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Former president Donald Trump has never been particularly adept at masking his true feelings. He feels confident in his ability to close the deal, however robustly he’s previously undermined his position. So if he says something disadvantageous, he seems to believe that saying more things can get him back on track. So he just says stuff.

Sometimes, though, the stuff he says is more revealing than he intends. As were the comments he made on social media early Monday.

The post on Truth Social offered a lot of the standard excoriations and complaints: His opponents for the 2024 Republican nomination were bad for various reasons, the left is dangerous, the right is ineffectual, etc. What’s important about the post was the predicate for this standard sales patter: the announcement of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) that recipients of a driver’s license in the state would be automatically registered to vote.

“The Radical Left Governor, Josh Shapiro, has just announced a switch to Automatic Voter Registration, a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME!” Trump wrote. “This is a totally Unconstitutional Act, and must be met harshly by Republican Leadership in Washington and Pennsylvania.”

He’s said things like this before. In early 2020, Trump declared that legislation aiming to expand voting access in light of the pandemic would lead to “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” A week later, this time responding to a Fox News broadcast, he asserted that easier voting thanks to mail-in ballots had “[t]remendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

But that was before his breathless effort to retain power despite losing that year’s presidential election. His baseless claims about the threat of fraud from mail-in ballots did not manifest, though he insisted they did. In the absence of any credible evidence of widespread fraud, though, he and his allies shifted their rhetoric: The problem was perhaps less that fraud occurred than that the system had been rigged against him. This was a useful claim because it was vague; things like accurate reporting on his presidency could be presented as an Elite Plot™ to ensure that he lost.

Most often, though, the “rigging” allegation centered on the expansion of voting mechanisms prompted by the pandemic. Trump and allies such as attorney John Eastman railed against Pennsylvania’s effort to make it easier to cast a ballot by mail as an unconstitutional disadvantaging of the incumbent president; that the change was made by the Republican legislature before the pandemic and validated by the state Supreme Court has seemingly offered little cause for adjustment of this position.

When Wisconsin’s conservative-majority Supreme Court determined in 2022 that the state couldn’t allow ballot drop-boxes (which had been used in 2020), Trump and his allies hyped the decision as validating their allegations about the security of the election. In reality, there’s no evidence that any significant fraud was committed in 2020 through mail ballots or drop-boxes, but — as with that social media post about the “tremendous potential” for fraud — it was useful to imply that these systems were dangerous because Trump felt that they gave an advantage to Democrats. Just as he thinks Pennsylvania’s new voter-registration process does — though, in this case, he doesn’t allege that it will foster fraud.

It’s worth ruminating on that for a second. Trump is simply stating that increasing the number of registered voters will be bad for his party. He and his allies will unquestionably interlace some post-hoc claims about the threat of fraud, claims that Trump has done more than anyone to both amplify and expose as unfounded. But he didn’t make that claim on Monday morning. He just complained that having more voters would mean more Democratic victories.

This isn’t necessarily true, of course. But it is often the case that voting groups that vote more heavily Democratic are less likely to be registered to vote. Young people and less wealthy Americans, for example, are more likely to rent homes. When they move, they often need to re-register to vote — and then find their new voting place. Elections systems are often built to make it easier for frequent voters to cast ballots, and infrequent voters often skew Democratic. In April, I looked at the number of polling places stationed at senior centers and senior living communities; there were one-and-a-half times as many as there were at colleges and universities nationally.

Trump’s argument is very much in keeping with his approach to elections in general. Theoretically, federal elections are intended to capture the sentiments of as much of the adult citizen population as possible. In practice, both parties are often happy to have their opponents’ voters stay home. (In the wake of his 2016 victory, for example, Trump celebrated low turnout from Black voters.) It’s not common, though, for a presidential candidate to simply deride an effort to get more people to vote as politically disadvantageous.

The argument is fundamentally anti-democratic: Having more people weigh in on candidates reduces our party’s power and therefore should not be allowed. Republicans have spent decades hyping the idea that voter fraud is common (which it isn’t) because raising the idea of stealing votes is a more palatable way of opposing expansions to voting than simply saying they want to disadvantage Democrats. (Sometimes, even before Trump, the mask slipped.)

There’s another way to look at Trump’s disparagement of the effort in Pennsylvania. The system, as it stands, is rigged in a way that allowed Trump to win in 2016. It’s likely that Trump’s 2020 loss was a function of his unpopularity more than it was the changes in voting systems, but Trump would obviously rather blame those systems. So he claims that allowing more people to vote was rigging the election when it is probably more fair to describe it as unrigging a system that made it harder for many Americans to vote. Trump is very eager that it not be unrigged further.

What 2020 proved is how rare voter fraud or illegal voting is, even in an election in which it was made easier than ever to cast a ballot by mail. No election has been more scrutinized; no exceptional, significant or systemic illegality was found.

But Trump likes having it be hard for new voters to vote. He thinks, as he said on social media, that this helps him and his party. And given that the other lesson from 2020 was his lack of interest in respecting the democratic choices of the electorate, it comes as no surprise that he takes this position on the effort in Pennsylvania.

His allies in the state, putting on the familiar mask, argued that the move undermines confidence in the results. Trump didn’t bother.

WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel plans to begin an effort to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules rescinded under then-President Donald Trump, sources briefed on the matter said Monday.

The move comes after Democrats took majority control of the five-member FCC on Monday for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 when new FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was sworn in.

The FCC is set to take an initial vote on the net neutrality proposal in October, the sources added.

In July 2021, Biden signed an executive order encouraging the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules adopted under Democratic then-President Barack Obama in 2015.

The FCC voted in 2017 to reverse the rules that barred internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes, also known as paid prioritization. Days before the 2020 presidential election, the FCC voted to maintain the reversal.

Rosenworcel denounced the repeal in 2017 saying it put the FCC "on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the American public."

She plans a speech to outline her plans on Tuesday, the sources added. A spokesperson for Rosenworcel declined to comment.

In 2022, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 that the 2017 decision by the FCC to reverse federal net neutrality protections could not bar state action, rejecting a challenge from telecom and broad industry groups to block California's net neutrality law. Industry groups abandoned further legal challenges in May 2022.

The appeals court said that since the FCC reclassified internet services in 2017 as more lightly regulated information services, the commission "no longer has the authority to regulate in the same manner that it had when these services were classified as telecommunications services."

Days after Biden took office, the U.S. Justice Department withdrew its Trump-era legal challenge to California's state net neutrality law.

WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is due to try to advance steep spending cuts this week that stand no chance of becoming law and could force a partial shutdown of the U.S. government by next Sunday.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sought to avoid that scenario when he hammered out a spending agreement with Democratic President Joe Biden this spring. But some members of his own party have threatened to depose him if he does not support steeper cuts that are sure to be rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be furloughed and a wide range of services, from financial oversight to medical research, will be suspended if Congress does not provide funding for the new fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

Congress typically misses that deadline and passes stopgap spending bills to avoid disruption while they finish their work.

But McCarthy has been unable so far to muster support for a temporary spending extension as a group of hardline Republicans have refused to go along. Republicans control the House by a narrow 221-212 majority and have few votes to spare.

McCarthy has put the stopgap bill on hold and instead will advance legislation that reflects conservative priorities.

When the House returns on Tuesday, lawmakers expected to take up four spending bills for the coming fiscal year that would impose new restrictions on abortion access, undo an $11 billion Biden administration climate initiative, and resume construction of the Mexico-U.S. border wall, a signature initiative of former President Donald Trump.

Those bills are certain to get rejected by the Senate, and the White House has said Biden would veto two of them.

McCarthy has said he hopes the effort would buy goodwill and allow him to pass a stopgap that would avoid a shutdown.

But Representative Matt Gaetz, a prominent McCarthy antagonist, said on Sunday he would not back a stopgap, even if it results in a shutdown.

"If the departments of Labor and Education have to shut down for a few days as we get their appropriations in line, that's certainly not something that is optimal. But I think it's better than continuing on the current path," he said on Fox News.

Another hardliner, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, said in a statement she would not even support bringing the spending bills up for debate on the House floor, because Ukraine aid is included with them.

Greene and other members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus have pushed to cut agency spending to $1.47 trillion, which is $120 billion less than Biden and McCarthy agreed to in their May compromise.

That only accounts for a fraction of the total U.S. budget, which will come to $6.4 trillion for this fiscal year. Lawmakers are not considering cuts to popular benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are projected to grow dramatically as the population ages.

The Senate, meanwhile, is scheduled to advance a stopgap spending measure on Tuesday. If it passes, that could force McCarthy to rely on Democratic votes to pass it as well and avoid a shutdown before Oct. 1, which would incur the anger of his right flank and potentially put his job at risk.

Trump has urged Republicans to force a shutdown to interfere with his two federal criminal cases. The Justice Department says criminal prosecutions would continue in the event of a shutdown.

Fox News aired the first GOP debate of the 2024 election cycle from Milwaukee on Wednesday night, featuring eight candidates. Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact-checked, but following is a list of 10 suspicious claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates. These claims are examined in the order in which they were uttered.

“We all need to understand Joe Biden’s Bidenomics has led to the loss of $10,000 of spending power for the average family.”

— Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.)

This seems wildly overstated. In April we had checked a claim by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income. We tracked down the source of that statistic — E.J. Antoni, a research fellow in regional economics with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. As of last week, he’d revised his estimate down to $6,800.

But, more to the point, economists we contacted were dubious about the math, which relied on a change in purchasing power and a change in borrowing power. The change in borrowing power relied on mortgage rates — and not every family is looking for a new home. As for Antoni’s reliance on average weekly wages, this measure does not follow the same workers across time, and consequently the economists said it was an imperfect basis for families’ income changing over time.

Several economists pointed to another metric — real disposable personal income per capita — as a better gauge. That figure is produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Commerce Department.

Per capita income, after inflation, was $46,790 in December 2020 and $46,795 in June 2023 — an increase of $5. That’s basically flat — but a far cry from a $10,000 decline.

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“A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come — it’s supported by 70 percent of the American people.”

— Former vice president Mike Pence

Recent polling does not back up Pence’s claim of such support for banning all abortions after 15 week of pregnancy, when people are directly asked about it, though in general, polls have shown majority opposition to second-trimester abortions.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last year found that 36 percent supported and 57 percent opposed a law that would make abortions legal only in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Last month, a Marquette Law School poll found that 47 percent of those surveyed favored a ban after 15 weeks, compared to 53 percent who said they would oppose it.

Also last month, an AP-NORC poll found that about half of Americans say abortions should be permitted at the 15-week mark.

A Fox News poll in April found that 54 percent supported such a ban, while 42 percent opposed it. But that is still well short of 70 percent.

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“We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth, and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.”

— Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

This is a common Republican talking point — that Democrats support nationwide abortion-on-demand up until the moment of birth. The implication is that late-term abortions are common — and that they are routinely accepted by Democrats.

The reality, according to federal and state data, is that abortions past the point of viability are extremely rare. When they do happen, they often involve painful, emotional and even moral decisions.

About two-thirds of abortions occur at eight weeks of pregnancy or earlier, and nearly 90 percent take place in the first 12 weeks, or within most definitions of the first trimester, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which favors abortion rights. About 5.5 percent of abortions take place after 15 weeks, with just 1.3 percent at 21 weeks or longer.

Increasingly, there is a period when premature births and late abortions begin to overlap. The CDC recorded almost 22,000 births between 20 and 27 weeks. Babies born before 25 weeks are considered extremely preterm, with vital organs such as heart, lungs and brain very immature. But the survival rate has climbed to 30 percent for 22-week babies and 55 percent for 23-week babies, according to a 2022 study.

Some states record whether a fetus was born alive during an abortion and whether efforts were made to save it. Seven were born alive in Florida in 2022, nine in Arizona in 2020, one in Texas in 2021 and five in Minnesota in 2021. A CDC study of 143 cases between 2003 and 2014 found that most died within hours, with only 4.2 percent surviving for more than 24 hours.

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“Crime is at a 50-year low in Florida.”

— DeSantis

This statement is based on incomplete data, according to the Marshall Project, an online journalism organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.

“About half of the agencies that police more than 40% of the state’s population are missing from figures the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) used for a statewide estimation,” the news organization said. Participation in national data collection is even lower, with less than eight percent of Florida’s police departments included in an FBI federal database. Many of the largest, such as the Miami Police Department, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department, are missing from the national numbers.

It is impossible, then, to compare Florida’s crime rate with that of other states. And in any case, the crime rate in Florida has been steadily declining for three decades.

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“We have a crime wave in this country.”

— Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy

This is a bit out of date. Crime spiked during the pandemic, and though rates are still higher than before the pandemic, homicides are dropping in dozens of major cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Examining homicides in 30 cities that make homicide data readily available, an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice found that the number of killings in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4 percent compared to the first half of 2022.

Moreover, gun assaults (-5.6 percent), robberies (-3.6 percent), nonresidential burglaries (-5 percent), larcenies (-4.1 percent), residential burglaries (-3.8 percent) and aggravated assaults (-2.5 percent) fell in the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year. However, car thefts continued to increase.

FBI data shows that the nationwide violent crime rate peaked in 1991 with 758.2 crimes per 100,000 people; in 2020, the rate was 398.5. The nationwide homicide rate reached a high in 1991, at 9.8 per 100,000 population. By 2019, it had dropped to 5.1.

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“Not only weaponization in the Department of Justice against political opponents, but also look at the parents who show up at school board meetings are called domestic terrorists.”

— Scott

This is a frequent GOP talking point but it’s false. Attorney General Merrick Garland has never equated parents to terrorists, and in fact he told Congress he “can’t imagine” a circumstance under which that would happen.

This all started with a Sept. 29, 2021, letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) that asked President Biden for federal resources to help monitor “threats of violence and acts of intimidation” against public school board members and other school officials. Five days later, Garland issued a memo addressed to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and federal prosecutors. He called for action within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.

Garland’s memo never mentioned domestic terrorism, but the NSBA letter that prompted it included a line that asserted “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” There was enough blowback to that language that on Oct. 22, the NSBA apologized for the letter, saying “there was no justification for some of the language included.” A new executive director for the association was installed, the letter was deleted from the NSBA website, and the association announced in February that it had launched an independent review of how the letter was created.

Nevertheless, the Justice Department never equated parents to domestic terrorists.

When questioned by Republicans in congressional hearings, Garland and other top Justice officials have insisted that they do not think concerned parents are terrorists. “I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism,” Garland told the House Judiciary Committee.

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“The Biden administration wanted to put 87,000 people in the IRS instead of giving the money we need to our own Border Patrol.”

— North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum

“Let’s fire the 87,000 IRS agents and hire or double the number of Border Patrol agents.”

— Scott

This 87,000 figure is a common GOP talking point but it is wildly exaggerated to speak of “agents” as Scott did. When Congress passed a bill to provide the IRS with an additional $80 billion in funding over ten years, that money was to be used in part to hire 86,852 full-time employees in the next decade. But many of those employees would not be enforcement “agents” but people hired to improve information technology and customer service. Treasury officials say that because of attrition, after 10 years of increasing spending, the size of the agency will have grown only 25 to 30 percent when the hiring burst is completed.

The administration’s strategic plan for the IRS, released in April, estimated that an additional 1,543 full-time employees would be hired for enforcement in 2023, or about 15 percent of newly hired staff. That would grow to 7,239 in 2024, or 37 percent of new staff.

Biden administration officials have pledged that enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes will concentrate on those earning more than $400,000.

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“We secured the southern border and reduced illegal immigration by 90 percent.”

— Pence

Ninety percent is a cherry-picked number, apparently comparing May 2019, the highest month for border apprehensions during the Trump administration, to April 2020, when apprehensions plunged because of lockdowns at the start of the covid pandemic. Another complicating factor is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection changed the way it counted apprehensions during the pandemic, making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult because the numbers were inflated by people who were expelled for health policy reasons, not just enforcement actions. But generally, annual apprehensions increased during the Trump administration.

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“We eliminated critical race theory from our K through 12 schools.”

— DeSantis

Critical race theory refers to an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, and not just demonstrated by individual people with prejudices. It is generally taught in higher education, such as law or graduate school, not at lower grade levels. So this is a bit of an empty boast. Educators, school officials and several Florida public school districts told PolitiFact that critical race theory wasn’t taught in Florida’s elementary, middle or high schools.

PolitiFact rated DeSantis’s claim as “mostly false,” saying that at most the state under DeSantis “rejected prospective teaching materials in recent years that it claimed was related to CRT. But questions remain about its rationale in several cases.”

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“I did not grow up in money.”

— Ramaswamy

Earlier in the debate, Ramaswamy had said, “My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.” But then he went further later in the evening with the line “I did not grow up in money.” His parents did well enough, however, that in his book “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy wrote that by the time he was in sixth grade, he had a “comfortably middle-class family with two incomes.” His father worked for General Electric, which had a cost-cutting boss at the time, and he wrote that the fear of a layoff was ever present, so his father “tried to make himself indispensable” by becoming a patent attorney for the firm.

By the time he was 18, Vivek had a stock portfolio significant enough that he earned $453 in dividends in 2002, according to his tax return. By his sophomore year in college, when he made about $3,500 in wage income, he earned $11,712 from dividends alone.