Category: Not Factual

A White Nationalist is Among Donald Trump’s Pledged Delegates in California

White supremacist William Johnson

A Los Angeles attorney who advocates for the creation of a “white ethno-state” is on an official list of Donald Trump’s Republican convention delegates published Monday night by state election officials.

William Johnson, a self-described white separatist who is the chairman of the American Freedom Party, is among the delegates pledged to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee published by the California Secretary of State’s office.

The American Freedom Party is a group whose stated aim is “to represent the political interests of White Americans” and preserve “the customs and heritage of the European American people.” The party advocates deporting “all non-white immigrants and U.S. citizens, including anyone with any ascertainable trace of Negro blood” and believes that “diversity is white genocide.” In 1989 Johnson published a book entitled Amendment to the Constitution: Averting the Decline and Fall of America that laid out his plans for these racial deportations and called for the repeal of the 14th and 15th amendments. The book garnered him significant notoriety and he even appeared on many talk shows to discuss it.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, Trump’s campaign said Johnson’s inclusion on the published list of delegates was an error.

“Upon careful review of computer records, the inclusion of a potential delegate that had previously been rejected and removed from the campaign’s list in February 2016 was discovered,” Tim Clark, Trump’s California campaign director, said in the statement. “This was immediately corrected and a final list, which does not include this individual, was submitted for certification.”

But state officials said the billionaire may not have any way to formally cut him from the list. Sam Mahood, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, said California election code deals with selection and certification of delegates, but not their removal.

“They submitted a delegate list to our office yesterday, which was the deadline,” Mahood said. “They attempted to submit a revised list today, which we informed them we would not be accepting because it’s past the deadline.”

In practice, Johnson could simply not attend the Republican National Convention, where he would be replaced by an alternate delegate.

A spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment.

In California, Republican voters seeking to become convention delegates apply directly to their candidates’ campaigns, which then sort through the submissions and select their slate of delegates. These names are later submitted to the Secretary of State’s office.

“Donald Trump is the candidate that will Make America Hate Again,” Mark Paustenbach, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

“Trump’s racist, xenophobic candidacy continues to fuel a resurgence of white nationalism in the United States, and to elevate a man like this shows that Trump has neither the temperament nor judgment to serve as president.”

In an interview with The Times, Johnson said he received an email from the Trump campaign on Tuesday afternoon confirming that his name “was erroneously listed as a potential delegate.”

Johnson said he had advocated for Trump in recent months, setting up robo-calls supporting the candidate in seven different states, but not California. Johnson said he also created a “crisis hotline to be able to handle people who have been traumatized or vandalized supporting Trump.”

Johnson, who unsuccessfully ran for a judgeship in Los Angeles County in 2008, did not mince words when asked by a reporter to explain his politics.

“I would like a separate white ethno-state…. I think diversity and multiculturalism is a failure, and I think it’s going to destroy civilization,” he said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the American Freedom Party as an organization founded by “racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule.” Joanna Mendelson, an investigative researcher with the California branch of the Anti-Defamation League, said groups like the American Freedom Party highlight a tonal shift in the white supremacist movement, away from brash displays of violence and toward a subtler approach.

“What these individuals do is they kind of use pseudo-intellectual racism to articulate their views, and they attach themselves to national topics, be it immigration or the elections currently, and insert themselves into the conversation,” she previously told the Los Angeles Times. Johnson was one of the keynote speakers at Camp Comradery last year, a national gathering of white separatists in Bakersfield, according to Mendelson and the American Freedom Party’s website.

Trump, who has often been criticized for his controversial statements about Mexicans and a call to deny Muslims access to the country, ran into trouble earlier in his campaign when he was slow to disavow an endorsement from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Trump’s other California delegates include more established figures like House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) and Harmeet K. Dhillon, vice chair of the state’s Republican Party.

With Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz dropping out of the race, California’s June 7 primary will serve as little more than a coronation for Trump.

Brian Levin, director of Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said Johnson is well-known in extremist circles, and his appearance among Trump’s delegates highlights the way this year’s election cycle has served to legitimize voices that were previously considered fringe.

“This white nationalist is someone that any respectable, mainstream candidate should leave skid marks running from,” Levin said.

(h/t Los Angeles Times)

Update

The white nationalist William Johnson has resigned as a delegate for the Trump campaign.

They don’t need the baggage that came along with my signing up as a delegate.

Reality

Trump is playing this off as a simple mistake, and point out the fact that William Johnson was removed from a list a few months ago holy shit what was William Johnson even doing on a list to be a potential delegate in the first fucking place!?

From campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks:

Yesterday the Trump campaign submitted its list of California delegates to be certified by the Secretary of State of California. A database error led to the inclusion of a potential delegate that had been rejected and removed from the campaign’s list in February 2016.

As you can see it was all a database error that holy shit what was William Johnson even doing on a list to be a potential delegate in the first fucking place!?

As it turned out the Trump’s explanation was a total fabrication because the Trump campaign was personally corresponding with William Johnson a day before the story broke.

william-johnson-campaign-email

And even though he tried to resign as a delegate, due to California delegate rules William Johnson will remain as a delegate for Trump.

In the end this is not surprising at all as Trump has had a history of white supremacy. Some examples include:

If Trump had reviewed our Supporters list, he would have found William Johnson under the list of hate group leaders.

Links

William Johnson’s Delegate Pledge Form

Trump Tries to Backtrack His Defaulting on Debt Comments

Donald Trump declared Monday the U.S. never has to default on debt “because you print the money,” while trying to clarify his strategy for managing the national debt.

Trump insisted that he never said the U.S. should default or attempt to renegotiate with creditors, as had been reported. Trump told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on “New Day”:

People said I want to go and buy debt and default on debt, and I mean, these people are crazy. This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default because you print the money, I hate to tell you, OK?

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee explained he would center his approach on debt buybacks if and when interest rates go up.

I said if we can buy back government debt at a discount, in other words, if interest rates go up and we can buy bonds back at a discount — if we are liquid enough as a country, we should do that. In other words, we can buy back debt at a discount.

He also repeated his claim that he is “the king of debt.”

I understand debt better than probably anybody. I know how to deal with debt very well. I love debt — but you know, debt is tricky and it’s dangerous, and you have to be careful and you have to know what you’re doing.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

Trump lied. In an interview with CNBC on 5/6/16 that we cataloged here along with video, Trump was asked if the U.S. needs to pay its debt in full or if it could negotiate a partial repayment, Trump said:

I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.

Also during his CNBC interview, Trump had said that interest rates should be kept low — contradicting his remarks on CNN Monday — because a rate jump could trigger a catastrophic increase the cost of borrowing.

We’re paying a very low interest rate. What happens if that interest rate goes up 2, 3, 4 points? We don’t have a country.

Furthermore, whether through debt buyback or restructuring, neither of Trump’s debt-reduction proposals from the past week square with his party’s core approach on the issue — deep spending cuts and entitlement program reform.

The Republican Party’s official platform argues the U.S.’s looming “debt explosion” should be averted through “immediate reductions in federal spending, as a down payment on the much larger task of long-range fiscal control.”

These cuts “must be accompanied by major structural reforms,” according to the platform, and pointing to programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the GOP argues that “we must restructure the twentieth century entitlement state.”

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FRhyL83qbw

Links

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000515269

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trump-debt-bankruptcy-wall-street-222976

New York Times article that Trump claimed misrepresented him. They didn’t.

Donald Trump Flip-Flops on Campaign Self-Funding

Facing a prospective tab of more than $1 billion to finance a general-election run for the White House, Donald Trump reversed course Wednesday and said he would actively raise money to ensure his campaign has the resources to compete with Hillary Clinton’s fundraising juggernaut.

His campaign also is beginning to work with the Republican National Committee to set up a joint fundraising committee after his last two rivals—Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich—dropped out in the wake of Trump’s resounding Indiana win on Tuesday.

“I’ll be putting up money, but won’t be completely self-funding,” the presumptive Republican nominee said in an interview Wednesday. Trump, who had largely self-financed his successful primary run, added that he would create a “world-class finance organization.” The campaign will tap his expansive personal Rolodex and a new base of supporters who aren’t on party rolls, two Trump advisers said.

The new plan represents yet another flip-flop for Trump, who has for months portrayed his Republican opponents as “puppets” for relying on super PACs and taking contributions from wealthy donors that he said came with strings attached.

Mr. Trump’s creation of a joint fundraising committee comes eight months behind that of his likely general-election foe, Clinton. She and the Democratic National Committee reached an agreement last August to create the Hillary Victory Fund, which raised more than $60 million through the end of March. Of that, about $13 million has been transferred to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, while nearly $6 million has gone to the DNC.

The former secretary of state raised more than $213 million for her campaign through the end of April, on top of more than $67 million raised by her allied super PACs.

(h/t Fox News)

Reality

With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, he’s rejected almost every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other candidates.

Media

Trump Accuses Cruz’s Father of Helping JFK’s Assassin

Donald Trump alleged that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president. Trump claimed that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963.

His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. But I think it’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible.

As the anchor mentioned the photo that allegedly included Cruz, Trump continued:

I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.

(h/t Politico)

Reality

Donald Trump’s source is the pro-Trump supermarket tabloid newspaper The National Enquirer. That’s right… this paper:

National Enquirer, "Ted Cruz Father Linked to JFK Assassination!"

The Miami Herald debunked this claim rather well:

Gus Russo, an author and journalist who has written extensively about the JFK assassination and Oswald, is dubious. Russo told [the reporter] in an interview that Oswald, who was living in New Orleans in 1963, was not connected to the Cuban community there and would not have had a Cuban supporter helping him. “He was the ultimate loner,” said Russo. Another man seen in the video handing out leaflets had been hired by Oswald to do so at an unemployment office, according to the Warren Commission. Rafael Cruz also lived in New Orleans, but it was later in the 1960s. As for the photo “evidence,” Russo said, “It’s very subjective. It’s not proof. It’s just an opinion. To charge something this big, you’d better have better proof than that ‘it looks like him.’”

Media

Trump Says Cruz’s Father Shouldn’t Be ‘Allowed’ To Say Mean Things About Him

Donald Trump hit back hard Tuesday at Ted Cruz’s father after he made an appeal to “every member of the body of Christ” to vote for his son, and not the “wicked” – calling the comments “disgraceful” and “horrible.”

The Examiner reported that Rafael Cruz had been meeting for days with Indiana pastors, many of whom have since endorsed the Texas senator.

Speaking with the head of the American Family Association of Indiana, the elder Cruz had warned of the “wicked electing the wicked” and urged fellow Christians to come out to vote.

I implore, I exhort every member of the body of Christ to vote according to the word of God, and vote for the candidate that stands on the word of God and on the Constitution of the United States of America. And I am convinced that man is my son, Ted Cruz. The alternative could be the destruction of America.

But Trump unleashed on the Cuban-born Rafael Cruz, a pastor, after he made his religious appeal to Indiana and other voters to support his son in the Republican presidential nominating contest. Indiana is voting Tuesday.

I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to do it. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to say it … You look at so many of the ministers that are backing me, and they’re backing me more so than they’re backing Cruz, and I’m winning the evangelical vote. It’s disgraceful that his father can go out and do that. And just — and so many people are angry about it. And the evangelicals are angry about it, the way he does that. But I think it’s horrible. I think it’s absolutely horrible that a man can go and do that, what he’s saying there.

In a sharp turn, the Republican presidential front-runner then abruptly invoked a tabloid story about Rafael Cruz’s supposed connection to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

(h/t Fox News)

Reality

Trump has made the statement before that people shouldn’t be “allowed” to say negative things about him and that he would like to limit the freedom for people who disagree with him through litigation.

Also by claiming that Pastor Rafael Cruz shouldn’t preach about supporting a candidate (who happens to be his son) is the definition of a double-standard in the purest sense. Trump has had support from so many pastors who have used their position as a church leader to publicly preach about voting for Donald Trump that a new word was coined, “Trumpvangelicals“. These include Mike Murdock, Paula White, Robert Jeffress, and Joel Osteen, join the list of Kenneth Copeland, and 40 others who met with Trump at Trump Tower in September 2015.

There is also Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, publicly supported Trump, supported his stance on rejecting the Iran deal, and supported Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering America.

At Trump’s Cleveland rally, Pastor Darrell Scott of New Spirit Revival Center Ministries performed a sermon to introduce Trump to the stage. Pastor Scott called Trump humble, blamed “liberal media for brainwashing” you for thinking Trump could possibly be an out-and-out racist, and directed people to vote for Donald Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCHZbB-M9oE

Jerry Falwell Jr. publicly endorses Donald Trump, compares him to King David, and produced radio advertisements evoking Bible passages:

“Donald Trump lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus has taught in the great commandment.”

Trump Claims He is Receiving the Most Votes Ever in Republican Primaries

Trump victory speech for Pennsylvania

Donald Trump’s march to the GOP nomination picked up steam last week, with dominant primary victories in the northeast.

After the wins, several news outlets reported that the New York billionaire could break the record for most Republican primary votes in history — if Trump scores big in Indiana, New Jersey and California. Those states have yet to vote.

Trump, apparently not wanting to wait, declared he’s already achieved the voting record.

“In the history of Republican primaries, I’ve gotten the most votes in the history of the Republican party,” Trump said during his speech on Friday, April 29 at the California Republican Party Convention south of San Francisco.

Trump went on to say he’s broken the record without needing to wait for big states like California.

Reality

Donald Trump said he’s already earned the most Republican primary votes in history. However Politifact contacted Eric Ostermeier, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and founder of the number-crunching blog Smart Politics, has taken a look at the data.

“He is on pace to break the record, but he hasn’t yet,” Ostermeier told PolitiFact California. “I’ve seen no possible configuration of numbers that show he’s already broken it.”

Ostermeier placed Trump’s primary vote total at about 10 million so far. That’s still short of the 10.8 million votes George W. Bush received in the 2000 GOP primaries.

If one counts both primaries and caucuses, Trump would still be short of Bush’s overall tally, the professor said. Bush’s total is considered closer to 12 million if both types of elections are counted, he said.

Ostermeier estimated Trump would likely achieve the primary vote record if he earns a strong win in California’s primary, where he could pick up more than a million additional primary votes. He said Trump’s large vote totals can be attributed to the relatively close match-up he’s had with Cruz late into the primary season.

Several news articles, including by the Washington Post and Politico, used primary vote totals logged by RealClearPolitics.com. Its data show Trump has yet to break the record.

Trump’s campaign did not respond to our request for comment.

Trump Makes False Claim of 31,000 Attendees at Costa Mesa

Twitter

During his speech at the Pacific Amphitheater in Orange County, California, Donald Trump made the claim that there was 31,000 in attendance. Trump later tweeted his claim.

(h/t OC Weekly)

Reality

Trump claims there were 31,000 people in attendance, however the Pacific Amphitheater can only hold 8,000. OC Weekly, which has covered events at the Amphitheater for the past 20 years, called his claim, “full of crap“.

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6UJnjUoYTA

Trump Blames Immigrants for Rise in LA Crime

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump opened his California campaign in Costa Mesa, addressing thousands of supporters in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour. Trump mostly stuck to this usual stump speech – attacking Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and the media.

But in the latter part of his address, he made note of a sharp rise in local crime rates. We wanted to check out his claims.

Claim #1: Crime is up. 

“In Los Angeles, homicides are up 10.2 percent,” Trump said. “Rapes are up 8.6 percent. Aggravated assaults are up 26.5 percent,” he told the raucous crowd. “Your crime numbers, they’re going through the roof, and we can’t have it anymore.”

Trump’s statistics are correct. He was citing LAPD statistics. Crime rates did rise significantly last year in Los Angeles and other major cities. However, what he leaves out is that crime levels are far below historic rates.

Last year, the city recorded 280 homicides. That was 26 more than 2014. But in 1990, there were 1,100 murders in Los Angeles.

“When you look at the long-term trends in Los Angeles, the arrows are pointing in the wrong direction for any sort of crime increase,” said Franklin Zimring, director of the criminal justice research program at Boalt Hall’s Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “Homicides are not just lower, but vastly lower.”

Claim #2: Illegal immigration is to blame for the crime spike

Trump was on much less solid ground when he blamed the crime spike on illegal immigration from Mexico.

To underscore his point, he opened his speech by ceding his podium to Jamiel Shaw Sr., whose son was shot and killed in Los Angeles by an immigrant in 2008. He also invited to the stage other locals whose loved ones were killed by immigrants.

As he has his entire campaign, Trump vowed to crack down on what he describes as a flood of illegal immigrants.

“We are going to build the wall,” Trump added. “Mexico is going to pay for the wall.”

What Trump never mentions is that government statistics show a sharp drop in illegal immigration.

The United States Border Patrol reported 337,117 apprehensions nationwide last fiscal year, compared to 486,651 the year before, a 30 percent decline.  That’s also a nearly 80 percent decline since the peak of apprehensions in fiscal year 2000, when more than 1.6 million apprehensions were made.

A 2015 Pew Research Center study also found that between 2009 and 2014, more Mexican nationals left the U.S. than came. The study found that an estimated 1 million Mexican nationals (including their U.S.-born children) left the U.S. to return to Mexico, but less than 900,000 migrated to the U.S. in the same time period.

Zimring also points out that decades of academic research has shown new immigrants tend to be law abiding.

“First generation immigrations of all kinds have extremely low crime rates,” said Zimring.

(h/t NPR)

Trump Team Tells GOP He Has Been ‘Projecting an Image’

The Celebrity Apprentice

Donald Trump’s chief lieutenants told skeptical Republican leaders Thursday that the GOP front-runner has been “projecting an image” so far in the 2016 primary season and “the part that he’s been playing is now evolving” in a way that will improve his standing among general election voters.

The message, delivered behind closed doors in a private briefing, is part of the campaign’s intensifying effort to convince party leaders Trump will moderate his tone in the coming months to help deliver big electoral gains this fall, despite his contentious ways.

Even as his team pressed Trump’s case, he raised fresh concern among some conservatives by speaking against North Carolina’s “bathroom law,” which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificates. Trump also came out against the federal government’s plan to replace President Andrew Jackson with the civil-rights figure Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

The developments came as the GOP’s messy fight for the White House spilled into a seaside resort in south Florida. While candidates in both parties fanned out across the country before important primary contests in the Northeast, Hollywood’s Diplomat Resort & Spa was transformed into a palm-treed political battleground.

Trump’s newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage.

“When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” Manafort said in a private briefing.

“You’ll start to see more depth of the person, the real person. You’ll see a real different way,” he said.

The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange.

“He gets it,” Manafort said of Trump’s need to moderate his personality. “The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.”

The message was welcomed by some party officials but criticized by others who suggested it raised doubts about his authenticity.

“He’s trying to moderate. He’s getting better,” said Ben Carson, a Trump ally who was part of the GOP’s front-runner’s RNC outreach team.

While Trump’s top advisers were promising Republican leaders that the GOP front-runner would moderate his message, the candidate was telling voters he wasn’t ready to act presidential.

“I just don’t know if I want to do it yet,” Trump said during a raucous rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Thursday that was frequently interrupted by protesters.

“At some point, I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored,” he said, predicting that the size of his crowds would dwindle if he dialed back his rhetoric.

Ben Carson, on an appearance on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show also made a statement saying the public “reality show” person is different from the real man.

(h/t AP)

Reality

Even if Trump’s public persona should change, and should he win the Republican primary, he’ll have a mountain of evidence to contend with.

Trump: I ‘Helped a Little Bit’ With Clearing Rubble at Ground Zero

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop at the First Niagara Center, Monday, April 18, 2016, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Donald Trump has gotten a lot of attention over the past 12 hours for referring to the Sept. 11 terror attacks as “7/11” during a speech in Buffalo. It’s an awkward, amusing slip-up — but it’s just a slip-up.

More interesting, perhaps, is something he said shortly afterward.

Trump was talking about “New York values” — a means of dismissing Ted Cruz in Trump’s home state. As he did during the debate where Cruz first made the point, Trump was using the attacks as a way of espousing what it is that New Yorkers stand for. Unusually for him, he was reading from a sheet of paper.

Then he offered this aside.

“Everyone who helped clear the rubble — and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit — but I want to tell you: Those people were amazing,” Trump said. “Clearing the rubble. Trying to find additional lives. You didn’t know what was going to come down on all of us — and they handled it.”

(h/t Washington Post)

Reality

In the context of the statement of the Ground Zero cleanup, Trump sounds as if he is lumping himself in with the first responders who worked to physically remove the rubble. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble… and I helped a little bit…”

Despite some wacko conspiracy theorists, Donald Trump unquestionably went to Ground Zero after the attacks. However the assertion that he had lifted a finger himself personally to help is questionable. The taking of video and images at the ground zero cleanup was banned by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, so the likelihood of photographic evidence either way would be slim.

What is more likely from the available evidence is he paid for workers to join in the cleanup efforts, which itself was commendable. For example this German interview on September, 13, 2001 where the reporter asks, “Will you be involved, will you take any efforts, any steps to reconstruct the area?”

“Well, I have a lot of men down here right now. We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So we’ll have a couple of hundred people down here.”

At worst it is a gross misrepresentation of his actual contributions to the Ground Zero cleanup and at best a miscommunication of intent. Pardon us for placing the bar a little higher for a candidate to a major political party for the President of the United States.

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrt9YKrlJAY

 

1 … 168 169 170 171 172 … 178