Donald Trump’s latest scheme gets blown wide open

| 12:12 pm EDT June 24, 2018
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Things are certainly not going according to the plan Donald Trump had in mind when he plotted to overthrow American democracy and, with help from foreign adversaries, stay in power indefinitely. The documented coordination between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin goes back at least as far as 2013 when Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. Along with assistance from Putin, Trump planned to steal the 2016 election, appoint a trusted and loyal Attorney General to protect him from any investigation, and institute as many voter suppression techniques as necessary to ensure that he and the Republican Party would reign supreme.

The first phase of the plan went better than even Trump could have hoped for. Weaponizing the hacked DNC emails, deleting or altering voter databases, and utilizing Cambridge Analytica for targeted social media attacks, Trump was able to illegitimately take the highest office in the land. The second part of Trump’s plan did not go quite as well. Trump is still furious, more than a year later, that Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. With a clear consciousness of guilt, Trump has attacked Sessions on Twitter and in interviews on a regular basis since the recusal on March 2, 2017.

Assuming his plan would have made it through the first two steps, the third portion of Trump’s power grab was to make it even harder for those opposed to him to vote in future elections, with this plan revolving around the previous similar success in Kansas by Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State in Kansas. As the ACLU stated, “Kobach has a ready-made plan to gut core voting rights protections enshrined in federal law. And he has been covertly lobbying Trump’s team and other officials from day one to sell them the falsehood that noncitizens are swinging elections.” Based on Kobach’s success of voter suppression in Kansas, last May Trump announced the formation of the Voter Fraud Commission, with Kobach serving as the vice chair and day-to-day administrator. While Trump claimed this was assembled in an effort to investigate Trump’s fictitious claim that three million illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election, it was clear to most that this was simply a way to further suppress the vote in all future elections.

This past Tuesday, a federal judge stifled Donald Trump’s ultimate goal, and truly embarrassed Kobach, by striking down Kobach’s documentary proof of citizenship law and “ordered Kobach, who decided to represent himself in the litigation and repeatedly violated basic rules of civil procedure, to attend six hours of continuing legal education classes.” That’s right – a judge just told Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State and someone who has had a law degree for 23 years, that he needs to take more legal classes. While this is a humiliating defeat for Kobach, it’s simply another failure for Trump that is sure to leave him even more furious and terrified.