Facts? Trump Doesn’t Need No Stinkin’ Facts!

Trump stooges can’t deliver.

A regime that rails against “DEI,” decries “fake news,” and claims devotion to meritocracy has stocked its ranks with overwhelmingly white, incompetent sycophants who routinely fail to back up outlandish, vindictive allegations with facts. The result is serial failure and humiliation.

The problem is evident in serial court debacles. CNN reported on U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro’s recent humiliation — a second trial defeat — in failing to convict an alleged high-profile MS-13 gang mastermind. Her loss fits the former Fox TV host’s pattern of unprecedented defeats (also evident in DOJ’s unprecedented record of getting “no bills” from grand juries) that has stunned legal experts. “An increasingly alarming number of cases have fallen apart this year in DC’s federal court — even when the cases appear to be strong arguments against violent crime, relatively straightforward to prove, and tried by experienced prosecutors,” CNN wrote. In nearly a dozen criminal cases, two defendants were acquitted and four ended in mistrials with “jurors reporting in courtroom notes that they deliberated ‘hopelessly’ and were in complete ‘impasse.’”

(Alicja Nowakowska/iStock)

That failure rate is unmatched by prior administrations but typical in the Trump regime’s often vindictive prosecutions. Despite Attorney General Todd Blanche’s wild accusations, many cases are shockingly devoid of evidence, ensuring defeat before even reaching a jury. Hence, the D.C. district court just granted the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the bogus “vandalism” case against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, falsely accused of destroying the lining on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool (which — no surprise! — actually resulted from the no-bid contractor’s error).

Wild accusations from Donald Trump and his minions; no facts; no case. That is the pattern in a slew of vindictive investigations/prosecutions (e.g., mortgage “fraud” cases against Letitia James, a “perjury” case against James Comey, a baseless investigation into former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, a threatened investigation of Sen. Adam Schiff). Remember when Blanche publicly declared there was plenty of evidence of criminal intent to bolster his bizarre indictment of Comey because he reposted an image of seashells? Now? Crickets. The case, widely regarded as preposterous, is expected to be dismissed.

Trump and his minions’ utter failure to back up wild accusations extends well beyond courtrooms. Whistleblowers, for example, now reveal the Trump regime lacked facts to sustain its vendetta against colleges and universities for alleged antisemitism, its go-to cudgel for attacking academic independence and diversity efforts.

As the New York Times reported:

Trump administration officials ignored the recommendations of their own investigators as they pushed to find civil rights violations at three Ivy League universities…. The Aug. 17 account came from a former Department of Justice civil rights lawyer, Haley Van Erem, and colleagues whose names were redacted, who said they were assigned in 2025 to an administration task force on antisemitism.

In a report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, whistleblower lawyers confirmed the Trump crew used antisemitism “as a pretext to cut federal grants to pressure Brown, Columbia and Harvard.”

Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) denounced the DOJ in an August 18 letter:

Trump Administration officials abandoned their duty as government lawyers to impartially investigate the facts and apply the law. Instead, they used the legitimate goal of investigating antisemitic discrimination on campus as a pretext for retaliating against, and punishing, universities, faculty, and students for engaging in protected speech disfavored by President Trump and his Administration. In other words, you seem to have overseen a large-scale fraud perpetrated against the American people and our universities, attacking disfavored groups on knowingly false grounds and exacerbating fear and division among different groups in our society.

(Brown and Columbia, which already capitulated to DOJ’s threats, might consider trying to unwind the settlements based on supposedly baseless accusations.)

In a similar vein, Trump’s flunkies have never produced evidence to back up his incessant claims of massive noncitizen voting. Following Trump’s widely panned Oval Office speech regarding alleged noncitizen voting, the big document “reveal” turned out to be a bust. As The Guardian reported, data “described electronic voting machine vulnerabilities, foreign access to state voter registration data and foreign digital manipulation strategies ... [but] no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote, which Trump lost.” More recently, a bogus report from the Census Bureau fashioned by an outside MAGA-friendly outfit to bolster specious voting fraud claims proved to be essentially worthless.

And now, the New York Times reported, “A month after the Trump administration declared without evidence that thousands of noncitizens had illegally registered to vote in Nevada, officials with the Department of Homeland Security were unable to substantiate the claim.” Trump’s wild accusation that “278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states, including an exact number of 15,903 in Nevada,” turned out to be — surprise ! — nonsense. DHS officials let on during a meeting that “they had identified just 185 potential noncitizens in the state so far,” a minuscule percentage of registered voters.

In contrast to its baseless cascade of allegations and accusations, the Trump team melts down when confronted with disagreeable, quantifiable proof that refutes its propaganda, as it did when the Center for American Progress produced a report showing “his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime,” the New York Times reported. Trump’s personal lawyer then threatened to sue CAP for $5 billion (yet to be filed as of this writing), the “latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment.”

In response to the blatant effort to chill speech and saddle it with crippling legal costs (as the Federal Trade Commission tried, one may recall, with Media Matters), CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden defiantly defended her organization’s “rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis” in a written statement:

Based on analysis of crime data, our report demonstrated facts about the National Guard deployments that are inconvenient to the Trump administration. Since its inception, CAP has published analysis of the impact of government policy under Democratic and Republican administrations.

This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless. A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration.

She vowed not to “cower nor bend” to Trump’s authoritarian bullying. It was gratifying to see right-leaning think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Niskanen Center, denounce the attack on free speech.

In sum, Trump’s accusations, whether in court filings, presidential addresses, policy declarations, or legal threats, do not deserve any presumption of good faith. This gang’s attacks on enemies and in support of its own twisted agenda routinely lack substantiation. Moreover, its attacks on foes who do have the facts amount to nothing more than fascist bullying.

It’s long past time for legacy media to inform Americans that the regime routinely lies about perceived adversaries. When it comes up with new allegations, it would behoove reporters to remind Americans of its well-established habit of fabulist claims and baseless accusations.

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