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Trump advisor Justin Clark, pictured here in September, told an audience of influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the GOP will go on offense in 2020 to monitor polls. (Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
After Admitting "It's Always Been Republicans Suppressing Votes," Trump Advisor Says Party Will Get Even More Aggressive in 2020
"It's clear there's no law Donald Trump and his right-wing machine won't bend, break, or ignore to try to win the presidency."
Dec 20, 2019
Reporting on Friday shows a top advisor for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign caught on tape in November bragging of the Republican Party's history of voter suppression--and promising to go on the offensive in 2020.
The revelation came from the Associated Press in a report Friday on comments by Trump re-election advisor Justin Clark at an event in Madison, Wisconsin.
"Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," said Clark. "Let's start protecting our voters. We know where they are... Let's start playing offense a little bit. That's what you're going to see in 2020."
\u201cIn an audio recording obtained by the AP, a Trump reelection adviser tells Wisconsin Republicans that the GOP has "traditionally" relied on voter suppression. He later said he was referring to false allegations that the party has used such tactics. https://t.co/3tzZ1s3Ps1\u201d— The Associated Press (@The Associated Press) 1576897444
AP reported that Clark's remarks show the Republican Party determined to use relaxed civil rights regulations to their advantage:
The roughly 20-minute audio offers an insider's glimpse of Trump's re-election strategy, showing the campaign focusing on voting locations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which form the the so-called "blue wall" of traditional Democratic strength that Trump broke through to win in 2016. Both parties are pouring millions of dollars into the states, anticipating they'll be just as critical in the 2020 presidential contest.
Republican officials publicly signaled plans to step up their Election Day monitoring after a judge in 2018 lifted a consent decree in place since 1982 that barred the Republican National Committee from voter verification and other "ballot security" efforts. Critics have argued the tactics amount to voter intimidation.
One Wisconsin Now deputy director Mike Browne expressed his outrage over the remarks and the alleged strategy.
"The strategy to rig the rules in elections and give themselves an unfair partisan advantage goes to Donald Trump, the highest levels of his campaign and the top Republican leadership," said Browne. "It's clear there's no law Donald Trump and his right-wing machine won't bend, break, or ignore to try to win the presidency."
Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch, said that Clark's comments showed that the GOP plans to go beyond suppressing the vote and "will now supplement with aggressive voter intimidation at polls."
Clark told AP that he was speaking in jest about a Republican history of voter suppression. But elections observers weren't buying it.
"This should be one of those things that Democrats never stop talking about," said Media Matters editor-at-large Parker Molloy. "This is a scandal. "
HuffPost senior enterprise editor Nick Baumann wasn't suprised at the content of the remarks but rather at the fact they were made in the first place.
"This seems like a noteworthy admission of something many people believe to be true but few people involved acknowledge," said Baumann.
Progressive advocacy group For Our Future Wisconsin treated the report as a call to action.
"Fight back by voting," the group tweeted.
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Reporting on Friday shows a top advisor for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign caught on tape in November bragging of the Republican Party's history of voter suppression--and promising to go on the offensive in 2020.
The revelation came from the Associated Press in a report Friday on comments by Trump re-election advisor Justin Clark at an event in Madison, Wisconsin.
"Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," said Clark. "Let's start protecting our voters. We know where they are... Let's start playing offense a little bit. That's what you're going to see in 2020."
\u201cIn an audio recording obtained by the AP, a Trump reelection adviser tells Wisconsin Republicans that the GOP has "traditionally" relied on voter suppression. He later said he was referring to false allegations that the party has used such tactics. https://t.co/3tzZ1s3Ps1\u201d— The Associated Press (@The Associated Press) 1576897444
AP reported that Clark's remarks show the Republican Party determined to use relaxed civil rights regulations to their advantage:
The roughly 20-minute audio offers an insider's glimpse of Trump's re-election strategy, showing the campaign focusing on voting locations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which form the the so-called "blue wall" of traditional Democratic strength that Trump broke through to win in 2016. Both parties are pouring millions of dollars into the states, anticipating they'll be just as critical in the 2020 presidential contest.
Republican officials publicly signaled plans to step up their Election Day monitoring after a judge in 2018 lifted a consent decree in place since 1982 that barred the Republican National Committee from voter verification and other "ballot security" efforts. Critics have argued the tactics amount to voter intimidation.
One Wisconsin Now deputy director Mike Browne expressed his outrage over the remarks and the alleged strategy.
"The strategy to rig the rules in elections and give themselves an unfair partisan advantage goes to Donald Trump, the highest levels of his campaign and the top Republican leadership," said Browne. "It's clear there's no law Donald Trump and his right-wing machine won't bend, break, or ignore to try to win the presidency."
Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch, said that Clark's comments showed that the GOP plans to go beyond suppressing the vote and "will now supplement with aggressive voter intimidation at polls."
Clark told AP that he was speaking in jest about a Republican history of voter suppression. But elections observers weren't buying it.
"This should be one of those things that Democrats never stop talking about," said Media Matters editor-at-large Parker Molloy. "This is a scandal. "
HuffPost senior enterprise editor Nick Baumann wasn't suprised at the content of the remarks but rather at the fact they were made in the first place.
"This seems like a noteworthy admission of something many people believe to be true but few people involved acknowledge," said Baumann.
Progressive advocacy group For Our Future Wisconsin treated the report as a call to action.
"Fight back by voting," the group tweeted.
Reporting on Friday shows a top advisor for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign caught on tape in November bragging of the Republican Party's history of voter suppression--and promising to go on the offensive in 2020.
The revelation came from the Associated Press in a report Friday on comments by Trump re-election advisor Justin Clark at an event in Madison, Wisconsin.
"Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," said Clark. "Let's start protecting our voters. We know where they are... Let's start playing offense a little bit. That's what you're going to see in 2020."
\u201cIn an audio recording obtained by the AP, a Trump reelection adviser tells Wisconsin Republicans that the GOP has "traditionally" relied on voter suppression. He later said he was referring to false allegations that the party has used such tactics. https://t.co/3tzZ1s3Ps1\u201d— The Associated Press (@The Associated Press) 1576897444
AP reported that Clark's remarks show the Republican Party determined to use relaxed civil rights regulations to their advantage:
The roughly 20-minute audio offers an insider's glimpse of Trump's re-election strategy, showing the campaign focusing on voting locations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which form the the so-called "blue wall" of traditional Democratic strength that Trump broke through to win in 2016. Both parties are pouring millions of dollars into the states, anticipating they'll be just as critical in the 2020 presidential contest.
Republican officials publicly signaled plans to step up their Election Day monitoring after a judge in 2018 lifted a consent decree in place since 1982 that barred the Republican National Committee from voter verification and other "ballot security" efforts. Critics have argued the tactics amount to voter intimidation.
One Wisconsin Now deputy director Mike Browne expressed his outrage over the remarks and the alleged strategy.
"The strategy to rig the rules in elections and give themselves an unfair partisan advantage goes to Donald Trump, the highest levels of his campaign and the top Republican leadership," said Browne. "It's clear there's no law Donald Trump and his right-wing machine won't bend, break, or ignore to try to win the presidency."
Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch, said that Clark's comments showed that the GOP plans to go beyond suppressing the vote and "will now supplement with aggressive voter intimidation at polls."
Clark told AP that he was speaking in jest about a Republican history of voter suppression. But elections observers weren't buying it.
"This should be one of those things that Democrats never stop talking about," said Media Matters editor-at-large Parker Molloy. "This is a scandal. "
HuffPost senior enterprise editor Nick Baumann wasn't suprised at the content of the remarks but rather at the fact they were made in the first place.
"This seems like a noteworthy admission of something many people believe to be true but few people involved acknowledge," said Baumann.
Progressive advocacy group For Our Future Wisconsin treated the report as a call to action.
"Fight back by voting," the group tweeted.
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LATEST NEWS
'We're Turning Into a Dictatorship': Trump Tariffs Seen as Ploy to Further Consolidate Power
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy called President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs "a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
Apr 07, 2025
Analysts puzzling over the bizarre formula the Trump administration used to calculate its country-by-country tariff rates are wasting their time, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in a response to the American president that has gone viral in recent days as global markets continue to nosedive.
"It's not economic policy, it's not trade policy," Murphy (D-Conn.) said in remarks recorded after Trump announced the sweeping tariffs last week. "It's a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
While President Donald Trump's universal tariffs on imports make no sense as an effort to rectify the failures of the status quo trade regime and bring back offshored U.S. jobs, they are comprehensible when viewed as "a tool to try to compel pledges of loyalty, this time from companies and industries in the United States," Murphy argued.
"You have to understand that everything Donald Trump is doing is in service of staying in power forever—either him or his family or his handpicked successors," the Democratic senator continued. "He's trying to destroy our democracy."
Murphy contended that the president designed the tariffs to be so widespread that corporations across private industry would have to come to the White House and "make an agreement with Trump in which he gives them tariff relief in exchange for a pledge of political loyalty."
"What could that pledge look like?" Murphy continued. "Well, maybe they agree to champion his economic policy publicly. Maybe they agree to make contributions to his political campaign. Maybe they agree to police their employees to make sure that nobody that works for that company works for the political opposition."
Politico reported late last week that businesses across corporate America "fear Trump's wrath" and are thus declining to criticize the president's tariff policies even as they wreak havoc worldwide and threaten to spark a devastating recession.
"There is zero incentive for any company or brand to be remotely critical of this administration," one unnamed public affairs operative told Politico. "It destroys your ability to work with the White House and advance your policies, period."
"While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
Murphy is hardly alone in seeing Trump's tariffs as an instrument of power consolidation.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, wrote Monday that "we're turning into a dictatorship" as Trump conjures "fake national emergencies" to jack up tariffs, deport people en masse without due process, gut efforts to combat the climate crisis, and dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
"As Trump declares emergency after emergency to justify his reign of terror, he's simultaneously eliminating America's capacity to respond to real emergencies," Reich wrote. "Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
One analyst, Zack Beauchamp of Vox, argued the tariffs are more a symptom of the decline of U.S. democracy rather than a cause of it.
"Trump's tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn't have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes," Beauchamp wrote. "The fact that America isn't functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin."
"It's still possible that Trump steps back from the brink," he added. "But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: The long decay of America's democratic system means that we are all living under an axe. And if this isn't the moment it falls, there will surely be another."
Trump Calls Tariff Madness a 'Beautiful Thing to Behold' as Global Markets Crater
"If the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
Apr 07, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump late Sunday openly embraced the global chaos sparked by his sweeping tariffs, careening headlong into a potentially catastrophic trade war as worldwide financial markets plummeted and American retirees began to panic.
In a post on his social media platform, Trump declared that his tariffs are "already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold."
"Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!" Trump wrote as recent retirees and people near retirement expressed fear and astonishment at the swift damage the president's policy decisions have done to their investment accounts.
One retiree, a 68-year-old former occupational health worker in New Jersey, told NBC News that she is "just kind of stunned, and with so much money in the market, we just sort of have to hope we have enough time to recover."
"What we've been doing is trying to enjoy the time that we have, but you want to be able to make it last," the retiree, identified as Paula, said on Friday. "I have no confidence here."
Trump's post doubling down on his tariff regime came as Asian markets cratered and U.S. stock futures opened bright red, signaling that Monday will bring another broad sell-off in equities. One of Trump's top economic advisers claimed in a Sunday interview that the president is not intentionally crashing the stock market, even as Trump—returning from a weekend golf outing in Florida—characterized the tariffs as "medicine."
"I don't want anything to go down," the president said. "But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something."
Bloomberg's John Authers wrote early Sunday that "if the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
Though the stock market and the economy are not synonymous, economist Josh Bivens recently noted that they are currently "mirroring each other: Stock market weakness is reflecting broader economic weakness."
"While the stock market isn't the economy, the stock market declines we have seen in recent weeks are genuinely worrying," wrote Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "They are a symptom of much larger dysfunctional macroeconomic policy that will likely soon start showing up in higher unemployment and slower wage growth for the vast majority."
'Totally Lawless': Judge Orders Trump to Return Man Sent to El Salvador Prison in 'Error'
"This was an illegal act," said U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis.
Apr 06, 2025
A federal court judge on Sunday declared the Trump administration's refusal to return a man they sent to an El Salvadoran prison in "error" as "totally lawless" behavior and ordered the Department of Homeland Security to repatriate the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, within 24 hours.
In a 22-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis doubled down on an order issued Friday, which Department of Justice lawyers representing the administration said was an affront to his executive authority.
"This was an illegal act," Xinis said of DHS Secretary Krisi Noem's attack on Abrego Garcia's rights, including his deportation and imprisonment.
"Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or officer; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador in direct contravention of [immigration law]," the decision states.
Once imprisoned in El Salvador, the order continues, "U.S. officials secured his detention in a facility that, by design, deprives its detainees of adequate food, water, and shelter, fosters routine violence; and places him with his persecutors."
Trump's DOJ appealed Friday's order to 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, but that court has not yet ruled on the request to stay the order from Xinis, which says Abrego Garcia should be returned to the United States no later than Monday.
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