Will any Republican chief rise up for Ruby Freeman?

Former President Donald Trump did what he always does in tough times and attacked a person of color with three nonsensical smears about Ruby Freeman Monday night.

Apparently, attacking this black woman again brought no relief from his dangerously injured ego, so he lashed out and reloaded Wednesday morning with two new attacks on this woman who had done nothing wrong except count votes Trump didn’t gave what he wanted.

Here is one of Trump’s wounded animal lawsuits, offered with the proviso that he does these rants because he knows they will be shared and thus his lies will be amplified and seep into the national consciousness. Trump lost Georgia fairly and honestly. The 2020 election was the safest election in US history. Trump’s own attorney general and officials in 50 states found no evidence of widespread fraud. Trump has never presented any evidence of his fraud allegations, and his campaign lost its challenges over allegations of voter fraud.

But Trump isn’t ready even now to accept that truth, so he hits like he always has. Therewith:

The Ruby Freeman tapes I uploaded to Truth Social are AMAZING. Now they can be heard and seen across America, along with the actual act of “filling the ballot box” with far more votes than it would take for me and Senator Perdue to win GEORGIA. At first she thought they got caught, got VERY nervous and wanted to “spill the beans”. Then SOS, GBI, FBI calmed her down, helped her clean up her social media, took her away (for two months!). THEN CHANGE YOUR STORY!

None of that happened. In fact, Trump lost the 2020 election by millions of votes.

Despite this, Ruby Freeman was forced to shut down her own small business and flee her home to live in an undisclosed location on the advice of the FBI over Trump’s allegations against her after he lost the 2020 election.

You see, Ruby, a grandmother, volunteered for the work that citizens across America used to do to give back to their communities: She volunteered to do the tedious work of counting votes.

And those votes didn’t add up to a victory for Trump, so he went after Ruby and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, attacking them with lies and accusing them, without evidence, of “bagging” the November 2020 election for Joe Biden “having tampered with” the ballot.

It got worse. Reuters reported:

Freeman made a series of 911 calls in the days after she was publicly identified by the president’s camp in early December. In a call on December 4, she told dispatchers she had received a barrage of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs,” adding, “It’s scary because they say things like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We’re coming for you.’”

Two days later, a panicked Freeman called 911 again after hearing a loud banging on her door just before 10 p.m. Strangers had also come the night before. She asked the dispatcher for help. “Lord Jesus, where are the police?” she asked, according to the recording obtained by Reuters in a record request. “I don’t know who keeps coming to my door.”

Freeman and Moss worked on the Fulton County election. Fulton County is predominantly black or African American, like many of the other areas Trump has targeted with unproven and false allegations of fraud, like Detroit.

There is an undeniable racist component to Trump’s cheating allegations, which focus on cities with mostly black voters. The problem is that this is not widely discussed and accepted.

Judge Jill Karofsky of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the “[t]two counties. . . are attacked because of their different populations. Because they are urban. I suppose because they vote democratically.” Addressing Trump’s attorney, Jim Troupis, Judge Karofsky said, “This lawsuit, Mr. Troupis, smacks of racism.”

Of course, the man who was a known racist also used racism to whistle the dog whistle at his followers, who were primed to believe racist lies about people in mostly black cities. Basically, these attacks, based on nothing but lies, are an attempt to disenfranchise people of color, and the continued attacks on Ruby Freeman serve as a warning to other black women not to participate in the voting process, lest they also be based accused of nothing and are expelled from their homes and businesses.

In June 2022, we learned how Ruby Freeman felt after these attacks. “You know how it feels when the President of the United States takes aim at you?” asked Ruby Freeman.

Trump’s attacks on Freeman were part of a widespread Trump campaign to pressure and intimidate election officials.

This is Trump’s way of dealing with ego wounds. He thrashes and tries to draw blood. Other people’s pain and fear is the only ointment he has when he’s hurt. And now he’s injured. Most recently, he went so far as to blame Republicans for the medium-term losses in how they handled Roe’s ouster, to suggest he wasn’t the cause.

That was the rare occasion when the former president was right. But he’s wrong that he’s not part of the Republican Party’s branding problem.

Trump is a lost cause when it comes to seeking integrity and decency. But where are Republicans willing to stand up for Ruby Freeman? There should be at least a few in the Republican leadership who might wish to offer even a measure of decency to publicly protest this ongoing assault on a private individual in his 1960s.

It’s likely Freeman will consider litigation, which Maddow Blog says would be easier now that Trump is no longer acting president.

The deep lack of decency in Trump’s ongoing attacks on Ruby Freeman should not be dismissed as more of the same. They are dangerous, how dangerous these election lies are, we all learned on January 6th and again with the attack on Paul Pelosi.

Someone in the Republican leadership should be willing to stand up for a campaign worker who has been forced to flee her own home following violent threats from her party leader. Everyone? Everyone?

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily’s newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been accredited to report on President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and to exclusively interview spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively on her first appearance at home following the then-Vice President’s first impeachment to report to President Donald Trump.

Sarah is a two-time Telly Award-winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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