarding voting machines turned off, then gave a QAnon conspiracy theorist named Conan Hays stolen credentials to "inspect" them. Peters lied to other county officials about Hayes' identity.When Hayes released video and data that he had downloaded from the machines' on-board software to the internet, Peters lied again about her involvement and falsely claimed that the reveal of the data (which included passwords that could have been used to further tamper with Mesa County election results) were not a "big deal." 

The voting machines Peters allowed to be tampered were ordered replaced by the county's all-Republican board in order to comply with Colorado's strict ballot security laws. This cost taxpayers more than $800,000.

Her crimes during the 2020 election cycle weren't even Peters' first brush with tampering with election results. In 2019, she left 574 ballots uncounted in a drop-off ballot box in a heavily Democratic area of her district. When this was discovered, she called it an "error."

Trump using his power to reward people who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is nothing new: he called the convicted criminals who stormed the session of Congress where Joe Biden's win was certified "hostages," and then pardoned them immediately after returning to office—including those who attacked and injured police. He's even appointed some of them to high-ranking positions in the Justice Department.

Why does this matter?

• Rewarding people who break the law on your behalf is textbook fascism. 

• People who abuse their powers of office and commit crimes, especially for political reasons, should be punished.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made one last desperate attempt to prevent the release of the report on his Jan. 6 activities (and failed).

As required by law, outgoing special counsel Jack Smith has compiled a two-volume report summarizing the results of his investigations into Trump. This was divided into two volumes. The first deals with Trump's actions in furtherance of his conspiracy to remain in office in spite of the results of the 2020 election, including but not limited to his role in the January 6th riot that nearly prevented Congress from acting to certify President Biden's victory. The second deals with the actions undertaken by Trump and several of his employees to, in effect, steal classified government documents and hide them in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. 

The judge in his classified documents trial, Aileen Cannon—herself a Trump appointee—issued an injunction last week preventing either from being released, even though her case had nothing to do with the election interference case. Following a ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturning that blanket order, she instructed that the election interference material (Volume I) could be released after three days—meaning midnight tonight.

With just a few hours to go, Trump made one last desperate attempt to keep the report secret long enough for him to take office and—presumably—bury it forever, or at least as long as he remains in power. His legal pleading called it an "attempt to interfere with an incoming Presidential administration in this manner, let alone on the very eve of inauguration by means of a false report issued by a discredited prosecutor who has now resigned in disgrace."

(It is true that Smith resigned—because his investigation was complete and the Department of Justice has acknowledged that Trump will never permit any criminal investigation into himself or his allies. Trump remains at risk of federal prosecution in both cases, though not while he is in office.)

At 11:30 PM, Cannon issued an order denying Trump's motion. It was couched in dry legal language, and suggests that she had no ability to rule otherwise, although that is not strictly true. At worst, she would likely have been overruled by the 11th Circuit again, something that has happened quite often since the man who appointed her became a criminal defendant in her court.

As of the time this post was published, it is not clear what—other than Americans being reminded of a coup attempt that played out mostly in full view of the cameras—Trump is so afraid of. He and his lawyers have seen the report, which may contain damning or embarrassing information not previously made public. 

UPDATE: Volume I has been released and is available here.

Why does this matter?

• In a democracy, government officials don't get to disappear evidence of their wrongdoing just because it might embarrass them or hurt them politically.

• In a democracy, nobody is supposed to be above the law—and if they are, that doesn't mean that some small measure of accountability is an "unfair attack."

• The American people might be interested in knowing who they've elected.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got real electoral votes from people under criminal indictment for casting fake electoral votes.

Today was the day that state electors cast their votes for president. As expected, Trump won—but he did so with the votes of people under criminal indictment in at least three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Those people pretended to be legitimate electors in 2020 and submitted forged documents casting "votes" for Trump, in an attempt to cause legal confusion and to give Trump sympathizers in Congress an excuse to delay or deny certification of President Biden's victory.

In other words, it was part of the larger conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep Trump in power by illegal means. Trump's personal attorneys and campaign officials were involved in coordinating the scheme. They were among those who were convicted of crimes as a result, not counting the fake electors in five states. 

Trump himself was indicted by a federal grand jury for his role in the conspiracy, although unlike many of his co-conspirators, he will escape punishment. While the case against him could still be revived after his term ends, he is widely expected to pardon himself—something he threatened to do even during his first term as evidence of his criminal actions mounted.

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if even ceremonial votes are cast by people who attacked Americans' right to free and fair elections.

• Criminal conspiracies to overturn elections are bad even if the perpetrators get away with it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He celebrated the chance to appoint an FBI director he thinks will be personally loyal to him… again.

Shortly after taking office in 2017, Trump demanded that then-FBI Director James Comey swear personal loyalty to him. Comey refused, and Trump fired him shortly thereafter. 

The firing was particularly urgent for Trump, because the FBI was conducting the investigation into Russia's interference on Trump's behalf in the 2016 election. In fact, the firing was so suspicious that the acting FBI Director immediately opened an obstruction of justice investigation into Trump. As a result, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate exactly how much influence Russia had over the election—and over Trump.

This was the sequence of events that led to Trump appointing Christopher Wray as the new FBI Director in 2017. Wray remained in office through the end of Trump's term, earning some respect for his willingness to defend the nation's law enforcement agencies from Trump's attacks.

After Trump left office, he was indicted in federal court for stealing classified documents and fomenting a coup. The FBI was involved in investigating both sets of crimes and, among other things, executed search warrants on Mar-a-Lago, where Trump had stashed those boxes of stolen government documents.

Trump was infuriated by Wray's "disloyalty" in refusing to obstruct those investigations, and promised to replace him if re-elected. Today, after Wray's announcement that he would resign rather than be fired, Trump was gleeful, saying that "today is a great day for America as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice." 

Trump plans to replace Wray with another director he hopes will be personally loyal to him—and he may get it this time. Kash Patel is an election denier who has mimicked Trump's language about the supposed "deep state" conspiracy against him and—again parroting Trump—threatened to jail journalists.

Why does this matter?

• It is under no circumstances whatsoever appropriate for a president to demand a pledge of personal loyalty from the director of the FBI.

• Even now, nobody is above the law, but it's bad if Trump thinks he is and acts like it.

• Virtually all of the people Trump accuses of "weaponizing" politics against him are Republicans he appointed.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He winked at an insane conspiracy theory.

Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican primary for a seat in a deep-red Georgia district this week. Trump promptly congratulated her on Twitter. 

But Greene claims to believe in the weird mix of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, which—for example—has Trump and some (but not all) of the military locked in a secret battle against child sex slavery with Tom Hanks and online furniture companies. 

Greene herself has also called liberal Jews Nazi collaborators, said the mass shooting that killed 58 people in Las Vegas was carried out by anti-gun activists, and had a long history of social media posts attacking Muslims and people of color.

Asked today about his support for Greene, Trump—who has promoted QAnon himself, said "Well, she did very well in the election. She won by a lot. She was very popular and she comes from a great state and she had a tremendous victory. So absolutely, I did congratulate her."

Trump also revived another conspiracy theory this week, coyly suggesting that vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris might be ineligible for the office because her parents were immigrants. Trump's first real foray into politics came as a hype man for the "birther" conspiracy about President Obama.

Why does this matter?

• A president who didn't want to rule as a dictator probably wouldn't cuddle up to a movement that wanted to make him one.

• There has to be something evil, stupid, or racist enough for a president to distance himself from.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He fired the inspector general for the intelligence community.

Late on this Friday night, during a national health crisis, Trump notified Congress that he was firing the inspector general for the intelligence community. It was Michael Atkinson, a Trump appointee, who made Congress aware of the existence of a valid and plausible whistleblower complaint about Trump's attempts to force the government of Ukraine to "investigate" the family of a political rival.

Atkinson's immediate superior, Joseph Maguire, at first refused to turn the whistleblower's complaint over to Congress. Atkinson, however, was legally required to notify Congress of its existence. 

Within a few months of Atkinson's refusal to cover up that complaint, Trump was impeached.

Maguire himself was fired last month because one of his subordinates told Congress—accurately—that the intelligence community had concluded that Russia was once again acting to interfere in the 2020 election on Trump's behalf. He and Maguire join a long list of people Trump has fired for either investigating or failing to stop investigations into his attempts to get foreign countries to influence American elections. These include his national security advisor John Bolton, FBI Director James Comey, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (and his brother), Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Undersecretary of Defense John Rood, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump, who demands personal loyalty from government employees and expects them to act as a personal defense team, did not give any actual reason for the firing. 

How is this a bad thing?

• Purging people from government who are insufficiently loyal to the leader is what dictators do.

• Presidents aren't above the law.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to muddy the waters on Russian election interference even more.

Speaking to reporters today, Trump again claimed that he hadn't been told about Russian efforts to interfere in the 2020 election—an obvious lie that his own staff has already contradicted.

Q: Have you been briefed that Russia is trying to help Bernie Sanders?  And if so, what’s your message to Putin?  Are you comfortable with him intervening?

TRUMP:  Nobody said it.  I read where Russia is helping Bernie Sanders.  Nobody said it to me at all.  Nobody briefed me about that at all.  What they try and do is — certain people like certain people to have information.  No different than it’s been. 

But I have not been briefed on that at all.  Nobody told me about it.  They leaked it.  Adam Schiff and his group — they leaked it to the papers and — as usual.  They ought to investigate Adam Schiff for leaking that information.  He should not be leaking information out of intelligence.  They ought to investigate Adam Schiff.

The idea that Trump, who is President of the United States, hadn't been told about this is ridiculous. Not only did Trump fire his Director of National Intelligence last week for telling Congress about this ongoing attack, but intelligence officials have already confirmed to reporters that he was aware.

Nobody other than Trump has suggested that Rep. Schiff leaked the findings. For once, though, Trump himself isn't a suspect: his own tweets about the election match up exactly with what U.S. intelligence officials have found about the Russian disinformation campaign that Trump has been trying so hard to keep secret.

Why should I care about this?

• It's wrong to lie to the American public, especially about things that are this important.

• Presidents who don't want to look like hostile foreign governments are pulling on their strings should start by not doing and saying exactly what those foreign governments want.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He helped the Putin regime with its propaganda campaign.

Trump was openly rooting for another vote-counting debacle in the Nevada caucuses. It would not only make Democrats look bad, but it would also further the Putin regime's attempts to sow distrust in American elections.

Unfortunately for Trump, the votes in the Nevada caucuses have been counted without incident. But the winner, Bernie Sanders, did give Trump the chance to help a different Russian propaganda campaign, by "backing" Sanders as the Democratic nominee. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, the U.S. government has found that the Putin regime has been trying to sow discord between the Democratic candidates for the nomination by spreading rumors of a plot to keep Sanders from winning.

Trump claimed today that he hadn't known about Russia's involvement in the Democratic primary, although his own staff told the Post yesterday that he was aware. That makes sense, because Trump—who normally has trouble focusing on intelligence briefings—is intensely interested in this. He fired his acting Director of National Intelligence last week for even acknowledging the fact that Russia was working to help him get re-elected.

Trump has been copying the Putin regime strategy since before it was reported on, "helping" Sanders by claiming that the Democratic Party is "rigging" the election against him. He's tweeted over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again about "rigged" nominations in the last few weeks—at least nine times. 

That is exactly what Russian propagandists online have been saying.

Sanders's reaction was a blunt threat to Putin: stay out of American elections. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly and openly asked Russia—and Ukraine, and China, and any other country that might be interested—for help. 

Why does this matter?

• The right thing to do when foreign countries try to undermine American democracy is not to help them.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He "celebrated" a part of the Constitution he doesn't much like.

The Trump administration today put out a brief, understated announcement noting the 150th anniversary of the Fifteenth Amendment. It was ratified on February 3, 1870, as part of the readmission of the former Confederacy into the union, and it guarantees that

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

In reality, Trump is pretty hostile to the Fifteenth, and hasn't made much secret of it. One of his first acts after taking office was to form a commission to "investigate" the millions of non-citizen Latino voters who supposedly cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, giving her a popular vote victory. Trump never said where he got those numbers, how he knew who they voted for, or produced any evidence of noncitizen voting. The commission disbanded without having found any evidence, either. It was generally regarded as Trump's way of trying to suppress the Latino vote in future elections.

Last month, Trump's senior campaign advisor, Justin Clark, openly called for voter suppression. He specifically mentioned poll-monitoring strategies, which attempt to drive down voter turnout in minority neighborhoods by intimidating voters, or delaying them with bureaucratic challenges to their registration. (Later, after his remarks were reported on with audio evidence, Clark claimed he was misunderstood.)

Both Trump's 2016 campaign and the Russian government operation working on his behalf made suppression of African-American voters a priority, although Trump still denies they were actively working together. His campaign did hire a firm with connections to the Russian government to compile massive amounts of targeted voter data, though, which was ultimately "shared" with the Putin regime.

Why should I care about this?

• Trying to keep people from voting because you're afraid they might not vote for you is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He retweeted QAnon fan accounts, twice.

Trump had another fairly typical Friday, at least by his standards: zero scheduled work, a round of golf, and lots of tweets. 

At least two of today's tweets were from fan accounts of the conspiracy theory/troll group QAnon, best known for spreading the "Pizzagate" hoax that accused Hillary Clinton of running a child sex slavery ring out of a DC-area pizza joint. Trump campaign officials have promoted QAnon hoaxes, which led to a man shooting at employees in an attempt to "save" the nonexistent children being trapped in the restaurant's nonexistent basement.

The basic idea behind QAnon, like a lot of Trump-era viral media—including the Russian fake news posts that flooded social media in 2016 and since—seems to be to create the idea that nothing is really real. Or, as Russian dissident and chess champion Garry Kasparov put it:

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) December 13, 2016

Trump openly tells people not to believe their own eyes if something makes him look bad, and his political handlers have embraced the message. Kellyanne Conway famously invented the concept of "alternative facts" as a way of explaining why Trump insisted that his press secretary lie about his inaugural crowds in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It's not clear whether Trump, a master hoaxer in his own right, knows what QAnon is or whether he believes any of their "theories." (He does retweet them a lot, though.) But he apparently liked the look of the posts he sent to his millions of Twitter followers today. One references an out-and-proud misogynist movement, and the other was a picture of a dog turd.

Why is this a bad thing?

• It's bad if the most powerful person in the world is spending a weekday helping internet trolls and scammers go viral.

• Facts and reality exist even if it would be better politically for Donald Trump if they didn't.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He did what he always does when he gets in trouble.

To all appearances, Trump did nothing today but golf and tweet. The day's 20 tweets and retweets—an increasingly typical day's "work" for Trump—give some sense of Trump's anxiety, and perhaps his evolving strategy, over the metastasizing whistleblower scandal. 

Trump's emerging theme with Biden seems to be to insist that it was somehow Biden, and not Trump himself, who attempted to extort the government of Ukraine for his own political gain. Trying to smear opponents with things that he himself is known or suspected to have done has been his default political strategy. Among many other example's, he's said that Hillary Clinton was a misogynist and a bigot who sought Russia's help to influence the election, ran a crooked charity, was too close to the Saudis, and was mentally unstable and too infirm to be president. He's also said that President Obama's academic degrees were fake, that he illegally profited from the presidency, and that he played too much golf.

Trump repeatedly insisted that he was the innocent victim of a smear campaign undertaken by a secret conspiracy of the Democratic party, the entire news media, and his own government.

What is so bad about this?

• Trying to deflect attention from your own acts doesn't change them.

• Past a certain point, psychological projection becomes a sign of mental illness.

• The same thing is true of thinking that everyone is conspiring against you.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He found another 11 million votes he's decided to count for himself.

Trump lost the popular vote in the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by 2,764,903 votes. Even though he still won the electoral college vote, he immediately claimed that three to five million people had voted illegally for Clinton. (He didn't say how he knew how they voted, or who they were, or how they'd accomplished it. A "commission" he created after taking office to find evidence for his claims couldn't say, either.)

Today, Trump inflated that claim to sixteen million votes. This time, the culprit was Google, which supposedly "manipulated" 12% of the total votes cast. 

It didn't. As Hillary Clinton herself put it:

It's always difficult to tell if Trump believes these claims, although it's pretty clear he expects other people to. But with a series of very ominous polls coming in that show him in danger of losing re-election, Trump is rattled. Today, he spun a conspiracy theory about "something going on" at Fox News, whose poll shows him losing by wide margins in 2020 to every leading Democratic candidate. 

Trump, whose campaign knew about and—at the very least—approved of Russia's attempts to intervene in the election on his behalf, seems to be repeating his stance from 2016: that elections are only valid if he wins them.

What's wrong with this?

• Pushing propaganda showing overwhelming support for the leader is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

Social media.

Trump's day began with 16 tweets before 9:15 A.M, including a thread that reads as deranged even by Trump's standards. In it, he called himself "so great looking" and a "stable genius" before swerving into racial slurs and nicknames for Democratic presidential candidates. (He apparently tried to call South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg "Alfred E. Neumann," after the famous Mad magazine character, but accidentally tagged the unrelated Twitter user @AlfredENeuman99, who is not a fan.)

Some of the more alarming tweets were later deleted and re-posted, by someone with access to Trump's account, with better spelling, more coherent wording, and corrected tags.

Many of the other tweets were spent promoting what amounted to a campaign event about it in the form of a White House "social media summit." No actual social media company was invited, but the exclusively pro-Trump crowd of trolls and "influencers" did feature some notable names. The guest list included:

• James O'Keefe, a hoax video maker who has racked up criminal convictions and six-figure lawsuit damages.

• Ali Alexander, who tried to sabotage Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris as she rose in the polls after the first debate by spreading birther-style rumors that she was "not an American black." (Trump's son Donald Jr., who sometimes gets assigned social media outreach to the fringes of Trump's base, retweeted Alexander.)

• Ryan Fournier, one of the founders of "Students for Trump," whose partner in that venture was arrested three months ago on federal fraud charges.

• Ben Garrison, a political cartoonist known for his drawings of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, most famously one in which "the Rothschilds" and George Soros are shown holding the puppet strings of the U.S. military. Garrison was uninvited at the last minute, although Trump hasn't said why he was invited in the first place.

The main theme of the "summit" was Trump's favorite (but false) conspiracy theory that social media companies are targeting conservatives. None of the people invited have actually been banned from any social media platforms.

The summit attendees were also present when Trump announced his latest swerve on census policy, where they picked fights with actual reporters.

Who cares?

• It's wrong to use taxpayer money to reward your own political supporters.

• The President of the United States has more important things to worry about than his Twitter follower count.

• People who surround themselves with criminals, overt racists and anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists do it because they like what those people have to say.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He took every possible position on whether Russia got him elected in the space of 20 minutes.

As usual, Trump spent most of the workday on Twitter, and one tweet in particular generated a lot of attention. In it, Trump said:

Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist...

It was immediately noticed that Trump was, for the first time, admitting what literally every other intelligence and federal law enforcement agency that has investigated it already knew: that Russia helped him get elected.

Less than an hour later, Trump completely contradicted himself.

Q: Do you believe that Russia helped you get elected? 

TRUMP: No, Russia did not help me get elected. 

Q: That’s what [your tweet] said. 

TRUMP: You know who got me elected? You know who got me elected? I got me elected. Russia didn’t help me at all. Russia, if anything, I think, helped the other side.

In reality, the Putin regime actively sabotaged the 2016 presidential election in order to get Trump elected, or at least to delegitimize Clinton, the expected winner. It hacked into the Democratic National Committee's e-mail servers and released selected messages aimed at demoralizing potential Hillary Clinton voters. It conducted widespread attacks on state election systems, and compromised election computers in at least two counties in Florida. It hired buildings full of professional online trolls aimed at spreading propaganda and disinformation online. It successfully cultivated relationships with Trump's family members and campaign manager in order to offer them "dirt" on Clinton. And it responded on the very same day of Trump's request on live TV that it conduct cyberattacks against Clinton.

There is unanimous agreement among experts that Russia's attempts to interfere in elections are ongoing, so it matters that Trump is more or less unable to admit that the attacks happened in the first place.

Why should I care about this?

• A president who can't or won't even try to protect American elections from foreign interference is unfit for office.

• It's bad if the president is compromised by a hostile foreign power because he needs its help to stay in power.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he was "surprised" that his son was being called back to explain his testimony before the Republican-controlled Senate.

In news that broke yesterday, Donald Trump, Jr., was subpoenaed to testify once again before the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump Jr.'s previous testimony about the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian agents peddling "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, and the Trump family's attempts to build a luxury high-rise in Moscow during the 2016 campaign, is contradicted by other witnesses. 

And while it's not illegal to lie to the American public in a press release, as Trump Sr. did in crafting his family's response to the unfolding scandal, it is illegal to lie in testimony to Congress.

Asked about it today, Trump Sr. said this:

Q: Mr. President, as you saw, the Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed Don, Jr. That’s the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. What do you make of that? 

TRUMP: Well, I was very surprised. I saw Richard Burr saying there was no collusion two or three weeks ago. He went outside and somebody asked him. “No, there’s no collusion. We found no collusion.” But I was very surprised to see my son. My son is a very good person, works very hard.

...He’s now testified for twenty hours or something. A massive amount of time. The Mueller report came out. That’s the bible. The Mueller report came out and they said he did nothing wrong. The only thing is it’s oppo-research.

There are a few lies here. First, Donald Jr. did not testify for "twenty hours" to Mueller's team, because he completely refused to cooperate at all.

The Mueller report—or at least the portions left unredacted by Trump's hand-picked attorney general—does not say that Trump Jr. "did nothing wrong." The closest it comes is to say that prosecuting Trump Jr. for his apparent violation of federal laws prohibiting foreign election tampering would be challenging, because Trump Jr. could plausibly claim he was too ignorant of those laws to form the requisite criminal intent.

Trump Jr.'s name appears 153 times in the visible portions of the report. Here is some of what it does say in the portions that Trump has allowed Congress and the public to see so far:

• that Trump Jr. participated in the Trump Tower meeting with agents of the Russian government, which immediately precipitated more Russian cyberattacks on Trump Sr.'s political enemies:

• that Trump Jr. helped publicize Russian propaganda created by the now-indicted Russian "Internet Research Agency" to help Trump Sr. win the election

• that Trump Jr. had repeated secret interactions with Wikileaks, the site that the Russian government was using to disseminate propaganda and stolen information

• that Trump Jr. tried to bargain for "dirt" on Clinton at the Trump Tower meeting in exchange for Russia's influence over policy after the election

• that Trump Jr.'s actions regarding the Trump Tower meeting, on their face, violated federal laws against foreign election tampering

• that Trump Sr. actively involved himself in a disinformation campaign about the Trump Tower meeting in an attempt to protect his son and himself from criminal exposure

• that Trump Sr.'s attempts to deceive the public about what had happened at the Trump Tower meeting made even Trump Jr. uncomfortable

One part of Trump Sr.'s statement rings true, however: he very likely was genuinely surprised that Republican senators would allow any investigation into him, his campaign, or his family.

Why should I care about this?

• Presidents are not above the law, and neither are their family members.

• It's wrong to lie, even if it's to protect an adult child suspected of criminal activity.