Donald Trump’s last gasps grow more desperate

| 10:00 pm EST February 14, 2019
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Following Donald Trump’s hate rally in El Paso this week, many questioned why he was holding a rally for the 2020 election already. While some thought it was too soon to be campaigning for an election that’s over a year and a half away, others wondered why he was campaigning at all. While Trump craves the adulation that accompanies one of his rallies, this one was more than a simple rally, and was in fact a planned distraction to try to change the news cycle from the bad news surrounding him.

While it is becoming more and more likely that Trump will not be running for reelection, it appears that he is doing everything in his power to ensure his success should he run. During Wednesday night’s episode of “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” Congressman Eric Swalwell was asked about the recent article from The Daily Beast concerning the drastic firing of federal officials whose sole purpose is to fight foreign election interference, who now “fear the department won’t prepare adequately for election threats in 2020.”

Swalwell told O’Donnell: “We’re no longer powerless, and we don’t have to take these blows to our democracy anymore. Donald Trump is afraid of what these teams would find, which is that Russian interests are working on his behalf, and if he has any chance at all at winning in 2020 they’re going to have to work overtime because the American people are no longer on his side.”

As Palmer Report previously documented, when Republicans were still in the majority in the House, they did everything to subvert democracy, including the vote to “zero out our election security funding” prior to the 2018 midterms. Swalwell reflected on this event when speaking to O’Donnell, stating this new move by Trump “is in line with what the Republicans did just a year ago when they took over $300 million that was slated for election funding security and they zeroed it out.” One big difference between then and now is that Democrats control the House and finally have the ability to do something about it.