Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.
Washington
Trump allies at Heritage declare 2024 election illegitimate in advance
“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” said Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”
The report said a key finding was that the sitting president is the greatest danger to the peaceful transition of power, with no mention of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to keep himself in office. Instead it offered that conclusion as justification for doubting the outcome of the 2024 election and trying to reject anything other than a Trump victory. Trump himself has repeatedly declined to say he will accept the results or rule out a violent response. He has told his supporters that he can only lose through cheating.
Howell said the exercise would lead Heritage to file more litigation over election procedures. He also said it should help the public resist “psychological operations” that he claimed were used in 2020 and are being used again. He didn’t say who supposedly ran the operations.
“The upshot is that we will see a contested election the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Adam Ellwanger, a rhetoric professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who helped lead the simulation. “If we see the kind of manipulations that we saw in 2020, I wonder if average Americans who are supporters of the president [Trump] will swallow that so easily as they did in 2020.”
The simulation, known as the “2024 Transition Integrity Project,” is technically independent of the Heritage Foundation but included multiple Heritage employees. The full list of participants was withheld, which Howell said was for their safety. Another participant present on Thursday was Josh Findlay, who was until recently the Republican National Committee’s director of election integrity operations. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts spoke at the end of the event.
The Heritage Foundation, a longtime bastion of conservative orthodoxy that has more recently reinvented itself for the Trump era, has become a lightning rod in the campaign because of its role in convening “Project 2025.” That project published detailed policy proposals for every federal agency, ready for the next Republican administration to implement. Some of the most controversial ideas including banning abortion medication, facilitating White House involvement in law enforcement and rolling back legal protections for LGBTQ Americans.
As some of those proposals have garnered scrutiny, Trump and his campaign have repeatedly distanced themselves from the effort. Many of the proposals were written by alumni of his administration and are likely to be appointees if he wins another term.
The Republican National Committee has its own election integrity operations, including litigation.
Attendees on Thursday walked past a mobile billboard criticizing Trump and Project 2025, which the Democratic National Committee positioned outside Heritage’s headquarters. Biden campaign spokesman James Singer called Thursday’s presentation “nothing more than an attempt to justify their efforts to suppress the vote, undermine the election, and ultimately another January 6.”
Howell said the election threats project was devised in response to a 2020 bipartisan group of academics, former officials, journalists and others that tried to anticipate and prepare for ways that then-President Trump might try to disrupt the election or the peaceful transfer of power. Their report raised concerns about violence but did not imagine a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol that temporarily disrupted the formal certification of Joe Biden’s win.
Both that effort and the 2024 project used tabletop exercises, also known as “war games,” that assign participants various roles to simulate how they might interact. In the 2024 project at Heritage, President Biden was played by former senator Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.). Those war games included contemplating surprise emergencies such as the Streisand kidnapping. (In the war game, she was rescued the next day.)
Howell accused the Biden administration of a “coordinated invasion over our southern border for the purposes of impacting this election.” As evidence, he said a camera crew went door to door in an apartment complex outside Charlotte, asking people whether they were noncitizens registered to vote, with 10 percent responding yes. Howell said his team did not verify those registrations. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
One scenario in the war games involved people flooding the FBI with reports of civil rights violations as a staged provocation for the Justice Department to take over local election authorities. Howell and Ellwanger objected to those observers using a version of arguments that have been consistently made against civil rights legislation since the Civil War.
“To put it simply, the federal government should have a very limited role in our election systems. They should be left to the states to decide,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “on behalf of the Department of Education (ED),” on Monday released a Notice Inviting Grant Applications for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. Applications are due by May 29.
Last November, ED announced that it had entered into an interagency agreement with HHS to administer the CCAMPIS program. This is the first CCAMPIS competition conducted under this arrangement.
Approximately $73.5 million will go to institutions of higher education that awarded at least $250,000 in Pell grants to enrolled students in FY 2025. HHS will award about 148 grants, ranging from $150,000 to $1 million.
The terms of the grant competition are not significantly different than prior competitions. As before, there are two absolute grant priorities that every application must address – leveraging non-federal resources and utilizing a sliding-fee scale for low-income parents.
This year’s competition includes only one invitational priority that reflects the Trump administration’s general educational policy. The new priority, entitled “Expanding Education Choice in Early Learning Settings,” encourages applications that “expand access to education choice … including by empowering parents in choosing the early learning setting that best meets their family’s needs.” Flexible childcare programs that include drop-in care and care during nontraditional hours are also encouraged.
One other notable difference from prior competitions is an expanded “Terms and Conditions” section that not only requires compliance with applicable civil rights laws, but also refers to Trump administration Executive Orders and guidance on racial discrimination that clarify “the application of federal antidiscrimination laws to programs or initiatives that may involve discriminatory practices, including those labeled as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) programs.” This includes any “discriminatory equity ideology [as defined in Executive Order 14190] in violation of a federal antidiscrimination law.”
The exact scope of these terms is unclear because courts have not found many of the practices described in these Executive Orders and guidance documents to be violations of federal law.
The Newsfeed
This week, the team brings you stories about how communities including Filipino immigrants, Sephardic Jews and Somalis arrived in the Pacific Northwest
Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
Group hopes to boost recognition for Seattle’s Filipinotown
By Venice Buhain
The group Filipinotown Seattle hopes to make sure that the legacy of Filipino Americans in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District isn’t forgotten.
One of the group’s current projects is pushing for a Filipinotown placemarking sign in the CID.
“Filipino Americans have had a presence here for over 100 years in Seattle,” said Filipinotown Seattle Executive Director Devin Israel Cabanilla.
He said that the signage is important to remind people that “the International District is not just Chinatown. Japantown. Filipinotown is here as well.”
The group held a poll on what signage might look like and where it might be located. It would be similar to the Chinatown sign on South Jackson Street and Fifth Avenue South, or the Wing Luke Museum
In the early 20th century, the area now known as the CID was a hub full of businesses, entertainment, social groups and housing that served Seattle’s growing immigrant population from Asia and elsewhere. The communities all intermingled throughout the CID.
“This area was a central place for Asian Pacific immigrants simply because of segregation,” Cabanilla said.
Because the Philippines was a U.S. territory from 1898 to 1946, Filipino immigrants were unaffected by laws in the 1920s that restricted immigration from Japan or China. Many Filipinos came to study at the University of Washington or to work in burgeoning industries, like lumber, farming, canneries and factories.
While the physical Filipino presence in terms of buildings and storefronts in the CID dwindled in the later 20th century with redevelopment, Seattle Filipinos and Filipino Americans continued to make impacts locally, regionally and nationally.
“It may not have been in terms of storefronts, but our presence has always existed in terms of politics, culture as well,” Cabanilla said.
The Seattle Department of Transportation said it is aware that the group is working on its signage request, but the Department of Neighborhoods has not yet received a formal request. They are also working to develop a clearer process for this and other similar neighborhood signage proposals.
Filipinotown Seattle said it hopes that the sign helps remind Seattle of the CID’s unique designation as a neighborhood shaped by many immigrants and migrants to Seattle.
“Is it Chinatown? Is it Japantown? Is it Little Saigon? It’s all those things. And I think re cultivating that this is a multicultural district, Filipinotown is helping establish: Yes, it’s more than one thing,” Cabanilla said.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
The state of Washington is getting a seventh temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Marysville Washington Temple was announced Sunday night during a devotional in the Marysville Washington Stake by Elder Hugo E. Martinez, a General Authority Seventy in the church’s United States West Area Presidency.
“We are pleased to announce the construction of a temple in Marysville, Washington,” the First Presidency said in a statement. “The specific location and timing of the construction will be announced later. This is a reason for all of us to rejoice and express gratitude for such a significant blessing — one that will allow more frequent access to the ordinances, covenants and power that can only be found in the house of the Lord.”
The other temples in Washington are the Columbia River, Moses Lake, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Vancouver temples.
The church has 214 temples in operation. Plans for another 170 temples have been announced; many of those temples are in various stages of planning and construction.
Sunday’s temple announcement follows the new practice of the church’s First Presidency, which determines where temples will be built — and when and how they will be announced.
The First Presidency directed a General Authority Seventy to announce the first temple in Maine at a fireside there in December.
In January, church President Dallin H. Oaks said the Maine announcement set the pattern for future temple announcements.
“The best place to announce a temple is in that temple district,” he told the Deseret News.
The First Presidency will continue to decide where future temples will be built. It then will “assign someone else to make the announcement in the place where the temple will be built,” he said.
This pattern came to him as a strong impression after he assumed leadership of the church in October, following the death of his friend, President Russell M. Nelson.
This came as a strong impression to him shortly after he assumed the leadership of the church, President Oaks said.
The church remains in the midst of an aggressive temple-building era. President Nelson announced 200 new temples from 2018 to 2025. All but one were announced at general conference.
Five dozen temples are now under construction.
President Oaks now has overseen the announcement of two temples, neither at a general conference.
At the October conference he said that “with the large number of temples now in the very earliest phases of planning and construction, it is appropriate that we slow down the announcement of new temples.”
Ten new temples are scheduled to be dedicated in the next six months.
- May 3: Davao Philippines Temple.
- May 3: Lindon Utah Temple.
- May 31: Bacolod Philippines Temple.
- June 7: Yorba Linda California Temple.
- June 7: Willamette Valley Oregon Temple.
- Aug. 16: Belo Horizonte Brazil Temple.
- Aug. 16: Cleveland Ohio Temple.
- Aug. 30: Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple.
- Oct. 11: Miraflores Guatemala City Guatemala Temple.
- Oct. 18: Managua Nicaragua Temple.
Two-thirds of the 170 temples still to be built are outside the United States.
Temples are distinct from the meetinghouses where Latter-day Saints worship Jesus Christ each Sunday. Temples are closed on Sundays, but they open during the week as sanctuaries where church members go to find peace, make covenants with God and perform proxy ordinances for deceased relatives.
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