Source: Anadolu Agency / Getty
Last week, we reported that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said it plans to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers across battleground states to monitor the counting of votes and potentially challenge the count. The plans were confirmed by the RNC, which announced that attorneys would be stationed at “every single target processing center where mail ballots are tabulated.” Obviously, this is being done mostly to bolster the thoroughly debunked narrative that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump. They’re operating under the guise of democracy and securing elections that no Republican official appears to be able to prove need securing.
Make it make sense.
In the vulgar, sharp arc of American history, the only consistent group needing voter and election protection has been Black people, regardless of party. In 1898, in the integrated but majority-Black city of Wilmington, North Carolina, Black aldermen and magistrates had been elected to serve. The elected white mayor was a member of the bi-racial Fusion party which sought to make full meaning of the words laid out in the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Wilmington was a rare southern city in those heady days in the generation following the war.
Until it wasn’t.
The History of America is the History of Voter Suppression
White residents of the area were stoked and led by former Confederacy Col. Alfred Waddell, who said that to stop Black voters, white people should “choke the Cape Fear (River) with carcasses.” Waddell led a fear-mongering campaign that MAGAs carry forward today: Black men were rapists and they were coming for white women. Then there’s the other go-to lie: the Coloreds are taking over our beautiful white republic.
And in Wilmington 126 years ago, the white supremacists rioted throughout the city–and state–for days, killing Black people and destroying Black businesses–especially newspapers. In the end, the dead numbered between 60 and 300, an unspeakable and unethical margin of error that telegraphs, even today that Black lives, Black bodies don’t matter. As for the number of Black people driven from their homes and out toward the swampland and sea? Thousands. And the duly elected aldermen, magistrates and mayor (who was not Black, but a member of the Fusion party) were removed at gunpoint. It was the singular successful coup d’état on American soil.
North Carolina followed its Southern neighbors who’d rescinded voting rights for Black men 20 years before. Poll taxes and literacy tests were installed along with the grandfather clause, and the tradition of white violence and intimidation against Black voters was cemented.
Which is why it’s both gaslighting and unsurprising that Lara Trump, the ex-commander-in-would-be-thief’s daughter-in-law and the new co-leader of the RNC, is out here promoting the MAGA campaign’s ballot op D.R.O.P. Squad as if they’re going to be doing necessary work by correcting the 2020 election fraud that the former head of election cybersecurity, Trump’s own attorney general, his administration’s own Department of Justice and dozens of judges all agreed never happened.
But here we are.
Lara the Illegal
On Tuesday, Lara made an appearance on Newsmax. She pretended that the RNC was acting to protect our precious democracy. Her plan seems to be to use any means necessary to make her father president again, whether the presumptive nominee legitimately wins the election or not. Cheating, lying, bullying, threatening? All on the table.
“This election, I think we can all see the most important thing aside from getting out the vote is protecting that vote,” she told Newsmax host Eric Bolling. “We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers, people standing in polling locations, but people who can physically handle the ballots.”
For the record, poll watchers physically handling ballots or voting machines is very much illegal, but why would Lara know that? She’s only the co-leader of one of the nation’s two major political parties, after all.
But it’s fine, good people, because the people who apparently don’t know things are training the poll watchers to also not know things.
“We train them to actually work in these polling locations and think about how much better off that makes us in terms of transparency,” Lara said.
“They can count how many ballots come in and how many ballots should go out of every single polling location,” she went on to say. (Also no.)
Now, here’s the part of the interview that really gets my eyes rolling.
“Eric we all know 2020 was not all on the up and up people had a lot of unanswered questions,” she said. “We can never repeat that so in addition to these these poll workers we’re going to have lawyers and all the major polling locations across the country.”
See, this is the thing that people, especially conservatives, do that is supremely annoying; they present a notion as if it’s a universally agreed-upon fact, when, truthfully, there is zero evidence to support it. None of the “big lie” spreaders ever presented a shred of evidence that “2020 was not all on the up and up,” and the only people who “had a lot of unanswered questions” were people who believed Trump’s orangey-white nonsense, because it’s what they wanted to believe, and willfully ignored any answers given by actual election officials that poked holes in their tinfoil hat-worthy conspiracy theorizing.
“Here’s something else we need to make clear: if we catch you cheating, and we’re looking for you out there to cheat, we will prosecute you to the full extent of the law. It is not worth it to cheat in a federal election that is a crime my friends, you do not want to commit,” Lara continued.
Considering that Lara appears to be referencing the fictional “cheating” in the 2020 election and that she’s outright admitting that they will be “looking for” people to do again what they didn’t actually do the first time, her words could easily be interpreted as a preemptive call to intimidate voters, manipulate the election and reject the election results if Trump doesn’t win. It’s a sentiment echoed across social and multiple other media. Of course we could just call all of this simply American history choosing to remain American history.
SEE ALSO:
There He Goes Again: More Trump Hate Speech
We Fight Back: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Impact on Black Voting Rights
