Scott Varley/Digital First Media/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images

If you can remember as far back as January 2020, way back then, we at Mother Jones asked you to share your political mail. As my colleague Tim wrote at the time:

Facebook, for all its faults (actually, because of all its faults), makes it extremely easy to search political advertisements. Anyone can see what states are being targeted, how much reach an advertisement had, and how much money went into it. But there’s no such database for old-fashioned political mail. You know the kind—glossy, filled with impeccably lit photos of the candidate’s smiling family. Or perhaps improperly darkened, ominous-looking images of their opponent. Campaigns and outside groups often say stuff in mailers they don’t say in public—it’s where they show their true colors. (Remember those unseemly Ted Cruz mailers in 2016? Or this super-racist attack on an Asian-American candidate in 2018?) It’d be easier if campaigns and other organizations just sent us all this stuff, but they don’t, and so we need your help: Did you get a piece of political mail that caught your eye for one reason or another? Send it to us.

The instructions are simple:

1. Take a photo of the mailer—the full thing, if you can
2. Email it to our tipline, scoop@motherjones.com
3. Use in the subject line: “Mailers” 
4. Tell us your home state in the subject line or body of the email

We’re looking for mailers of all kinds, be they from presidential candidates or congressional candidates or would-be sheriffs and county assessors, be they about ballot initiatives or issues relevant to the election, be they funny or tacky or monstrous. Tips can be anonymous, and we’ll be sure to redact any identifying details from the photos before publishing them.

Mother Jones Illustration/Shuttershock

This post was originally published as part of The Trump Files—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 26, 2016.

Donald Trump has a long track record of pushing officials in New York and other cities to yield to his demands, but he doesn’t always get his way. Take the case of an old building in Los Angeles that he bought a stake in, where the local school board thwarted Trump’s attempt to build yet another massive tower.

The building was the Ambassador Hotel, a rundown property most famous for being the site of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. It closed in January 1989 and that year Trump snapped up a 25 percent interest in the partnership that owned the hotel, later pledging—what else?—to build the world’s tallest building on the site. But LA’s school board wanted to use the property to build a high school, and its members voted to seize the Ambassador using eminent domain.

Rather than agreeing on a sale price with the district, the Los Angeles Times reported, Trump decided to fight. Trump launched a years-long battle as he first lobbied to keep the property, then agreed to sell when he needed cash in 1991, and finally waded into a complicated legal battle with the city as both parties squabbled over how much the land was worth. Trump complained during one deposition obtained by the Times that the “fools” on the school board had taken the hotel from him “as viciously as in Nazi Germany.” And he griped: “I assumed that the people essentially teaching the kids were not stupid. They turned out to be very stupid.”

The school board eventually won the dispute, knocked down the hotel, and built a wildly expensive K-12 campus that opened in 2010. And Trump, defeated, sold his stake in the partnership in 1998 and never tried to build a major building in Southern California again.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 17, 2016.

“By my calculations, one percent of Americans, who control 90 percent of the wealth in this country, would be affected by my plan. The other 99 percent of the people would get deep reductions in their federal income taxes.”

No, that’s not Bernie Sanders. That’s Donald Trump describing the tax plan he proposed in 1999, a plan targeted specifically at raising huge amounts of money from rich people and promoted in language that Occupy Wall Street would have loved.

Trump proposed hitting anyone worth $10 million or more with a one-time 14.25 percent tax on their assets, saying it would raise $5.7 trillion dollars and wipe out the national debt. According to Trump, his own bill would have come to more than $700 million dollars (pegging his net worth at just under $5 billion), but he said he was happy to fork over the cash. “Some will say that my plan is unfair to the extremely wealthy,” he wrote his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. “I say it is only reasonable to shift the burden to those most able to pay…I believe we have an obligation to pay. Taxes represent the cost of freedom and its defense. It is a small price.”

The tax plan was part of Trump’s brief and unsuccessful run for the Reform Party nomination in 2000. But while the wealth gap between the top one percent and the rest of society has risen dramatically since then, Trump has backed off his willingness to sacrifice his own money for the common good. Not only did he drop support for his 1999 plan, but his 2016 tax plan would increase the national debt by another $10 trillion and hand out tax breaks that would be “highly concentrated among the highest-income households, which would get a bigger percentage of the tax cuts than the share of taxes they pay now,” writes the Wall Street Journal. That plan is so expensive that the Trump campaign has set up a team of economists who are “tweaking” the plan to lower its costs.

Mother Jones Illustration; Shuttershock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 16, 2016.

If there’s one thing Donald Trump is determined to protect, it’s his name. From a brand of business cards to two real estate developers with the same last name, the Republican presidential candidate has never held back from suing over the word “trump.”

In 1989, the target business was Trump Travel & Tours, a family-owned travel agency in the small town of Baldwin, New York, owned by Jules Rabin and his daughter Claudia Rabin-Manning, according to Newsday. The paper reported that Donald not only wanted the small business to change its name, but he expected $4 million in damages.

According to Rabin-Manning, the agency was already named Trump Travel when she bought it, and the term was used in reference to playing cards. “I didn’t know what to do,” she told the New York Daily News in May. “I wondered, ‘Am I going to lose my business?’ I was so upset.” The case was settled out of court, but she told the Daily News that fighting the suit cost her almost $10,000 and she was forced to put a disclaimer on her business stationery, signs, websites, and emails declaring that the agency was “not affiliated with Donald J. Trump or the Trump Organization.”

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 31, 2016.

“Donald Trump Presents the Most Beautiful Women in the World” isn’t a joke headline or a Trump campaign pledge. Believe it or not, it’s the actual name of a TV show Trump pitched to ABC in 1993.

In 2016, Slate published a letter found by University of Iowa professor Travis Vogan in which the real estate mogul, still recovering from a string of bankruptcies and business failures in the early ’90s, told ABC’s Roone Arledge that a 60- to 90-minute special featuring Trump interviewing beautiful women from around the world would be a ratings hit. “This program will be done on a yearly basis and will get huge ratings,” Trump wrote. “I will promote it heavily—along with everything else I do.” Another unnamed mystery network was of course “very interested,” so ABC would have to act fast, he said.

Trump included a handy list of beautiful women he could interview, made up mostly of supermodels. He also included Princess Diana—”whom I know and I think will speak to me,” he insisted—as part of his long-running campaign of creeping on the beloved British royal.

It’s not clear if Arledge even acknowledged the letter, and the show was never made. As we know, Trump is always at his most charming and respectful when addressing attractive women on TV, so ABC likely turned down a gold mine.

Andrew Harnik/AP

Donald Trump’s campaign told the Associated Press on Saturday that Vice President Mike Pence would no longer be attending a Trump campaign fundraiser in Montana that was being organized by supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory. 

Pence’s team reportedly did not provide a reason for the switch. The AP revealed on Wednesday that the event was being organized by two QAnon supporters, Cayrn and Michael Borland, in Bozeman, Montana. The couple had shared Q-related memes and retweeted pro-QAnon accounts on social media. 

The conspiracy theory claims, without evidence, that a cabal of elite liberal pedophiles is locked in a battle with President Donald Trump who is trying to stop them, but is being thwarted by the “deep state.”

The Borlands have donated over $220,000 to Trump’s reelection campaign, according to the AP. This isn’t the first time the President has received money from far-right supporters with problematic beliefs. The Trump campaign has also taken thousands of dollars in donations from at least one neo-Nazi and other extremist individuals, according to the Popular Information newsletter.

Trump has also not shied away from the conspiracy theory, not-infrequently retweeting QAnon accounts. When asked about Q in a White House Press Briefing, the president declined to reject it. Instead, he praised its adherents.

General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, similarly pulled out of a QAnon event last August, after Mother Jones reported on its ties to QAnon. After appearing to keep some distance between him and theory, Flynn seemed to warm up to Q. On July 4th, he posted himself taking pledge to the group. 

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Twitter put a warning on one of President Trump’s tweets on Saturday morning, in which he encouraged followers to vote twice in North Carolina, which is illegal.

In his tweet, Trump urged people voting by mail in North Carolina to show up to polling sites to make sure that their vote was being counted, and if it wasn’t, to vote again in person. Election officials have specifically warned against doing this, saying that it could cause unnecessarily long lines at polling stations.

This wasn’t the first time the president has encouraged voter fraud: He did the same thing earlier this month, telling supporters in North Carolina to vote twice (both by mail and in-person). “Let them send it in, and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote,” Trump said. “If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote,” 

Users trying to view the tweet on Saturday were first met with a warning from Twitter explaining that the election misinformation tweet is against Twitter’s civic and election integrity rules:

We placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our Civic Integrity Policy, specifically for encouraging people to potentially vote twice. https://t.co/yy674OE26n

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) September 12, 2020

This is only the latest instance of Twitter trying to curb misinformation spread by the President. Twitter put the same warning on a Trump tweet last month in which he said drop boxes for mail-in votes could lead to election fraud. Facebook also said that videos of Trump encouraging people in North Carolina to vote twice would be taken down because the company found them to be in violation of its policies against voter fraud.

Andrew Harnik/AP

The Editor-in-Chief of the influential academic journal Science has slammed President Donald Trump as a dangerous liar, whose deliberate distortions of the coronavirus crisis have “demoralized the scientific community and cost countless lives in the United States” by muzzling health officials and sowing confusion.

In a new column published Friday by the peer-reviewed outlet, H. Holden Thorp argued that, “Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: He flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American people.” This, he says, “may be the most shameful moment in the history of U.S. science policy.”

Thorp, a distinguished chemist and the top editor for the Science family of journals, was reacting to revelations contained in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward, and accompanying tapes, that show Trump knew about the severity of the coronavirus, and even how the pathogen might spread in the air, in early February, even as he obfuscated and misled the public by insisting the virus would miraculously disappear. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward in March. “I still like playing it down.”

“Trump was not clueless,” Thorp concludes. “He was not ignoring the briefings. Listen to his own words. Trump lied, plain and simple.”

The newly reported Trump comments provide crucial new ways to understand how the coronavirus crisis unfolded in the U.S.—and makes watching this Mother Jones super-cut of Trump’s early denials and deflections even more chilling:

Michael Monfluery, 38, who has never been eligible to vote, stands in a Miami-Dade courthouse following a special court hearing aimed at restoring the right to vote under Florida's Amendment 4. ZAK BENNETT/AFP via Getty Images

On Friday afternoon, a federal appeals court upheld a Florida law requiring people with past felony convictions to pay off all fines, fees, and restitution before becoming eligible to vote, potentially denying the franchise to hundreds of thousands of citizens in a key battleground state.

In 2018, 64 percent of Florida voters approved a historic ballot initiative, Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to people who’d been stripped of them due to felony convictions. But a year later, the Florida legislature passed a law adding a requirement that people seeking their right to vote under the initiative pay off all financial obligations stemming from their convictions. Voting rights advocates called the move a modern-day poll tax, and have warned it could prevent 775,000 people from voting even though they’ve served their time. While a lower federal court had struck down that “pay-to-vote” law, the 11th circuit court of appeals, which has a Republican majority thanks to five Trump-nominated judges, upheld it. “The financial obligations at issue are directly related to legitimate voter qualifications,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee, in a 6-4 decision.  

It’s the latest in a series of recent decisions by Republican or conservative-dominated courts that will make voting more difficult, particularly for Democratic-leaning constituencies.

On Thursday, another federal court of appeals ruled that a Texas law that allows voters over 65 to vote by mail for any reason but forbids people under 65 from citing fear of contracting COVID-19 as a reason does not violate constitutional prohibitions on age discrimination. Younger voters in Texas are far more likely to be Democrats and people of color than voters over 65.

That same afternoon, the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that counties could not begin sending out mail ballots until it ruled whether the Green Party’s presidential candidate qualified for November’s election. That ruling could lead to widespread voter confusion or delays, since counties have already begun mailing out 378,000 absentee ballots requested by voters. Nearly half of Wisconsin Democrats say they plan to vote by mail, compared to just 18 percent of Wisconsin Republicans. Any obstacle involving mail balloting will disproportionately affect Democratic voters.

The ruling affecting Florida could lead to massive uncertainty among voters who have felony convictions. The state has no central database where people can check whether they owe money related to their sentence. meaning thousands of voters who remain eligible under the ruling could still be dissuaded or prevented from voting. “Had Florida wanted to create a system to obstruct, impede, and impair the ability of felons to vote under Amendment 4, it could not have come up with a better one,” wrote Judge Adalberto Jordan in a scathing dissent. 

The decision comes just 52 days from the November election, in a state where polls suggest Biden and Trump are neck-and-neck—and which was decided by only 537 votes in 2000.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 15, 2016.

“It’s a much more sophisticated game than Monopoly,” Donald Trump said when his new board game, “Trump: The Game,” debuted in 1989. (Note: It’s not.) So sophisticated, in fact, that Trump admitted that even he sometimes lost. “I’ve done very well at the game…but on occasion, I got clipped,” he said at the game’s announcement in February.

Bob Stupak, a Las Vegas casino owner, was apparently listening. A month later, he challenged Trump to a head-to-head “Trump: The Game” battle for a $1 million prize, announcing it via a full-page ad he ran in the New York Post and the Press of Atlantic City.

Stupak told his local NBC station, KSNV, that he was generously giving Trump a chance to profit off the Stupak name. Stupak had recently earned fame for winning a $1 million bet on that year’s Super Bowl. “I’m not looking to ride on Donald Trump,” he said. “I’m giving him an opportunity to ride on my reputation. I’m the one who makes the large wagers, or has a history of doing it. And also to give him an opportunity to try to promote his new game.”

Trump, sadly, said no. “It’s always possible to lose, even for someone who’s used to winning,” he told the New York Post.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on July 13, 2016.

The construction of Trump Tower may have been Donald Trump’s greatest achievement, but it was a disaster for the city’s artistic legacy.

To build his skyscraper, Trump first had to knock down the Bonwit Teller building, a luxurious limestone building erected in 1929. The face of the building featured two huge Art Deco friezes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted to preserve. The museum asked Trump to save the sculptures and donate them, and the mogul agreed—as long as the cost of doing so wasn’t too high.

But then, according to journalist Harry Hurt III in his book Lost Tycoon, Trump discovered that taking out the sculptures would delay demolition by two weeks. He wasn’t willing to wait. “On his orders, the demolition workers cut up the grillwork with acetylene torches,” Hurt wrote. “Then they jackhammered the friezes, dislodged them with crowbars, and pushed the remains inside the building, where they fell to the floor and shattered in a million pieces.”

The art world was shocked. “Architectural sculpture of this quality is rare and would have made definite sense in our collections,” Ashton Hawkins, the vice president and secretary of the Met’s board of trustees, told the New York Times. Robert Miller, a gallery owner who had agreed to assess the friezes, told the paper that “the reliefs are as important as the sculptures on the Rockefeller building. They’ll never be made again.”

The Times reported that Trump also lost a large bronze grillwork, measuring 25 feet in length, from the building that the museum had hoped to save.

Trump—posing as spokesman John Baron, one of the fake alter egos he used to speak to the press throughout his career—told the Times that he had the friezes appraised and found they were “without artistic merit” and weren’t worth the $32,000 he supposedly would have had to pay to remove them intact. “Can you imagine the museum accepting them if they were not of artistic merit?” Hawkins said in response.

“It’s odd that a person like Trump, who is spending $80 million or $100 million on this building, should squirm that it might cost as much as $32,000 to take down those panels,” Otto Teegen, who designed the bronze grillwork, told the Times. Yet he wasn’t willing to protect the art in this construction deal.

President Donald Trump at the 47th annual March for Life.Abaca Press/SIPA USA/AP

As the time before Election Day continues to dwindle, President Donald Trump is trying to shore up or win back supporters wherever he can. For the white suburban women who helped push him to victory in 2016, for instance, he’s peddling LAW AND ORDER! And for the supporters on the Christian right, he just released a Supreme Court nominee shortlist that is chock-full of far-right legal minds.

Crucially, the list almost explicitly declares that in a second Trump term, Roe v. Wade is dead. Maybe Trump is hoping these lady suburbanites don’t look at the list and the history of the 20 people on it too closely; just 13 percent of small city/suburban women support overturning Roe.

Lucky for us, we have shortlister Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) broadcasting the message, with zero ambiguity, just a half-hour after Trump’s announcement: 

It's time for Roe v. Wade to go.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) September 9, 2020

To be clear: A Republican favoring anti-abortion judges is nothing new. It’s just not usually so…obvious, let alone explicit. Don’t forget Susan Collins still really believes Brett Kavanaugh considers Roe settled law. 

As for the potential future justices beyond Cotton, there are two other senators on the list, Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO). Both have been equally outspoken about their abortion opposition. On the campaign trail in 2016, Cruz argued that Roe wasn’t settled law, and that abortion should be banned even in cases of rape and incest. Just last week, Cruz and Cotton signed onto a letter asking the FDA to take Mifeprex, commonly known as the abortion pill, off the market. Hawley meanwhile has declared that he would only support a Supreme Court nominee who explicitly acknowledges that Roe was “wrongly decided.” In a July interview with the Washington Post, he explained: “Roe is central to judicial philosophy. Roe is and was an unbridled act of judicial imperialism. It marks the point the modern Supreme Court said, ‘You know, we don’t have to follow the Constitution. We won’t even pretend to try.’”

The rest of Trump’s list is far less vocal about the issue, but that doesn’t mean they’re less extreme—multiple of Trump’s candidates have support from groups with anti-abortion views, like the Federalist Society and the Susan B. Anthony List. Here’s a limited sampling:

• Sarah Pitlyk, a Trump-nominated federal judge in Missouri, has a long track record of opposing abortion, as well as surrogacy and fertility treatment. She’s also claimed that frozen embryos should be considered human beings and that destroying them is akin to killing children.
• Gregory Katsas, now a federal appeals court judge in the District of Columbia, fought to limit abortion access as a high-ranking official in the Bush administration and has also stated “the right of abortion, which isn’t in the Constitution […] has all these made-up protections.”
• Stuart Kyle Duncan, a judge on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, repeatedly upheld the admitting privileges law that was eventually overturned in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, and once again challenged and overturned more recently in Louisiana’s June Medical Services v. Russo. And as the lead counsel in a major contraception case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, he argued that some forms of contraception amount to abortion.
• James Ho, one of Duncan’s colleagues on the 5th Circuit, has used his written opinions to lament “the moral tragedy of abortion” and defend fetal burial requirements. 
• Daniel Cameron, the attorney general of Kentucky (who is deciding the future of the Breonna Taylor case), fought valiantly against the state’s governor to temporarily ban abortions during the coronavirus pandemic because they should not be considered “essential procedures.” The state legislature stepped in and passed a law granting Cameron the power to shut down the state’s abortion clinics himself.

Theresa Lau, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said that her organization has vehemently opposed previous nominations for folks on Trump’s shortlist, include Pitlyk, Duncan, and Katsas. When I asked her thoughts on the nominees, she was unequivocal: “Everyone on that list is extremely troubling.”

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 17, 2016.

If there’s one thing Donald Trump really doesn’t like, it’s being called out. British journalist Selina Scott found that out the hard way when she challenged his false claim that he wholly owned the Empire State Building.

In 1995, Scott interviewed Trump for a British television documentary. Scott and her producer, Ted Brocklebank, used the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in the background of the film to highlight how Trump’s claims “‘didn’t stand up,'” Brocklebank told journalist Michael D’Antonio in his book The Truth About Trump.  

One of those claims occurred during a helicopter ride over Manhattan. Scott wrote in the Daily Mail early this year that Trump boasted that he was the sole owner of the Empire State Building, a declaration that Scott immediately challenged. He later said he owned 80 percent of the building, then admitted to owning just 50 percent of it. Scott reported Trump’s false claims in her film.

Trump wasn’t happy, and he took his revenge on Scott, sending her letters calling her “‘very sleazy,’ ‘unattractive,’ ‘obnoxious,’ and ‘boring,'” D’Antonio writes.

The mogul continued:

Selina, you have little talent and, from what I have seen, even fewer viewers. You are no longer ‘hot’; perhaps that is the curse of dishonesty. You would, obviously, go to any lengths to try to restore your faded image, but guess what—the public is aware and apparently much brighter than you. They aren’t tuning in! I hope you are able to solve your problems before it is too late.

Scott also wrote in the Daily Mail that Trump’s insults continued for years. In just one example, Scott said he sent her a clip of a story about his net worth with the message, “‘Selina you are a major loser.'”

In 2009, the 14-year feud with Scott took another turn. When Trump wanted to build his Scottish golf course in Aberdeen, members of the local council who were deciding whether to allow Trump to build on protected land received a copy of the mogul’s 1995 interview with Scott, according to the Guardian. When Trump found out that the council had seen the video, he lashed out at Scott, who said she wasn’t involved in the film’s distribution to the council. He called her a “third-class journalist” and said her interview with him was “‘a boring story then and she has since faded into obscurity where she belongs.'”

Scott didn’t hesitate in fighting back. In a prescient comment in light of recent revelations, Scott told the BBC last year, “I knew he was an unreconstructed misogynist.”

Mother Jones Illustration/Shuttershock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on October 24, 2016.

When Donald made his first huge splash by building the Grand Hyatt hotel in Midtown Manhattan in the late 1970s, he did so on the back of an enormous, unprecedented tax break from the city. Trump, through his big-donor father, had close ties to then-Mayor Abe Beame (D). “Whatever my friends Fred and Donald want in this town, they get,” Beame once told the man who sold the hotel site to Trump. What Trump wanted, and got, was a deal in which a tax-exempt city agency bought the site of the hotel, leased it back to Trump for $1 a year, and spared him from paying property taxes for 40 years.

The massive tax abatement angered other developers, so the city made Trump agree to give back some of his profits each year as a rent payment. But when the Grand Hyatt became a success, the hotel cooked the books so it could pay the city less.

In 1986, according to CBS News, the Grand Hyatt had its best year ever. After getting $3.7 million from the hotel in 1985, city officials expected an even larger payment the next year. Instead, Trump ordered the Grant Hyatt to change its accounting methods to lower its reported profits. Despite its banner year, the hotel paid the city just $667,000.

Karen Burstein, the city’s auditor general, investigated the hotel’s accounting practices and called them “aberrant and distortive” in a 1989 report. Experts who reviewed the report for CBS News said it “detailed failures in basic bookkeeping, the seemingly sudden adoption of irregular accounting methods, and efforts to stymie officials.” That included being unable to find many of the hotel’s ledgers and other financial paperwork, which Burstein called “just inexcusable.” She concluded that Trump owed the city $2.9 million as a result of his maneuvers, but it doesn’t appear to have gotten the money back. The New York Times reported last month that the city may have recovered only $850,000 from Trump in a 2004 settlement.

“Trump leveraged tax forgiveness and clout into a deal where he had essentially no risk at all; there was no downside,” Burstein told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “Then, having triumphed, he repaid his benefactors by excoriating them as inept, venal and useless.”

Trump sold his stake in the hotel in 1996, but the tax abatement is still in effect. While the city initially said it would cost it about $4 million a year, or about $160 million in lost revenue over its lifetime, it’s ended up being even costlier. According to the New York Times, the tax break has cost the city almost $360 million so far—and there are still four years left on the deal.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on August 2, 2016.

Donald Trump isn’t the only Trump in the world, but that fact apparently came as a surprise to Donald in 1984. That’s when Trump got a letter from the publisher of Drug Store News welcoming him to the fraternity of chain drug store owners. But Trump hadn’t bought Duane Reade or CVS. The letter was intended for a business called the Trump Group, run by South African-born developers Eddie and Jules Trump, which had recently bid for the Pay ‘n Save chain.

Donald, to put it mildly, was not pleased. “The defendants are South Africans whose recent entrance in the New York area utilizing the name ‘the Trump Group’ can only be viewed as a poorly veiled attempt at trading on the goodwill, reputation and financial credibility of the plaintiff,” read a lawsuit he quickly filed against the Trump Group. He lost that case but did succeed in having the Trump Group’s trademark revoked in 1988.

That didn’t hurt the other Trumps too much. The Real Deal, a New York real estate publication, noted in 2009 that Eddie and Jules, who still use the Trump Group name, have “quietly built an empire on luxury real estate development” in Florida and other places. Eddie was even placed 35th on a 2013 list of the world’s 50 most “influential” rich people, a list on which Donald did not appear.

But there’s no bad blood between the Trumps, even if Jules was an early $25,000 donor to Marco Rubio’s super-PAC, according to Gawker. “I’m friends with them,” Donald told the New York Times. “They’re quality guys. They do quality developments.”

“We’re very boring,” Jules told the Real Deal. “We’re very different from Mr. Trump. He’s much more interesting. Go write about him.”

President Donald Trump talks to a crowd of supporters after arriving at Wilmington International Airport, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2020, in Wilmington, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Election Day, according to my wall calendar and many other sources, is exactly 60 days from today: Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Depending on where you live, polls will open in the morning and close between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. at night. If you vote in person, you might get a sticker. You might even be able to cast your vote at an NBA arena.

But the voting merely ends on November 3. It begins today. Like, right now. 

According to the US Election Assistance Commission, 41 percent of all votes in the 2016 president election were cast before Election Day—17 percent at early-voting locations and 24 percent by mail. That’s 57 million votes, cast early. This year, with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing states to devote more resources to mail voting, it’s likely to be even higher. And the first of those ballots are being mailed today, in North Carolina. 

Per the Charlotte Observer:

On Friday hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots will go in the mail as the state becomes the first to start voting for the November election. Election officials are braced for a record number of mail-in votes. More than 618,000 absentee requests had been received through Wednesday, and election officials expect up to 10 times as many as usual to be cast this year.

In North Carolina, absentee ballots can be requested until October 27, and returned ballots must be postmarked by 5 p.m. on November 3—though given the current crunch at the United States Postal Service, North Carolinians will probably want to give themselves more of a buffer than that. There’s probably a lot more you should know. Thankfully there are tons of simple resources to navigate the registration and voting process wherever you live.

The point is, it’s finally happening. Much of the coverage of the presidential campaign and down-ballot races will focus on November 3—or perhaps the aftermath of November 3, as votes in some states continue to trickle in through the mail and be counted. (In other states—this New York Times has a good primer of which ones—your returned mail-in ballot will have to be received by election officials before the polls close on Election Day.) But it’s just not so clear-cut anymore. Elections have life-spans of their own. From this point on, every day that goes by—every damaging story, every crisis, every ad barrage—is unfolding during an active election. By the time the first presidential debate starts in Cleveland on September 29, people will have been voting for about three weeks. Some, perhaps, will be watching it with a ballot in their hands.

Biden presents a diploma to a West Point graduate in 2016.Xinhua/Zuma

Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden on Friday shot back at President Trump’s apparent disdain for American troops, calling his reported remarks about soldiers who died in battle “disgusting.”

Biden’s comments came in response to an explosive Atlantic article, published Thursday, that describes Trump referring to soldiers who were killed in battle as “losers,” excluding wounded veterans from military parades, and canceling a visit to an American cemetery near Paris because he was more concerned about the appearance of his hair on a rainy day than honoring the dead. Trump reacted, as usual, by attempting to discredit the media.

The Atlantic Magazine is dying, like most magazines, so they make up a fake story in order to gain some relevance. Story already refuted, but this is what we are up against. Just like the Fake Dossier. You fight and and fight, and then people realize it was a total fraud!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2020

But Biden, speaking from a community center in Delaware, pointed out that Trump has repeatedly and irrefutably disparaged veterans in the past. “We’ve heard from his own mouth his characterizations of American hero John McCain as a loser in 2015,” Biden said, “and his dismissal of the traumatic brain injuries suffered by troops serving in Iraq as mere ‘headaches’ not too long ago.”

Biden also brought up his son Beau Biden’s military service, insisting that “when he went to Iraq for a year, won the Bronze Star and other commendations, he wasn’t a sucker.”

And Biden called attention to perhaps the most egregious insult to the military of all. “He stood by, failing to take action or even raise the issue of Vladimir Putin, while the Kremlin puts bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan,” Biden said. “Quite frankly, if what is written in The Atlantic is true, it is disgusting. It affirms what most of us believe to be true—that Donald Trump is not fit to be the commander in chief.”

According to a new report from The Atlantic, Trump's referred to service people killed in battle as “suckers."

For Biden, who was speaking from a community center in Delaware, it was personal: "When my son volunteered and joined the United States military… he wasn’t a sucker!" pic.twitter.com/blFx7whABB

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 4, 2020

Mother Jones Illustration/Shuttershock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 22, 2016.

Donald Trump doesn’t like to lose. When he was trailing in the polls this summer, he began offering a dire warning: The 2016 election would be “rigged” through massive voter fraud. He blamed election fraud, too, when he lost the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz. And in 2012, when President Barack Obama won reelection over Mitt Romney, Trump called for a “march on Washington” to “stop this travesty.”

But Trump’s allegations of rigged elections extend beyond domestic politics. When Glenfiddich announced in 2012 that a notorious Trump critic had received the most votes for its annual Top Scot award, Trump cried foul, accusing the renowned Scotch distillery of holding a rigged election. Per the Guardian:

After suggesting that the voting for Forbes had been fixed by “a small group of detractors” casting multiple votes, he continued: “Glenfiddich’s choice of Michael Forbes, as Top Scot, will go down as one of the great jokes ever played on the Scottish people and is a terrible embarrassment to Scotland.”

William Grant & Sons gave short shrift to Trump’s criticisms, which he first aired on Twitter on Tuesday, insisting it had nothing to do with the voting for the award, which Glenfiddich has sponsored for 15 years.

Forbes, a salmon fisherman who lives next-door to Trump’s golf course outside Aberdeen, became a folk hero in Scotland for his refusal to sell his 23-acre farm to the billionaire. According to Trump, Glenfiddich boosted Forbes because it was jealous of Trump’s own brand of Scotch. “Glenfiddich is upset that we created our own single malt whisky using another distillery, which offers far greater products,” he said in a statement. “People at our clubs do not ask for Glenfiddich, and I make a pledge that no Trump property will ever do business with Glenfiddich or William Grant & Sons [the company that owns Glenfiddich].”

Lest there be any doubt about his position on Glenfiddich, Trump capped off his declaration of war with the traditional Twitter rant:

Trump’s public spat didn’t do much damage. Revenue for Glenfiddich’s parent company increased 12.5 percent in the fiscal year following the boycott.

Alexei Nikolsky/TASS via ZUMA Press

A new intelligence report produced by the Department of Homeland Security predicts the Russian government will “continue amplifying criticisms of vote-by-mail and shifting voting processes amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine public trust in the electoral process.”

The finding suggests that Russia is already engaged in a campaign to destroy faith in the voting system at the same time that President Donald Trump has made similar claims for similar motives, with the assistance of Attorney General Bill Barr and other supporters.

The activity described by the report follows the playbook employed during the 2016 election interference campaign: Find and exacerbate existing fissures in domestic US discourse and society to wreak havoc.

When it comes to the now hot-button issue of mail voting, the report warns that “Russian state media, proxies, and Russian-controlled social media trolls are likely to promote allegations of corruption, system failure, and foreign malign interference to sow distrust in democratic institutions and election outcomes.”

The September 3 report, titled “Russia Likely to Continue Seeking to Undermine Faith in US Electoral Process,” explains that the public debate around vote by mail “represents a target for foreign malign influence operations” that seek to “undermine faith in the electoral process by spreading disinformation” about vote by mail elections.

The report comes the week after a group of senior federal intelligence and law enforcement officials told reporters in an anonymous briefing that they have not seen any evidence of foreign nations trying to manipulate mail ballots, as claimed by Barr and Trump.

A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report, which was tweeted out by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl Thursday afternoon.

Last week, during the Hatch Act-shattering Republican National Convention, my colleague David Corn published a new hot-mic video of Donald Trump: a 13-minute conversation between Trump and his lawyer, captured during a break between videotaped depositions for the 2015 fraud lawsuit against Trump University.

As David wrote:

Trump boasted about how his company threatened the Better Business Bureau to change the D rating it had assigned Trump University to an A. He complained about the federal judge overseeing the suit, Gonzalo Curiel, elliptically talking about how to challenge him and referring to “the Spanish thing.” Trump also griped that he had been sued personally in this case, and Petrocelli had to explain to Trump that he, not just Trump University itself, was in the legal crosshairs because Trump had been accused of making false statements to promote the venture. And Petrocelli pointed out that the case was not a lock for Trump because some of Trump’s “guys” had been “sloppy.”

We published the original full-length source video as well a shorter video that highlights the most revealing moments from the recording. But The Internet asked for more.

Readers and commenters asked for a full transcript and even more context. (2,000 words isn’t enough?) So we did one better: We had David himself sit down and talk us through the entire video, pausing at critical moments to provide expert context and commentary. (If you enjoyed our other video, think of this like the Director’s Cut—but without the marked-up commemorative box set.)

So sit back. Wind your wristwatch. Fix your hair just so. And take in our full-length breakdown of a video that reveals how our current president conducted his private business when he thought the cameras weren’t rolling.