Explosive Diarrhea Cha-Cha-Cha

Trump's national address on election security was a bunch of bullshit

The only thing newsworthy about Donald Trump's national address last night on election fraud was that he was doing it. Trump did this for his ego and as a pretense to stealing this year's midterm elections.

Trump did not reveal any evidence of election fraud. One of the few outlets that showed his address, Fox News, stopped talking about the address about 15 minutes after. Of course, after being sued for $178.7 million for spreading lies about Dominion voting machines in the 2020 election, they may be a little gun shy and had to find some other bullshit to talk about, like another feature on Zohran Mamdani or commie socialists.

Trump claimed that the government kept information about voter fraud out of his daily briefing during his first term, saying, “Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else and to the best of our knowledge they did not inform Congress.”
Except the people in charge of that were people he hired. That was his government. And how would he know what was in the briefings since he never paid attention to them? Trump’s CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, was Director of National Intelligence in 2020. If there was a deep state keeping this information from him, it was his deep state.

This is like complaining that Biden's government censored speech on Twitter while Donald Trump was president, before there was a Biden government.

Trump claimed that China had gained access to voter data, that it had bought, stolen or hacked tens of millions of voter data files across 18 states, but didn't offer any evidence that they had interfered in the election. It was not a surprise that he barely mentioned Russia.

US intelligence and congressional officials have long known that China obtained voter data that is publicly available information and usually purchased by political campaigns. This is the same information his campaigns have bought. Yet, former intelligence officials have said that China gathered the data not to manipulate voting results, but instead to better craft influence campaigns to shape voters’ perceptions.
The documents actually concede that China NEVER endorsed any broad-based effort to undercut Trump, like Russia did with Hillary Clinton in 2016, which Donald Trump never wants to talk about. Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't talk about Chinese bamboo ballots are Italian satellites.

The only thing missing during his speech was Sidney Powell spreading her conspiracy theories next to Rudy Giuliani with shoe polish dripping off his head.

If you remember correctly, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump endorsed Russian meddling, and even invited Russian agents to his campaign headquarters to divulge dirt on Hillary Clinton. After he was president, Trump flew to Helsinki and took Vladimir Putin's side while standing next to him against our national intelligence agencies when the Russian president claimed he never meddled in our election.

At this time, Trump's Justice Department is pushing ahead with an investigation into a possible “grand conspiracy” by Democrats to tie him to Russia. In 2020, Trump's DOJ enacted a special counsel investigation that was meant to debunk the Mueller investigation, but failed and ended with no arrests.

By focusing solely on China, Donald Trump is again encouraging Russia to meddle in our elections. They know that if they do, there will be no sanctions or any other forms of punishment against them because Donald Trump will deny that they did it.

Trump said, “Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.” Except the 2020 election was the safest in American history of to that point, and the documents that Trump did release confirmed that. The person undermining trust in our elections is Donald Trump.

The documents Trump released also do not contain significant new revelations about vulnerabilities in election systems. One of the documents posted on the White House website bluntly stated, “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”

Trump called for fixing vulnerabilities in electronic voting system so that “we can never watch a stolen election again.” Again? When was the first one? Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, fairly, and that is a fact. He lost that election by over 7 million votes.

He said, “If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states. And we are committing to fix it, and we are also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.”

Trump has spent the first part of his second term dismantling the election protections built up over previous years. The FBI’s task force on foreign influence was shut down, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sharply cut back a task force that warned against foreign meddling and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been gutted. And Trump has appointed an heir to a housing fortune with no relevant experience as the interim Director of National Intelligence. And during testimony this week to be confirmed as the new DNI, Trump's nominee, Jay Clayton, was too chickenshit to state that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, again, by over 7 million votes.

Trump also spent time during his speech yelling about non-citizens registered to vote. Except there was no massive voter fraud or election interference in the 2020 election. The biggest case of election interference in the 2020 election was when Donald Trump called Georgia’s Secretary of State to demand that he find him 11,780 votes.

Donald Trump has also been demanding that states give him all of their voter data, which blue states are rebelling against. Today, Markwayne Mullin, the Director of Homeland Security, threatened to bring criminal charges against state officials who refuse to cooperate and give the federal government state voter data. But the constitution states that elections are to be controlled by the states, not the federal government. Markwayne Mullin can't do what he is threatening.

Trump finished his speech, demanding that Congress passed the so-called SAVE act, which is a voter suppression bill and doesn't address most of the concerns he talked about in his speech.

“Addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America act,” Trump said. “The only reason you would not do it is you want to cheat. Because your policies are so bad. And your candidates are so pathetic.” Yet the Republican Party enacted new voter suppression laws after Trump lost in 2020, and this year they have been redistricting mid-decade to give the Republican Party more districts to Stymie their expected losses in this year's midterms.

The so-called SAVE America act does nothing about foreign meddling or election interference.

This is an issue that only Donald Trump wants to talk about when most Americans would rather he focus on inflation, the economy, and his chosen war against Iran. This is a buildup dis stealing the midterm elections and into the future, the 2028 presidential election. This year, expect federal troops, ICE, or otherwise, to be stationed at voting precincts.

The greatest threat to free and fair elections isn't China or non-citizens, but Donald Trump and Republicans.

Creative note: It always feels weird when I draw Trump without his ear diaper or big pink mouth, but those features would have gotten in the way of today's cartoon.

Canadian smoke: smoke from the Canadian wildfires has reached as far south as Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I hear even further south. I'm glad I saved a few N95 masks. The air stinks, and it kind of burns the eyes.

Drawn in 30 seconds:

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