MAGA Official Floats Gruesome Threat Against Election Officer

An Arizona MAGA official made a bloodthirsty threat during a meeting with Republican party members against an election officer who supported certifying the state election results in the 2022 midterms.

County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, has come under fire from his fellow party members since he said the 2020 and 2022 elections had not been rigged. He posted a video Monday of Maricopa County GOP official Shelby Busch’s grisly comment on X, formerly Twitter. Busch is the first vice chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee and, according to Richer, an adviser to far-right Senate candidate Kari Lake.

The video shows Busch speaking at an event about her narrow interpretation of the concept of “unity.”

“But let’s pretend that this gentleman over here was running for county recorder, and he’s a good Christian man who believes what we believe. Now, we can work with that, right? That, that’s unity,” she said.

Clearly to Busch, unity is just uniformity—more specifically, compliance and support for Christian nationalism, a far-right Christian movement that seeks to place all aspects of U.S. society into the hands of Christians, including the responsibility of filing public documents on a local level, as it turns out.

“We’re gonna agree that we’re going to run a good Christian foundation campaign, and we’re gonna treat each other well, and we’re going to get through this together. That’s unity,” Busch continued. “But, if Stephen Richer were in this room, I would lynch him.”

The room burst into sharp, nervous laughter that quickly dimmed. “I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country,” Busch said.

Busch’s unhinged resentment comes from the Republican frenzy that followed the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterm elections, during which her buddy Lake lost her gubernatorial run.

After the 2022 midterms, Lake and her allies baselessly insisted that Richer had been responsible for her loss, after Maricopa County had some issues with the tabulator machines, although similar issues were reported in the county where Lake actually won. In 2023, Richer filed a defamation lawsuit against Lake, who admitted that all of Richer’s claims were true.

In May, the Maricopa County GOP formally censured Richer, as well as all seven of Arizona’s State Supreme Court justices, for rejecting bids to overturn the 2022 election results from Lake and Abe Hamadeh, a Republican candidate who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona’s 8th congressional district.

Busch is the founder of We the People AZ Alliance, a group that purports to be an election integrity watchdog but is funded by election deniers, including Mike Lindell, Patrick Byrne, and Michael Flynn. Her comments show just how far the Republican Party has fallen.

Donald Trump’s advisers have revealed their new plan for resolving the war between Russia and Ukraine—and it involves Ukraine’s immediate submission.

The plan effectively promises an increase in U.S. weapons aid to Ukraine so long as it shows up for peace talks with Russia, reported Reuters. And while that deal may not sound so bad, the writing between the lines isn’t so simple. Trump’s advisers envision that the peace talks—which Trump would facilitate should he win the November election—would also quietly include Ukraine ceding part of its territory that is currently occupied by Russian forces.

The concept was drawn up by retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, both former chiefs of staff on Trump’s National Security Council. Trump did not immediately sign on to “every word” of the plan, but Fleitz told Reuters that they were “pleased to get the feedback we did.”

The Kremlin told Reuters that Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to peace talks, but that any proposal by a possible future Trump administration would have to reflect the “reality on the ground.”

When pressed on the details of the plan, Fleitz explained that Ukraine would not formally need to relinquish its land to Russian forces. He did concede, however, that Ukraine was unlikely to regain control of all of its territory in the near future.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said that ending the war on the borders of its current front lines—where Russia has gained a foothold in the southeast portion of Ukraine—would be “strange,” pointing to the fact that Russia had violated international law by invading it in the first place.

“Ukraine has an absolutely clear understanding and it is spelled out in the peace formula proposed by President [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy, it is clearly stated there—peace can only be fair and peace can only be based on international law,” Podolyak told Reuters.

The plan’s promise to send more military aid to Ukraine only if it admits defeat and ends the war seems a bit counterintuitive—and disingenuous, considering that Trump and his advisers have done practically everything within their power to undermine sending more military aid to the embattled nation since the beginning of the year. And the plan’s obvious benefit to Russia also raises further concerns over Trump’s notoriously cushy—and sometimes subservient—relationship with Putin.

Beneath his usual bluster, Donald Trump is “concerned” about his debate with President Joe Biden on Thursday, according to former RNC spokesperson Tim Miller.

Miller pointed to Trump’s suggestion that Biden has been using performance-enhancing drugs to get “jacked up” before campaign events and his insistence that Biden take a drug test before Thursday as proof that the former president is worried about Biden’s attacks on him at the debate.

“I do think that what we can see publicly is that Donald Trump is concerned about how this debate is being framed up as you lead into the debate. That is why he’s doing all the weird stuff about Joe Biden being on drugs. It’s worth reminding everybody that he tried this exact same playbook in 2020.… But he already tried this ‘Joe Biden is on drugs’ thing. It didn’t work then,” Miller said on MSNBC.

Indeed, analysts agreed that Trump handed Biden an easy win in the first debate in 2020 by lowering expectations, attacking Biden as a feeble basement dweller, only to appear unhinged beside Biden’s relative composure. This year, not only Trump but the entire Republican apparatus may be setting itself up for a similar blunder. The RNC has made Biden’s age, depicted in selectively edited videos of gaffes by Biden on the campaign trail, a centerpiece of its campaign strategy.

Trump isn’t alone in calling for Biden to take a drug test; Texas GOP Representative Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician freshly accused of ethics violations, also accused Biden of taking performance enhancers and demanded that he submit to a pre-debate test. If Miller is right, a strong showing by Biden at the debate could be disastrous for Trump and a Republican messaging machine that seems pot committed to depicting Biden as senile.

Charlie Kirk has been a GOP bombshell since he founded Turning Point USA in 2012. He has raised millions of dollars for conservative causes and gotten thousands of young people to turn out and vote down ballot for the Republican Party. But 14 years on, Kirk’s biggest critics aren’t leftists—they’re fellow conservatives, who claim that the 30-year-old’s vision is wilting and dragging their campaigns down with it.

A brutal report published Tuesday in The Guardian notes the growing discontent with Kirk.

Tudor Dixon, a Republican candidate who lost Michigan’s 2022 gubernatorial race, has publicly vented that Turning Point’s backing meant practically nothing when it came to the ballot box.

“As a candidate who didn’t win, and who was promised that Turning Point would have a big influence in Michigan, it makes you crazy,” Dixon said on her podcast in February. “I gave up a salary for 18 months, sold my car, did everything I could to run for office. And people like [Kirk] are the reason we are not winning.”

Even in Arizona, where Turning Point has transformed the state legislature into a cohort of Trump acolytes and former Turning Point employees, Republicans have lost faith in Kirk’s approach, slamming his rhetoric as “toxic” without “winning messages.”

“Turning Point has become toxic in Arizona,” Tyler Montague, an Arizona-based Republican strategist, told The Guardian. “They’ve helped to cement an extreme worldview, creating anger that in turn generates political energy that they harness. That’s their game.”

And Kirk’s white-supremacist ideals on race have made even far-right-aligned Black communities question Trump’s values for keeping Kirk so close by. One Black pastor in Cleveland who has been close to Trump for more than a decade accused Kirk of trying to raise the next generation of Hitler Youth and claimed that Trump was only hurting his chances of winning over people of color by keeping Kirk—who has disparaged George Floyd as a “scumbag” and claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. was “not a good person”—so close by during this election season.

“Kirk talked all this negative shit about Black people, and his proximity to President Trump caused people to wonder: Is that what Trump is thinking too? I have publicly refuted Kirk because every vote counts,” Scott told The Guardian.

Donald Trump provided a small window into his preparation strategy for Thursday night’s debate hosted by CNN, and it seems like the former president is in deep, deep trouble. 

Before Trump’s rally in Philadelphia Saturday night, Trump stopped for an interview with conservative radio talk show host Chris Stigall, during which they discussed the former president’s approach to the upcoming presidential debate.

Stigall asked how Trump was feeling about CNN’s debate terms, including mutable mics and the lack of live audience, suggesting that the terms to which the former president readily agreed suddenly present an unfair burden. 

“It’s probably a one-on-three,” Trump said, referring to Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the two CNN anchors tapped to host. Amid all of his whining about an event he fully opted into, Trump confirmed that his actual debate prep is nonexistent.

“People say, ‘How are you preparing?’ I’m preparing by taking questions from you and others, if you think about it,” said Trump.

It’s difficult to imagine how being interviewed by a fan could possibly prepare Trump for the difficult questions that are likely to come his way on Thursday night. Trump will likely face questions about his role in the January 6 insurrection, the millions of dollars he owes author E. Jean Carroll, or the additional millions he owes in penalties from the Trump Organization’s civil fraud case in New York. He’ll likely also face questions about his recent conviction on 34 felony charges in his hush-money trial, allegations that he stole classified documents and obstructed their retrieval, and his racketeering indictment in Georgia for a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election election. 

Trump will likely field questions about his whole range of unsavory, in many cases illegal, deeds and dangerous proclamations, which conservative pundits would never deign to ask him about. 

“So, uh, I’m preparing by dealing with you. You’re tougher than all of them, right?” Trump said, grinning crookedly. 

Stigall burst into laughter, appearing overjoyed. Trump then shook Stigall’s hand, and thanked him for being a “good friend.” Stigall promptly changed his profile picture on X, formerly Twitter, to a photo of him shaking hands with the former president. 

This is hardly on par with the “hostile environment” Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt described during her Monday interview on CNN, which was ultimately cut short. Leavitt said her candidate was wading into dangerous waters so that he could reach the broadest possible audience—admitting that the debate will be the furthest thing possible from these softball interviews with his own supporters.  

But appearances like Leavitt’s, which devolved into airing grievances about Tapper’s coverage of the former president, are Trump’s real debate prep, and it started weeks ago. Through escalating conspiracy theories alleging Joe Biden will be on performance-enhancing drugs, whining about biased moderators and the weaponization of mutually agreed-upon debate terms, Trump’s spin campaign and his debate prep are really one and the same: a battle plan that demands no real strategy because it discounts the outcome before the fight even takes place. 

It’s not dissimilar from Trump’s election strategy. If you can’t beat ’em, there was no race, right? But for someone obsessed with not being a loser, it’s shocking how blatantly Trump telegraphs his inability to win. If his comments are anything to go by, Thursday night will be a fiasco.