Ohio Senator JD Vance still likes Mark Robinson—even if his boss doesn’t.
While campaigning in North Carolina Friday, the Republican vice presidential nominee gave a quick shout out to the conservative outcast before realizing, midsentence, that he was running off script.
“I want to give a shout-out to—you guys have a great lieutenant governor,” Vance said before putting his finger up in the air.
“Sorry, um, we got—sorry,” Vance continued. “Mark isn’t here.”
NEW >> JD Vance gives a shout out to Mark Robinson in North Carolina.
“I want to give a shout out, you guys have a great Lieutenant Governor… *long pause* S-s-sorry. *pause* Sorry, Mark isn’t here”
Uh oh. pic.twitter.com/U6dm6S8bIo
— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) October 25, 2024
He was, of course, referring to North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor and the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who was removed from the billing of Vance’s rallies for political measure.
Robinson morphed into a political pariah after CNN published a sprawling investigation last month about his pre-politics proclivities, which included writing in online pornographic forums that he had, at least at one time, desired to own slaves, enjoyed transgender porn, and peeped on women’s locker rooms. In the weeks that followed, Robinson sued CNN for defamation, seeking $50 million in damages for “reputational harm” over what he described as a “high-tech lynching.” On Tuesday, Robinson tweaked that number, amending the lawsuit to instead seek just over $25,000 in damages.
Vance may not have gotten the memo that Robinson had been booted from the Trump campaign trail as a result of the stunning report. Hours before the story dropped, the Trump campaign reportedly told the Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-flouting antisemite that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Carolina Journal in September. Local Republican strategists had also reportedly called on Robinson to exit the North Carolina gubernatorial race in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state, but Robinson roundly rejected those calls.
Long before the MAGA movement deemed Robinson to be dead weight, the exceedingly controversial politico had near countless headline-grabbing scandals based on his disturbing online history. Those included posts in which he minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers (despite admitting that his wife had an abortion), and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.” Robinson has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”
Robinson has been projected to lose North Carolina since at least July, with some political forecasters expecting a double-digit loss to his Democratic opponent, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein.
Read more about Robinson:
Escalating his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump is now calling the United States “a garbage can for the world.”
The Republican nominee used the descriptor twice on Thursday night during a campaign rally in Arizona. “First time I’ve ever said ‘garbage can’ but, you know what, it’s a very accurate description,” he claimed.
On Friday in Texas, Trump again said, “We’re like a garbage can. First time I said it was last night.… I said it—I don’t know, just came out, ‘garbage can.’ We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people they don’t want.”
The unsavory, nativist phrase has elicited public outcry, and on Friday afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris said Trump’s remarks were “just another example of how he really belittles our country.”
“This is someone who is a former president of the United States, who has a bully pulpit. And this is how he uses it? To tell the rest of the world that somehow the United States of America is trash?” Harris said. “I think, again, the president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are.”
Online, many have decried Trump’s remarks as unpatriotic and departing from past U.S. leaders’ statements about America and immigration—such as those of John F. Kennedy, who celebrated America’s status as a “nation of immigrants” and wrote that “everywhere, immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.”
Historian Douglas M. Charles noted that Trump’s rhetoric parallels that of Ku Klux Klan leader William J. Simmons, who in the early 1920s said the United States is not “a melting-pot” but “a garbage can! … When the hordes of aliens walk to the ballot box and their votes outnumber yours, then that alien horde has got you by the throat.”
While the wording may be new—for Trump—his comparison of immigrants to garbage is consistent with his tendency to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, spanning back to his claims that Mexico was “bringing drugs,” “crime,” and “rapists” to the U.S. when announcing his 2016 campaign. More recently, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” repeatedly referred to them as “animals,” and spread debunked rumors about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Several former White House officials who served under Donald Trump have come out in support of retired General John Kelly, who earlier this week called the former president a fascist who often praised Hitler.
Politico reported Friday that more than a dozen officials agreed with Kelly in a letter of their own, stating that “this is who Donald Trump is.”
“The revelations General Kelly brought forward are disturbing and shocking. But because we know Trump and have worked for and alongside him, we were sadly not surprised by what General Kelly had to say,” they wrote in the letter.
The letter goes far in backing Kelly, with the signatories saying that like him, they “did not take the decision to come forward lightly.”
“We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments. Everyone should heed General Kelly’s warning,” the letter states.
The letter’s signatories included Trump administration officials such as former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former press secretary to the vice president Alyssa Farah Griffin, and former assistant secretary of homeland security Elizabeth Neumann, among others.
Grisham spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, telling the Chicago audience that Trump “used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, just say it enough and people will believe you.’” Griffin has also come out against Trump, calling his message to women “creepy.”
The letter is the latest example of many Republicans turning against Trump. Some have even gone on to endorse Harris, such as a group of more than 100 former GOP officials, as well as former staffers to previous Republican presidential candidates. Harris hopes that the GOP defections don’t stop there but continue at the ballot box in 11 days.
The chair of the conservative-led House Freedom Caucus said that North Carolina’s legislature ought to preemptively grant Donald Trump all 16 of the state’s electors before any vote has even been counted.
Maryland Representative Andy Harris’s outrageous comments were in response to a speech that right-wing extremist Ivan Raiklin, who previously assembled a “Deep State target list” of Trump’s political enemies, gave at a Republican Party dinner hosted Thursday. Raiklin argued that due to the widespread damage and displacement caused by Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s Republican-led state legislature should award its electors to Trump ahead of the election results, according to Politico.
Raiklin also suggested that Republican-controlled state legislatures in New Hampshire, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia, and Wisconsin could carry out similar schemes, by coming together for a vote on Election Day.
When Raiklin opened the floor to questions, Maryland Representative Andy Harris said that it “makes a lot of sense” for North Carolina’s legislature to simply say Trump won, and actually suggested that waiting for the results of the popular vote would somehow “disenfranchise” voters.
“You statistically can go and say, ‘Hey, look, you got disenfranchised in 25 counties. You know what that vote probably would have been,’” Harris said. “Which would be—if I were in the Legislature—enough to go, ‘Yeah, we have to convene the Legislature. We can’t disenfranchise the voters.’”
The popular vote typically determines the allocation of electors in all 50 states.
Harris argued that the plan would only work in North Carolina, and would probably look like an illegal plot to steal the White House if Republicans tried it anywhere else.
“But how do you make the argument in other states? I mean, otherwise it looks like it’s just a power play. With North Carolina I mean, it’s legitimate. There are a lot of people who aren’t going to get to vote, and it may make the difference in that state,” he continued.
When asked to explain his statement, Harris told Politico, “As I’ve repeatedly said, every legal vote should be counted. I would hope everyone could agree that legal American voters whose lives were devastated by the recent storms should not be disenfranchised in the upcoming voting process.”
Early voting in North Carolina began last weekend, and already, voter turnout appeared to be lessened by the destruction of Hurricane Helene earlier this month. Across 13 counties in western North Carolina that were identified as the most affected by Helene, voter turnout on the first day of early voting was significantly lower than it was in 2020, according to Citizen Times.
Donald Trump’s ex-allies and former staffers agree that the Republican presidential nominee is a fascist—but the people laser-focused on returning him to the Oval Office are working overtime to undercut the dire warning.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist ideology, characterized by dictators who lean on military force to quash civil opposition. Trump has repeatedly mirrored the rhetoric of some of the world’s most infamous fascist leaders—namely, Adolf Hitler—on hot-button issues such as immigration. Earlier this week, interviews in The Atlantic and The New York Times revealed that Trump had, in private conversations, showered the violent regimes with praise, reportedly telling White House staffers that he needed the “kind of generals that Hitler had.”
In a joint statement released Friday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed that it was Vice President Kamala Harris, and her decision to formally label Trump a fascist, that has ushered more violence into the presidential race (as opposed to Trump’s dangerous and economically unstable policy goals).
Harris “must abandon the base and irresponsible rhetoric that endangers both American lives and institutions,” the pair wrote.
Memorializing the assassination attempt on Trump in July, the conservative leaders argued that the “Democratic nominee for President of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus.”
“Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over,” Johnson and McConnell wrote. “The Vice President’s words more closely resemble those of President Trump’s second would-be assassin than her own earlier appeal to civility.”
But the joint letter belies the reality that the conservative leaders are backing Trump for wildly different reasons. Johnson, a Christian nationalist with plans to curb LGBTQ+ right and hand states the keys to ban abortion, has vehemently defended Trump for years, going so far as to design the legal strategy to further the former president’s 2020 election interference conspiracy. On the other hand, McConnell—an expedient Republican operative—has privately referred to Trump as “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” and a “despicable human being,” all while publicly endorsing him and promising that he’s on the “same team” as the Republican presidential nominee.
Their letter also conveniently ignores the fact that Trump has repeatedly called Harris a fascist for the past few months, despite the fact that Harris’s rhetoric and policies don’t align with the authoritarian ideology while Trump’s do.
Meanwhile, almost half of all Americans acknowledge that Trump is a fascist, according to a new poll from ABC News/Ipsos. That included 87 percent of Democrats, 46 percent of independents, and 12 percent of Republicans. That same survey found that nearly two-thirds of voters view Trump as a candidate who regularly departs from the truth.
Read more about Trump’s comments:
It appears Jeff Bezos is very afraid of Donald Trump. For the first time in 36 years, The Washington Post will not be endorsing a presidential candidate this election.
The Post’s editorial page editor David Shipley announced the news to shocked colleagues in a reportedly tense meeting Friday morning. The paper’s publisher, William Lewis, published a note to readers shortly thereafter confirming the news, writing that the newsroom is “nonpartisan” and wants to let readers “make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions.”
It’s a stunning announcement from the paper that proudly adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” just after Trump became president in 2017.
The news caught staffers completely off guard. In fact, the Post—reporting on the chaos within its own newsroom—noted that a presidential endorsement for Kamala Harris had already been drafted. The paper’s editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned soon after the public announcement, and other staffers are similarly furious over the decision. One opinion writer, speaking anonymously to Semafor’s Max Tani, said, “If you don’t have the balls to own a newspaper, don’t.”
The Post’s union put out a statement pointing a finger directly at Bezos for the decision.
Marty Baron, the newspaper’s former executive editor, also slammed the decision. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he wrote on X. “[Donald Trump] will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner [Jeff Bezos] (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
The Post endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020, calling out Trump’s threat to democracy as well as his “few accomplishments in his first term and no agenda for his second.” The editorial board has also previously condemned Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection, his actions while in office, and his general rhetoric.
Suffice it to say, this is a major departure that can only be explained by cowardice from Bezos, one of the world’s richest people. The Amazon founder is likely worried about how a Harris endorsement would hurt him if Trump returns to office. Bezos has contracts before the federal government that could be at risk, including Amazon’s shipping and cloud computing services and his Blue Origin space company (also a government contractor).
The news indicates a troubling trend of billionaires already bowing to Trump. Earlier this month, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong reportedly ordered the paper to avoid making an endorsement in the presidential election. On Wednesday, the LA Times’ editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, saying the decision made the paper look “craven and hypocritical” given its past reporting and editorials on Trump.
This story has been updated.
More on the chaos of the 2024 race:
Almost half of all Americans view Donald Trump as a fascist, according to a new poll from ABC News/Ipsos.
The poll, released Friday morning, shows 49 percent of registered voters think of Trump as fitting the definition of a “political extremist who acts as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” The survey also found that nearly two-thirds of registered voters say Trump departs from the truth.
The poll’s results seem to break down along political lines, with 87 percent of Democrats, 46 percent of independents, and 12 percent of Republicans calling Trump a fascist. The poll showed that 22 percent of registered voters saw Kamala Harris as a fascist, broken down to 41 percent of Republicans, 20 percent of independents, and 3 percent of Democrats.
The poll was conducted before Trump’s former chief of staff, retired General John Kelly, told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday that the former president fit the definition of a fascist and had praised Hitler multiple times in the past. An article published Tuesday from The Atlantic also detailed Trump’s praise for autocrats and his desire to use the military against his political opponents.
Harris has called out the former president for his authoritarian wishes, saying on Wednesday, “We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question, in 13 days, will be: What do the American people want?”
Well, right now, the American people are almost evenly split in their choice for president, according to the latest polls, with some of them showing Trump ahead and others giving Harris the edge. With only 11 days left to go, Harris still has to convince more Americans that Trump is a fascist, and how dangerous that would be. Unfortunately, it appears many Americans openly embrace Trump’s fascistic ideas, such as putting immigrants in militarized camps. The question is whether those Americans will vote in large numbers.
Very related read on Trump fascism:
Senator Lindsey Graham is sounding the alarms that another seismic terrorist attack is on the horizon—if Donald Trump doesn’t win the November election.
During an interview on Fox News’s Hannity Thursday, the South Carolina Republican baselessly argued that Vice President Kamala Harris’s border policies would cause another 9/11.
“That’s Donald Trump, Kari Lake, Sam Brown—let’s secure these Senate seats to help this president shut down the border before another 9/11 comes,” Graham said as the show’s outro music began.
“This is the most important election in our lifetime. Turn around those caravans. LindseyGraham.com,” Graham added.
yikes — Lindsey Graham on Hannity’s show suggests another 9/11 is coming unless Trump is elected pic.twitter.com/u2BDDfKqIc
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 25, 2024
A $118 billion bipartisan border deal was moments from coming to fruition earlier this year, before Republicans willingly tanked it in order to hand Trump fodder for his 2024 campaign. The deal would have tightened rules for asylum and created a standard for shutting down the southern border if undocumented crossings reached daily benchmarks, meeting practically every requirement set by the conservative caucus.
And run on the issue he has. At a rally earlier this month in Aurora, Colorado, the Republican presidential nominee amped up his Nazi rhetoric, weaponizing violent and dehumanizing language against immigrants, referring to them as the “enemy from within,” while advocating for harsher criminal punishments for the vulnerable demographic, including promising the death penalty.
“They took the criminals out of Caracas, and they put them along your border, and they said if you ever come back, we’re going to kill you,” Trump said.
“Think of that!” he continued. “We have to live with these animals. But we won’t live with them for long!”
Trump has made his own violent threats about his potential loss in recent months, including claiming that the nation would lose World War III if he failed to resume the Oval Office.
“We won’t even be in World War III, we’ll be losing World War III with weapons the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said at a Nazi-attended conservative conference in Racine, Wisconsin, in June. “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed. And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me. It’s true.”
A ballot initiative campaign to enshrine abortion rights in the New York state Constitution has raised more than $2 million toward its efforts—but only a sliver of that money has been spent on reaching voters. The lion’s share has gone toward consultants and overhead, according to Politico.
New Yorkers for Equal Rights has been organizing in support of the Equal Rights Act, or Prop 1, a measure that will prohibit government discrimination regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, pregnancy status, disability status, or sexual orientation. It will also codify abortion protections.
But New York voters may not actually know that, because Republican groups have been waging a fierce campaign against the measure by focusing on the amendment’s protections for transgender people, threatening that the measure could end women’s sports. Vote No on Prop 1 has spent nearly half a million dollars on ad spots to run during Jets, Bills, and Giants football games, according to the New York Post. In one ad, the group claims the measure will somehow aid in allowing noncitizen voting, which is not only illegal, it hardly ever happens.
And, so far, the advertising and outreach efforts of New Yorkers for Equal Rights have been practically nonexistent, which is surprising for a group that has raised so much money. But that’s because the bulk of their fundraising isn’t going toward voter outreach at all.
While the group had spent $1.3 million by the end of September, nearly $900,000, or 70 percent, went to hiring consultants, fundraisers, pollsters, and other staff. Only $226,000 was spent on direct contact with voters, according to Politico’s review of the committee’s campaign finance reports.
The group also received $744,000 in in-kind contributions, 85 percent of which went to cover staff, while only 14 percent went to advertising and outreach costs.
For comparison, high-profile campaigns for propositions in New York typically spend more than 90 percent of their funds on direct voter contact.
“That’s just malpractice,” said one consultant not affiliated with the campaign, who was granted anonymity to speak openly with Politico.
The campaign insists that more ads are coming. It launched a $500,000 advertising effort on streaming and digital media on October 8, which will appear on the next financial disclosure report. The group plans to have spent at least $2.4 million on direct voter outreach by the end of October.
New Yorkers for Equal Rights campaign director Sasha Ahuja said that the group was also planning to jump on a spike in voter attention as the election draws nearer.
“We went up on digital and streaming a month before the election and, like countless campaigns across the country, we’re concentrating our paid media efforts in the final weeks—when voters are most engaged,” Ahuja told Politico.
“Running a successful campaign in New York also requires top-tier staff and organizers—which is why we built out a robust ground game early, ensuring we can reach voters as Election Day approaches,” Ahuja added.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced in June their support for the campaign, which planned to raise $20 million to spend on television ads, direct mail and organizing in support of the Equal Rights Act.* Democratic leaders hoped that putting abortion on the state ballot might motivate Democratic voters to support Democratic candidates in November, flipping back four swing districts that turned red during the midterm elections.
* This story has been updated to clarify who intended to raise the money.
Read more about abortion rights:
Elon Musk is thumbing his nose at the Department of Justice, on Thursday night resuming his super PAC’s scheme to give away $1 million to a battleground state voter every day despite receiving a warning from the DOJ earlier in the week.
Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC announced two winners on X Thursday night: Jason from Holland, Michigan, and Brian from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They join four other winners since Musk began the giveaway on Saturday to registered voters in swing states who sign the super PAC’s petition in support of the First and Second Amendments.
On Wednesday, it was reported that the DOJ sent a letter to America PAC warning that the scheme may break federal laws against paying people to register to vote. Legal experts have said that at best, Musk’s scheme falls into a legal gray area. Now it seems that the tech mogul is daring the federal government to take action against him and press charges, which would not only create a major media circus, but also result in a long legal battle against the world’s richest man.
Musk has thumbed his nose at the federal government and gotten away with it in the past. He faced penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission for lying on X (formerly Twitter) about being able to take his Tesla car company private, but was able to stay on as CEO, only paying a fine and losing his board chairman position for three years. With his vast net worth, he could probably drag out any court case against him, even when the DOJ is involved. Moreover, if the DOJ were to hit Musk with criminal charges, the case would continue long after Election Day on November 5, and the tech mogul would likely still keep giving money away in the meantime.
In addition to his lottery, Musk is busy with his other efforts to return Donald Trump to the White House, including talking strategy with right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch, keeping negative stories about Trump off of his X platform, and posting debunked conspiracy theories as well as misinformation.
The tech CEO is using his money in other nefarious ways as well, including a cynical ad campaign using Israel’s brutal war in Gaza to convince Arab American voters in Michigan that Kamala Harris is too pro-Israel, and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania that she opposes Israel’s actions. It seems that Musk thinks that his power and money allow him to influence politics in any way he wishes, and he clearly doesn’t fear repercussions from the government.
Unfortunately More on Elon:
