The Trumpdown

Firefighters in Greenville, Mississippi who responded to a fire that gutted a historic black church on Tuesday night found “Vote Trump” graffiti spray-painted on the side of the building when they arrived.

Officials in Greenville, a Mississippi Delta town of about 34,000, told reporters on Wednesday that the fire was not accidental and the attack on the 111-year-old Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church “appears to be a race crime.”

Police Chief Delando Wilson called the pro-Trump graffiti on the burned church a clear act of “intimidation,” aimed depriving the town’s African-American residents of their “right to vote whatever way they choose to vote.”

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are assisting in the investigation and trying “to determine if any civil rights crimes were committed,” according to the F.B.I. field office in Jackson, the state capital.

Angie Quezada, a local reporter who photographed the aftermath of the attack, noted that a crowd-sourced effort to help pay for the rebuilding of the church was underway.

The GoFundMe appeal asked for $10,000 to help repair the church. More than $105,000 was raised in the first 11 hours of the campaign.

Trump, who is favored to win Mississippi easily, campaigned in Jackson in August alongside Nigel Farage, a nationalist politician from England who stoked fears about immigrants ahead of this summer’s referendum in favor of a British exit from the European Union. He told Trump’s overwhelmingly white audience that the vote for Brexit was a sign that “if the real people” were “prepared to stand up and fight,” they could “take back control of their country, take back control of their borders and get back their pride.”

The Trump campaign said in a statement on the fire: “We are deeply saddened for the members of the Hopewell M.B. Church community and condemn in the strongest terms this terrible act that has no place in our society.”

Closing in the polls and basking in the warmth of the crowd’s love in Miami on Wednesday, Donald Trump suddenly paused during a speech to pursue a personal vendetta against an NBC reporter, Katy Tur, accusing her of refusing to report on the size of his rallies.

“We have massive crowds,” Trump said, before launching into the entirely false claim he repeats at every gathering, that the attendance at his rallies is a major story the reporters following his campaign refuse to report. “There’s something happening — they’re not reporting it,” he said.

Trump then pointed at Tur in the press pen, adding: “Katy, you’re not reporting it, Katy. But there’s something happening, Katy. There’s something happening, Katy.”

As Trump turned the crowd’s attention on Tur, some of his supporters could be seen pointing in her direction, and her colleagues reported that she was jeered.

As Tur explained in a Marie Claire article in August, Trump has been picking on her since he took exception to the tough questions she asked him in an interview last year.

Last December, he singled her out for abuse on Twitter calling her “dishonest” for reporting, accurately, that he had abruptly ended a speech after a primary campaign event was disrupted by protesters.

Four days after that tweet did not lead to Tur’s firing, Trump turned on her again, after news crews covering his speech in North Carolina refused his order to pan the room, to show the size of the crowd. “Some of the media’s terrific, but most of it — 70 percent, 75 percent — is absolute, dishonest — absolute scum,” Trump said. He then praised a right-wing blog, Gateway Pundit, for echoing his claim that Tur had lied.

“They did the most beautiful story about what a lie it was from NBC,” Trump said, pointing to Tur at the back of the room. “She’s back there, little Katy, she’s back there,” he said, as the crowd erupted in boos. “Katy Tur, he added. “Third. Rate. Reporter. Remember that.”

After the event, Tur wrote, the atmosphere was so hostile that she had to be escorted to her car by the Secret Service. She has endured death threats on social networks ever since.

In July, when Tur pressed Trump on his extraordinary call for Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s email server — to steal and release the messages she had deemed private and deleted — he bristled at her questioning. “Mr. Trump, do you have any qualms about asking a foreign government — Russia, China, anybody — to interfere, to hack into the system of anybody in this country?” Tur asked.

Trump tried to deflect the question, but when Tur persisted, he interrupted her, saying: “Be quiet. I know you want to, you know, save her.”

Trump’s denunciation of the media is by now so routine that his fans harassed reporters before the rally in Miami even started on Wednesday, with one of them claiming the “lying press” was willing to “sell out for a few shekels.”

During the event, as BBC reporter filmed the crowd while Trump said, “there has never been anywhere near the media dishonesty like we’ve seen in this election,” one of his supporters could be heard shouting, “nasty media!”

Update: Late Wednesday night, Tur responded to Trump’s taunting of her, and reported that the candidate had previously told journalists who follow him that he is aware of the fact that the pool camera that records his speeches cannot also pan away to show the crowds.

A newspaper published by the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas endorsed Donald Trump, signaling that white supremacists see in his “America First” campaign coded support for their racist ideology.

The newspaper’s support for Trump generated headlines recently after an image of it was posted on Twitter by a resident of Harrison, Arkansas, who was distressed to find a copy left outside her home.

The image spread gradually on the social network after the Twitter user, a Democratic activist, shared it several times. In another update, the horrified recipient of the paper explained that Harrison, where it is published, is also “where the director of the Knights of the KKK resides and prominent citizens are members.”

This edition of the quarterly newspaper was available at the KKK headquarters in Harrison as early as August, when it was spotted there by Imran Garda, a South African journalist.

Garda was in Harrison to interview Pastor Thomas Robb, the Klan leader who wrote the front-page editorial, for a report on Trump’s white supremacist supporters for Turkey’s TRT World, an English-language channel of the state broadcaster.

“We’ve been saying for a long time, white people in the country as a whole would follow our ideas if we had the power and the finances and the ability to get it into their heads — to broadcast it to them, into their hearts — if they could hear what we have to say,” Robb told Garda. “Donald Trump has in a sense validated what we’ve been saying. For the most part, he’s saying the very same things we’ve been saying.”

As Rachel Maddow reported, the same edition of Klan newspaper, The Crusader, also includes a bizarre celebration of the Saturday Night Live sketch “Racists for Trump,” under the headline, “Trump Candidacy Moving Dialogue Forward.”

Other features in the issue are devoted to the surge in media attention for the Klan owing to Trump’s campaign, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and photos of a recent gathering attended by William Johnson, a white supremacist Trump supporter who just paid to broadcast a homophobic attack ad in Utah in support of the Republican candidate.

The Crusader also drew attention to a speech against “non-white immigration” given in Austria by a Croatian-American white supremacist, Tom Sunic. Sunic, a Trump supporter who was educated in California but now lives in Zagreb, recently spoke alongside Johnson at a conference of extreme nationalists in Germany.

Sunic, whose Twitter feed also features images from all-white beauty pageants in Europe, has been rallying support for Trump from his fellow American expatriates.

After the Klan’s endorsement was reported by the Washington Post on Tuesday night, a spokesman for Trump said “the campaign denounces hate in any form,” and called the publication “repulsive.” There was, however, no repudiation of the Klan’s support from the much larger platform of Trump’s own Twitter account.

As the Post noted, Trump was slow to reject the support of the former Kan leader David Duke earlier in the campaign. Duke, who is now running for the United States Senate in Louisiana, released an ad last week urging his supporters to vote for Trump.

(Updated, 22:28 p.m.) A rarely used Twitter account, sharing links to material released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, became fodder for partisan argument on Tuesday when, without explanation, it drew attention to Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich in 2001, on the final day of his presidency.

Coming days after F.B.I. Director James Comey was criticized for announcing a fresh review of emails from Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, the tweet prompted accusations that supporters of Donald Trump inside the bureau are ignoring Justice Department guidelines to avoid any actions that might be perceived as attempts to influence next week’s election.

The documents, which were posted online Monday, are of little obvious interest, since they are heavily redacted and relate to an F.B.I. investigation of possible corruption that closed 11 years ago with no charges. Still, those rooting against Hillary Clinton’s campaign were elated, largely because of the mistaken belief that the records were related to a new investigation of the Clinton Foundation that has reportedly made little headway.

In fact, the F.B.I. files relate to accusations that Bill Clinton had pardoned Rich, who was indicted for tax evasion and sanctions-busting, because the wealthy oil trader’s former wife, Denise Rich, had donated money to help build the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Clinton foundation, originally set up to fund that project, was later relaunched as an international philanthropic organization that has both done good and raised questions about possible conflicts of interest.

Hillary Clinton’s press secretary, Brian Fallon, called the timing of the F.B.I. release of the documents “odd,” since it seemed to ignore the pre-election guidelines, and there was no obvious reason the files had to be made public this week.

The fact that, until the early hours of Sunday morning, the @FBIRecordsVault Twitter account had not been used to share links to new material since the middle of 2015 fueled suspicion that whoever is in charge of social media at the F.B.I. archive seemed to be in an unusual rush to draw attention to these documents before the election.

Three of the other document collections referred to when the account suddenly sprang to life at 4 a.m. on Sunday could also be described as election related: an archive of documents from the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state; a similar trove from the probe of David Petraeus (whose case is constantly compared to Clinton’s by Trump); eight pages about Fred Trump, the Republican candidate’s late father.

The few pages of F.B.I. files about Fred Trump relate to routine record searches from 1966 and 1991. They do not, as Fallon noted, include any records from the federal investigation of Fred and Donald Trump from 1973, when the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division sued the family business for violating the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against potential tenants on the basis of their race. The Trumps were eventually forced to operate according to the terms of a consent decree, but only after their lawyer, Roy Cohn, was rebuked by a judge for accusing F.B.I. investigators gathering evidence of “gestapo-type conduct,” according to Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice.

The Rich case has some contemporary resonance, given scathing criticism by former Attorney General Eric Holder of Comey’s decision to announce that his investigators are reviewing newly discovered emails to and from Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide. Holder, as Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general at the time, was involved in the decision to grant the Rich pardon. Comey, then a federal prosecutor, ultimately decided in 2005 to close the investigation into that pardon without bringing charges.

In a statement released late on Tuesday, the F.B.I. gave no explanation for the flurry of pre-election activity from a long-dormant Twitter account, but insisted that Freedom of Information Act requests triggered the release of documents relating to the pardon. “Per the standard procedure for FOIA,” the bureau said in the statement, these materials became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures.”

Apparently concerned about the real possibility that Donald Trump could lose the state of Utah to a third-party candidate, Evan McMullin, a political action committee run by a white supremacist backing Trump plans to target Mormon voters there with homophobic voice-mail messages.

The recorded message, urging voters to support Trump, features the voice of William Johnson, a Los Angeles lawyer and self-described “white nationalist” who narrowly missed out on being a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention this summer.

The complete audio, obtained and posted on Soundcloud by Talking Points Memo, mocks McMullin’s mother for being “a lesbian married to another woman,” and goes on to suggest, without evidence, that the former intelligence agent and congressional staffer is himself “a closet homosexual.”

McMullin, who told the Salt Lake Tribune last week that he supports his mother even though he disagrees with her about same-sex marriage, posted a link to a Daily Beast report on the robocall on Twitter, calling the effort a “desperate attack.”

The ad was paid for by Johnson’s American National Super PAC. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Johnson defended the innuendo in the recording, claiming that it was supported by rumors on Reddit.

McMullin, who is supported by anti-Trump Republicans in Utah repulsed by the party’s nominee, continued to attack Trump for the ad, even though there was no sign of coordination with the campaign.

In an interview with CNN earlier this month, McMullin said Trump “has certainly empowered the white nationalist/ white supremacist movement, absolutely, and he’s brought them in to the Republican base.”

During the Republican primary campaign, Johnson recorded a similar call in support of Trump urging voters in Vermont and Minnesota to fight the “gradual genocide against the white race,” by rejecting Ted Cruz and Marco Rudio. “Don’t vote for a Cuban,” the call said. “Vote for Donald Trump.”

A Donald Trump supporter who went into an anti-Semitic tirade during the candidate’s rally in Phoenix on Saturday — screaming “Jew!S!A!” as the crowd chanted “U!S!A!” — called the whole thing a misunderstanding in an interview with Buzzfeed News.

The man, George Lindell, claimed that his pronunciation of the letter “U” in the name of his country just sounds like “Jew” because, as a house painter, “I’m around Mexican people all the time,” who mispronounce it that way.

“That’s the way I say U.S.A.” he insisted.

What his absurd excuse failed to account for was the fact that he was clearly recorded, by three different members of the media, explaining his chant at the time by shrugging his shoulders and saying, “We’re run by the Jews, okay?”

Lindell, who was wearing a “Hillary for Prison” t-shirt purchased from the far-right conspiracy site Infowars, also prefaced his remarks by pointing into the media pen at the back of the rally and saying to reporters, “You’re going down — you’re the enemy! You’re the ones working for the devil!”

Alex Jones, the Infowars founder, claimed on his radio show last week that a “Jewish mafia” dictates policy to the United States government.

The incident came after Trump started his remarks by accusing camera crews at the rally of refusing to pan away from him to show the size of the crowd he attracted. “I wish the cameras would turn, people don’t have any idea what’s going on,” he said. “They know,” Trump continued, pointing at the reporters Lindell would berate minutes later. “They are the most dishonest, corrupt people,” Trump added.

Lindell’s outburst, which was accompanied by a hand sign similar to ones used to denote “white power,” came shortly after Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton was controlled by “organized money.”

This was not, strangely, Lindell’s first moment of viral fame. In 2011, after he gave an unintentionally funny interview to a local news station about a car accident he was involved in, that video was transformed into a song, “Reality Hits You Hard, Bro,” by the Gregory Brothers, the comic remixers responsible for “Auto-Tune the News” and “The Bed Intruder Song.”

That Lindell was already a known quantity to some on the internet led some Trump supporters to claim that his appearance at the rally had been set up to embarrass the candidate. However, both a Lindell Paints Twitter feed maintained in his name, and an associated Facebook page, have been devoted for over a year to sharing conspiracy theories from far-right sites like Infowars, with headlines like, “Putin Just Brought the Rothschild World System to Their Knees,” “Synagogue of Satan,” and “Russia Today Declares 9/11 Was An Inside Job!”

At a rally the next day, in Las Vegas, when Trump again suggested that the media was not showing the crowd to conceal his popularity, reporters were given the finger, and subjected to homophobic slurs.

This post was updated at 14:37 p.m.

Updated | Oct. 30, 22:00 p.m.
Donald Trump has, for years, treated the lurid fantasies and conspiracy theories that animate the far-right imagination as fact, but that tendency reached new heights on Saturday, as he speculated wildly about the F.B.I. director’s announcement that investigators plan to examine a collection of emails from Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin.

At a rally in Colorado, Trump insisted, without basis, that F.B.I. director James Comey’s vaguely worded letter to Congress must mean that “now the evidence is so overwhelming — because they wouldn’t have done this unless the evidence was overwhelming.”

“I will tell you, without knowing anything,” Trump told supporters in Phoenix a few hours later, “the only reason that they did this action that you saw yesterday was: very, very serious things must be happening, and must have been found — very, very serious things, very, very serious things.”

In fact, the F.B.I. director has no idea if there is anything at all related to Clinton’s use of a private email server in the thousands of Abedin emails discovered on a laptop she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner — who is now under federal investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit messages to a minor — since investigators have not yet read any of the messages.

Comey’s initial notification to Congress, which led Trump to pronounce Clinton’s use of private email server “worse then Watergate,” failed to note what the director made clear in an internal memo to F.B.I. employees leaked to the Washington Post: agents are still “seeking access” to the emails and taking “steps to obtain and review them.”

As of Saturday night, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reported, “the F.B.I. had still not gotten approval from the Justice Department for a warrant that would allow agency officials to read any of the newly discovered Abedin emails.”

(On Sunday night, the F.B.I. did obtain a warrant to examine the Abedin emails on Weiner’s computer, Pete Williams of NBC News reported. Agents plan to use an automated system to see if the emails are merely duplicates of messages already examined, Williams said. “Officials say if this all goes quickly, and nothing potentially classified is found, it is possible that the F.B.I. could come out and say so within the next few days,” he added.)

As Matthew Miller, a former public-affairs director at the Justice Department, told the New Yorker, Comey’s initial statement was damaging because, “The public always assumes when it hears that the F.B.I. is investigating that there must be something amiss. But there may be nothing here at all.”

Seeking to stem the flow of misinformation, and conflicting reports in leaks to the press, four Democratic senators — Patrick Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Ben Cardin and Tom Carper — wrote to Comey and his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanding a briefing by Monday on what, exactly, is known about the Abedin emails.

At the Phoenix rally on Saturday, Trump also congratulated himself on what he took to be confirmation that his sexist claim, first made last year, that Huma Abedin must have divulged classified information to her husband — because, he said, no wife could keep secrets from a man she loved — was proven correct.

“Do you think there’s even a 5 percent chance that she’s not telling Anthony Weiner… what the hell is coming across?” Trump asked, rhetorically, at a fundraiser in Massachusetts in 2015. “Do you think there’s even a little bit of a chance? I don’t think so.”

Referring to those comments on Saturday in Phoenix, Trump said: “It’s called instinct folks. I had no idea I was going to be that accurate — boy, that was right on the nose.”

There is, however, as yet no evidence at all that Abedin either stored emails that contained classified information on the laptop she shared with her husband, or that he had access to the email account she used for work during her tenure at the State Department.

As Trump continued to insist that the unread emails prove that Clinton is a criminal, the rally in Phoenix was interrupted several times by chants of “lock her up,” and at least one stream of anti-Semitic invective was hurled at the media by a man wearing an Infowars.com “Hillary for Prison” shirt.

Speaking to the conservative Catholic broadcaster EWTN, Donald Trump sought to defend his outlandish claim that the election might be rigged against him by lying repeatedly about comments on election security made by then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008.

Trump, who built his base of support among conspiratorially minded Republican voters by fostering the myth that Obama was not born in the United States, grossly distorted the president’s remarks on the campaign trail in 2008, telling EWTN, “Obama said it was, I mean he said the electoral process is rigged.”

“If you look at Obama’s statements from eight years ago, take a look at what he said about it,” Trump added, in an interview recorded on Tuesday but broadcast Thursday night. “I saw it last night, it was like, incredible, he was far more outgoing as far as that’s concerned than I am.”

In fact, the only thing “incredible” about Obama’s 2008 remarks is the lengths to which Trump and his supporters are now going to mischaracterize them.

As the Trumpdown explained earlier this week, the Republican candidate’s campaign re-edited video of Obama’s reply to a voter who had asked, on September 3, 2008, how the Democrat could be sure that election would not be rigged or stolen by officials in Ohio.

Watching the unedited, original video of Obama’s complete answer shows that, far from arguing that the election system is rigged, he acknowledged that, in the past, both parties had been guilty of tampering with ballots, and called for strong federal oversight of the process and paper receipts for electronic voting machines to assuage those fears.

Trump began referring to Obama’s comments earlier this week — first by pointing reporters to copies of the complete video posted on YouTube under misleading headlines, and then by posting a heavily edited version of the remarks on Twitter that distorted their meaning.

Trump is splitting the white, non-Hispanic Catholic vote with Hillary Clinton, with 44% each, according to recent polling. That means Trump lags far behind the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, who won white Catholics by 19 points. Among Latino Catholics, Trump is losing to Clinton by a 76-13 margin.

Given that recent polls also show that a clear majority of Americans approve of the job Obama has done as president, Trump seems unlikely to benefit from continuing to appeal to the minority that hates him.

Donald Trump’s new campaign commercial, seeking support from Indian-American voters, has attracted attention mainly for the comical way the candidate stumbles through the Hindi phrase, “Abki Baar Trump Sarkar,” or, “This Time, a Trump Government,” a slogan adopted from the one used by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The rest of the ad uses excerpts from Trump’s remarks to a bizarre anti-terror gala staged this month in New Jersey by the Republican Hindu Coalition.

In that speech, Trump made common cause with the conservative Hindus over the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism.” He also heaped praise on Modi, a Hindu nationalist who was, until recently, barred from the United States for failing to stop Hindu mobs from killing more than 1,000 Muslims in communal violence in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002.

Trump’s address to the gathering was preceded by a live, Bollywood-style song and dance number in which Muslim terrorists, wielding light sabers, took the dancers hostage, before being overwhelmed by U.S. special forces.

The same event featured heavy-handed propaganda against Hillary Clinton, who was blamed for pursuing an anti-Modi agenda as secretary of state.

As my colleague Lee Fang reported, in addition to sharing an obsessive hatred of Muslims, Trump has business ties to Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, “having signed a licensing deal in 2014 to construct the Trump Tower Mumbai with Mangal Prabhat Lodha, a real estate mogul and BJP state legislator.”

Earlier in the campaign, Trump’s candidacy was also endorsed by a small group of anti-Muslim extremists in India, the Hindu Sena, who held a prayer ritual for him. “Trump has said Muslims should be banned from entering America,” the Hindu Sena leader Vishnu Gupta said. “Everyone should support that.”

“Trump is about to become the king of the world,” Gupta added. “How will we attack Pakistan without his support?”

But while Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has won him such visible support from Hindu nationalists, it is worth keeping in mind that polling suggests he is widely disliked by most Indian-Americans.

During the primary campaigns this year, one survey found that 62% of Indian-Americans viewed Trump unfavorably, while 65% had positive views of the Democratic Party.

Asked by researchers if they would vote for a candidate for office they otherwise agreed with if that person “expressed strong anti-Muslim views,” 59% of Indian-Americans said they would choose another candidate.

A recent national poll of Asian-Americans, directed by Karthick Ramakrishnan of the UC Riverside School of Public Policy, found that Trump was viewed unfavorably by 79% of Indian-Americans, while Clinton was viewed favorably by 70% of the community.

Among registered Indian-Americans voters in the same poll, Clinton enjoyed a massive lead over Trump: 70% to 7%.

One challenging aspect of covering Donald Trump’s campaign is how regularly the candidate references obscure internet memes, conspiracy theories and viral tweets that few outside the alt-right biosphere he now inhabits are familiar with.

A prime example was his answer, on Tuesday, when a CNN reporter, Jeremy Diamond, asked, “Do you still think the election’s going to be stolen from you?”

“Ask Obama,” Trump said, turning to face the reporter. “Tell him to look at his tape, when he was running eight years ago.” Without further explanation, he then turned and walked away, leaving reporters to ask themselves: what tape?

After some searching, it became evident that Trump was probably referring to a section of this C-Span video, recorded on September 3, 2008, as then-Senator Barack Obama fielded questions from voters at Kent State University-Tuscarawas in New Philadelphia, Ohio.

A portion of that video got a lot of attention on the alt-right last week, when Jeff Poor, a Breibart reporter, came across it on the C-Span website, clipped out three minutes of Obama talking about election security and posted it, along with a transcript, on the news site.

Poor’s clip, which was copied to YouTube by a Trump fan who added the misleading headline, “Obama Admits to Rigged Elections Back in 2008,” shows Obama answering a voter who asked: “I would just like to know what you can say to reassure us that this election will not be rigged or stolen.”

Obama responded by trying to reassure that voter that fears of vote-rigging by Republican officials (prompted by claims from some on the left that Ohio had been stolen from John Kerry in 2004) would simply not be an issue in the 2008 election, since Democrats were by then in charge of the state’s government. “I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we’ve got Democrats in charge of the machines,” Obama said, to some laughter and applause. He went on to advocate non-partisan oversight of the election system and common sense reform of the electronic voting systems to require that they provide paper receipts.

“Look, I come from Chicago,” Obama said, “so I want to be honest — it’s not as if it’s just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past, sometimes Democrats have, too.”

He continued:

You know, whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to, you know, tilt things in their direction. That’s why we’ve got to have, I believe, a Voting Rights Division in the Justice Department that is non-partisan, and that is serious about investigating cases of vote fraud, is serious about making sure that people are not being discouraged to vote. That’s why the voting-rights legislation that was passed a couple years ago to help county clerks make sure that the machines were in place that were needed are important. That’s why we need paper trails on these new electronic machines, so that you actually have something that you can hang on to after you’ve punched that letter, make sure it hasn’t been hacked into. I mean, those are all part of the process of making sure that our democracy works for everybody….

This is near and dear to my heart, because when I was a lawyer, I practiced voting rights law. And I filed a lot of lawsuits. In Illinois, I helped to make sure that you could go ahead and get registered at driver’s license facilities — at the DMV. So I’ve been working on this for a long time. I think the more people participate, the more they are paying attention, ultimately, the better off everybody is.

According to Poor, the Breitbart reporter, Obama’s observation that American elections have been tampered with by both parties, in the past, seemed terribly damning — as did his statement that “it helps” that Democrats would have oversight of the machines in Ohio in 2008. Outside that partisan bubble, however, it seems plain that Obama said something much less controversial.

Perhaps realizing that Obama’s full comments were not particularly supportive of the right-wing fever dream that the election is being “rigged” against Trump, by the end of Tuesday, he tweeted out not the full video but a highly edited version that distorts those remarks.

The edited video posted on Trump’s Twitter feed removed Obama’s call for “a Voting Rights Division in the Justice Department that is non-partisan” and would investigate allegations of vote fraud, but also ensure “that people are not being discouraged to vote.”

Trump’s edit also omitted the last four words of Obama’s recollection about having worked in Illinois “to make sure that you could go ahead and get registered at driver’s license facilities — at the DMV.” That sentence was clipped to end, weirdly, at the word “license,” perhaps to make it seem like support for the false belief embraced by the alt-right, that undocumented immigrants with driver’s licenses are able to vote in elections.

At the grand opening of his new hotel in Washington on Wednesday, Donald Trump took a moment to praise Newt Gingrich for defending him in a contentious interview with Megyn Kelly the night before. “Congratulations, Newt, on last night,” the candidate said. “That was an amazing interview.”

Video of the interview had spread widely on social networks, with much of the commentary focused on the moment at which the former speaker of the house scolded the Fox News anchor for highlighting Trump’s predatory behavior towards women, saying, “You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy.”

“I am not fascinated by sex,” Kelly replied, “but I am fascinated by the protection of women and understanding what we’re getting in the Oval Office.”

When she continued, “I think the American voters would like to know–” Gingrich cut her off, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “And therefore we’re going to send Bill Clinton back to the East Wing, because after all, you are worried about sexual predators.”

As Kelly responded, “it’s not about me, it’s about the women and men of America,” Gingrich cocked his head in mock astonishment. Moments later, he interrupted again, badgering Kelly about not calling Bill Clinton a sexual predator. “I want to hear you use the words, ‘Bill Clinton, sexual predator,’ I dare you.”

Fox News posted video of the full interview online, which shows that Gingrich’s attack on Kelly came after she reviewed the evidence that Trump’s collapse in the polls was entirely his own fault. It started, she argued, with Trump’s inability to handle criticism by a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, after the first debate, and continued with his failure to produce a convincing explanation for comments caught on tape by “Access Hollywood,” in which he boasted of sexual assault.

That this campaign is ending with Trump and Gingrich treating the ultraconservative Megyn Kelly as a de facto surrogate of Hillary Clinton is remarkable for many reasons.

Most obviously, there is the fact that Kelly’s own politics appear to be far to the right, given her frequent dismissal of racism as a factor in American life.

Then there is the fact that Kelly did try to warn Trump, in the first question directed to him at the first Republican primary debate last year, that he would need to come up with a good way of defending himself when Hillary Clinton inevitably accused him of abusive behavior towards women. Fourteen months later, as Trump hemorrhages support among Republican women, that looks like prescient advice Trump would have been better off taking than freaking out about.

Finally, as Trump’s defenders attempt to discredit the dozen women accusing him of assault, it is Kelly who has been forced to explain to male guests that women who are the victims of sexual assault by men often do not come forward at the time.

As New York magazine reported, Kelly apparently told investigators looking into the conduct of her former boss, Roger Ailes, that he had sexually harassed her a decade ago. Ailes, of course, after being forced out of his job at Fox on a raft of sexual harassment allegations, then went on to advise Trump.

Updated: The self-appointed leader of “Blacks for Trump,” who stood directly behind the candidate at a campaign rally in Florida on Tuesday, is a former member of a violent religious cult and a radical preacher with extreme anti-Semitic and homophobic beliefs.

The man, pictured throughout the rally behind Trump’s left shoulder, was seen on television exchanging thumb-up gestures with the candidate, who paused to say: “I love the signs behind me, ‘Blacks for Trump,’ I like those signs!”

Some viewers laughed at the fact that one of the signs was, in fact, being held by a white woman, but the group’s leader, who holds bizarre, extremist views, was standing beside her throughout the rally. He was born Maurice Woodside, but later changed his name to Michael the Black Man, as part of a personal reinvention after the cult leader he had followed throuhgout the 1980s, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed in 1991 for a series of killings that included the beheading of one victim. At the time, Woodside was accused by his own brother, who was also in the cult, of taking part in the murders of two dissident members, but was eventually acquitted.

As the Miami New Times reported two weeks ago, when Michael was also positioned on the bleachers behind Trump at a rally, after leaving the cult he became known in conservative circles “an anti-gay, anti-liberal preacher with a golden instinct for getting on TV at GOP events.”

Asked by the New Times why he supports Trump, Michael listed a number of delusional beliefs, including that “Hillary’s last name is Rodham, and their family members are Rothschilds.”

In recent months, Michael and his followers have appeared repeatedly at Trump events, wearing a T-shirts that read “Republicans and Trump are not racist,” above the url for his website, Gods2.com.

That website includes a political cartoon depicting Clinton and President Obama as instruments of the devil, an image of Michael with Sean Hannity and a video headlined, “Michael The Black Man helping Republicans and Tea Party from 1994 until now,” in which he also takes credit for protesting against the Florida recount in 2000.

Michael explained his decision to endorse Trump in a rambling 72-minute YouTube monologue, mixing together odd takes on scripture — like an aside about a biblical patriarch getting “drunk and having sex with a guy” — and political commentary. He also scoffed at the notion that Trump needed to be qualified to be an effective president. “What’s important to me is Trump gets in,” Michael said, “he doesn’t have to be qualified or none of that crap, because the most unqualified people is who God always chose.”

Speaking to supporters in Sanford, Florida on Tuesday, Donald Trump made the strange suggestion that someone might have helped Hillary Clinton cheat in last week’s debate against him, by giving her not just the questions in advance but also “the answers.”

The puzzling line of attack expands on an analogy Trump first used last week, when he compared Clinton to Charles Van Doren, a contestant on the 1950s game show “Twenty One,” who was secretly given answers in advance by the show’s producers. That attack was based on the revelation that Clinton’s campaign was, in fact, tipped off about one question before a CNN forum in March — that the candidate would be asked about the death penalty.

A hacked email obtained by WikiLeaks showed that Donna Brazile, a Democratic operative who was a paid CNN pundit at the time, did send the text of a question on the death penalty to a Clinton aide the night before the forum. Despite that advance warning, Clinton did not rework her answer for the forum, giving the same justification for her position that she had offered in a Democratic primary debate a month earlier.

But in describing this real evidence that a Democratic operative did secretly try to help Clinton succeed in the primary campaign face-off with Bernie Sanders, Trump undercut his argument by misstating and greatly exaggerating the facts. First, he falsely claimed that Brazile had provided Clinton with “all the questions,” rather than just one, and incorrectly called the forum “a debate.” Then, he amped up the charge, shouting, “She got the answers to a debate!”

Before anyone could process what, exactly, it would mean to be given the answers to a debate, rather than the questions, Trump added: “I wonder if she had the questions the other night, to our debate — because everybody tells me I killed her in that debate, which I think I did.”

Trump, of course, lost last week’s debate to Clinton, which was moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, according to every scientific opinion poll of debate watchers. His supporters have repeatedly claimed that the former secretary of state’s ability to dominate all three debates with Trump can only be explained by some sort of cheating, not considering the possibility that she might have a deep familiarity with policy as a result of her long experience in government.

Updated: At a campaign event in Miami on Tuesday that was more in keeping with the norms of politics in North Korea, Donald Trump brought reporters to one of his golf courses and invited 10 of his employees on stage to praise him.

Before the first speaker took the stage, Trump joked that “this guy better say good, or I’ll say, ‘You’re fired!'”

The man, a Latino, then prefaced his remarks by saying that he was proud to work at Trump’s property “even though I have many issues with my family because I’ve been supporting this man here.” As he left the stage, Trump told reporters, “and I promise you we didn’t set this up at all.”

Having previously been duped into giving live air time to Trump events that were more about promoting his properties than the election, cable news channels declined to broadcast the event in full, with even Fox News cutting away from the string of testimonials from people the candidate pays.

The staged endorsements came the same day that Democratic activists shared a copy of what appeared to be an “election memo” sent to thousands of people who work for America’s largest private time-share developer, David Siegel, in which he urged employees to vote for Trump.

Siegel’s company, Westgate Resorts, has not yet replied to a request to confirm the authenticity of the memo, but the developer sent a very similar memo to employees in 2012, warning them that there might be layoffs if President Obama was reelected.

Siegel also boasted about helping to secure Florida for George W. Bush in 2000, by pressing thousands of employees to vote for the Republican candidate. In an interview with the same publication, the developer explained that he gave employees not-so-subtle hints about what he wanted them to do by putting negative articles about Al Gore in envelopes along with their paychecks.

As The Atlantic explained in 2012, after Siegel’s anti-Obama memo was leaked to Gawker, employers cannot explicitly pay workers to vote a certain way, but, in most states, they are permitted to make their preferences known before election day.

Unlike Florida, California does have a law stating that “no employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.”

At almost every campaign stop these days, Donald Trump urges his supporters not to lose heart just because most opinion polls show him headed for defeat. Look, he says, at what happened with Brexit — the British vote in favor of exiting the European Union in June that shocked the political and media elite of the United Kingdom.

In the past few days, Trump has predicted that America’s white working-class is poised to deliver an election-day sequel he’s called “Another Brexit,” “Beyond Brexit,” “Brexit Plus,” or “Brexit Times Five.”

But if Trump is really expecting to sweep to victory on the kind of anti-immigrant, nativist wave that decided the British referendum, he is likely to be disappointed.

To start with, as Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight observed last week, it is simply not true that the polls in Britain predicted a vote against Brexit in the final weeks of that campaign.

“The final polls showed a toss-up between the United Kingdom leaving the European Union or remaining in it, and ‘leave’ eventually won by 4 points,” Nate Silver explained on Thursday. “If the polls were biased against Trump by that much in this election, he’d still lose, by a margin approximating the one by which Mitt Romney lost to President Obama four years ago.”

Perhaps more importantly, the idea that the American electorate is similar to the British one on the issue Trump has made the centerpiece of his campaign, immigration, is not borne out by evidence.

Having spent a good part of my childhood shuttling between the United States and the British Isles, I can attest that one of the most common errors Americans make about Britain is failing to understand just how different the two cultures are, particularly with regard to attitudes on immigration, despite sharing a (more or less) common language.

As I reported in August, this manifests itself in ways that cut against the likelihood of Trump riding to power on an anti-immigrant backlash. To start with, there is evidence that Americans are far more likely than Britons to say that the ethnic and racial diversity brought about by immigration makes their country better, not worse.

This is supported by new data on attitudes to undocumented immigrants released last week in a Fox News poll that showed Hillary Clinton with a six-point lead over Trump. A largely overlooked aspect of that poll was the overwhelming majority in support of giving “illegal immigrants who are currently working in the United States,” a path to citizenship — rather than deporting them, as Trump has promised.

The survey showed that since Trump launched his campaign last year, by branding Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals and “rapists,” support for granting legal status to the undocumented has increased, climbing to 74% of likely voters this month. Just 18% of the electorate backs Trump’s plan for mass deportations.

Two Cuban-American sisters, Annie and Ceci Cardelle, performed a public service this weekend, by proving beyond doubt that the Trump campaign does not speak a single word of Spanish.

More precisely, they proved that Donald Trump’s son Qusay Eric and his wife Lara have no idea that the word contra means “against.”

The proof came in the form of a photograph of the sisters posing with the Trumps on Friday in North Carolina as Annie wore a T-shirt with the words “Latina Contra Trump” scrawled in big letters across the front.

The Cardelles told Buzzfeed News that they were surprised no one at the rally or on the campaign staff seemed to realize that the shirt was a protest against Trump.

After Donald Trump finished speaking in Cleveland on Saturday night, his supporters hurled abuse at reporters covering the rally, a now familiar ritual, thanks to the candidate’s repeated attempts to dismiss all unflattering news about him as media fabrications.

The night before in Pennsylvania, an NBC News producer, Frank Thorp, captured the intensity of the crowd turning to jeer the press pen after Trump said “they are dishonest people.”

In Cleveland on Saturday, video recorded by Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed News showed that, mixed in with the usual insults, was a new one: Lügenpresse, a German word meaning, “lying press.”

As CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out, the word is a term of abuse first made popular in Germany by the Nazis. In recent years, it has been adopted by Germany’s far-right and is often heard at anti-immigrant rallies, chanted by followers of PEGIDA, a German acronym for a name that translates roughly as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West.

It is not entirely clear how the word made it from Germany to Cleveland, but a likely source is the alt-right bible, Breitbart, which has made common cause with the anti-Muslim hysteria in Germany and uses the word frequently.

To judge whether the word sounds, as Molly Ivins once said of Pat Buchanan’s nativist rhetoric, “better in the original German,” readers can watch a short clip of anti-Muslim soccer hooligans in Cologne chanting “Lügenpresse, halt die Fresse,” (“Shut up, lying press”) in 2014.

The hatred for Hillary Clinton among Donald Trump’s supporters has led to increasingly graphic depictions of violence against her at his rallies. When the Republican presidential candidate railed against his rival on Saturday at Regent University in Virginia Beach, for instance, reporters spotted a depiction of Clinton’s head on a stake in the crowd.

Posters on sale at the event showed Clinton’s face at the center of a target practice bullseye, with the words: “Killary Rotten Clinton — Chipping away your gun rights since 1993.”

Concerns that Trump’s rhetoric might inspire an actual attack on Clinton spiked in August, when he lied to supporters in Wilmington, North Carolina, falsely claiming that, “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment.”

“If she gets to pick her judges: nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said, to boos. “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know,” he added, in an aside that was widely taken as a reference to Clinton’s possible assassination by gun-rights fundamentalists.

After the rally at the Christian university in Virginia Beach on Saturday, Trump supporters wearing masks depicting the two candidates acted out the scene of the Republican choking the Democrat, who was in prison garb.

Curt Schilling, the former Red Sox pitcher who is better known these days for his ultraconservative politics, led a rally in support of Donald Trump outside Boston’s city hall on Saturday. Eyewitness accounts of the gathering suggested that in excess of 10 people heeded his call.

One bystander who happened on the event reported that Schilling, who has been talking about running for the Senate to unseat Senator Elizabeth Warren, told the happy few there that people who are not informed should abstain from voting.

Schilling, who recently defended Trump’s comment that he might be dating a 10-year-old girl he spotted in Trump Tower “in 10 years,” made headlines on Friday for asking Jake Tapper of CNN to explain how “people of the Jewish faith” can vote for Democrats.

At about the same time, Warren drew a crowd of 200 to a campaign event for a state legislator in a similarly rainy but far less populated part of Western Massachusetts.

According to Matt Szafranski, editor of a blog about politics in that part of the state, Warren stifled a laugh when asked about the possibility of facing Schilling in the 2018 race.

In what was billed by his campaign as a major policy address, laying out “his positive vision” for the first 100 days of his presidency, Donald Trump set foot on what he mistakenly called the “hollowed ground” of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Saturday and promised to sue all 11 women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault or harassment.

“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” Trump said. “Total fabrication — the events never happened, never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”

Trump’s use of “hollowed,” a botched reference to Lincoln’s phrase “we can not hallow this ground,” in his dedication of the graveyard at Gettysburg in 1863, inspired derision online.

Before turning to a list of previously announced steps he promised to take, if elected, Trump paused to air the grievances about potential voter fraud, his opponent and the media that punctuate every rally.

After citing misleading statistics about how many dead people are still registered to vote — suggesting, without evidence, “some of them are voting” — Trump complained that he was not running unopposed. “Hillary Clinton should have been precluded from running,” he said, because of her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

Trump then blamed the proliferation of stories about him forcing himself on women — just as he said he did in the leaked 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape — on corporate control of media companies, like CNN, the Washington Post and NBC, which he accused of “trying to tell the voters what to think and what to do.”

If elected, Trump said, his administration would block deals that put too much power in the hands of corporations he accused of “trying to poison the mind of the American voter,” by reporting credible allegations that he abused women.

As Stuart Stevens, the Republican strategist who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, noted, Trump himself has reportedly been pondering the launch of Trump TV, a new right-wing media channel, after his likely loss the election.

When he finally got around to listing the policies he would pursue in office, Trump first promised to institute a huge tax cut, and then railed against the lack of investment in public infrastructure crippling the United States economy.

Trump’s tax cut would cost the federal government an estimated $5.3 trillion over the next decade. He promised on Saturday “to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years.”

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the current funding gap to repair America’s roads, bridges, transit systems, power plants and schools could have been entirely covered by the $2.8 trillion in tax cuts George W. Bush gave mainly to the wealthiest Americans in 2000.