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Francisco 2.0

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Francisco 2.0

  1. 4 minutes ago, GenXer said:

    The quarterly conference calls with analysts should be interesting (assuming DJT has them)

     

    It's kinda perplexing that Trump isn't performing some kind of stock manipulation daily on his Twitter knock off.  I mean, he bitches about this or that...but unless I've missed it somehow, you don't see him daily or hourly pumping up the rubes to "go get some stock today!  It's poised to be more valuable than Amazon tomorrow!"

    Which leads to two possibilities:  Trump has been made very aware of what the SEC can (and will do) so he's actually heeding advice and laying low.....or, he's just utterly fucking clueless about how stock offerings work and just wants his cut ASAP and doesn't give a shit if anyone actually buys it.

     

     

    • Hook 'Em 1
  2. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/15/24130735/tesla-layoffs-10-percent-workforce-disappointing-sales

     

    Quote

    As part of the layoffs, Tesla senior vice president Drew Bagliano is said to be leaving the company, Bloomberg reports. Electrek noticed that the Tesla badge has vanished from Baglino’s profile on X (formerly Twitter), as it has from policy chair Rohan Patel. Baglino, who’s been at the company for over 18 years in several roles, is still listed as senior VP in charge of Tesla’s energy and powertrain division on LinkedIn.

     

     

    • Fuck Around and Find Out 2
  3. 15 minutes ago, immamac said:

    The best part about this is they think that SEC filings are the media and a campaign against the company. They don’t understand that those are the required filings for any publicly traded company. Reading the first filing was actually insane. No one would invest in this company if they read it. 

     

    I'm just going to assume that most of these fine folk who are investing every last penny that they have into this stock think the SEC is a football conference, and wonder why in the hell they would have anything to do with stocks.

     

     

     

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1
  4. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/us/politics/trump-vice-president-pick.html

    This might be the only VP pick in history based solely on how much money they can kick back to Trump.  It's gonna be pay to play.

     

    Quote

    As former President Donald J. Trump sifts through potential running mates, he has peppered some advisers and associates with a direct question: Which Republican could best help him raise money for the rest of the presidential campaign?

    That inquiry reflects the evolving calculations of Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential search — and how his scramble to keep up with President Biden’s colossal fund-raising totals may be weighing on his mind as he considers his options.

     

    Quote

    Mr. Trump’s selection process, which is still in its early stages, has largely revolved around conventional questions like who could step in as president if needed, political calculations including contenders’ position on abortion rights, and more Trumpian curiosities like whether a politician physically resembles his idea of a vice president.

    But Mr. Trump has asked several people about the fund-raising prowess of possible running mates, according to three people with direct knowledge of the conversations, signaling a fresh angle in his search for a running mate.

     

    Quote

    The initial feedback has pointed him toward a handful of members of Congress with strong donor connections and at least one deep-pocketed governor. One long-shot possibility with a proven record of raising piles of cash — former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina — was only recently a bitter presidential rival, and her name can spark outrage from Mr. Trump.

    “Trump is going to want a team player, and this is going to be about adding value to the ticket,” said former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who remains close with Mr. Trump and set records for Republican fund-raising. “It’s also going to be about someone who understands the job — who understands the Senate and the House — because he’s not going to want to waste one minute in office.”

     

    Spoiler

    This article is based on interviews with nearly a dozen Republican operatives and politicians who are familiar with Mr. Trump’s deliberations, some of whom have ties to the possible contenders and all of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

    In some cases, Mr. Trump is still getting to know potential contenders.

    After a recent meeting at Mar-a-Lago with former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a Democrat-turned-independent who has become popular among conservatives, he made clear to advisers that she should be on his list of options.

    In other cases, Mr. Trump has fixated on the whimsical over the practical. He has asked several people about running with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying he is intrigued by the branding potential of a “Trump-Kennedy” ticket despite his recent attacks on Mr. Kennedy and the unlikelihood of such a scenario. Mr. Trump’s campaign team remains adamantly opposed to the idea, and Mr. Kennedy, who is already running for president as an independent, has said he would not consider such an offer.

    It is also unclear among Mr. Trump’s advisers whether he ultimately intends to give considerable weight to a contender’s fund-raising ability, or whether his recent focus is a consequence of his overall concerns about cash. That fixation has permeated both his presidential bid and his costly legal defense in his four criminal cases — and further blurred the line between the two.

    The former president relied on one of his political fund-raising vehicles, the Save America PAC, to pay for roughly $50 million in legal expenses last year. He has started replenishing that fund with help from the Republican National Committee, where recently installed Trump loyalists now control the purse strings.

    Mr. Trump’s campaign team, meanwhile, has acknowledged that it expects to be outspent by Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump has responded with a furious pace of fund-raising, despite his typical prickliness at the idea of having to ask wealthy donors for cash.

    “There is no shortage of immensely qualified people President Trump can choose from,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman. “He’ll make his decision when he is ready and at the appropriate time.”

    If fund-raising concerns further influence his vice-presidential search, that path could lead toward a pair of former Republican presidential primary opponents, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Ms. Haley, and a coterie of members of Congress, including Representative Elise Stefanik of New York and Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina and J.D. Vance of Ohio.

    Mr. Trump has signaled interest in all of them as potential running mates, except for Ms. Haley. To some people, he is said to have shown indifference when asked about Ms. Haley’s joining his ticket. To others, he has savaged her with brutal and personal criticisms.

    Still, one of the truisms of Trump World is that no one is ever completely cast out unless they want to be left out. For her part, Ms. Haley said during the campaign that she would not serve as anybody’s No. 2.

    But when it comes to supplementing Mr. Trump’s own fund-raising ability, Ms. Haley could prove a compelling choice. Ms. Haley’s presidential campaign and allied groups collected more than $146 million, according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign fund-raising.

    Of that total, $14.3 million came in small contributions collected mostly online — an impressive sum considering that her team needed to find email addresses and phone numbers for donors not already supporting Mr. Trump.

    Mr. Burgum, for his part, did not raise much for his presidential campaign, but he is worth hundreds of millions of dollars due largely to the sale of his computer program business to Microsoft in 2001.

    Mr. Trump also has a history of populating his inner circle with wealthy businessmen. Mr. Burgum attended a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago this month and, at Mr. Trump’s request, addressed the crowd of about 100 donors, as did Mr. Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman who ran for president this year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

    Mr. Rubio built a formidable fund-raising operation for his own presidential bid in 2016. And while many of those donors, such as Isaac Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment, are already supportive of Mr. Trump, others are not.

    Norman Braman, a billionaire South Florida auto dealer, and Paul Singer, the founder of the Elliott Management hedge fund, two key financial backers of Mr. Rubio in 2016, both put money behind presidential primary opponents of Mr. Trump this year. Mr. Braman supported Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Mr. Singer donated to Ms. Haley.

    One complication for Mr. Rubio’s vice-presidential prospects is that he and Mr. Trump are both residents of the same state, which could run afoul of a constitutional rule.

    While Mr. Trump maintains additional homes in New Jersey and New York, and switched his residency as president, he has told people Mr. Rubio would have to legally move to another state to join the ticket.

    Mr. Trump has told these people that it would probably be difficult for Mr. Rubio to move his family but that Florida voters would be too upset to lose the former president as a resident.

    Mr. Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, has already started helping Mr. Trump raise money.

    Ahead of a Trump fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago this month, he called several donors to urge them to pitch in. He was also one of the hosts of a fund-raiser in Greenville, S.C., held days before the state’s presidential primary, that netted a reported $6 million for the former president.

    As Mr. Scott ran for president last year, donors plowed $45.9 million into his campaign and allied groups, about two-thirds of which came from large donations, according to Open Secrets.

    Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and a longtime Scott supporter, has lobbied Mr. Trump to add the South Carolina senator to his ticket. Mr. Ellison’s involvement was first reported by Puck, which has also described Mr. Trump’s interest in contenders who are strong fund-raisers.

    Ms. Stefanik’s network of donors comes from across the conservative spectrum.

    A former aide in President George W. Bush’s White House, Ms. Stefanik has received support since her first House victory a decade ago from several wealthy establishment donors, including Cliff Asness, a billionaire founder of AQR Capital Management, who backed Ms. Haley’s presidential bid, and Mr. Singer. She met with recently with Mr. Singer and laid out why she thought Mr. Trump would win in November, and Mr. Asness hosted a small group meeting for her at his office where she did the same.

    Since vigorously defending Mr. Trump against his first impeachment in 2019, Ms. Stefanik has also developed relationships with donors affiliated more closely with his conservative movement. Mr. Perlmutter has hosted fund-raisers for her along with Steve Wynn, the casino mogul, who has privately urged Mr. Trump to consider Ms. Stefanik.

    Ms. Stefanik, who replaced former Representative Liz Cheney as the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, has also drawn interest more recently from donors compelled by her push to investigate antisemitism on college campuses. In the first three months of the year, she collected $7.1 million for her own re-election and other Republican causes, her campaign announced this month.

    Mr. Vance is close with Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son and a key political adviser, and the pair helped raise money to pay for a Trump rally in Ohio to benefit Bernie Moreno, the Republican nominee for Senate in the state.

    Mr. Vance also has ties to Silicon Valley from his time working as a venture capitalist in San Francisco for Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal. Mr. Thiel was one of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016 and spent roughly $35 million on Republicans in 2022 but has said he does not plan to be involved in the presidential contest this year.

    One of Mr. Thiel’s close associates, David Sacks, gave more than $1 million to political causes in 2022. He was involved with the announcement of Mr. DeSantis’s primary challenge against Mr. Trump but was also spotted at a fund-raiser Mr. Vance held his year for Mr. Moreno, where Mr. Sacks spent time chatting with the younger Mr. Trump.

    Mr. Vance and Blake Masters, an Arizona House candidate and fellow Thiel acolyte, are exploring a Silicon Valley fund-raiser for the elder Mr. Trump, although a person familiar with the matter said the event was still in the planning stages.

     

  5.  

     

     

    And because it's cut off:

     

    STEPHANOPOULOS: Just to sum up. You support Trump for president even if he's convicted in the classified documents case. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?

     

    SUNUNU: Yeah. Me and 51 percent of America.

     

    S: Governor, thanks for your time this morning.

    • Rage+1 6
  6.  

     

    https://politicalwire.com/2024/04/12/trump-plays-up-veep-speculation/

     

    Quote

    Trump Plays Up Veep Speculation

    Wall Street Journal: “Trump is making the most of the veepstakes, asking guests of his Mar-a-Lago Club here who they like. He is also monitoring the soft auditions—such as the fundraiser speeches—of those thought to be in the mix.”

    “People close to Trump say he is enjoying the speculation and feels no pressure to decide quickly. No one person has an inside track, people close to the former president say, and the contest could run up to the GOP convention in July.”

     

    • Haha 1
  7. https://www.thedailybeast.com/truth-social-investors-try-to-keep-hope-alive-as-stock-tanks?ref=home?ref=home

     

    Quote

    Donald Trump’s acolytes gathered at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday evening to celebrate the public listing of his social media firm, even as the company’s stock continued to crater. Under the Palm Beach sky, right-wing radio host Sebastian Gorka sucked on a cigar, actor Jon Voight posed for photos, and country singer turned Bible salesman Lee Greenwood belted his runaway hit “God Bless the USA.” At the end of the song, he and the former president saluted.

    In a speech, Trump encouraged investors to keep calm. “We have over $200 million dollars in cash, which is very liquid,” he said, according to a reporter from Right Side Broadcasting Network in attendance.

     

    Quote

    On Trump’s social media site, Truth Social, the mood is less ebullient. “Man I really thought we were gonna see a jump today. Especially after that party last night. There is always tomorrow,” one user lamented on Thursday morning.

    “Doesn’t it seem strange that the price goes down steadily every day? Haven’t seen a green day for a while,” wondered another.

    Shares of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group, have fallen more than 50 percent since late March, as the company’s dire financial position has become more clear. Last year, it brought in just $4.1 million in revenue and posted a $58.2 million loss.

     

     

    Quote

    Even after tanking, however, the business is still worth more than $4 billion on paper—a number that defies normal valuation metrics. Trump loyalists have helped keep the stock afloat as a way to financially support him, though TMTG remains heavily shorted by investors who believe its shares will continue to fall.

    On Truth Social, retail investors are encouraging each other to keep the faith. “When the whole world is set on ruining you with everything that they have got, it’s a good sign that you are likely on the right side of things,” one person wrote on Thursday.

     

    Spoiler

    Another user sought to liken TMTG to high-growth tech companies: “I don’t understand all the concern about this stock going down. All of the big stocks were very low at the beginning,” the person said. “We are less than a month into this being an actual stock. I am optimistic about [Truth Social] and will continue to hold and keep buying when I can.”

    Other users speculated that the Mar-a-Lago event was proof that the company is rounding a corner. Why else would executives and bigwigs gather for a raucous party? “I think there is something coming very soon, and they are all excited about it. Something they worked very hard to make happen. A milestone for the team,” one of the believers wrote. “I hope we find out very soon.”

    Trump owns a majority of Truth Social’s shares, though he is suing to amass more control. In a lawsuit filed last month, he argued that his two co-founders—who were previously contestants on his reality show The Apprentice—had underperformed in their duties and didn’t deserve their 8.6 percent stake.

    The former associates, Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, have filed their own lawsuit alleging that the company tried to unfairly dilute their stakes. They are also seeking to challenge a six-month lock-up provision on selling their shares.

    Some Truth Social users blame the mainstream press for “spreading lies” about the company, as one person framed it. And despite nerves about the stock’s downward slide, many of them have pledged to keep buying shares.

    “Just sat down with my broker yesterday and am having him move $10,000 of my Roth IRA, that we had sitting idle for kind of like an extra ‘emergency fund’, into $DJT stocks!” one user declared excitedly. “This is the only time I would hope for the price to drop so I can get as many shares as possible!”

    Another chimed in: “Not going to be able to sleep tonight. If you stick it out I believe you will be rewarded greatly. I believe God directed me here.”

     

    • Haha 6
    • Prepare your anus 1
  8. 5 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Is "TL;DR" in it?  Because...TL;DR.

    https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ljk5fiy

    TL;DR phr.
    [abbr. too long, didn’t read]
    a voluntary affirmation of one’s short attention span or lack of intelligence when faced by anything beyond a brief message.

    2014    [US]    C. Eble UNC-CH Campus Sl. Spring 2014 15: T.L.D.R. — < too long; didn’t read protest and request for a summary.

    • Like 1
  9. Green's Dictionary of Slang.  This is incredible, free of charge and has no ads.

    https://greensdictofslang.com/

    So, check it out my fellow mouth-breathers.

    And some backstory:

    Quote

    Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly 100,000 entries supported by over 400,000 citations from c. ad 1000 to the present day. The main focus of the dictionary is the coverage of over 500 years of slang from c. 1500 onwards.

    The printed version of the dictionary received the Dartmouth Medal for outstanding works of reference from the American Library Association in 2012; fellow recipients include the Dictionary of American Regional English, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It has been hailed by the American New York Times as ‘the pièce de résistance of English slang studies’ and by the British Sunday Times as ‘a stupendous achievement, in range, meticulous scholarship, and not least entertainment value’.

     

     

    Quote

    On this website the dictionary is now available in updated online form for the first time, complete with advanced search tools enabling search by definition and history, and an expanded bibliography of slang sources from the early modern period to the present day. Since the print edition, nearly 60,000 quotations have been added, supporting 5,000 new senses in 2,500 new entries and sub-entries, of which around half are new slang terms from the last five years.

     

    • Hook 'Em 1
  10. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/04/trump-maga-movement-grassroots-republican-party/678043/

    Excerpt from a new book  Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy.

     

    Quote

    Salleigh Grubbs was in her office on Friday, November 20, 2020, when she got a phone call from a friend. Susan’s at Jim Miller Park—they’re shredding ballots! the friend said. Susan was Susan Knox, a woman Salleigh had met a week earlier when both were volunteering as election observers at Jim R. Miller Park, an event center in Cobb County, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, where the county government was now conducting a hand recount of the ballots in the presidential election. The recount had been ordered by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, under pressure from President Donald Trump and his allies, who insisted that Trump hadn’t really lost Georgia by more than 11,000 votes. Salleigh didn’t believe the result either. Her own Cobb County had been the largest source of Republican votes in the state, and for decades it had formed the bedrock of the modern Georgia GOP, launching the careers of Newt Gingrich and others. Hillary Clinton narrowly carried the county in 2016—a minor political earthquake.

     

    Quote

    Salleigh was a lifelong Republican, but politics had always been a side interest for her, as she explained to me in one of several interviews in recent years. At 55, she was the mother of two boys who’d grown up and moved out. Like many people of her generation, she’d started spending more time on Facebook. She called herself a “keyboard warrior” and became a more and more outspoken Trump supporter. Over the course of 2020, she started to believe that all the COVID-induced emergency changes to voting procedures were part of a plan to steal the election. Even so, the results on Election Night stunned her. Republicans lost seats up and down the ballot in Cobb County, including the county-commission chair, district attorney, and sheriff. Salleigh thought these were all races the GOP should have won.

     

    Quote

    Now, at her job as general manager of a company that sold liquid and powder coating equipment, she grabbed her keys and bolted out of work so fast, people thought someone in her family had died. She got in her silver Toyota Venza and practically flew the 15 miles to Jim Miller Park. She pulled her car around the back and saw a huge box truck. The name on the side, in green and blue, was A1 Shredding & Recycling Inc. secure on‑site destruction services, it read.

     

    Quote

    Salleigh parked her car sideways to block in the truck, like she’d seen them do on Starsky & Hutch. She stepped out of her car wearing flip-flops, black leggings, a navy-blue NRA T‑shirt with an American flag made up of rifles on the back, and frameless oval eyeglasses. She met up with Susan, who’d already taken a video on her phone of the driver wheeling trash bins over to the truck. He put the bins under a big chute on the side of the truck that sucked everything out and ripped it to shreds. Susan also had taken photos of the bins in the loading dock, stuffed with envelopes reading official absentee ballot. Next to the bins was a cardboard box with a crudely drawn diagram saying shred.

     

    Spoiler

    Salleigh later said that she tried talking to the driver—“Who called you? What’s the deal here?”—and he held up a piece of paper in the cab window to cover his face. Salleigh thought that was suspicious—what was he hiding? Susan had called 911, but 15 minutes passed without any officers, so now she dialed again.

    “It’s an emergency, and we need them here now!” Susan said, according to a recording of the call.

    “Okay,” the operator said. “Our officers are aware. It looks like they’re busy in that area. Now, you said, it’s going to be referenced, a Black male with a white shredding machine?”

    “Yep,” Susan confirmed.

    “Okay. Does anybody have any weapons?”

    “I don’t know. I’m not close enough … Would you please send an officer ASAP—”

    “Ma’am, ma’am, hang on one second,” the operator said. “We’re gonna send our first available unit. The sergeant is already aware of the call. The units are busy in that area.”

    “I would think that the presidential election would be pretty much as important as anything in our country for a policeman in Cobb County to get over to Jim Miller Park,” Susan said.

    While Susan was still on the phone with the operator, the truck started to move, and she cried, “It’s pulling off. The truck is pulling off!”

    The driver managed to maneuver around Salleigh’s car. So Salleigh jumped back in and took off after him. Susan followed.

    Salleigh tailed the truck for about 10 miles, until she ran out of gas. She ditched her car at a RaceTrac station and hopped into Susan’s Mercedes.

    “Get in, girl,” Susan said, as she and Salleigh later recounted to me. “I’ve got a full tank of gas, and I just had the car washed.”

    They were back in pursuit of the shredding truck. Susan had a trump sign in the back seat. The Soul Town channel was playing on her XM radio. Salleigh thought they were like Thelma and Louise, or maybe Lucy and Ethel from I Love Lucy.

    Salleigh knew her way around, but Susan wasn’t as familiar with this part of town. She started to worry. What if the driver called someone? They were just two women chasing a shredding truck. The driver stopped in the middle of a four-lane road and put his flashers on, Susan later recalled. She and Salleigh were hiding behind a dumpy tire store, unsure of what to do next. That’s when Susan said, “We might not need to keep going.” Salleigh agreed.

    They decided to go to the police station. The staff told them no one there would take a report and instead directed them to a wall-mounted phone. Salleigh picked it up, and the operator on the line told her the police weren’t taking any election-related complaints; she could call the secretary of state, the state official in charge of elections. Salleigh squinted as she listened, darting her eyes from side to side. “Do you know who made that determination?” she asked. “Do you have any idea who that was?”

    Salleigh listened to the operator’s answer and repeated it back as Susan recorded a video on her cellphone. “You were just told that about 10 minutes ago? Wow. Okay. And what’s your name, please? Operator 3442,” Salleigh repeated, rolling her eyes. “Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. We appreciate what you guys do. Uh-huh, buh-bye.”

    Salleigh twirled around to untangle herself from the phone cord and hung up the handset. She shot Susan a look: eyes wide with disbelief, jaw dropped. Salleigh kept thinking the FBI would show up in their blue-and-yellow jackets to impound the shredding truck and seize the evidence. She struggled to understand why the officers at the police station didn’t seem to care about this apparent crime in progress. How far did the corruption go?

    That same afternoon, Salleigh and Susan posted some of their photos and videos from Jim Miller Park online, and they quickly went viral. One of Trump’s own lawyers, Lin Wood, shared the images with his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. “Looks to me like they may be destroying election documents in Cobb County, GA,” Wood wrote. “What do you think? #FightBack Against Election Crimes.” It was just one in a torrent of rumors that Wood and other Trump allies were feverishly amplifying. People started calling the Cobb County police to report the shredded ballots they’d seen on the internet. The shredding-truck company was getting slammed with hundreds of calls. People showed up at the company’s office. The manager was scared for his drivers, a police report recorded. The company released a statement saying it had no knowledge of the contents of the materials it had been hired to shred. The county government, through its election director, put out its own official statement saying the document shredding was “routine” disposal of “non-relevant materials.” The envelopes that said official absentee ballot were just empty envelopes. All the actual ballots had been saved and stored, as required by state law. Later, the FBI did investigate allegations of voter fraud in Georgia, and the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta testified that officials found no evidence of wrongdoing.

    But Salleigh thought she would never know for sure. The evidence had been destroyed. To her, it was proof of what she already thought: There was no way Republicans could have lost the election. The experience galvanized her even more. Within five months, the woman who had never been active in local party politics would become her county’s GOP chair.

     

    Salleigh was not an anomaly. She was part of a nationwide movement of Trump supporters who learned from their shortcomings in 2020 and organized to address them. In the version of history that took hold within the MAGA movement, the cause of Trump’s defeat that year was being narrowly thwarted at almost every step by fellow Republicans. The clerk in Antrim County, Michigan, who said the incorrect vote tallies reported on Election Night were just an honest mistake, quickly fixed, was a Republican. Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, who had refused Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to reverse the outcome, was a Republican. The board of supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona, that screened Trump’s calls and certified Joe Biden’s win was majority Republican. Trump failed to pressure every House Republican to object to the Electoral College votes on January 6, and he got only a handful of senators. Even Trump’s own vice president refused to help him block the official certification in Congress. As close as he got to keeping himself in power, Trump came up short only because of uncooperative members of his own party.

    In response, many of his supporters decided they had to take over the party apparatus, working from the ground up, beginning with the smallest, lowliest units of political organizing—the precincts—and building from there to districts, counties, and states, all the way to the Republican National Committee. This plot, known as the “precinct strategy,” was developed by a little-known Arizona lawyer named Dan Schultz and popularized by Steve Bannon on his podcast, War Room.

    In the years since the 2020 election, the precinct strategy has driven thousands of new Republican activists like Salleigh to take over their local parties not just in Georgia, but in North and South Carolina, Florida and Texas, Michigan and Wisconsin. The strategy has proved effective, in that it forced out Republicans who were anything less than completely faithful to Trump and his election denial, smoothing his path back to the Republican nomination—and perhaps all the way to the White House.

     

    A month after the shredding-truck chase, at the end of December 2020, Salleigh and Susan decided to go to the state capitol, in Atlanta, for a hearing on election irregularities. They hoped their eyewitness accounts would help persuade the state legislature to do what the president and his allies were demanding to change the outcome: call a special session, where lawmakers could reject the election results and award Georgia’s Electoral College votes to Trump.

    The women waited in line for a chance to speak. Susan went first. She passed out printouts of the photos she’d taken of the trash bins at Jim Miller Park. One of the senators, Bill Heath, asked, “Do you have any photographs of actual ballots being shredded?”

    “What do you think those were in that can that he was shredding?” Susan said. “It says an official ballot.”

    “That appears to be the envelopes,” Heath replied, “that are the inner envelopes from—”

    “If you look closely some of them look like they’ve never even been unsealed,” Susan said.

    “I was just, I was trying to find ballots in the picture, and I don’t see ballots.”

    Susan played him her video recording.

    “Look,” Heath went on, “I’m not trying to discredit your testimony, I just don’t see ballots. I just see envelopes here.”

    “Do you not see where it says B‑A‑L‑L‑O …”

    Salleigh could not believe what she was hearing. Senator Heath was a Republican! How could he not see what they saw clearly in the video? When it was Salleigh’s turn at the podium, she started to calmly explain what she’d seen, but as she went on her voice got louder and higher. “We have seen the fraud. We have been lied to, we have been distracted, we’ve been held up, and we’re tired of it.” She was almost shouting now. Her voice started to quiver. “I am tired of people that we vote to put in office stabbing us in the back.”

    She paused then to collect herself. “I’m passionate,” she said. “I’m not going to apologize for being passionate. And I’m not going to apologize for being a patriot either.”

    Someone in the hearing room whooped and clapped. Salleigh gave a big phony smile. “Any questions?” she asked, though she could sense that the lawmakers were not interested.

    The committee chair who was running the hearing laughed nervously. “No, ma’am,” he said sheepishly. “I think what you said is something that’s felt by many people across this state, hundreds of thousands of people.” He spoke gently, carefully, trying to ease the tension. “So thank you for doing what you’ve done and for being willing to stand up and tell about what you’ve seen.”

    Trump had tweeted urging people to watch the hearing as it was being livestreamed online, and Salleigh got so many texts and calls from people all across the country who loved her testimony, strangers she didn’t even know. When people asked her who she was, she’d say, “I’m just nobody, really, but I’m somebody who loves my country,” as she put it in a Facebook Live video. In certain circles, she was becoming something of a legend: the woman who chased a shredding truck.

    Salleigh was disappointed that her testimony did not persuade the state legislature to call a special session to throw Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump. Nor did Congress overturn the election results on January 6. Instead, Trump got impeached for incitement of insurrection. It was a confusing time. She told me she found comfort listening to Steve Bannon’s podcast, where she heard him interview Dan Schultz about the precinct strategy.

    Susan encouraged Salleigh to run for a party position, and Salleigh set her aim higher than the precinct level. She decided to run for county chair. She would mobilize her friends and Facebook followers, who would flood the county’s precinct caucus, becoming qualified to vote for her. She proudly passed around the video of her testimony at the state-senate hearing. “I’m a dedicated woman,” she described herself at a forum in April 2021 with the other county-chair candidates. “I chased the shredding truck.” The audience laughed and cheered.

    Party meetings to elect a new county chair were often not the most exhilarating, but that year, the party headquarters, in a Marietta strip mall, wasn’t big enough. The gathering, held later that same April, moved to a church across the street. When Salleigh saw all the new members show up, it reminded her of the scene in the movie Network when everyone shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Even though it was a three-way race, Salleigh won on the first ballot, with nearly a supermajority. Salleigh gave a few radio interviews, where the hosts held her up as a poster child for the precinct strategy in action.

     

    The ground-up transformation of the Republican Party through people like Salleigh quietly helped shape the Republican field in the 2022 midterm elections, leading the party to nominate the most effusively MAGA candidates in battleground states. The strategy’s success almost instantly became its own undoing, as Democrats exploited Trump’s MAGA brand to portray Republican candidates as extreme and dangerous, alienating swing voters and even some Republicans.

    But with the Republican Party organization now firmly in the control of election deniers, the GOP would not moderate. The fully empowered MAGA movement would not give up. The threat it posed to democracy would not pass. The movement resolved to try again this fall, in the 2024 presidential election. New party officials, including Salleigh, helped shape the nominating rules and delegations selection to favor Trump’s return in the Republican primary, and they will be on the front lines of turning out voters, monitoring the polls, and potentially challenging the results in November, in service of the man whose myth inspired them all in the first place.

    A few days after her election as county chair, back in 2021, Salleigh was sitting in her first committee meeting at the county party headquarters in Marietta when she got a call from a blocked number, as she later recounted to me. She had a feeling who it might be.

    “Hello, Salleigh,” a familiar voice said over the phone. “This is your favorite president.”

    Salleigh was speechless. She pointed to her phone and mouthed, “It’s President Trump!”

    She stepped outside so she could focus. The party secretary came out to see what was going on, and Salleigh put the phone on speaker for a second so she could hear. “Oh my gosh,” the secretary cried, “It’s really President Trump!”

    Trump called a lot of people, usually rich friends and Republican politicians. His aides sometimes liked him to surprise unsuspecting supporters. But it was not every day he called a lowly county chair. He’d gotten Salleigh’s number from the Georgia state GOP chair, who’d wanted Trump to know her story, how he’d inspired regular people to join the party, so many of them becoming sentries of the cause like Salleigh. Trump told Salleigh she was a real winner. He said he was proud of her for her big victory, and it was great that she ran as an “America First” candidate. He was so polite and kind, Salleigh thought that if everyone could have a minute with him as she had, it might change a lot of his critics’ minds. It was, as she imagined Trump himself might say, “a perfect phone call.”

     

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