The former president urged attendees at the faith-themed event to vote — “Vote early. Vote absentee. Vote on Election Day. I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote,” he said — and promised that in four years, “we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

The Hill put it in their headline: Trump urges Christians to vote: ‘You won’t have to do it’ in four years.

Former President Trump at a Friday event hosted by the conservative Christian organization Turning Point Action urged Christians to vote, saying they wouldn’t have to do it again if they got out there in November and elected him because “everything” would be “fixed.”

“Christians, get out and vote, just this time,” Trump exclaimed to a cheering crowd in West Palm Beach, Fla.

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians” he added.

“I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote,” Trump said.

Trump’s remarks point to the need for both parties to get their most fervent supporters to the polls in what is expected to a close election that may be determined by turnout.

But both parties aren’t promising that there won’t be another opportunity to vote in 4 years.

This is from Mediaite: Trump Cryptically Declares, ‘You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ If He Wins Second Term.

Former President Donald Trump urged members of a crowd in Florida to vote and said that if he wins, they “won’t have to vote anymore.”

Speaking at a Turning Point Action event in West Palm Beach on Friday, Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election he lost, delivered a cryptic message.

“And again, Christians, get out and vote!” he said to a cheering audience. “Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine! You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians! I’m a Christian. I love you. Get out. You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again.”

Trump has responded to accusations about his authoritarian tendencies by saying he will not be a dictator “except for day one” of his second term. In 2022, the former president repeated the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. While doing so, he called for the “termination” of the Constitution.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

Again, I clearly heard him say “I’m not a christian.” But listen for yourself, and share you opinion.

Aaron Rupar and Stephen Robinson at Public Notice: How the press helped Trump sell himself as a strongman.

The authors note that the presidential race has been turned upside down during the past week,

But it’s worth devoting some attention to how the press did Trump’s work for him by portraying the aspiring authoritarian exactly how he wants to be seen — as a heroic strongman and newfound champion of political unity.

Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination for a third time on July 17 with a rambling, incoherent mess of a speech that offered a terrifying vision for America during its rare moments of coherence. His performance was widely regarded as a disaster. But a range of major newspapers didn’t cover it that way.

More than a few headlines actually raved about it. The Boston Globe: “In a departure, Trump calls for unity, healing in America.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Trump urges unity after assassination attempt while proposing sweeping populist agenda.” Baltimore Sun: “Subdued Trump describes assassination try, accepts nomination.”

As media critic Parker Molloy pointed out, these papers seemingly reported on Trump’s speech based on the prepared remarks, not the speech as he actually delivered it….

In reality, Trump’s RNC coronation was a collective failure of our justice system, political process, and a mainstream media ecosystem that has consistently failed to hold him accountable. He still faces a tough challenge to win this election — especially now that Harris is on the top of the ticket — but he got a significant propaganda boost from a credulous, optics-obsessed press….

Not long after Trump’s attempted assassination at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, mainstream outlets went along with the Trump campaign’s narrative: The shocking event had changed him for the better.

When Trump made his first appearance at the RNC on July 15, the New York Times described him as “subdued” and claimed he showed a “glimpse of vulnerability.” But Trump had already demonstrated he was unchanged earlier that day when he posted on Truth Social that his idea of “Uniting our Nation” was the dismissal of all criminal charges against him.

Trump spewed his usual invective against his political foes throughout the week. The media, nonetheless, continued to take seriously the idea that he was a new man.

Axios reported on July 15 that Trump “plans to seize the his moment by toning down his Trumpiness” and MSNBC’s Katy Tur described his first appearance at the RNC as “serene.” But the most egregious instance of this genre was a piece from Politico’s Natalie Allison, who wrote on July 17 that “there appears to be a new softness to Donald Trump, with people who’ve talked to him describing him with words like ‘existential,’ ‘serene,’ ‘emotional’ and even ‘spiritual.’”

None of those words rightly apply to the man who has made shouting out fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter a staple of his speeches (including at the RNC).

Please read the rest at the Public Notice link.

Donald Trump is seriously pissed that FBI Director Christopher Wray is asking questions about what really happened during the attempted assassination of the former president.

While appearing before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, Wray testified about the agency’s ongoing investigation into the deadly shooting at a Trump rally almost two weeks ago. Wray said it was still unclear what had caused the injury Trump suffered to his ear, whether a bullet or a piece of shrapnel from a teleprompter.

Trump, who began claiming within hours of the attack that he’d been struck by a bullet, didn’t like that one bit. He said as much in a rant on Truth Social Thursday night, which took aim at Wray (whom Trump appointed) specifically.

“FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress yesterday that he wasn’t sure if I was hit by shrapnel, glass, or a bullet (the FBI never even checked!), but he was sure that Crooked Joe Biden was physically and cognitively ‘uneventful’—Wrong!” Trump wrote.

“That’s why he knows nothing about the terrorists and other criminals pouring into our Country at record levels. His only focus is destroying J6 Patriots, Raiding Mar-a-Lago, and saving Radical Left Lunatics, like the ones now in D.C. burning American flags and spray painting over our great National Monuments—with zero retribution,” Trump continued.

There’s a simple solution. Trump can release the medical report from his examination after the shooting.

Carter Sherman at The Guardian: JD Vance called for ‘federal response’ to block women from traveling for abortions.

JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, promoted a baseless rightwing talking pointin 2022 when he warnedof George Soros-funded planes transporting Black women across state lines for abortions.

“I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation – let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled,” Vance said in a recently resurfaced podcast interview. “Ohio bans abortion in 2022, or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity – uh, that’s kind of creepy.”

The US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022. Vance’s statements echo a common anti-abortion talking point accusing abortion providers and their supporters of targeting people of color.

Black women did seek abortions at a higher rate before Roe fell, but public health experts say that this is far from proof of a racist conspiracy. They point to a number systemic factors – for example, Black women are more likely to live in areas where it’s harder to access contraception. They are also disproportionately harmed by abortion bans.

Vance continued: “And, and it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? Because it’s really creepy. And I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually. So, you know, how hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion in California and the Soroses of the world respect it.”

While Open Society Foundations, which was founded by Soros, does support reproductive rights, the billionaire philanthropist is not directing planes to swoop up Black women for abortions. He has been the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories for years.

Vance’s comments were reported by CNN. On Thursday evening, Kamala Harris’s campaign posted audio of the remarks on X.

Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the new meme going around–that the Republican ticket is “weird.” Here’s another take on that by Eli Stokols and Elena Schneider at Politico: How Trump and Vance went from a ‘threat to democracy’ to ‘weird.’

In the days since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the campaign against former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, Democrats are leaning into a new attack line against the Republican ticket: that they’re just really weird.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz , a potential Harris running mate who’s been using this description for months, said it during his first viral TV appearance of the week, and then in others. The Democratic Governors Association, which Walz leads, amplified it on social media. And the Harris campaign has adopted it as well, incorporating the label repeatedly this week in press releases and posts on X and TikTok.

As this simple and quintessentially Midwestern description of Trump and Vance catches on, it marks a notable rhetorical shift — away from Biden’s apocalyptic, high-minded messaging toward a more gut-level vernacular that may better capture how many voters react to far-right rhetoric of the kind Vance in particular trades in.

“It perfectly describes the uneasiness people feel. It’s how people who don’t live and breathe politics every day react to hearing the Republican vice presidential candidate denigrate people without children,” said Tim Hogan, a Democratic strategist who worked on the 2020 presidential campaign of another Minnesotan, Sen. Amy Klobuchar. “It’s simple. It’s how you might talk to your neighbor about the crazy political climate we’re living in.”

Walz’s post of his interview clip on X — captioned: “I’m telling you: these guys are weird.” — had 4.6 million views as of Friday afternoon. And when the Harris campaign sent out a memo on Thursday responding to Trump, or what they described as “a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance,” they included this among a list of takeaways: “Trump is old and quite weird?”

And on Friday, the Harris campaign used the term in multiple press releases. One focused on Vance’s anti-abortion stance, which called him “creepy” in the subject line, began with a simple declaration: “JD Vance is weird.” That followed another release highlighting negative coverage of Trump’s running mate in which Harris campaign spokesperson Serafina Chitika asserted that Vance had “spent all week making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas.”

More analysis at the link.

We’ve already begun to see the kind of sexist abuse that Kamala Harris is going to face during the campaign. Carole Cadwalladr wrote about it at The Guardian: This is a misogyny emergency. A huge outpouring is coming in the runup to the US election.

In 2016, a historically unprecedented incident took place. And yet, barely anyone even noticed. Even years later, we’ve failed to acknowledge it or to have begun the process of understanding it. Because we still can’t even see it.

And that’s because this incident involved a woman. And she was asking for it.

The woman was Hillary Clinton. What she was asking for was votes. And what she got was the single biggest outpouring of misogyny in human history.

We can now say that. Although no one ever does. But this was an unprecedented previously unimaginable event. Because 2016 was when the world’s first global instant mass communication technology – social media – crashed up against the most ancient of prejudices – misogyny.

And the result was an earthquake: Donald Trump.

In 2016, we weren’t prepared for it. We didn’t see it coming. We didn’t understand how these same social media platforms that have enabled us to share our thoughts instantly at a global scale also facilitate the worst kinds of human communication. How they are engineered to cater to our basest instincts and reward the clickiest, most hateful content.

But eight years on, we haven’t even begun to understand that lesson. We didn’t listen to Hillary. We haven’t yet realised that misogyny is one of the most dangerous weapons on Earth. The best friend of authoritarians and oligarchs. The handmaiden of tyrants.

Worst of all, we haven’t yet realised that misogyny represents the most urgent and pressing threat to global security.

Because it’s misogyny – networked misogyny across multiple global platforms that will earn their tech bro owners billions upon billions of dollars – that is going to decide the 2024 election.

And it’s misogyny that’s going to dictate the future of Nato, the outcome of the war in Ukraine, whether we have peace in Europe or more war. And because this is going to be a firehose that will be directed at a single woman – Kamala Harris – it will be misogyny multiplied: misogyny plus racism, the most toxic combination of all.

This week comments resurfaced that Trump’s newly appointed running mate had made about the woman who looks certain to be the next Democrat candidate. Comments from 2021, in which JD Vance dismissed Kamala Harris as a “childless cat lady”. If that sounds vaguely familiar, you may recognise those exact words from the attacks that Brexiteers directed at me. In my case, it was an assault that went on for years and created the permission for the same man who seeded the narrative to sue me in court.

I was gagged, the necessities of the court case silenced me. Sticks and stones will break my bones etc. But this was never about me. I was just the access point, a way to shut the story down, a viable target. And this was an attack that achieved its goal. Overnight, all reporting on the subject stopped dead.

But there are things that only veterans of the childless cat lady wars can know. They used to call us witches because we knew shit. We still do. That’s what makes us so powerful. And dangerous. That’s what JD Vance understands: our cat lady energy. We’ve lived through culture wars before they even had that name, before they invented memes and when they just burned us at the stake.

So, here’s what I need you to do now: to shut up and sit down and listen. You are at risk. We are all at risk. Because this is what I know: bad things are coming. We are in a code red emergency.

I’ve posted too much already, but I wish I could post the whole thing. Please go read it all at The Guardian.

I’ll end there. I hope you’re having a nice weekend. Take care of yourselves, everyone!