President Trump is trying to sue for defamation after yet another report found that the National Guard takeover of cities across America had no significant impact on violent crime levels.
In July, the Center for American Progress, or CAP, published a study analyzing the impact of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., which he has claimed time and time again saved those cities. In reality, the report found that the effort cost $1.7 billion and did virtually nothing.
“The findings of this analysis confirm what many already suspected: At the time of the administration’s federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments, the primary goal was never to stop crime,” the report noted. “There is no compelling evidence that these deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence.”
That scathing finding led Trump to threaten another defamation lawsuit, arguing that the report was false and malicious. Trump’s personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, contacted CAP on Monday with the lawsuit threat, giving the liberal think tank until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract the study and say sorry to Trump, The New York Times reported.
“The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates,” Trump ranted earlier this month. “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.”
CAP President Neera Tanden called Trump’s allegations “baseless” and vowed to fight back.
“Silencing research that is inconvenient to government policy is anathema to free speech and the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “CAP will neither cower nor bend to this attack on independent research.”
This all of course means that American taxpayers paid billions of dollars for the National Guard to loiter in the streets of blue cities—in metro stops, in beautiful public parks, by Trader Joe’s—for nothing.
President Trump isn’t spending any campaign cash on close midterm election races, irking his fellow Republicans and putting contests like the Texas Senate seat in jeopardy.
In July, Politico reports, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC didn’t spend any of its $400 million in the bank on Republican candidates, not even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who only narrowly won his state’s GOP Senate primary and faces surging Democrat James Talarico.
Republican donors say that Trump needs to step up to keep the Lone Star State from sending its first Democrat to the Senate since 1993, considering that he endorsed scandal-ridden Paxton at the last minute over incumbent John Cornyn. That endorsement was probably the deciding factor in the close runoff election and now Paxton is polling just one point ahead of Talarico, unheard of in staunchly red Texas.
“The message to Trumpworld is, ‘you broke it, now you own it. You gotta spend some of your money to defend him because we’ve got bigger fish to fry,’” one GOP donor told Politico.
A second donor told the publication that “the general view is that’s Trump’s responsibility to bankroll, especially since Paxton took out one [of] the GOP Senate’s best fundraisers and is currently running a lackadaisical campaign.”
These donors would prefer to spend their money on open Senate races in Michigan and North Carolina, kicking out Democrats like Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and protecting vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents like Susan Collins in Maine and Dan Sullivan in Alaska.
“There’s a lot of people that, one, don’t really like Paxton at all, they think he’d be a terrible senator or they were loyal to Cornyn—or both,” a third GOP donor said to Politico. “This is a situation that we didn’t need to spend this money at all. We need it in North Carolina, in Georgia. To make Texas a toss-up is just a foolish, foolish decision.”