Trump Thugs Planned to Intimidate Minority Voters

From the campaign where candidate Trump calls Hillary "crooked" at every rally:






Trump Loyalists Planned Voter Intimidation Using Fake ID Badges, Fake Exit Polling — Until HuffPost Asked Them About It

The “Vote Protectors” are affiliated with Trump adviser Roger Stone.


Vote Protectors, the anti-voter-fraud group hosted by Donald Trump ally and political dirty trickster Roger Stone, plans to send volunteers to monitor polling places in nine cities with high minority populations on Election Day, Stone said last week. Untrained poll-watchers have intimidated voters in previous elections. But Vote Protectors is going further than its predecessors. 

 Stone’s group created an official-looking ID badge for its volunteers to wear, and its volunteers planned to videotape voters and conduct fake “exit polls,” efforts that election experts say risks intimidating and confusing voters. 

Or at least that’s what the group was planning to do before The Huffington Post asked Stone about it on Tuesday. The controversial Trump ally, long known for his bare-knuckled political tactics, said that key proposals on his group’s websites were there without his knowledge, and assured HuffPost that he would operate within the confines of election law.

And this from David Leonhardt of the NYTimes:


Trump is scarier than Goldwater. He is scarier because he resembles a double agent dreamed up by liberal screenwriters. He embodies almost every left-wing caricature of Republicans that Republicans despise. He is a racist and a sexist — having refused to rent apartments to African-Americans, retweeted neo-Nazis, besmirched Muslims and Latinos and boastfully molested women. 

For years, Republicans have been frustrated by liberal sensitivity on race and gender. Comes now Trump, spewing bigotry. He is also an unrepentant denier of reality. Do you remember that Al Franken wrote a jeremiad against conservatives called “Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”? I imagine the book’s title offends you. Yet it now feels like a preview of a candidate who almost every day makes immediately disprovable claims. [...] 

 The best path is the hardest one. Only an unambiguous rejection of Trump will banish Trumpism for 2020 and beyond. Only a lopsided loss, with millions of Republicans so repelled by him that they vote for someone they never imagined they would, sends the message that bigotry, lying and authoritarianism violate Republican values — your values.

And Ross Douthat, conservative NYTimes columnist, does some soul searching and writes this truth:


"Some conservatives told themselves that Fox and Drudge and Breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible. Others (myself included) told ourselves that this irresponsibility could be mitigated by effective statesmanship, when in reality political conservatism’s leaders — including high-minded figures like Paul Ryan — turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation."