Former President Donald Trump writes in a new book set to be published next week that Mark Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and said the Meta chief executive would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again.
It represents Trump’s most recent attack on Zuckerberg, who he has repeatedly accused of intervening in the last presidential election. And it comes as Meta has taken steps to assure conservatives it will not influence this year’s campaign….
“Save America,” a Trump-authored coffee table book being released Sept. 3, includes an undated photograph of Trump meeting with Zuckerberg in the White House. Under the photo, Trump writes that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT,” Trump added, referring to a $420 million contribution Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made during the 2020 election to fund election infrastructure.
“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” Trump continues. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Category Archives: authoritarian threats in US
“Trump shares social media posts with QAnon phrases and calls for jailing lawmakers, special counsel”
Donald Trump shared more than a dozen posts on his social media network Wednesday that call for the trial or jailing of House lawmakers who investigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol, special counsel Jack Smith and others, along with images that reference the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The former president began posting a string of messages Tuesday evening after Smith filed a new indictment against him over his efforts to undo his loss in the 2020 presidential election. The new indictment keeps the same criminal charges but narrows the allegations against Trump following a Supreme Court opinion last month that extended broad immunity to former presidents.
Trump reposted a doctored image that was made to look like President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in orange prison jumpsuits, among other political figures, and a lewd post about Harris and Clinton that referenced a sex act. One post seemed to suggest former President Barack Obama should be tried in a military court.
Trump then began sharing more than a dozen posts from other users on the network that included the calls for Smith to be prosecuted, the lawmakers on the House committee investigating the Capitol attack to be jailed, and more. One image showed Smith with devil horns and red eyes….
One post featured an image of Trump and former President Barack Obama with the words, “All roads lead to Obama… retruth if you want public military tribunals.”
Some of the other posts Trump shared included phrases circulated among followers of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, including “Nothing can stop what is coming,” “Hold the line” and “WWG1WGA”, which is an initialism for “Where we go one, we go all.”
Rich Bernstein: “Protecting Elections Under U.S. v. Trump”
New at Society for the Rule of Law.
My Forthcoming Yale Law Journal Feature: “The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U.S. Election Law”
I have written this draft, forthcoming this spring in Volume 134 of the Yale Law Journal. I consider it my most important law review article (or at least the most important that I’ve written in some time). It offers a 30,000-foot view of the state of election law doctrine, politics, and theory. The piece is still in progress, so comments are welcome. Here is the abstract:
American election law is in something of a funk. This Feature explains why, what it means, and how to move forward.
Part I of this Feature describes election law’s stagnation. After a few decades of protecting voting rights, courts (and especially the Supreme Court), acting along ideological—and now partisan—lines, have pulled back on voter protections in most areas of election law and deprived other actors including Congress, election administrators, and state courts of the ability to more fully protect voters rights. Politically, pro-voter election reform has stalled out in a polarized and gridlocked Congress, and the voting wars in the states mean that ease of access to the ballot depends in part on where in the United States one lives. Election law scholarship too has stagnated, failing to generate meaningful theoretical advances about the key purposes of election law.
Part II considers the retrogression of election law doctrine, politics, and theory to a focus on the very basics of democracy: the requirement of fair vote counts, peaceful transitions of power, and voter access to reliable information. Courts on a bipartisan basis in the aftermath of the 2020 election rejected illegitimate attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. Yet the courts’ ability to thwart attempted election subversion remains a question mark in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Trump v. Anderson and Trump v. United States. Politically, Congress came together at the end of 2022 to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act to deter future attempts to manipulate electoral college rules in order to subvert election results, but future bipartisan action to prevent retrogression seems less likely. Further, because of the collapse of local journalism and the rise of cheap speech, voters face a decreased ability to obtain reliable information to make voting decisions consistent with their interests and preferences. Meanwhile, parties have become potential paths for subversion. Party-centered election law theory and the First Amendment “marketplace of ideas” theory have not yet incorporated these emerging challenges.
Part III considers the potential to transform election law doctrine, politics, and theory in a pro-voter direction despite high current levels of polarization, the misperceived partisan consequences of pro-voter election reforms, and new, serious technological and political challenges to democratic governance. Election law alone is not up to the task of saving American democracy. But it can help counter stagnation and thwart retrogression. The first order of business must be to assure continued free and fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. But the new election law must be more ambitiously and unambiguously pro-voter. The pro-voter approach to election law is one grounded in political equality and based on four principles: all eligible voters should have the ability to easily register and vote in a fair election with the capacity for reasoned decisionmaking; each voter’s vote is entitled to equal weight; the winners of fair elections are recognized and able to take office peacefully; and political power is fairly distributed across groups in society, with particular protection for those groups who have faced historical discrimination in voting and representation.
“Biden and Trump Have Succeeded in Breaking Reality”
From M. Gessen in NYT, an astute commentary on where we’re at:
Biden and Trump represent entirely different values and policies…. Biden is right: Trump poses an existential threat to democracy.
But both campaigns are creating a sense of unreality, in presenting politics as formulaic spectacle, abstracted from the actual politics each candidate represents and from people’s lived experiences….
Autocrats and aspiring autocrats, whatever their political orientation, have been telling this story for a long time. They say that the country is on the verge of catastrophe and that only one person — the great leader — can save it. They use this rhetorical strategy because it works. That is, it works in times when a critical number of people are feeling insecure, precarious, frightened, as many Americans clearly are….
It’s tempting to say that Trump’s autocratic movement has spread like an infection. The truth is, the seeds of this disaster have been sprouting in American politics for decades: the dumbing down of conversation, the ever-growing role of money in political campaigns, the disappearance of local news media and local civic engagement and the consequent transformation of national politics into a set of abstracted images and stories, the inescapable understanding of presidential races as personality contests.
“Global Perspectives on Judicial Politics and Democratic Backsliding”
A special issue of Law & Policy, edited by Michael Dichio and Igor Logvinenko. Here’s a description:
This Special Issue “Global Perspectives on Judicial Politics and Democratic Backsliding” includes ten articles by fifteen scholars, providing an in-depth analysis of the judicial politics in the context of democratic backsliding. Five of the articles focus on the U.S. judiciary, examining its unique position in both enabling and resisting democratic backsliding. The other five present case studies from Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, showcasing diverse tactics, approaches, and outcomes used by courts to react in a variety of ways to actors in these political systems. Published during the pivotal 2024 electoral year, this collection underscores the importance of continued research into the judiciary’s dual capacity to both protect and undermine democratic norms.
“Why it’s so hard to measure support for political violence”
538:
It’s true that, over the past few years, polls have shown increasing shares of Americans saying — in one way or another — they may be OK with political violence…
When asked whether they agree with the statement, “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track,” 20 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat agreed in a March Marist/NPR/PBS NewsHour poll. And a June survey from NORC and the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats found 7 percent and 10 percent of Americans agreed that the “use of force is justified” to either restore Trump to the White House or prevent him from becoming president again, respectively.
But research suggests these numbers may be exaggerating how many Americans truly support political violence. Polls with a lot of disengaged respondents (i.e., those who were not totally paying attention when taking a survey) are susceptible to overestimating support for violence, and vague questions that don’t specifically spell out what exactly is meant by “political violence” can also skew the results, according to a 2022 paper published in PNAS. Researchers found that, when they adjusted for these flaws by using engagement checks (trap questions to make sure a respondent is paying attention) and more detailed descriptions of acts of violence, the actual support was much lower than previous studies had found.
“Trump’s authoritarian lean appeals to the right. Swing voters, not so much”
Aaron Blake in WaPo, on a new Monmouth poll “suggest[ing] that if Democrats can drive home the idea that a second Trump term would be a more authoritarian one, that could alienate the most crucial 2024 voters, the ‘double haters,’ . . . the approximately 1 in 5 voters who dislike both Biden and Trump [and] tend to be the least authoritarian-leaning voters of all.”
Dangerous Times: Trump Chooses Election Denier JD Vance as VP Nominee
NYT on JD Vance:
Election denial: He has not committed to accepting the results of this year’s election. “If we have a free and fair election, I will accept the results,” he said on CNN in May. It’s a caveat that many Republicans have used, leaving the door open to the notion of foul play and helping to sow doubt in advance. In February, he told ABC News that if he had been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would not have certified the election as Mike Pence did, but would have “told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”
“Trump Once Unified Democrats and Divided Republicans. The Shooting And Debate Turned the Tables.”
The complete and total, to borrow a phrase, realignment of the GOP into the Party of Trump was nearly complete after he avoided being seriously challenged, let alone defeated, through the primaries. But it was cemented in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump escaped death and seconds later rallied his stunned audience to forge a bond few American presidents have enjoyed with their supporters.
With that instant moment of political iconography, Trump is well-positioned to stifle what little intra-party dissent remains in the GOP.
More worrisome for his opponents, and perhaps the country, the shooting and his defiant response will strengthen his case for a brand of strongman politics to which our democracy had mostly been immune. Trump’s clenched fist will strengthen his hand — not only in the campaign but also, should he win, with a party that will prove far less likely to resist his second-term impulses.
The Despicable Violence Against Former President Trump
Political violence has no place in our society. The attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump is despicable and deserves our condemnation.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
Political competition must respect the rule of law and peaceful competition for power.
It is sad that it is necessary to write these words.
My New One at Slate: “Democrats Sure Aren’t Acting as if Trump Beating Biden Is an Existential Threat to Democracy”
I have written this piece for Slate. Some snippets:
But more recently, Democrats have not done nearly enough to deal with the ongoing risks to democracy that they themselves repeatedly raise. They have supported election deniers running in Republican primaries in an attempt to ease the path for Democratic candidates in general elections. They have not made it a legislative priority to change or repeal the Insurrection Act, a law that could be a major tool in a second Trump administration to send federal troops into U.S. cities in what would surely be an invitation for violent clashes. They have sought to promote Trump’s dangerous rhetoric from 2020 opposing mail-in voting in the cynical, antidemocratic hope of tamping down Republican turnout….
A recent CBS poll showed that only 27 percent of people think Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, compared to 72 percent who think he does not. (A month ago, before the debate, the numbers were 35/65.) In swing-state polls, Biden is losing, and polls are moving in the wrong direction. Careful election analyst Dave Wasserman wrote on X: “The notion that the presidential is a Toss Up was a stretch even before the debate. Today, Trump has a clear advantage over Biden and a much more plausible path to 270 Electoral votes.” Dave Weigel notes that this is the first time in 24 years that a Republican is leading in polling averages after July 4. In July 2020, Biden was leading by 9 points. He ended up winning that race by exactly half that margin—a feat that raises further questions about his ability to overcome Trump’s growing lead…..
Instead, most Democrats are silent or have expressed their support for Biden’s run. Yet, behind the scenes, according to numerous reports, Democrats expect a shellacking, one that could not only take down Biden but also ensure that Trumpist Republicans control the House and the Senate. That situation of unified Republican political control, combined with a compliant Supreme Court, is powerful and volatile. Yet Biden seems to be taking this in stride too, telling interviewer George Stephanopoulos, when asked how he would feel next January if he stayed in the race and lost to Trump, “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
If it’s really true, though, that a second Trump term would be the kind of “five-alarm fire” that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned about in her dissent in the Supreme Court’s immunity case, and if Democrats really believe that a Biden loss is inevitable, then their failure to speak up now and intervene with Biden cannot be squared with their rhetoric of the Trump apocalypse of a second term…
“Rich Bernstein: Trump v. United States is the new Roe v. Wade”
Rich Bernstein at the Society for the Rule of Law:
On its face, the judicial method employed by Trump v. United States resembles Roe v. Wade in the ways that matter. Like Roe, the Trump majority explicitly relies on its views of wise policy. For example, the Trump majority invents immunities “to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution.” The Roe test eventually became “undue burden.” Both decisions support their policy pronouncements with one-sided snippets from prior cases that are readily distinguishable both factually and contextually.
Both decisions give one-sided descriptions of the policy considerations. The Trump majority thus worries about tit-for-tat prosecutions from successive administrations, but does not even rebut the dissent’s demonstration that immunity incentivizes all manner of future official presidential acts that constitute federal criminal conduct, including “[o]rganiz[ing] a military coup to hold onto power.” Both the Trump majority and Roe even announce a tri-partite division of rules going forward, just as a statute would. And so, we have gone from judge-made policies for three trimesters to judge-made policies for three buckets of presidential immunity issues. Missing from Trump, as in Roe, is any consideration of whether it is the politically-unaccountable Court that has the power to make policy in this area rather than the political branches that the voters elect and can replace.
Concomitantly, missing from the Trump majority, like Roe, is any serious engagement with the text of the Constitution and its history. The text of the Constitution gives Congress, not the Court, the power through legislation to create immunities for the Executive Branch. First, the Speech and Debate Clause creates constitutional immunities but only for the Legislative Branch. Second, the Necessary and Proper Clause empowers Congress to make “[a]ll Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing [i.e., legislative] Powers and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” (Emphasis added.) This gives Congress the power to legislate whatever immunities to ensure a bold and vigorous Executive Branch—which is part of the “Government of the United States”—that Congress sees fit. And Congress has created certain Executive Branch immunities, but never from federal criminal prosecution.
The Trump majority also ignored that the very Section of the Constitution that governs presidential elections—Section I of Article II—omits the President from any official role in determining the results. Those roles are given to the States, Congress, and (minimally) the Vice President. The Twelfth Amendment reiterates this omission of the President.
MORE at this virtual event Monday.
“Is Trump Now a ‘King’ Above the Law?”
I spoke with Australian Broadcasting Service’s News Daily podcast. Listen.