During an interview with CBS Miami, Donald Trump said he’d like to change the nature of the First Amendment in order to make it easier to file libel lawsuits against the media.
Trump spoke with Jim DeFede on Sunday, and he was asked about whether he feels that “too much protection” is given to the free press. Trump affirmed his belief on this issue, stating that America should lean towards the United Kingdom’s system for libel because it gives people who sue media agencies “a good chance of winning.”
“Our press is allowed to say whatever they want and get away with it. And I think we should go to a system where if they do something wrong… I’m a big believer tremendous believer of the freedom of the press. Nobody believes it stronger than me but if they make terrible, terrible mistakes and those mistakes are made on purpose to injure people. I’m not just talking about me I’m talking anybody else then yes, I think you should have the ability to sue them.”
Under English law, defamatory statements are assumed to be false, and the burden of proof lies with the defendant to show that their statement is true. While Trump talked about this system, Trump said that the American press is never compelled to apologize, and that “they can say anything they want about you or me and there doesn’t have to be any apology.”
Donald Trump vowed Saturday to sue the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct in recent weeks.
“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” Trump said during remarks in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”
He added that a “simple phone call” to major news outlets “gets them wall-to-wall coverage with virtually no fact-checking ever.”
In the last two weeks, at least 10 women have come forward accusing Trump of inappropriately touching them. Their allegations came after a 2005 videotape surfaced of
Trump bragging about being able to grope women and get away with it.
Trump often threatens to file lawsuits without actually doing so. Earlier this month, he threatened to sue The New York Times when it published assault allegations against him, but nearly two weeks later, he has declined to follow through.
Trump went on to suggest Saturday that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was behind the women’s allegations.
“It was probably the (Democratic National Committee) and Hillary’s campaign who put forward these liars with their fabricated stories,” he said. “But we’ll probably find out later through litigation, which we’re so looking forward to.”
Asked about Trump’s claim, Clinton, speaking to reporters aboard her campaign plane Saturday night, simply said, “That’s just not accurate.”
Donald Trump regularly threatens to sue individuals who criticize him, but rarely follows through. But when he does and on the occasions that he wins he ruins that person’s life, like former Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin, who was forced to pay Trump $5 million dollars after a judgement went against her.
Lisa Bloom, who represents Jill Harth, who has accused Trump of making unwanted sexual advances on her on two separate occasions in the early 1990s, replied to Trump on Twitter Saturday afternoon.
“If Trump sues accusers we then have subpoena power to require not only Trump but all his enablers to appear for depositions. A field day,” Bloom said as part of a series of tweets.
Donald Trump on Thursday cut an interview short with an Ohio journalist after the correspondent asked him to address criticism that he’s racist and sexist.
The Republican nominee quietly thanked NBC 4’s Colleen Marshall and began to walk away while she was halfway through asking him how he feels about being “labeled a racist” and “called a sexist” so close to Election Day.
When she proceeded to probe him for his response, he said: “I am the least racist person you’ve ever met.”
Trump had been discussing an array of topics with Marshall, including his claims that the election is rigged and Republican leaders who have withdrawn their support from him, for about three minutes before she brought up the apparently sensitive issue.
If Trump can’t answer a simple question from a reporter without losing his temper, how can we expect him to react when dealing with adversarial foreign leaders?
Trump claimed he was the least racist person ever, and we might be inclined to believe him if it wasn’t for the racist things he has said over the course of his campaign.
So far we’ve cataloged over 115 instances of Trump making a racist comments or claims. Some of them include:
Donald Trump was the leader of the “birther” conspiracy theory movement, which was a racist attempt to delegitimize America’s first African-American president.
Trump retweeted the same white supremacist not once, but twice.
The Trump campaign had 3 known white supremacists as delegates to the Republican National Convention to represent Trump, William Johnson, Guy St. Onge, and Lori Gayne whose Twitter handle was “whitepride”.
Media
Looks like things got hairy at the end of this Trump local interview. He just walks away:
During the 3rd and final presidential debate, Donald Trump denied any allegations that he’s groped or kissed women, the Republican nominee attempted to deflect the claims with one of his own: “Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody.”
Then, not a half hour later and completely unprompted, Donald Trump spoke into his microphone to interrupt Hillary Clinton while she was answering a question about how she would raise taxes on the rich to tackle debt and entitlements if she were to become president, saying she was “such a nasty woman.”
“My Social Security payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald’s, assuming he can’t figure out how to get out of it,” Clinton said.
“Such a nasty woman,” Trump said into the microphone while Clinton was talking.
She continued her answer without acknowledging the insult.
Donald Trump does not respect the democratic process.
A defiant Donald Trump used the high-profile setting of the final presidential debate here Wednesday night to amplify one of the most explosive charges of his candidacy: that if he loses the election, he might consider the results illegitimate because the process is rigged.
Questioned directly as to whether he would accept the outcome should Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton prevail on Nov. 8, Trump demurred. “I will keep you in suspense,” the Republican nominee said.
When given a chance to clarify his remarks by host Chris Wallace, Trump simply repeated his refusal to say for certain that he would accept the results of the election.
Clinton called Trump’s answer “horrifying,” saying he was “talking down our democracy.”
With his leading of the racist birther movement and his refusal during the third debate, this is the third consecutive presidential election that Donald Trump tried to de-legitimize.
In order to understand just how anti-democracy and anti-American Trump’s stance is, we need some historical context.
The United States of America is credited as the very first time in the recorded history of the world a peaceful, election-based transfer of political power of the premier from one political party to another. The entire world watched as America’s election of 1800 became a bitter and ugly fight between incumbent President John Adams and challenger and fellow founding father Thomas Jefferson. People in Europe, who lived under monarchies and theocracies for centuries, assumed this would be the point where America’s experiment with democracy would fail. But when President Adams lost and peacefully conceded total and complete power to Jefferson, it placed the rest of the world is disbelief, and led as an example for every election that followed.
(Side note, I’m a fan of Roman history and there were many instances where individuals were made dictator, usually to help stop an invading group, and then peacefully stepped down when their term as dictator was up. It was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus who first began this tradition, who many statesmen modeled themselves after including George Washington who insisted his paintings and sculptures were to be inspired from those of Cincinnatus.)
2000 Election
Many of Trump’s surrogates have pointed to the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore as a recent example of one candidate not conceding to another.
Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “Al Gore had already conceded the election to George W. Bush in 2000, Chris, we remember the night well. And then he called to retract his concession, and it went on for six weeks, it went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.”
But what Conway and the other supports are deceitfully neglecting to mention is in 2000, we had a perilously close popular vote in the state of Florida which triggered an automatic machine recount of ballots in the state. Only after that recount showed the race even closer than it was previously—just 327 votes separated the two candidates out of 6 million votes total across the state—did Gore opt to pursue a hand recount in four counties, a right granted to him by Florida law.
The day after the Supreme Court ordered the state of Florida to stop its recount of ballots on December 12, 2000, Al Gore conceded the race and called George W. Bush to congratulate him on his victory.
This is absolutely and unequivocally nothing like Trump refusing to accept the results of the election should he lose.
The law banned the procedure, imposing a fine and imprisonment for any physician who “knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in 2007.
Some 91 percent of abortions take place in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Only 1.3 percent of abortions happen at or after 21 weeks after conception. Of those, the vast majority happen before 24 weeks. Under the current federal ban, a dilation and extraction (D&X), or intact dilation and evacuation (D&E) — what opponents call “partial-birth” abortion — is still allowed if the life of the mother is at stake, which his guaranteed under Row vs. Wade. Still, very few providers perform it and the exact number of procedures is not known, but it’s believed to be small.
That’s because, along with the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, 19 states have their own such bans, while 43 states impose some kind of restriction on abortions later in pregnancy.
Understand that abortion is a very serious and polarizing issue to many people, but if we are to have an equally serious discussion and debate then we should be arguing the facts and realities instead of fear-based allegations, otherwise we dishonor the lives and decisions of everyone involved.
In another early-morning tweet-rage, Donald Trump on Monday claimed widespread voter fraud was taking place before Election Day, ramping up his charges that the presidential election is being rigged.
Trump also criticized Republicans who have not backed up his claims. A number of GOP officials, including Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.), have said they are confident in the state election processes and safeguards.
Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!
The Trump campaign pointed to a 2012 Pew Center on the States study of ways to make the election system more accurate, cost-effective and efficient. At an Oct. 17 rally, Trump cited the three main findings of the speech to back up his claim that voter fraud is common across the country:
About 24 million (1 in every 8) voter registrations were significantly inaccurate or no longer valid because people moved, had died or were inactive voters.
More than 1.8 million records for people who are deceased, but whose registrations were still on voter rolls.
About 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state. This could happen if voters move to a new state and register to vote without notifying their former state.
Outdated technology, shrinking government budgets and paper-based registration systems contributed to inaccuracies and inefficiencies.
But the study does not say that these problems indicated signs of isolated or widespread voter fraud. Yet Trump used the 1.8 million figure to inaccurately claim at the rally: “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals right now are listed as voters. Oh, that’s wonderful. Well, if they’re going to vote for me, we’ll think about it, right? But I have a feeling they’re not going to vote for me. Of the 1.8 million, 1.8 million is voting for somebody else.”
The campaign pointed to three instances of voting irregularities — in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Virginia. But they were isolated instances that do not amount to widespread voter fraud — and do not show they are as common as he says they are.
Trump’s campaign then sent lists of nearly 300 instances of voting irregularities between 2004 and 2016. Some of the cases involved indictments and guilty pleas of actual voter fraud, where someone illegally mailed an early ballot or cast a ballot at a polling place to defraud the system.
But the lists also included unsupported allegations of fraud, investigations into potential fraud and reports of less nefarious activities, such as people voting incorrectly and voting machines malfunctioning.
Even if all 300 instances were confirmed cases of actual voter fraud, they would make up such a small portion of total ballots cast in that 12-year period that it would be preposterous to call voter fraud a widespread or a “big, big” problem.
More than 1 billion ballots were cast from 2000 through 2014. There were 31 incidents of specific, credible allegations of voter impersonation at the polls, according to research by Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, who has been tracking such data for years. So the problem that Trump is warning his voters to watch for at the polls — to make sure things are “on the up and up” — happens at the rate of 31 out of 1 billion ballots cast.
But it would be certainly nearly impossible to do something like that to tip a presidential election. We’re talking about a nationwide effort of local, state and federal election officials colluding to commit a felony. Politicians and lawyers for both major parties and every poll watcher would have to be in on it. A conspiracy so large and full of holes, only the most oblivious and illogical would think it exists.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump dug deeper in his dangrous efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the U.S. election, saying on Twitter on Sunday that he believed the results were being “rigged” at many polling places.
His tweet came hours after his vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, said Republicans would accept the outcome of the Nov. 8 contest between Trump and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Trump, who is trailing Clinton in opinion polls, did not provide any evidence to back his allegations of impropriety at the voting booth.
The New York businessman, who has never held elective office, has often said the electoral process is skewed against him, including during the Republican nominating contests, when he disputed the method for winning delegates to the Republican National Convention.
His latest complaint of media bias stems from allegations by women that he groped them or made other unwanted sexual advances, after a 2005 video became public in which Trump was recorded bragging about such behavior. He apologized for the video but has denied each of the accusations.
“Election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign, by putting stories that never happened into news!” Trump tweeted on Sunday, a sentiment he also expressed in posts and during rallies in Maine and New Hampshire on Saturday. The comments raised questions both from Republicans and Democrats about whether he would accept the outcome should he lose to Clinton.
Trump said after the first presidential debate in September that he would “absolutely” accept the election outcome. But a few days afterward, he told the New York Times: “We’re going to see what happens.”
He has also urged his supporters to keep an eye on voting locations to prevent a “stolen” election, which some critics interpreted as encouraging them to intimidate voters.
When asked for more detail about how the election will be rigged, Trump and members of his campaign have all pointed to “inner-cities” with largely African-American populations, such as Philadelphia.
Trump has called for “election observers” in these African-American communities where he hopes to place his supporters who are untrained in the election process to question individual voter’s eligibility, which many experts identify as voter intimidation.
Top Donald Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani claimed Sunday that Democrats could steal a close election by having dead people vote in inner cities, while vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said the ticket will “absolutely accept the result of the election.”
“I’m sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans,” the former New York City mayor told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” “You want me to (say) that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that.”
But he did say the amount of cheating would only impact extremely close races — noting, for example, if either Trump or Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania by “5 points,” the cheating he alleges would occur would be negligible and not change the outcome.
Giuliani was backing up Trump, the Republican nominee, who has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail — without providing evidence — that his race against Clinton is being rigged.
Trump tweeted Sunday: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD”
But Pence told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that he will accept the Election Day results.
“We will absolutely accept the result of the election,” he said. “Look, the American people will speak in an election that will culminate on November the 8. But the American people are tired of the obvious bias in the national media. That’s where the sense of a rigged election goes here, Chuck.”
Tapper pushed back on Giuliani, saying even Republicans had debunked the conspiracy theories pushed online that low vote totals in Philadelphia in 2012 for Mitt Romney were the result of a rigged process.
Giuliani said as a prosecutor, he remembers an election in Chicago in which 720 supposedly dead people voted — and that 60 dead people cast ballots in his own mayor’s race.
He said elections fraud would only make a difference in a 1 to 2 percentage point races.
He also said that only Democrats do it, because it happens in inner cities.
“I can’t sit here and tell you that they don’t cheat. And I know that because they control the polling places in these areas. There are no Republicans, and it’s very hard to get people there who will challenge votes. So what they do is, they leave dead people on the rolls and then they pay people to vote as dead people, four, five, six, seven” times, Giuliani said.
“I’ve found very few situations where Republicans cheat. They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities, they’d do as much cheating as Democrats do,” he said.
Tapper said: “I think there are a lot of elections experts that would have very, very strong disagreements with you.”
Giuliani responded: “Well then they never prosecuted elections fraud.”
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and also a top Trump ally, said on ABC’s “This Week” that Trump’s concerns about election rigging are “not about election officials at the precinct level.”
However, he also urged Trump voters to monitor polling stations.
“I remember when Richard Nixon had the election stolen in 1960, and no serious historian doubts that Illinois and Texas were stolen. So to suggest that, we have, you don’t have theft in Philadelphia is to deny reality,” Gingrich said.
Rudy Giuliani has spit out so many conspiracy theories and out-right lies, he is starting to conflate them all together. So not only does he not have any evidence for the two originating conspiracy theories, he would also not have any evidence for this new one he just invented, that dead people are voting in Philadelphia and Chicago, either.
First Giuliani is claiming that dead people are voting in elections, and to this there is a kernel of truth. For example earlier this year an investigation by CBS in Los Angeles uncovered 215 instances of voter impersonation since 2004 of people who have since deceased voting in local elections. However, unlike alt-right website like Breitbart who try to blow it way out of proportion calling it ‘hundreds‘, those numbers are so low compared to the 4.8 million registered voters in Los Angeles to hardly be a concern in a county that is so deeply blue it is often a target to conservatives. And while Rudy tries to paint this as a Democrat conspiracy, keep in mind in that report while 146 of the voters were indeed Democrats, 86 were registered Republicans.
And second, ever since the 2012 election there have been internet claims of voter fraud in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where 0 votes were cast for Mitt Romney. Even Sean Hannity jumped into these waters a few times, all of which have been debunked over and over again. In the 59 divisions of Philadelphia, the average number of registered Republicans in these divisions was 17 people. The Philadelphia Inquirer sought out these voters after the election and found that many people moved, some were registered incorrectly, and others just plain didn’t vote.
A Donald Trump supporter wearing a “Gays for Trump” T-shirt got rounds of high-fives after placing a protester in a violent headlock during a North Carolina campaign rally Friday.
The violence erupted after the protester had rushed towards the stage holding an American flag upside down during a rally in Greensboro. Upon spotting the protester, Trump — getting back to his violence-encouraging old ways — repeatedly crowed “Get out!” from the stage.
The “Gays for Trump” vigilante, who also wore a red “Make America Great Again” cap, can then be seen in video rushing towards the protester, pummeling him before locking his head with his left arm.
The violent episode was quickly broken up by officers, who escorted the protester out as rally-goers erupted in “USA! USA! USA!” chants.
After getting pushed away by an officer, the gay-friendly brawler received at least a dozen high-fives from cheering Trump supporters.
Trump, meanwhile, decried the protester for disrespecting the Star Spangled Banner and ignored his violent supporter.
“That’s what’s happening to our country, that’s what’s happening. That is total disrespect for our flag, that’s what’s happening to our country,” the Republican nominee said from the stage.
“We’re going to turn it around, folks. We’re going to turn it around.”
Protests at Trump rallies do not occur in a vacuum. Since he first announced his candidacy, Trump continues to make racist, sexist, and authoritarian remarks that marginalizes anyone who do not meet his view of white and conservative enough.
