Trump Just Scored a Major Win on His Election Lies About Voting

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin announced this week that his state would only use paper ballots in the upcoming general election.

“We use 100% paper ballots with a strict chain of custody. We use counting machines, not voting machines, that are tested prior to every election and never connected to the internet,” Youngkin said in a statement announcing that he’d codified his administration’s election security procedures in Executive Order 35. “We do not mass mail ballots. We monitor our drop boxes 24/7.”

Youngkin also said the state would identify voters using DMV data and other data sources to update voter rolls daily, “scrubbing the lists to remove those who should not be on it.” The scrubbing would target the deceased, people who had moved out of state, and “non-citizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register,” Youngkin explained.

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday, Youngkin—who was reportedly a potential candidate for Donald Trump’s running mate—insisted that “American elections should be decided by American citizens, and Virginia elections should be decided by Viriginians.

“This executive order is so important because it does make sure that we have clean voter rolls, it makes sure that votes are counted accurately, and it recognizes the fact that elections need to be trusted by voters,” said Youngkin, before diving into criticisms of Kamala Harris.

Ninety-three percent of votes cast in 2020 had a paper record, whether it was a paper ballot, a mail-in ballot, or a slip printed by an electronic voting machine for voters to review before officially casting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Not only are paper ballots useful for voters who want to verify the accuracy of their ballots, but crucially, paper ballots are integral to postelection audits.

Trump posted about the order on Truth Social Wednesday, apparently thrilled with Youngkin’s efforts to supposedly secure his state’s elections.

“All votes will be on paper ballots and counted safely and fairly, not by machines connected to the internet—A big security risk. We must work hard to make sure the Election is FAIR and SECURE!!! EVERY STATE SHOULD FOLLOW VIRGINIA’S LEAD. We need volunteers to watch the polls—So important,” Trump wrote.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that electronic voting machines used in 2020 were rigged in favor of Joe Biden. Since then he and his allies have continued to spread conspiracies about electronic voting. Fox News was even hit with two lawsuits from electronic voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic for pushing Trump’s claims. Dominion settled with Fox, while the Smartmatic lawsuit has not yet gone to trial.

But despite Trump’s insistence on paper ballots, they don’t automatically guarantee a win for him. In 2020, the use of paper ballots allowed a hand-count of every ballot cast in Georgia, which certified Biden as the winner of that state’s presidential election.

Even that recount did not satisfy Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in Georgia or stop his ultimately failed attempts to have the results overturned—something that he was still complaining about as recently as Thursday. Ultimately, Trump doesn’t actually care about ensuring secure elections—only about winning.

White supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes shockingly revoked his support from Donald Trump’s campaign early Friday, announcing on social media that he and his allies believed that the presidential bid is headed for a “catastrophic loss.”

“Tonight I declared a new Groyper War against the Trump campaign,” Fuentes wrote on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after midnight, referring to a group of far-right activists known as groypers.

Fuentes explained that he and his far-right squad of online trolls “support Trump” but that they view his 2024 campaign as being “hijacked” by lobbyists, consultants, and donors that had aided Trump’s 2016 Republican opponents. All in all, Fuentes believed they were “blowing it.”

“Without serious changes we are headed for a catastrophic loss,” Fuentes wrote.

“This is NOT a purity spiral, this is about living up to the AMERICA FIRST credo put forth by Trump in 2016 which will ensure VICTORY in 2024,” Fuentes continued. “On Monday I will present a detailed statement of the facts, a mission statement, and a plan of action on my Rumble channel. STAY TUNED.”

In another post two hours later, Fuentes shared a screenshot of trending hashtags on Truth Social, including “#GroyperWar2”, “#FireLaCivita,” and “#FireWiles,” the latter two of which refer to senior Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who helped engineer Trump’s political resurrection following his loss in 2020.

“We haven’t even started,” Fuentes captioned the screengrab.

Despite white men making up a massive part of Trump’s primary support base—and his attempts to pander to them this election cycle—the Republican nominee has seen a stunning slip in support within this demographic.

Former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton was thoroughly unimpressed with Donald Trump’s last-minute presser at Mar-a-Lago, criticizing him as a man so dishonest that he can no longer perceive the difference between the truth and his lies.

Responding to a clip from Trump’s Thursday speech in which the former president claimed he had been “protective” of Hillary Clinton during his administration (despite telling crowds at the time that she should “be in jail” and be “locked up”), Bolton told CNN that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”

“It’s not that he lies a lot because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference,” Bolton continued. “So he makes up what he wants to say at any given time. If it happens to comport with what everybody else sees—well, that’s fine. And if it doesn’t comport with anybody else, he doesn’t really care and he’s had decades of getting away with it.

“So in his mind, the truth is whatever he wants it to be. And that’s what you heard today,” Bolton added.

Trump’s list of lies on Thursday was almost the length of his speech. Among them included claims that his January 6 crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (it wasn’t even close). He insisted that Democrats want to gut Social Security (they don’t, but Republicans are trying to). And he swore that no one died on January 6 (four of his own supporters died from the events, including Ashli Babbitt, whom Trump and his allies attempted to morph into a MAGA martyr).

He also, strangely, drew out an entirely fabricated tall tale about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Vice President Kamala Harris’s old boyfriend, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Hours after the press conference, it became clear that the actual passengers who shared the 2018 helicopter ride with Trump were former California Governor Jerry Brown and current California Governor Gavin Newsom, both of whom called bullshit on the story.

Donald Trump isn’t going to be taking part in his trademark rallies until after the Democratic National Convention ends on August 22.

The Republican presidential nominee and convicted felon said he’ll resume traveling at that point, at a rambling press conference Thursday. 

Trump was asked by a reporter why he hadn’t been campaigning this week, to which he replied, “Because I’m leading by a lot and because I’m letting their convention go through and I am campaigning a lot.”

When the reporter asked if Trump would increase his travel, Trump said, “After their convention, yeah.”

When another reporter compared Trump’s schedule to Harris’s, Trump got defensive, saying, “What a stupid question.”

Trump’s light schedule is in stark contrast to Vice President Kamala Harris’s and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s. Harris announced Walz as her running mate in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, and the pair have since traveled to rallies in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan. They will travel to Arizona Friday and Nevada on Saturday.

Even J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has kept up a busy schedule, following the Harris campaign in visits to Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday and traveling to North Carolina on Thursday. In contrast, Trump has only visited Montana, a solid red state, this week. So why is Trump taking the next two weeks lightly? It was quite different in 2016, when Trump held seven different rallies between August 9 and 13 in four different states.

Usually, the last three months of a presidential campaign are a sprint, with candidates rushing to make stops in critical areas after their party’s convention. Is Trump taking it easy due to his age or even cognitive issues? His press conference was all over the place, and to many, it indicated that Trump is not well. Would he be able to handle a rigorous schedule if he returns to the White House? 

Vice President Kamala Harris has scored a historic endorsement from the country’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights group, which could signal a significant shift in her campaign against Donald Trump, who has successfully attracted Latino voters.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, will endorse Harris on Friday through its political arm, the LULAC Adelante PAC, according to CBS. This will be its first presidential endorsement since the organization’s founding in 1929.

The LULAC Adelante PAC’s chairman, Domingo Garcia, gave a statement about the endorsement to CBS. “Vice President Harris has proven herself a stalwart ally and advocate of the Latino community throughout her career and is the right choice for the continued prosperity of Latinos in the United States and the future of our country,” Garcia said. “The politics of hate-mongering and scapegoating Latinos and immigrants must be stopped!”

LULAC’s endorsement comes just as Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, arrive in Arizona, a swing state where nearly one in four voters is Latino. The PAC’s board members are expected to join Harris before her rally in Nevada on Saturday to officially declare their endorsement.

Since the last election, the Democratic Party has lost significant ground with Latino voters. A 2020 poll showed that a significant percentage of Latino voters supported Biden over Trump, 61 percent to 36 percent.

Cut to four years later, and a recent Pew Research Poll found that the two candidates were tied among Latino voters, at 36 percent. Pew also found that nearly a quarter of Latino registered voters supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent run for president, accounting for roughly 9.5 million votes that could potentially be claimed by either major-party candidate.

Despite Trump’s hateful rhetoric about immigrants, the former president has found inroads with Latino voters, who view him as being good for the economy, among other issues.

It’s clear that one endorsement won’t be enough for Harris to appeal to Latino voters around the country, but it marks a positive direction for Harris’s recent swell of enthusiasm and support. Harris has also gained the support of LULAC’s large grassroots network, which stretches throughout key battleground states.

For Harris, grassroots campaigning could make all the difference among this critical voting block in swing states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as Southwest states like Arizona, where Biden won by fewer than 10,000 votes.