Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann, and it’s Election Day. If you’re watching this on Substack right now, help us out by clicking the ❤️ and tapping the restack icon. Those two clicks are what help get independent journalism in front of the most people.
Today, a fact-checker who has covered Donald Trump for years is laying out the five most likely debunked claims the president is likely to make if Republicans lose the midterms tonight, and what the facts actually show. A new poll finds that more than half of active-duty troops are reportedly wanting to quit due to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s politicization of the military. A January 6 insurrectionist Trump pardoned is now facing new federal charges for allegedly threatening to assassinate judges. And voters, election officials and even a former Capitol rioter are all worried Trump is planning to deploy his most militant supporters back to the Capitol if the midterms don’t go his way.
One quick thing before today’s news: on the day millions of Americans will decide who controls Congress for the next two years, social media platforms owned by MAGA billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are actively promoting disinformation while burying independent journalism telling the plain truth about what’s happening. Musk is even doing this while pouring almost half a billion dollars into Republican campaigns. But you can ensure their efforts fall short by becoming a paying subscriber and getting these stories directly in your inbox, which is the one thing they can’t touch.
Fact-checker Glenn Kessler knows Trump’s election playbook as well as anyone. He spent more than two decades at the Washington Post, and spent 15 years running the paper’s fact checker in which he frequently countered Trump’s lies, before Jeff Bezos’ cuts pushed him out. He’s now tracking and debunking the president’s false statements for MS NOW. Ahead of today’s vote, Kessler published a “prebuttal,” predicting that Trump will make at least five widely debunked claims should the GOP lose one or both chambers of Congress tonight.
The first claim is that late-counted mail ballots supposedly erased Republican victories. Leads tend to change on election night simply because of the order in which votes get counted. Democrats can appear strong early on in jurisdictions that count mail ballots first, while Republicans tend to narrow the gap as Election Day votes roll in. Trump has already argued that foul play was afoot in Virginia and California earlier this year due to this pattern, even though the Brookings Institution found mail voting fraud amounted to only four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots, which is obviously nowhere near enough to change the result of a statewide election. Just last month, Trump himself released a video urging his supporters to vote early, absentee or by mail. The president himself frequently votes by mail, given that he’s registered in Florida but lives in Washington.
Trump’s second often-repeated myth is that noncitizens are supposedly voting in large numbers. Trump has floated the claim that there are roughly 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote across the country and that 35,152 were registered in New Jersey alone. While New Jersey’s own preliminary review found there were roughly 6,600 improper registrations and up to 400 actual voters, FactCheck.org concluded that still wasn’t anywhere near enough to change the outcome of any federal race in the Garden State.
Third, Trump is insisting that Democrats get multiple ballots. In a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee this spring, he baselessly insisted that Democrats can sometimes get “six or seven ballots.” When Maryland mailed out replacement primary ballots to fix a printing error, the president said the correction was meant to hurt Republicans’ chances. Kessler observed that because Maryland’s ballot return envelopes each carry a unique identifier, there is still only one ballot per voter that actually gets counted.
Fourth, Trump frequently claims foreign governments and/or voting machines somehow changed results at the last minute. In a primetime speech this summer, Trump said there were “shocking vulnerabilities” in election systems, though he declined to present any actual evidence. There’s still nothing to prove that any foreign government ever changed vote totals in an American election at any point in history.
Finally, Trump has claimed on multiple occasions that Democrats’ opposition to nationwide voter ID laws is proof that they’re cheating in elections. When the president’s SAVE Act failed to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, he posted to his social media platform that Democrats wanted to sink it because “they want to continue to cheat in Elections.” But the National Conference of State Legislatures has made clear that states without photo ID laws for voting have plenty of other ways to verify voters’ identities.
In November of 1864, with the country in the midst of a civil war, Abraham Lincoln said that if the Confederacy could force the Union to forego or delay a national election, it could claim to have already conquered the country. Lincoln went through with the election anyway, because he knew that election aren’t a threat to the republic, but are the very essence of the republic itself. A president who spends months telling his followers that any election loss is because of theft is doing from the inside what Lincoln refused to let an army do from the outside.
Meanwhile, many of the very same people who swore an oath to defend the country are now looking for ways to rejoin civilian life. A new poll conducted by the veterans group Common Defense found that 53 percent of active-duty troops want to quit because of how much the military has been politicized under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Another 45 percent said the defense secretary’s policy changes and the instability that followed have them thinking about leaving the service earlier than they anticipated.
Two-thirds of active-duty servicemen and women said recent policy decisions governing the military were made for partisan political purposes more than out of concern for mission readiness. Army veteran Jose Vasquez, who leads Common Defense, told Military.com that more troops are blaming hyper-politicization for pushing them out of the service. Vasquez added that this presented a “readiness crisis.”
Half of the troops polled disapproved of Donald Trump’s performance as commander in chief. Hegseth’s approval rating was nearly identical. This isn’t a criticism of the entire chain of command though, as troops rated their own commanders much better, with an average approval rating of 56 percent. This poll comes as the war with Iran continues to rage on. Trump said over the weekend that he’s still planning to “take care of” more targets in Iran, and he carried out bombings of various sites just last night.
The framers feared the prospect of an army that only answered to one man instead of to the people, prompting them to write into Article I of the Constitution that no federal appropriations for the army could last longer than two years. They had just watched kings deploy soldiers against their own citizens, and they wanted Congress to have the power of the purse on a short leash. When our troops swear an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution, only to watch their public service get turned into a political prop, they’re rightly recognizing the very same danger the founders were most worried about.
New federal charges have been filed against Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., a 58-year-old former car wash owner from Georgia, for threatening the lives of multiple federal judges.
During the January 6 insurrection, Meredith had car trouble as he approached Washington D.C., and he was unable to get to the Capitol before police already took back control of the building and stopped the riot. The next day, he sent a message to a family member threatening to “put a bullet” in the head of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to Justice Department documents. Agents went on to discover a 9mm handgun, an assault-style rifle with a scope and roughly 2,500 rounds of ammunition in his truck and trailer, meaning that traffic problem likely saved many lives.
Meredith pleaded guilty to his initial charges and served time behind bars before Trump pardoned him on his first day back in office along with nearly 1,600 other participants in the insurrection. According to the New Yorker, Meredith has since turned on his own relatives, former classmates and even his own former lawyer, demanding financial compensation and threatening to seize their property through lawsuits.
Now, federal prosecutors say he posted to social media that “ALL J6 Federal JUDGES will be EXECUTED!” Seamus Hughes of CourtWatch News reported that the FBI linked the social media account in question to Meredith using records from Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), Google and T-Mobile. A federal judge found probable cause two days before Halloween. That same social media account reportedly asked Trump to appoint him as “Head EXECUTIONER” and warned various judges in an October post that Pete Hegseth “has plans 4U.”
Nearly 60 years ago, the KKK bombed the home of federal judge Frank Johnson’s mother in Montgomery, Alabama, because handed down a ruling that Black Americans had the right to march from Selma and vote. Back then, the terrorists were fighting against the federal government. But today, a man threatening to execute judges has been pardoned by the current president of the United States. That’s the biggest difference between a country with a violent fringe group of extremists, and a country where those extremists have friends in the Oval Office.
Tell Congress: impeach Pete Hegseth for his murderous crimes!
The kind of rhetoric seen from people like Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr. is exactly what has election officials in multiple states on edge today.
The Telegraph recently interviewed 38 year-old Jason Riddle of New Hampshire, who drank wine from a member of Congress’ office during the 2021 Capitol insurrection. In 2022, he wrote in his local paper that he regretted the insurrection failed to overturn the 2020 election. Now, Riddle is sober and is a member of a group called Leaving MAGA. Riddle told the Telegraph he worries history may repeat itself depending on what happens in the midterms tonight.
In some battleground states, polling places have installed bulletproof glass out of an abundance of caution. Some election officials are even carrying firearms in anticipation of violent threats. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said that some officials are bracing for the possibility that — for the first time in American history — the federal government “might be an adversary looking to actively interfere [with the electoral process].”
When reporters asked Trump on October 27 if he would accept the results of the midterms, he said he would, but with the caveat that they had to be “honest elections.” The Trump administration’s Justice Department has already sent warnings of potential non-citizen voting to election officials in every state. The DOJ has also asked Washington state to set aside ballots from more than 400 allegedly illegal registrants. Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said the timing was obviously designed to cast baseless suspicion on election results. The Justice Department is also deploying 1,000 federal monitors to the polls in all 50 states. For context, that’s triple the number of observers sent in the 2022 midterms.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the paper that voters fear Trump “will not care” about legal challenges playing out in court “and will call in people with guns.” The new Congress is slated to begin on January 3, 2027. Plenty of Americans c learly remember that it seemed unthinkable that there would be an attack on the Capitol building until it actually happened.
The only successful coup in American history happened in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 1898. That was when white supremacists who just lost an election armed themselves, burned down the office of the Black newspaper, killed dozens of their neighbors and put themselves in city hall. Nobody was ever punished for that despicable act. The lesson the country learned was that if you’re willing to use violence against an election and nobody will stop you, then to the victor go the spoils. That’s why the events the unfold across the country in the days following tonight’s election will matter just as much as what happens at the polls today.
As tens of millions of Americans are casting their ballots to decide control of Congress, the news outlets owned by billionaires with Mar-a-Lago memberships like David Ellison, Jeff Bezos and the Murdochs are determined to depress and demoralize Democrats. Independent journalism like the kind you read every day at Raw America is increasingly becoming the only reliable way to learn about what’s really happening.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. If you haven’t yet, help us get these stories in front of the most people by clicking the ❤️ and tapping restack. It genuinely helps more than you know.