October 14, 2024

Dog Bites Man

I had a busy weekend, so admittedly, I wasn’t as tuned into the news as I usually am, but there was an interesting item from Saturday that seems to be largely flying under the radar: A man with illegally-obtained guns and a fake press credential was arrested at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Coachella, California on Saturday. The local sheriff reported that his deputies “probably prevented” a “third assassination attempt” on Trump. Despite those dire words, the Secret Service and FBI, along with the U.S. Attorneys Office, issued a joint statement that “former President Trump was not in any danger.”

I’m a bit flabbergasted, though, because it seems like in other times (eras?), news like this would grab the front pages of national news. It’s currently story #2 on CNN’s politics page, a couple of screens down on the New York Times’s, and nowhere to be seen on either Fox News’s politics page or the Washington Post’s. It feels almost like another form of desensitization where Trump being threatened by people with guns is news on the level of “dog bites man”, and barely ranks as “newsworthy”.

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Younger Woman Appears Healthier Than Older Man

Vice President Kamala Harris made news on Saturday as well, by releasing a letter from her doctor, pronouncing her in good health. Physician Joshua Simmons pointed out that, while the 59-year-old does suffer from seasonal allergies, sporadic hives and nearsightedness, she maintains an active lifestyle and “very healthy diet”, despite her busy schedule. He also made a point to mention, “She possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency”.

Naturally, this puts the spotlight on Trump to do the same. The campaign has put out a statement that the 78-year-old has released updates from his personal physician, and the doctor who treated him after the first assassination attempt, but those are just letters, and not an actual medical report. A letter released while he was president was so over-the-top positive that many suspected that Trump wrote it himself and just had his doctor sign it.

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GOP Lies About Immigrants

Very notable about this election, in contrast to previous presidential contests, is the sheer volume — I mean both in number of stories and relative loudness of the tellers — of false information (read: lies) being pushed about immigrants, particularly in relation to voting. NPR has a rundown of 6 main facts about these false noncitizen voting claims that I’ll quickly summarize here:

• There are severe penalties for noncitizens who illegally try to vote. When filling out a voter registration form, people are asked to affirm, under penalty of perjury, that they are eligible citizens. Lying about that can result in fines, imprisonment, or deportation, and potentially the loss of the ability to ever become a U.S. citizen.
• Available data shows noncitizen voting is incredibly rare. While the extremely conservative Heritage Foundation actively promotes claims about the risk of noncitizens voting, their own data shows a grand total of only 85 cases relating to allegations of noncitizens voting over the past 22 years. Furthermore, the American Immigration Council, analyzed the data and found that most of those cases involved legal immigrants who were mistakenly told that they could vote. The analysis found only 10 cases involving undocumented immigrants have happened since the 1980s. For their part, Heritage has stated that these are only a sampling and not comprehensive, but data from other sources corroborates the findings that this is an extremely rare occurrence.
• Flawed studies have fueled false claims. A lot of the scaremongering about noncitizens voting comes from a 2014 paper that drew its conclusions from an online survey, which estimated that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008. Almost immediately after the paper was published, its methodology was called into question, including from the organization who created the survey that the paper based its data on — eventually leading to even the paper’s author re-revising the numbers to a fraction of what it used to be. Despite that, Trump and other conservative organizations continue to tout the original, flawed figures.
• A small number of localities allow noncitizens to vote in municipal races only. Some areas do allow noncitizens to vote, but only in local elections — like city council or school board. They are still barred from voting in federal and state elections, and there are systems in place to ensure they don’t receive ballots for the other races.
• Most people who arrived at the border in recent years have no path to citizenship. One lie that keeps cropping up is that the Democrats are fast-tracking immigrants at the southern border so they can become citizens and vote legally. But in reality, it can take more than a decade for asylum seekers to make it through the process to citizenship, and that’s only for a small minority of applicants. And the Biden administration has made even that arduous process more difficult.
• Misleading claims about noncitizens voting can undermine confidence in the 2024 election. By continuing to beat the drum for these (and other similar) lies, Trump and his allies appear to be laying the groundwork for how they could contest this year’s election if it doesn’t go their way. They still say that Trump actually won the 2020 election, but widespread fraud caused them to lose — which isn’t true in the slightest. There’s been zero evidence of truth to any of those claims, but a poll in June found that 30% of Americans believe that lie.

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