Elizabeth Blackadder, Cat and Irises, 2001, watercolor
Good Afternoon!!
It’s a long weekend here in Massachusetts (Indigenous Peoples Day), and I’m planning to try to relax and read something other than politics news. Lately I can’t tolerate watching cable news, but I’ve been obsessed with keeping up with everything that is happening in the presidential campaigns. I spend too much time on social media, but it’s the only way to find out what Trump is really up to, because of the legacy media’s compulsive sanewashing of Trump’s demented behavior and speech patterns.
If you use social media, you may have seen Trump’s bizarre behavior during his speech at the Detroit Economic Club. The speech was supposed to be about economics but, since Trump has no comprehension of economics, he did his usual nonsensical rambling act. The New Republic: Watch: Trump Completely Loses Train of Thought in Awkward Speech.
Donald Trump drifted in and out of coherency during an awkward, weaving speech Thursday at the Detroit Economics Club, where he ranted about tariffs and railed against government mandates on electric vehicles….
But while explaining his fears that Kamala Harris’s policies would cause domestic manufacturing to leave the United States, Trump seemingly got carried away by the tide of his own weave and swept out into a sea of complete nonsense.
“And, it’s so simple, I mean, you know. This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they wanted to land,” Trump said. “Or, he gets the … engines back—that was the first I realized, I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming—cylinders, no wings, no nothing—and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with a circle, boom!”
“Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?” Trump said, seemingly referring to President Joe Biden’s campaign events that took precautions for Covid-19, in an awkward non sequitur.
“He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill ’em up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. He couldn’t fill up the eight circles, I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, so beautiful to look at,” Trump continued.
Trump claimed that Biden “used to have the press stand in those circles, cause they couldn’t get the people. And then I heard we lost, no we’re never gonna let that happen again.”
“But—” he continued. “We’ve been abused by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries.”
There are more examples of Trump’s insane rambling at the TNR link. But it’s not just rambling–it’s dementia; and it seems to be getting worse all the time. He flits from tangent to tangent, because his executive functioning is failing, likely from damage to his frontal lobes. You can watch the video clip at the TNR link.
This is disgusting, but I’m going to post it anyway. Trump appeared to either break wind (or foul his diaper) at least twice during his speech in Detroit. This is something that was happening even when he was in the White House. Reporters also noticed it happening during his fraud trial. WTF?!
Donald Trump attacked the city of Detroit in a speech he was giving while stumping for votes in Detroit.
The former US president and Republican nominee was speaking on Thursday at the Detroit Economic Club in the city, which is the biggest city in Michigan – one of the most crucial swing states in the 2024 US election.
But Trump, whose speeches are frequently rambling and lengthy discourses rather than set piece deliveries, could not stop himself from lambasting the city in which he was speaking by pointing to Detroit’s recent history of economic decline from its heyday as the home of American car production.
As he was speaking about China being a developing nation, Trump said: “Well, we’re a developing nation too, just take a look at Detroit. Detroit’s a developing area more than most places in China.”
He later returned to the theme, warning of an economic disaster if his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, wins in November’s election.
“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” Trump said….
Democrats in the state reacted angrily to the insults and saw a chance to score political points.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer posted on Twitter/X: “Detroit is the epitome of ‘grit,’ defined by winners willing to get their hands dirty to build up their city and create their communities – something Donald Trump could never understand. So keep Detroit out of your mouth. And you better believe Detroiters won’t forget this in November.”
Former President Donald Trump is aware his rhetoric about migrants has become increasingly toxic, yet he has decided to double down on that strategy in the final weeks of the campaign cycle.
According to Rolling Stone’s Naomi Lachance and Asawin Suebsaeng, the ex-president is even rebuffing advice from his campaign team to “play it safe” as voters prepare to head to the polls on November 5. Lachance and Suebsaeng cited two unnamed sources close to Trump in their report, writing that Trump intended to “slam his foot on the gas” rather than pull back on his anti-immigrant message.
Agnes Miller Parker, Siamese Cat and Butterfly, 1950, wood engraving
“That’s how you lose,” Trump reportedly said in response to one of his aides.
The publication’s other unnamed source said the ex-president paid close attention to which lines at his rallies garnered the biggest reactions from his audiences. This includes not only his false claim that there are 13,000 undocumented immigrants freely roaming the United States who have been convicted of murder elsewhere (most of those 13,000 are currently incarcerated), but also his call to be a “dictator” on “day one” of a second term….
The former president recently demonstrated his willingness to take his condemnation of migrants to a new low on Friday night, posting a lengthy screed to X (formerly Twitter) in which he promised to use an 18th century law to round up, detain and deport immigrants. That law — the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — would allow for the detainment of migrants without trial based solely on their country of birth. The last time that law was used was to force Japanese-Americans into detention camps during World War II.
“November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America,” Trump tweeted. [W]e will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.”
And you’re not safe if you’re a legal immigrant, as Trump and Vance have both made clear in their attacks on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Kamala Harris next month and return to power.
“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”
By Elizabeth Blackadder
Woodward cites Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist now jailed for contempt of Congress, as saying of Milley: “We’re gonna hold him accountable.”
Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.
Milley was able to persuade Trump to back down, Woodward writes, but fears no such guardrails will be in place if Trump is re-elected.
Woodward also describes Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since his retirement last year, and quotes the former general as telling him, of Trump: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.”
The longtime Donald Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls
in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage by an undercover journalist.
The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president’s legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.
“We gotta fight it out on a state-by-state basis,” said Stone. “We’re already in court in Wisconsin, we’re already in court in Florida.”
When the journalist, posing as a member of a rightwing voter turnout organization, pressed Stone for details on efforts to make sure Trump wins in 2024, Stone told him that the campaign has to “be ready”.
Mary Feddon, Tabby
“When they throw us out of Detroit, you go get a court order, you come in with your own armed guards, and you dispute it,” said Stone. In Detroit in 2020, there was a chaotic scene at a ballot counting center when GOP vote challengers pounded on the walls of the center and demanded to be let in.
Filmed at an August event in Jacksonville, Florida, called A Night with Roger Stone, the footage also reveals Stone’s lasting anger toward former attorney general Bill Barr, who he calls “a traitorous piece of human garbage”.
While in office, Barr acted as a staunch Trump ally, even pushing for a lighter sentence for Stone, when the operative was found guilty of witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection with a congressional inquiry into Russian interference during the 2016 election. Barr lost favor with the former president when he declined to publicly back Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, drawing outrage from Trump’s closest allies.
“Once we get back in, he has to go to prison,” Stone exclaimed. “He has to go to prison, he’s a criminal.”
Donald J. Trump took his seat at the dining table in his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower on the last Sunday in September, alongside some of the most sought-after and wealthiest figures in the Republican Party.
There was Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who finances Republican campaigns and pro-Israel causes, and Warren Stephens, the billionaire investment banker. Joining them were Betsy DeVos, the billionaire former education secretary under Mr. Trump, and her husband, Dick, as well as the billionaire Joe Ricketts and his son Todd.
Some politicians might have taken the moment to be charming and ingratiating with the donors.
Not Mr. Trump. Over steak and baked potatoes, the former president tore through a bitter list of grievances.
He made it clear that people, including donors, needed to do more, appreciate him more and help him more.
By Miroco Machiko
He disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris as “retarded.” He complained about the number of Jews still backing Ms. Harris, saying they needed their heads examined for not supporting him despite everything he had done for the state of Israel.
At one point, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that these donors had plenty to be grateful to him for. He boasted about how great he had been for their taxes, something that some privately noted wasn’t true for everyone in the room.
The rant, described by seven people with knowledge of the meal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, underscored a reality three weeks before Election Day: Mr. Trump’s often cantankerous mood in the final stretch. And one of the reasons for his frustration is money. He’s trailing his Democratic rival in the race for cash and has had to hustle to keep raising it.
Not only does Ms. Harris have far more money to buy ads and pay for staff after raising $1 billion in less than three months as a candidate — a sum greater than the total Mr. Trump raised all year — but she has also been freed from having to plead directly to donors anymore. She raised more than twice as much as Mr. Trump in July, August and September.
Good! Let him keep wallowing in self-pity, driving away people who could donate to his campaign.
I’ll end with something truly unbelievable: On October 16, Fox News and Trump are planning a town hall on women’s issues! From the press release:
FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Harris Faulkner will present a town hall with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump focusing on issues impacting women ahead of the election and news of the day at Reid Barn in Cumming, Georgia. The event, which will be held with an audience entirely composed of women, will pre-tape on October 15th and air on October 16th on The Faulkner Focus (11 AM-12 PM/ET). FOX News has a standing invitation to Vice President Harris for a townhall event of equal stature which has been extended to her campaign multiple times since she became a candidate for president in August.
In commenting on the town hall, Faulkner said, “Women constitute the largest group of registered and active voters in the United States, so it is paramount that female voters understand where the presidential candidates stand on the issues that matter to them most. I am looking forward to providing our viewers with an opportunity to learn more about where former President Trump stands on these topics.”
Orovida Pissarro, Cat and Mouse, 1966
Faulkner joined FNC in 2005 and currently serves as the anchor of The Faulkner Focus and a founding co-host of Outnumbered. At 11 AM/ET, The Faulkner Focus features interviews with top newsmakers and analysts and is cable news’ most-watched program in the timeslot, averaging nearly 2 million viewers. Outnumbered features an ensemble of four female panelists and one male breaking down the day’s headlines from all perspectives and dominates the competition at 12 PM/ET with 1.8 million viewers. Both programs outpace broadcast program’s NBC’s TODAY Third Hour, TODAY with Hoda & Jenna, The Kelly Clarkson Show, NBC News Daily, ABC’s GMA3, CBS’ The Talk and The Drew Barrymore Show.
As the first Black woman to helm back-to-back weekday cable news programs, Faulkner has also played integral roles in FNC’s election coverage over the last several cycles. She is the lead of the network’s “Voter’s Voices” segments and recently presented a series titled, ”Families in Focus,” where she interviewed the family members of the then-presidential candidates during the 2024 primaries. Additionally, Faulkner has hosted a variety of primetime specials and townhalls focused on current events, including forums focused on policing in America, the ongoing conversation of justice in the country and education during the COVID-19 pandemic, among other topics.
That should be good for a laugh.
Have a nice weekend everyone!!
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This is going to be a brief post, because I’m not feeling well today. It’s just a cold, but I’m really tired and not up to doing much.
The election is less than a month off. I got my mail-in ballot a couple of days ago, and I plan to send it in today or tomorrow. I can’t wait to vote for Kamala Harris. I would have done it already, but there are a bunch of ballot questions I have to read about first. One that I know I will vote for will end the practice of requiring students to pass standardized tests (MCAS) in order to graduate.
Kamala Harris and Howard Stern
Harris has given a bunch of interviews this week, and more are coming. Of course the mainstream media is not happy, because she chose interviewers who are likely to reach voters who don’t follow the news day to day like us politics junkies.
“DON’T CALL IT A ‘MEDIA BLITZ’ — After avoiding the media for nigh on her whole campaign, VP KAMALA HARRIS is … still largely avoiding the media,” the two authors of Playbook wrote.
The specific media the authors are talking about here is “legacy media,” also called the “mainstream media.” Think CNN, the New York Times or Fox News. Politico accuses Harris of skirting outlets like those in favor of alternative venues, such as podcasts and late-night TV.
The complaint comes after Harris’ team announced her latest media schedule. On Monday, she’s slated to appear on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” and then on Thursday, she plans to stop in Nevada for a Univision town hall. She was interviewed on the wildly popular sex and dating podcast “Call Her Daddy” in an episode that was released on Sunday, and later this week, she’s scheduled to appear on “The View,” “The Howard Stern Show” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
The Playbook authors admit that the “60 Minutes” interview and the Univision town hall may offer some value to voters, but they take issue with the other appearances on her schedule.
“Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris,” the authors wrote. “Instead, expect most of these sit-downs to be a continuation of the ‘vibes’ campaign Harris has perfected.”
Harris and Stephen Colbert
Politico’s real gripe, though, is that Harris is doing a disservice to voters by avoiding difficult interviews with news outlets like, well, Politico. This is something that only news outlets like Politico care about. Voters don’t care. Anyone reading or watching exclusive news interviews with Harris is already an engaged voter and has probably already decided who they’re going to vote for in November.
Harris is employing a smart strategy. When your opponent in an election is Donald Trump, and tens of millions of people will vote for you based on the fact that you’re not Trump, you can afford to spend time courting, and possibly energizing, the folks who are less engaged with politics. “Call her Daddy” is the fifth-most popular podcast on Spotify. Is it really not worth an hour of Harris’ time to appear in front of that audience?
Politico says its criticism is warranted because somebody needs to ask Harris the tough questions that voters want answered. But she’s already doing that. CBS News released a preview of Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview, and it shows her talking about her proposed economic policies. What tough questions is she not answering? Politico never says.
Here’s a tough question: Who cares? To complain that a presidential candidate is not doing interviews with the same outlets that have had almost exclusive access to presidential candidates forever reeks of superciliousness. It’s also counterintuitive. Essentially saying to Harris, “Come do an interview with us so we can kick your ass” is not a persuasive argument. When I was in college studying journalism, my professors often warned that journalists tend to display a uniquely annoying type of arrogance. That’s exactly the type of self-important pretense that we’re seeing here.
Harris is doing exactly what she needs to do, and she’s not going to be intimidated by the likes of Politico, or even The New York Times. She was on 60 Minutes on Monday. Yesterday she went on The View, The Howard Stern Show, and Stephen Colbert. I haven’t heard/seen the first two, but I did watch Colbert’s show last night. Harris was great and the audience reaction was enthusiastic, to put it mildly. More interviews are coming.
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the new book by Bob Woodward that is coming out next week. As usual, Woodward kept quiet about important information in order to increase sales. The biggest revelation is that Donald Trump sent Covid tests to Vladimir Putin during the time when Americans were desperate for tests and thousands of people were dying every day. In addition, Trump has stayed in contact with Putin since he left the White House.
As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.
Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.
Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.
The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward writes in the book, “War,” which is set to be released Oct. 15.
Trump denied sending the tests to Putin but, unfortunately for him, the Kremlin has confirmed the report.
The Kremlin confirmed on Wednesday that former United States President Donald Trump sent Russian President Vladimir Putin Covid-19 testing kits during the height of the pandemic, as reported by American journalist Bob Woodward in a new book.
“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a written response on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. That the U.S. and Russia exchanged medical equipment during the pandemic was already known.
But Woodward writes in his book that when Trump was still president in 2020, he “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use” during a time period when Covid tests were scarce.
I’m not sure why “journalists” aren’t asking about the top secret documents that Trump was storing at Mar-a-Lago when he spoke to Putin. Remember, not all of the documents have been returned.
According to CNN, Bob Woodward’s latest book reveals that Trump has spoken to Vladimir Putin as many as seven times since leaving the Presidency.
“In one scene, Woodward recounts a moment at Mar-a-Lago where Trump tells a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward writes.
Woodward asked Trump aide Jason Miller whether Trump and Putin had spoken since he left the White House. “Um, ah, not that, ah, not that I’m aware of,” Miller told Woodward.
“I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that,” Miller added.
Woodward writes that Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines “carefully hedged” when asked about whether there were any post-presidency Trump-Putin calls.
“I would not purport to be aware of all contacts with Putin. I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done,” Haines said, according to Woodward.”
According to WaPo’s version of the Woodward story the incident where Trump asked an aide to leave the room happened in early 2024.
This is unsurprising. After all, Trump has repeatedly described speaking to Putin in advance of the Ukraine invasion, including fairly explicitly during the debate with Joe Biden.
“When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never.”
But the confirmation that Trump keeps speaking to Putin is important for several other reasons.
We still don’t know where all the stolen documents are
If Trump was speaking to Putin before the Ukraine investigation and at least as recently as earlier this year, he was speaking to him during the investigation into his stolen documents, during the period when Trump was hiding boxes from his attorney to make sure he could steal documents.
Trump was going back and referring to some of these documents during the period he worked with Putin.
And perhaps most importantly, there were presumably classified documents loaded onto his plane on June 3, 2022 that got flown back to Bedminster, and probably some remained hidden at Mar-a-Lago (the FBI failed to search a room off Trump’s suite).
The FBI has never found the missing classified documents.
Trump was charged with hoarding some of America’s most secret documents in his basement. And during that entire period, he was checking in regularly with the leader of a hostile foreign country, the one who keeps helping him get elected.
After Donald Trump was asked in a Monday interview about the future prospects of Gaza, the former president made a curious claim: “You know, I’ve been there, and it’s rough.”
Perhaps he merely meant he has been to Palestinian territory, since he did visit the West Bank in 2017? Or maybe he was just talking about having been to the broader region?
Nope.
Trump’s campaign said Monday night that he meant what he said about having been to Gaza in particular – and the campaign insisted the claim is true.
“President Trump has been to Gaza previously and has always worked to ensure peace in the Middle East,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CNN.
Leavitt, though, did not provide a single detail about Trump’s supposed trip to Gaza. And she did not respond when we repeatedly asked for even the most basic information, like the year of the supposed visit.
So we were highly skeptical – because Trump has a long history of making things up, because of the lack of public evidence, because the Times of Israel has reported that Trump had never even visited Israel before his presidency, and because the Trump campaign had offered a substantively different comment to The New York Times earlier Monday.
That earlier comment, which a campaign official provided only on condition of anonymity, did not say Trump had actually been to Gaza. Instead, the anonymous campaign official tried some spin, correctly saying that Trump has been to Israel but wrongly saying, “Gaza is in Israel.”
We asked three former Trump officials who worked on Middle East policy whether they know of any proof for the former president’s claim, and the campaign’s claim to CNN, that Trump has been to Gaza itself. The only one who has responded, Trump-appointed former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker, said in an email: “As far as I know, he’s never traveled there. He did not go in 2017 when he visited Israel. I think this story is probably already over.”
Pretty much everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is a lie.
I’m going to end with a serious piece by Tom Nichols at the Atlantic: The Moment of Truth. The subhead is “The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.”
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments—his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington’s most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
“He went home,” Kelly said.
The message was unambiguous. After leaving the White House, Kelly had described Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.” At Mount Vernon, he was making a clear point: People who are mad for power are a mortal threat to democracy. They may hold different titles—even President—but at heart they are tyrants, and all tyrants share the same trait: They never voluntarily cede power
The American revolutionaries feared a powerful executive; they had, after all, just survived a war with a king. Yet when the Founders gathered in 1787 to draft the Constitution, they approved a powerful presidential office, because of their faith in one man: Washington.
Washington’s life is a story of heroic actions, but also of temptations avoided, of things he would not do. As a military officer, Washington refused to take part in a plot to overthrow Congress. As a victorious general, he refused to remain in command after the war had ended. As president, he refused to hold on to an office that he did not believe belonged to him. His insistence on the rule of law and his willingness to return power to its rightful owners—the people of the United States—are among his most enduring gifts to the nation and to democratic civilization.
Forty-four men have succeeded Washington so far. Some became titans; others finished their terms without distinction; a few ended their service to the nation in ignominy. But each of them knew that the day would come when it would be their duty and honor to return the presidency to the people.
All but one, that is.
Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.
Today, America stands at such a moment. A vengeful and emotionally unstable former president—a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, an admirer of foreign dictators, a racist and a misogynist—desires to return to office as an autocrat. Trump has left no doubt about his intentions; he practically shouts them every chance he gets. His deepest motives are to salve his ego, punish his enemies, and place himself above the law. Should he regain the Oval Office, he may well bring with him the experience and the means to complete the authoritarian project that he began in his first term.
Today’s illustrations are by Walter Chandoha, a famed cat photographer.
It’s difficult to believe that Trump’s lying could get any worse, but it has. He is now spreading outrageous lies at a level no one has seen before, to use one of his favorite phrases. And when Trump lies, MAGA Republicans follow his example. Lately, Trump has been spreading dangerous lies about the government’s efforts to aid communities devastated by Hurricane Helene.
MAGA Republicans are now lying about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in much the same way they lied about Haitian migrants bringing chaos and disease to Springfield, Ohio. Both disinformation efforts are flat-out lies, and both are designed to demonize immigrants. Immigration was the issue Trump was so eager to run on that he demanded Republican lawmakers reject the strong border bill a bipartisan group of lawmakers had hammered out.
The federal response to Hurricane Helene has drawn bipartisan praise, with Republican governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina thanking Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response.
But on Sunday, September 29, two days after the hurricane hit, the right-wing organization started by anti-immigrant Trump loyalist Stephen Miller posted: “Billions for Ukraine. Billions for illegal aliens. And what for the Americans? Reprogram every single dollar that FEMA has dedicated to support illegal aliens to go towards Americans who are facing unprecedented devastation!”
Yesterday, in Saginaw, Michigan, Trump echoed Miller, claiming that the Biden administration is botching the hurricane response because it has spent all the money appropriated for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on “illegal immigrants.” “They spent it all on illegal migrants.… They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them,” he said. Today, he claimed that “a billion dollars was stolen from FEMA to use it for illegal migrants, many of whom are criminals, to come into our country.”
Early this morning, X owner Elon Musk posted to his more than 200 million followers: “Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” On Wednesday, Dana Mattioli, Joe Palazzolo, and Khadeeja Safdar of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Musk has been financing groups with ties to Miller since 2022.
But of course, it is NOT happening in front of anyone’s eyes.
Walter Chandoha, The Mob
As always, Trump’s false claims represent projection of his own behavior onto others. Back to the Richardson piece:
Congress also appropriated money for a different fund, the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), which is part of Customs and Border Protection but is administered by FEMA. Established under the Trump administration in 2019, SSP gives grants to states and local governments to provide shelter, food, and transportation to undocumented immigrants. After Trump’s accusation, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement: “These claims are completely false. As Secretary Mayorkas said, FEMA has the necessary resources to meet the immediate needs associated with Hurricane Helene and other disasters. The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA’s disaster-related authorities or funding streams.”
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post did not leave the story there. “Trump has a habit of assuming other politicians act in the same way as he would,” Kessler wrote. So he looked into why Trump would have accused Biden “of raiding the FEMA disaster fund to handle undocumented migrants. It turns out that’s because he did this.”
In the middle of hurricane season in 2019, Kessler explains, Trump took $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund and redirected it to pay for detention space and temporary hearing locations for immigrants seeking asylum. “No, Biden didn’t take FEMA relief money to use on migrants,” the article title reads, “but Trump did.”
Unfortunately, Trump supporters actually believe his nonsensical lies, and that could lead to people failing to get the help they need from FEMA. Read more examples at the Substack link above.
WYFF4 in Greenville, SC, posted FEMA’s responses to several rumors that have been fed by the MAGAs:
Fact: FEMA has enough money right now for immediate response and recovery needs. If you were affected by Helene, do not hesitate to apply for disaster assistance as there is a variety of help available for different needs.
Fact: This is false: FEMA does not ask for or generally accept any cash donations or volunteers for disaster response. We do encourage people who want to help to volunteer with or donate cash to reputable voluntary or charitable organizations. After a disaster, cash is often the best way to help as it provides the greatest flexibility for these reputable organizations working on the ground to purchase exactly what is needed. If you encounter someone claiming to represent FEMA and asking for donations, be careful as that is likely a scam. Government employees will never solicit money. Learn more about how to help after a disaster: How to Help After Hurricane Helene
Fact: This is false. No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. FEMA’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.
Fact: Rumors about FEMA turning away donations, stopping trucks or vehicles with donations, confiscating and seizing supplies often spread after a disaster. These are all false. FEMA does not take donations and/or food from survivors or voluntary organizations. Donations of food, water, or other goods are handled by voluntary agencies who specialize in storing, sorting, cleaning, and distributing donated items. FEMA does not conduct vehicle stops or handle road closures with armed guards — those are done by local law enforcement.
And this one in particular could badly hurt desperate survivors:
Fact: This is false. One type of assistance that is often approved quickly after you apply is Serious Needs Assistance, which is $750 to help pay for essential items like food, water, baby formula, breastfeeding supplies, medication and other emergency supplies. There are other forms of assistance that you may qualify to receive once you apply for disaster assistance. As your application continues to be reviewed, you may still receive additional forms of assistance for other needs such as support for temporary housing and home repair costs. Learn more about the types of assistance available. If you have questions about your disaster assistance application and what you qualify for, contact us at 1-800-621-3362 to speak with a FEMA representative.
It’s sickening that Trump and his followers are pushing this nonsense, and they will continue to do so.
In the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Helene in the United States this week, a new storm emerged on social media – false rumors about how disaster funds have been used, and even claims that officials control the weather.
Local and national government officials say they are trying to combat the rumors, including one spread by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
By Walter Chandoha
One of the more far-fetched rumors is that Helene was an engineered storm to allow corporations to mine regional lithium deposits. Others accuse the administration of President Joe Biden of using federal disaster funds to help migrants in the country illegally, or suggest officials are deliberately abandoning bodies in the cleanup.
Republican Congress member Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X Thursday night: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
The conspiracy theories come at a pivotal time for rescue and recovery efforts following the storm, one of the deadliest U.S. hurricanes this century. And the presidential election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is just over a month away.
Republicans and Democrats alike say the rumors are causing problems.
“I just talked to one Senator that has had 15 calls TODAY about why we don’t stop …….. ‘fill in the blank,'” said Kevin Corbin, a Republican in the North Carolina Senate – a state that is one of the hardest hit by Helene. “98% chance it’s not true and if it is a problem, somebody is aware and on it,” he wrote on Facebook.
“I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions,” he added.
White House officials on Friday accused some Republican leaders and conservative media of intentionally peddling rumors to divide Americans in a way that could harm disaster relief efforts.
“Disinformation of this kind can discourage people from seeking critical assistance when they need it most,” a White House memo said. “It is paramount that every leader, whatever their political beliefs, stops spreading this poison.”
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Denver Riggleman, who served as senior technical advisor to the January 6th Committee, said he believes there is a significant risk of violence during the vote count of the Nov. 5, 2024 election because supporters of Republican nominee Donald Trump are so deeply immersed in conspiracy theories.
“They still have a plan to probably use lawfare to go after some of these certain states, but violence is certainly possible,” Riggleman told Raw Story. “I would say it’s actually probable. And I think it’s because you have people that are so riled up with these conspiracy theories and this good-against-evilvendetta that Donald Trump and I think a lot of the far right and the Christian nationalist type of individuals have been pushing into sort of the MAGA communications ecosystem.
Walter Chandoha’s daughter Marie feeding cats.
“It scares the hell out of me, as someone who’s dealt in counterterrorism for so long, to know that some of the same people who are around him — or a lot of the same people around him — for January 6th, 2021,” Riggleman added, “are the same people in his campaign today and the same people who were authors of Project 2025.”
A former Republican congressman and former military intelligence officer, Riggleman spoke to Raw Story after taping a message to North Carolina Republicans and independent voters on behalf of the Harris campaign at a recreation center in Greensboro on Thursday.
“Violence is bubbling right beneath the surface,” Riggleman said, citing the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the two assassination attempts on Trump this past summer. Riggleman identified variations on the QAnon conspiracy theory as a driving force of political violence.
“QAnon and that whole conspiracy theory mindset of ‘the Deep State’ or ‘globalists,’ or ‘false flags,’ that has bubbled into almost a mainstream belief, I would say within 30 to 35 percent of the Republican Party,” he said. “So, now it’s a battle of good against evil, as far as they’re concerned. The Democrats, independents and the RINOs — whoever they are — represent what’s evil. And I think that should scare the hell out of people. Because once you start dehumanizing people, that’s when violence is possible.
Read more at Raw Story.
Walter Chandoha, Cat and kitten
The Washington Post declines to use the word “lie”: As Trump makes false claims about hurricane relief, White House calls it ‘poison.’
EVANS, Ga. — Former president Donald Trump doubled down on misinformation about Hurricane Helene in an appearance in this storm-ravaged state Friday, repeating the falsehood that the White House used disaster funds for migrants.
Speaking at a news conference after a state disaster briefing, Trump again falsely said the U.S. government is unable to fund the storm response because it used the money on people “who came into the country illegally” — claims that the White House slammed in a memo Friday as “poison.”
Trump’s comments that the White House is “missing $1 billion” that was used for migrants, as he said Friday, have created a swirl of misinformation around the Helene response. The White House warned Friday that the falsehoods could keep hurricane victims from seeking the assistance they critically need, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency launched an anti-rumor tool that counters Trump’s claims.
The Biden administration said in its memo — which did not name Trump but included a headline that did — that Republicans are spreading “bald-faced lies” about the hurricane response and are “using Hurricane Helene to lie and divide us.”
“It is paramount that every leader, whatever their political beliefs, stops spreading this poison,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in the memo, adding: “This isn’t about politics — it’s about helping people.” [….]
The federal government has mounted a huge response following routine protocol, sending supplies, meals and more than 1,000 personnel; taking aid applications from affected residents; and coordinating with state and local agencies. Search-and-rescue efforts are ongoing in remote areas. The response faces logistical challenges because of the scope of the damage, across six states, and some residents have complained about waiting for on-the-ground aid.
Trump’s claims, however, have focused on undermining confidence in the federal response and tying his political opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to that negative picture.
He has sought to blame the hurricane devastation on immigration, on Thursday falsely saying that those affected by the hurricane are getting “no help” because the federal government has instead spent its money “on people that should not be in our country.” In response to questions from The Post, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed that Harris “stole” money from FEMA and repeated the claim that the federal government had no funding, without providing evidence.
Good Lord, will be ever be rid of this evil monster Trump?
Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states.
Research has shown that major disasters can influence both voter turnout and voter preference. And Helene has pushed this contest into novel territory: It’s the first catastrophic event in U.S. history to hit two critical swing states within six weeks of a presidential election, based on a POLITICO’s E&E News analysis of data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The challenge for Trump: The parts of western North Carolina and eastern Georgia that were flooded by the monster storm are largely Republican. In 2020, he won 61 percent of the vote in the North Carolina counties that were declared a disaster after Helene. He won 54 percent of the vote in Georgia’s disaster counties.
Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris this week visited Georgia, a state that President Joe Biden won by just 11,779 votes in 2020. Georgia and North Carolina each have 16 electoral votes, and polls show that Trump is leading Harris by about 1 percentage point in each state, well within the margin of error.
“There’s going to be a lot of [voting] alterations, and it probably is going to affect turnout,” said Andy Jackson, director of the John Locke Foundation’s Civitas Center for Public Integrity, a free-market think tank in North Carolina.
Now, both states face crucial decisions in the next few days about how to help people register and vote after massive flooding ripped away roads, shuttered towns and dispersed residents. Those include whether to extend next week’s voter registration deadlines, grant more time for voters to cast absentee ballots, and set up new polling places in areas where floods destroyed roads.
State records show that nearly 40,000 absentee ballots were mailed to voters in the 25 North Carolina counties that were declared a disaster following Helene. Fewer than 1,000 have been returned.
It was a stark ultimatum, delivered by President Joe Biden’s most senior aide.
At 5:30 a.m. Thursday, before the sun had risen above his Washington home, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients was on a Zoom call with two Cabinet secretaries and the executives of the shipping companies negotiating with workers who had gone on strike at critical docks along the East and Gulf coasts, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
With the nation’s economy — and much of the president’s legacy — hanging in the balance just weeks before the election, White House chief economist Lael Brainard told management that it needed to come up with a new offer to the striking longshoremen. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stressed that Hurricane Helene magnified the importance of a deal. Labor Secretary Julie Su expressed optimism that the union would agree to a temporary extension if raises were included.
Then in a surprising move, as the call was wrapping up, Zients told the board members of the U.S. Maritime Alliance that he was going to tell Biden in about an hour that they had agreed to propose a new offer to the union. By that point, the shipping executives had agreed to do no such thing. Zients was saying they would.
“I need the offer today — not tomorrow. Today,” Zients said on the call. “I’m going to brief the president in an hour that you believe you can get this done today.”
Walter Chandoha in his studio.
Less than 12 hours later, White House officials were celebrating a deal to reopen the ports until January — postponing the issue until after this November’s election. The agreement provides collective if temporary relief to skittish Democrats from the White House to Capitol Hill, while buoying Vice President Kamala Harris, along with Friday’s strong jobs report.
But the resolution of the strike also highlights Biden’s distinctive approach to labor unrest, one that has defied even his Democratic predecessors and sparked unease in some parts of the party. Even as White House officials claim vindication about their strategy, questions persist about whether Biden’s pro-union advocacy will be codified as the new Democratic approach — or represents a rare aberration in a long bipartisan tradition of siding more closely with management.
The agreement reached Thursday provides a 62 percent increase in wages for dockworkers and extends other terms of the current contract until Jan. 15. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) initially demanded 77 percent wage hikes but has moderated its request. Numerous difficult sticking points could scuttle a deal before the new January deadline, but if the deal holds, the pay gains amount to a $24-an-hour bump in the top pay rate over six years.
Trump really wanted the strike to last till election day. Just more evidence that Biden is a great president. I hope he will be an important resource for President Kamala Harris. See also this piece at CNN: Here are all the winners in the port strike deal.
Trump is running on lies and absolutely no substance. Reporters are demanding details on policy from Harris, but not from Trump–because he has no clue about policy and couldn’t care less about communicating anything except lies, lies, and more lies.
It’s probably right to call Kamala Harris the change candidate. Though she’s the vice president, she’s running against forces that struck down Roe and stripped the basic freedoms from half the country. So, for many, voting for her is voting for the restoration of individual liberty.
But I believe she’s a change candidate for another reason.
To understand, you have to reimagine Donald Trump. Think of him less as the Republican challenger to a Democratic administration and more as a kind of over-incumbent. He’s more or less an omnipresence, as if he were now sitting in the White House. His face is everywhere. His words are everywhere. The man takes up all the oxygen in every room.
Joe Biden is the president. Harris is his second in command. But since 2015, they and the rest of us have been living in the era of Trump.
And the dominant trait of our era has been negation.
As president, Trump was against fairness and balanced budgets when he cut taxes for the rich. He was against free trade and free labor when his administration tried to complete a border wall. He was against peace and diplomacy when he sabotaged relations with US allies. He was against competence when his negligence killed over a million people in the pandemic. And he was against democracy and the rule of law when he tried and failed to overturn a free and fair election.
What Donald Trump started as president, he has continued as the GOP nominee, the main difference being that the scale of negation is so massive that his own campaign is now about nothing, literally nothing.
There are no serious policies. There are no serious plans to solve problems. He isn’t giving anyone a reason to vote for him. Trump is only “s— talking America,” as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro put it, for the purpose of negating Kamala Harris and his enemies.
And to hide the blindingly obvious fact that Trump’s campaign is about nothing, he has made up fantastical lies about the economy being the worst on the planet, America being a “failing nation,” foreign leaders “laughing at us,” big cities being overrun by criminals, thugs slitting throats, gangs raping women and, of course, Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. Trump’s latest whopper is about the United States government refusing to help hurricane victims if they’re Republicans.
As Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: “At this point, the Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening — an imaginary bad economy, imaginary runaway crime and now an imaginary failure of Biden and Harris to respond to a natural disaster.”
Of course, his campaign is about nothing, because he believes in nothing.
Read the rest at Raw Story.
Trump is everywhere, dominating the news, spreading his lies much more quickly than they can be fact-checked. It makes no sense that this criminal, this monster, is actually permitted to run for president of the United States. Yet it is happening. I hope and pray he can be defeated.
Take care yourselves and your loved ones, everyone!
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Last night’s VP debate wasn’t anything to write home about. (I admit that I didn’t watch every minute of it.) Tim Walz seemed nervous at first, but eventually got in some meaningful jabs. J.D. Vance was confident, glib and polished, but he had a some shameful moments that will probably be remembered far longer than his mostly smooth delivery of lies and obfuscation. The instant polls either called it a tie or gave Vance a slight edge.
Tim Walz and JD Vance spent much of Tuesday night defending their running mates’ records. They were less successful promoting their bosses’ plans for the future.
The two vice presidential candidates spent the 90-minute debate relitigating the last eight years just as much as they focused on their visions for the next four, sparring over the intricacies of Donald Trump’s first term, President Joe Biden’s policies — and their own political baggage, including Walz’s false claim he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests and Vance’s past harsh criticisms of Trump.
The result was a wide-ranging, policy-heavy back and forth that often pushed Walz and Vance to play defense for the presidential nominees, affording them little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters just weeks before they head to the polls.
At the same time, they missed opportunities to use much-used attack lines against one another: Vance didn’t grill Walz on his military record while the Minnesota governor didn’t go after Vance over his “childless cat ladies” comment.
On immigration, Vance spent a large portion of his time defending Trump’s border policies, as Walz attacked the former president for only building less than 2 percent of the wall when he was in office. Vance used questions on the economy to argue that Trump delivered rising take-home pay and lower inflation, while slamming four years of Harris’ leadership on the economy. On health care, the men sparred over the Affordable Care Act and prescription drug costs under their running mates. And on foreign policy, they engaged in lengthy back and forth, both blaming each other’s parties for deteriorating global instability….
With no additional debates on the books, Tuesday night’s showdown may be the last significant national campaign event before November, increasing the weight of the vice presidential contenders’ closing arguments for their running mates. Polls show Harris and Trump in a neck-and-neck race, and Tuesday night was a chance for both men to pitch themselves and their party’s vision for the next four years.
Harris campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Walz “spoke passionately” about Harris’ “vision for a new way forward” and specifically highlighted Vance’s refusal to say Trump lost the 2020 election during what was perhaps the sharpest exchange of the night.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said, after Vance was pressed multiple times on the issue.
IN TUESDAY NIGHT’S VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, JD Vance and Tim Walz covered lots of issues: inflation, housing, guns, abortion, immigration, health care, and much more.
But there was only one question on which the vice presidency—the job for which these two men are competing—really matters. That question was whether they would certify the results of the next presidential election. And on that subject, Vance gave a non-answer that instantly disqualifies him: He refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Certification of elections was a central factor in Vance’s audition to become Trump’s running mate. Other contenders for the job demonstrated, as Vance did, that they were sufficiently right-wing or loyal to MAGA. But, as Thomas Joscelyn has pointed out in The Bulwark, Vance stood out in one respect: He was the one who signaled most clearly that he was willing to push constitutional boundaries to do Trump’s bidding.
In February, Vance went on ABC’s This Week and made it clear that unlike Mike Pence, he would have collaborated in Trump’s scheme to block the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.
Q: Would you have certified the election results had you been vice president?
Vance: If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors. And I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.
Three months later, in an interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Vance defended Trump’s scheme and explained how a vice president could have executed it. “You would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876,” said Vance. “The entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country.”
Vance dismissed the argument that courts had already rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. “You can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically,” Vance told Douthat. “And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”
When Douthat suggested that pursuing Trump’s scheme “would have pushed America into a crisis,” Vance refused to concede that the scheme was illegal. Trump “was using the constitutional procedures,” Vance argued. “He was trying to take a constitutional process to its natural conclusion.”
In short, Vance made it clear that he believed 1) Congress could second-guess and override election results submitted by states; 2) politicians, not judges, should decide these matters; and 3) any scheme could be rendered presumptively constitutional by inventing a new interpretation of the Constitution. As a Yale Law grad, he surely knows better.
“Margaret,” he said to moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”
It was a lie on top of another lie, supplemented by a pair of other lies, in support of an even bigger lie.
There was no “rule” against fact-checking. And Vance had just told a whopper. He had alleged that, in Springfield, Ohio, “you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants.”
There is no “open border,” Kamala Harris isn’t the president, and the thousands of Haitian migrants to which Vance was referring have legal status, which Brennan had accurately pointed out. But Vance claimed that “what’s actually going on” was that the Haitian migrants are there as part of “the facilitation of illegal immigration” — and he kept going until the moderators shut off the candidates’ microphones.
From the sidelines, Donald Trump cheered on his running mate. “Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS let into our Country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she cut off JD’s mic to stop him from correcting her!” he posted on Truth Social.
The up-is-down moment was all the worse because it was in response to Vance’s original libels about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield: that they were bringing crime, disease and, yes, eating the cats and dogs of the town’s residents. Vance declined to walk back that calumny during the debate, instead saying: “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”
It feels entirely appropriate that CBS chose to hold the vice-presidential debate in a studio once home to “Captain Kangaroo.”
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed Tuesday night — in contradiction of history — that his running mate, former President Donald Trump, “salvaged Obamacare,” the health insurance program that Trump tried to kill.
During the vice presidential debate on CBS against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance, a senator from Ohio, echoed Trump’s own recent revisionism. But the assertion also served to remind voters that Democrats ultimately won the yearslong political fight over expanding access to health insurance: The Republican ticket no longer wants to repeal the 2010 law.
Trump “actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States,” Vance said Tuesday night. “And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump.
“When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance added. “Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
But when Trump was president, repeal was a centerpiece of his agenda. In a dramatic Senate vote in 2017, Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected his plan to repeal Obamacare. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., cast the deciding vote by turning his thumb down with a theatrical flourish. A critic of Obamacare, McCain nonetheless concluded that the “skinny repeal” measure would leave people worse off than if Obamacare remained in place.
Walz noted that episode Tuesday night.
Trump “would have repealed [Obamacare] had it not been for the courage of John McCain,” Walz said.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate that his son Gus was among the many Americans who have witnessed a shooting, causing an otherwise contentious sparring session to be briefly waylaid by a moment of human compassion.
“I’ve got a 17-year-old,” Walz said, as part of answer to a question about the issue of gun violence, “and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball.”
When it was the Ohio senator’s turn to respond, Vance turned to Walz.
“Tim, first of all, I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting, and I’m sorry about that and I hope he’s doing OK,” he said.
Then he proclaimed: “Christ have mercy. It is awful.”
“I appreciate you saying that,” Walz thanked him.
Walz has previously referred to the anecdote along the campaign trail while discussing the need for gun control.
“Too many of us have been there,” he said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, two weeks ago. “My own son was in a location where someone was shot in the head.”
Tim Walz‘s former roommate and fellow lawmaker claims there’s a secret cabal of Republicans that supports Kamala Harris but whose members are too chicken to cross Donald Trump.
Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 alongside Walz told the Daily Beast Tuesday that not only will he be rooting for his ex-roomie to defeat JD Vance in Tuesday night’s debate, but former colleagues on the other side of the aisle will be, too.
“There’s a silent majority out there that wants to send a message to Donald Trump that he was fired once for a reason,” Murphy told the Daily Beast Tuesday.
Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA)
The only problem with these GOP members is that they fear Trump, who—in spite of everything—still has an iron grip on the GOP congressional establishment.
Former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is the latest GOP ex-member of Congress to endorse Harris, joining the likes of former Republican Reps. Jim Greenwood, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, has also endorsed Harris.
Walz’s friend Murphy, who served on House Armed Services when Walz served on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said he regularly texts with Republicans who say they support Harris and don’t want another four years of Trump in the White House.
“But they’re afraid,” he said, adding that Trump’s most recent personal attacks on Harris may be the final blow for Republicans who are privately fed up with the former president and 2024 GOP nominee. Murphy declined to name names.
“More Republicans will definitely be coming out to endorse Harris,” he predicted. “After lying about cats and dogs being eaten, Obama not being born in America, he’s now turning on her with false claims about a mental disability,” said Murphy, a combat veteran who served as a paratrooper with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq.
Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.
Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.
A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.
He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.
He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.
When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.
Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.
Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.
Read more at The Guardian.
If the VP debate was somewhat unmemorable, Trump’s behavior yesterday decidedly was not. Some highlights:
Not only was Donald Trump the sole living president—current or former—to not deliver a video message for Jimmy Carter in honor of the 39th president’s milestone 100th birthday on Tuesday, but he made no mention of the historic occasion despite talking about Carter’s presidency in an attempt to criticize Joe Biden.
On Tuesday, the Carter Center shared excerpts of messages of support from Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden that were shown at Carter’s birthday concert last month at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. The concert, a benefit that has raised $1.2 million thus far for the Carter Center’s mission to “wage peace, fight disease, and build hope,” airs Tuesday on Georgia Public Broadcasting….
Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden also posted about Carter on their official social media accounts. As of publication, Trump hadn’t even done that.
Instead, while campaigning in Waunakee, Wisconsin, Trump used Biden’s administration as a way to mention Carter—and not in a positive way.
“Jimmy Carter is the happiest man because Jimmy Carter is considered a brilliant president in comparison,” Trump said, after having called Biden “the worst.”
Carter, who left office in 1981, has had the longest post-presidency of any former commander-in-chief and is the only former president to have turned 100. He entered hospice care in February 2023….
Seen Tuesday surrounded by family and friends in his backyard while being saluted with a military flyover, Carter has downplayed his birthday. What’s more important to him, he has made clear through his family, is being able to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Former President Donald Trump dismissed the injuries of U.S. soldiers who were caught in a 2020 missile attack by Iran on an American military installation, while he fielded questions from reporters at his latest campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Earlier in the day, the former president reacted to the news of strikes on Israel by Iran, by claiming that nothing of the sort could have happened if he were still in office.
When confronted with this fact by a reporter, Trump downplayed the idea that U.S. troop casualties in the incident were a big deal.
“Do you believe that you should have been tougher on Iran after they had launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 soldiers injured?” asked a reporter.
“So first of all, injured. What does injured mean?” said Trump. “You mean because they had a headache. Because the bombs never hit the fort. So, just so you understand, there was nobody ever tougher on Iraq. They had no money with me, they would have made any deal with me. I would have had a deal made within — literally, I would have had a deal made within one week after the election.”
The troops who were wounded in the missile strike suffered considerably more than a headache, officials have said.
According to a Pentagon report at the time, 109 troops were injured, many of whom suffered traumatic brain injuries. Despite the report, Trump has insisted, “We suffered no casualties.”
MILWAUKEE — Republican nominee Donald Trump spoke for 33 minutes before his first mention of the ostensible focus of his remarks.
Signs reading “SCHOOL CHOICE,” “EDUCATION FREEDOM NOW” and “LET PARENTS DECIDE” decorated a small auditorium, and a panel of speakers preceding the former president focused on using public funds to let families choose between public and private, especially religious, schools. Trump read from a binder containing a prepared speech on the subject, and he switched abruptly between the text and a jumble of other topics.
“We can be nice and we can be politically incorrect, but the only thing they’re going to do there is cheat on elections, and we just can’t let this happen,” he said at one point. Without warning, he continued: “The city of Milwaukee is the home of first and oldest choice program.”
He spoke of “a million Rambos.” “Turnarounds” and “gotaways” and “dead-head spending.” He mixed up Iran with North Korea and strained to pronounce United Arab Emirates. He marveled at Hurricane Helene coming so late in the storm season, which typically runs through November. He falsely claimed government agencies can’t name the U.S. population, and he compared the conflict between Israel and Iran to “two kids fighting in the schoolyard.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Discovery World, Friday, Oct. 1, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Trump, 78, often speaks in a digressive, extemporaneous style that thrills his fans at large-scale rallies. But Tuesday’s event, in front of almost entirely reporters, was especially scattered and hard to follow. Polls show voters’ concerns about Trump’s age and fitness have increased since President Joe Biden, 81, withdrew and was replaced as the Democratic nominee by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump spoke slowly and appeared tired. It was his second stop of the day, and he has picked up the pace of campaigning in recent weeks….
Trump was more energetic during a speech to supporters in Waunakee, Wis., earlier Tuesday. He went on an extended riff about the 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” and made up a false claim that Harris raised taxes as the San Francisco district attorney, which is not a power of that office.
Trump avoided direct questions about how he would address the escalating violence between Iran and Israel, by repeatedly insisting it never would have happened if he were president. He claimed he could settle that war, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a single phone call apiece, but he declined to specify how.
“I don’t want to say what I’d use because I don’t want to give up negotiating abilities,” he said. He even boasted that with a second term he could have struck a peace deal between Iran and Israel.
There’s more Trump nonsense at the link. The guy is really coming apart.
…pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s most troubling showing yet on the campaign trail. Across two campaign events in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former and would-be president reiterated a truth that is much more important than who won the debate: namely, that he’s morally and intellectually unfit for office.
Both Trump events were packed with outrageous defamations and lies. His targets included troops wounded abroad while he was president, which would be unthinkable in anything resembling a normal era of politics.
Vicious as Trump’s attacks were, they also managed to be muddled in ways suggesting he isn’t up to the task of being president until he’s 82 years old. Vance’s slick lying and election denialism is even more ominous given the possibility that he may end up as the country’s leader in a second, nightmarish, Trump term….
Trump’s public addresses are disjointed and disconnected from reality at the best of times. Yesterday, however, was a particularly wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.
His first speech of the day in the the Madison suburb of Waunakee featured racially coded attacks on Brittney Griner, a Black American basketball player who was held hostage in Russia. Trump also lied about opposing the Iraq War and said all sorts of strange stuff, such as accusing Democrats of supporting “water-free bathrooms.”
The lowlight, however, came when Trump flat out defamed Kamala Harris for murder, saying of a murder victim, “She murdered him. In my opinion Kamala murdered him. Just like she had a gun in her hand.” (So much for Trump toning down the rhetoric and offering a message of unity — watch the clip below.)
Even lower depths were explored during Trump’s appearance later in the day in Milwaukee. Taking questions from the press, he told a reporter who asked him if he trusts the election process this time around that “I’ll let you know in 33 days” — the implication being that he would accept the results only if he wins. Riffing about immigration, he wandered off into a bizarre, woozy, blatantly racist rant about people in the Congo, a country that he boasted he did not know anything about. (“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”) [….]
Then, in a moment that would’ve driven news cycles for days had Biden done it, Trump confused the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, with the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and claimed his buddy Kim “is trying to kill me.”
Then came the episode when Trump mocked injured troops.
That debacle came when a reporter asked Trump if he should’ve been tougher in retaliation against Iran after they launched a 2020 missile attack on a US base in Iraq, which injured more than 100 US soldiers. The Iranian launch was in retaliation for a US drone strike which killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. More than 100 US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries.
Trump at the time lied about the incident, insisting that no soldiers were harmed and that he’d “heard that they had headaches.” The episode was mostly forgotten over the ensuing four years, but Trump reminded everyone about it during his news conference, peevishly responding to the reporter: “So first of all — injured. What does injured mean? Injured means — you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.”
After Trump finished downplaying serious, life-changing injuries suffered by the troops, he then attacked the reporter for not being “truthful” while mixing up Iraq and Iran.
Read on at Public Notice for more horrifying Trump quotes along with videos.
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Cats of the Louvre, a graphic novel by Taiyo Matsumoto
Happy Caturday!!
There are just 37 days remaining until election day, November 5. While Trump continues to display his growing cognitive issues as well as his ignorance of public policy, Kamala Harris has been making substantive appearances in which she intelligently spells out what she will do as president. Earlier in the week she spoke about her economic plans. Yesterday she visited the border in Arizona and gave a speech outlining her proposed immigration policies and attacking Trump’s failures.
Immigration has featured prominently in the 2024 presidential election, with polls showing voters placing more trust in Trump to handle the issue than Harris.
Democrats, grappling with years of border crises, have tried to gain ground by pointing to the bipartisan border measure that congressional Republicans blocked earlier this year after Trump came out against it. Harris on Friday lambasted Trump for his role in stymying that bill.
“It was the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. It was endorsed by the Border Patrol union. And it should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country,” she said at a rally in Douglas, a town on the US-Mexico border.
“But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill,’” she said. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
She said she would ask Congress to pass the measure if she is elected, and would sign it into law. She also laid out a series of proposals that she said were “not just about some rhetoric at a rally,” but would help stem the flow of migrants into the United States.
A bit more:
“Solutions are at hand if we focus on fixing a problem and not running on a problem,” Harris said.
She said she’d work with Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for “hardworking immigrants who have been here for years, for years, and deserve to have a system that works,” as well as “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children, who are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program but generally cannot become citizens under current law.
“They are American in every way. But still, they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship. And this problem has gone unsolved at this point now for decades,” Harris said. “The same goes for farmworkers who ensure that we have food on our tables and sustain our agricultural industry – and they too have been in legal limbo for years because politicians have refused to come together and fix our broken immigration system.”
Earlier this year, Biden announced an executive action severely limiting the ability of migrants to seek asylum at the US southern border if they crossed unlawfully – a departure from decadeslong protocol. Immigrant advocates have likened the executive action to Trump-era policies.
The measure can be turned on and off and lifted when there’s a daily average of fewer than 1,500 encounters between ports of entry, among other criteria. It remains in place.
Homeland Security officials have credited the action for driving down border crossings to the lowest point since 2020.
DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign on Friday proposed new border restrictions that would go further than the emergency rules the Biden administration deployed in June, making the announcement during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border Friday in an effort to confront one of her biggest political vulnerabilities.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
Harris’s proposed executive action would build on President Joe Biden’s current policy of essentially closing the U.S. asylum system unless illegal border crossings stay below 1,500 daily crossings for a week. Harris would lower that threshold and extend the period it must be met, advisers said,although exact figures were not immediately available.
The action might have a limited practical impact, at least in the short term, but the proposal appeared designed to send a message that Harris is taking a more assertive immigration posture than the administration in which she serves and that she is not ceding the issue to Donald Trump, who consistently scores higher marks among voters on border security and immigration.
In what her campaign had billed as a major speech in this community, which sits on the border, Harris also emphasized her support for an enforcement-heavy border security bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators earlier this year. She decried Trump’s central role in derailing it, noting that he had urged Republicans in Congress to oppose the legislation.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said, standing amid six different signs that said in capital letters, “Border Security and Stability.”
“Because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she added. “And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
Vice President Harris walked along the U.S. border with Mexico on Friday alongside a stretch of border wall built during the Obama administration, talking with border officials about their work.
It was a photo op meant to illustrate that she supports border security — one of the biggest concerns voters have about Harris — and to try to defang criticism from her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Later, she embraced a mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose, and made her most extensive remarks to date on how she would address border security and immigration reform.
“I will reach across the aisle and I will embrace common sense approaches and new technologies to get the job done,” she said….
She said her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general gave her experience to tackle the fentanyl problem.
“I’ve seen tunnels with walls as smooth as the walls of your living room, complete with lighting and air conditioning, making very clear that it is about an enterprise that is making a whole lot of money in the trafficking of guns, drugs and human beings,” she said.
“Stopping transnational criminal organizations and strengthening our border is not new to me, and it is a long standing priority of mine. I have done that work, and I will continue to treat it as a priority when I am elected president of the United States,” Harris said.
Read more at NPR.
Trump very much has not been focusing on policy, and if you’ve paid attention to his rallies and other public appearances, you know that he’s simply not capable of doing so. Even though he was “president” for four years, he has learned nothing about how the government works or about serious issues. He is incapable of learning, and why the media keeps propping him up is a mystery. Here are a couple of “issues” raised by the Trump camp over the past couple of days.
Former President Donald J. Trump threatened Friday to prosecute Google if he was elected to the presidency a second time, claiming that the tech company had been “illegally” showing only “bad stories” about him and only “good” ones about Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Trump said at a news conference on Thursday that the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted in connection with the security lapses by which a mob of his own supporters attacked the Capitol during the transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.
And on Friday, in Michigan, he called for an attorney general “somewhere, like in a Republican territory” to investigate Ms. Pelosi and her husband over reports that Mr. Pelosi had sold Visa stock ahead of the Justice Department’s filing an antitrust lawsuit against the company.
It was not immediately clear what prompted Mr. Trump to make the statement about Google on his social media website, Truth Social.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Mr. Trump wrote.
“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections,” he added. “If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
Google said it did not manipulate search results to favor any candidate.
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of search for relevant and common search queries,” a Google spokesman said.
The source of Trump’s claim appears to be the right-wing Media Research Center, which published a report on Wednesday covered this week by Fox News and The New York Post.
MRC’s report “analyzed the Sept. 6 Google search results” for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” The group alleges that the results favored outlets with “a history of leftist bias,” and that, while Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in his search results, Harris’s campaign website appeared third in hers.
Dismissing MRC’s report, a Google spokesperson told Fox, “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
Trump’s Truth Social post recalls his previous claims that Google search results are biased against him, which Google has denied.
It is also yet another example of Trump promising to prosecute his perceived political foes if he retakes the White House. Earlier this month, for example, Trump posted to Truth Social that, if he wins, “those people that CHEATED”—such as “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials”—“will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
This is what Trump is preoccupied with a month before the November election.
Oh, and JD Vance continues to say the quiet part aloud when it comes to women’s control over their own bodies and lives. Recently, close Trump adviser did it too.
One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term….
…[Y]esterday in an interview on Newsmax of all places, a host asked Trump spokesman Jason Miller whether Donald Trump supported or wouldn’t aim to prevent states from enforcing their own menstrual surveillance regimes. It was one of those Fox-like interviews in which the host seems to go out of his way to signal what the right answer is. You wouldn’t do this, right?
“But he wouldn’t support monitoring pregnancies, even if a state decided to do that?” the host asked.
Miller responded that “he’s [i.e., Trump’s] made it very clear that he’s not going to go and weigh in and push various states on how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That’s going to be up to the states.”
So he went there. It’s totally up to the states. Trump’s “leave it up to the states” approach applies to all these menstrual surveillance and travel restriction regimes as well. It’s a new opening for the Harris campaign to focus attention on an issue that hasn’t yet gotten enough attention — not just abortion rights as a general issue but states and county sheriffs’ effort to restrict women’s travel, access their medical records and current state of menstruation or gestation, and bar access to legal medications.
What else is on Trump’s befuddled mind these days? He’s “obsessed” with Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. story.
The former president even called up the 70-year-old Kennedy—who’s married to Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines—to ask if the bombshell reports about him and the 31-year-old journalist were true, and if the relationship ever went beyond the sending of “demure” nudes, according to Puck News.
“[Kennedy] denied the whole thing to Trump,” a source with direct knowledge told the outlet. “He said he hardly knows her. He said he met her one time.”
Trump was also apparently close to making a public statement about the alleged digital dalliance, having “almost posted to Truth Social, his social media platform, ‘My condolences to Ryan Lizza…’” according to the Puck report. Lizza, a Politico journalist, ended his engagement to Nuzzi last month after learning of her relationship with Kennedy, according to Vanity Fair.
Trump apparently exercised more restraint than his adviser, Corey Lewandowski, who tweeted and then later deleted his own post sharing the Kennedy gossip.
Nuzzi had interviewed Trump for a piece published earlier this month which, in part, featured a detailed description of the GOP nominee’s ear bandaged up following the attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.
The forbidden love between New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chronicled in a new report that reveals even more details of their dalliances.
The Page Six report, which cites only anonymous sources, claimed Friday the 31-year-old Nuzzi fell “madly in love” with the Kennedy scion, 70, after he “love bombed” her and sparked a virtual relationship during his campaign.
The two reportedly exchanged “I love yous” and had an affair that lasted nearly a year, complete with the duo having “incredible” FaceTime sex and speaking on “long calls.” The report also alleged that Nuzzi and Kennedy shared “endless texts” with each other.
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s supposed relationship kicked off as Nuzzi worked on a profile of the failed presidential candidate for New York.
Nuzzi, who was engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza at the time, traveled to Los Angeles to interview Kennedy during a hike together in October 2023. It was on that hike that Kennedy, who has been married to the actress Cheryl Hines for 10 years, reportedly made his first pass at Nuzzi and grabbed her arm “as a romantic overture.”
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s relationship heated up after the journalist contacted Kennedy with follow-up questions as she wrote her profile. The relationship reportedly remained under wraps for months, but word of it had reached Lizza by August.
Vanity Fairreportedthat Lizza had a “heated” call with Kennedy over the alleged affair upon learning of it. It remains unclear how Lizza caught wind of the reported fling, but the Daily Beast exclusively revealed this week that Kennedy had been bragging about receiving nude photos of Nuzzi.
I hope this will be the end of Nuzzi’s career in journalism, but it probably won’t be. She could always go to Fox News.
I’ve tried to keep this post light, because the news overall has been so depressing lately. In that spirit, I’m going to end with another hilarious, gossipy story about a Republican candidate.
Republicans have taken umbrage with the notion that they’re weird — specifically when it comes to accusations that they’re weird about people (usually women) who don’t have children.
The sentiment in Republican politics that childless Americans are — as JD Vance put it — disorienting and disturbing has become so prevalent that one GOP candidate has taken to borrowing his friends’ wife and children for photo ops.
According to a Friday report from The New York Times, Derrick Anderson — a former Green Beret running for the House of Representatives in Virginia — has repeatedly featured a woman and her three daughters in campaign materials.
One photo features the group posing close together in an image that you could probably find framed on a grandmother’s mantle, the type of photo that your parents made your uncle with a DSLR camera take because “we never get nice pictures together.” https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1839759803729752271
In one campaign video, Anderson is seen walking side-by-side with the same woman. In another video, which was featured on the National Republican Campaign Committee’s website and on his YouTube channel, shows Anderson speaking to the woman and the three girls while seated in a home dining room.
According to the Times, the woman and girls are “the wife and children of a longtime friend.” Anderson’s campaign website does not mention a wife or children, but notes that he “lives in Spotsylvania County with his dog, Ranger, a Dalmatian.” The Republican candidate recently revealed on social media that he is engaged to his girlfriend, Maggie, and has posted pictures of her — she is decidedly not the woman featured in the photos and videos.
A Friday article at The New York Times, headlined “G.O.P. Candidates, Looking to Soften Their Image, Turn to Their Wives,” reported how “male Republicans struggling to appeal to female voters concerned about their records on reproductive rights are unleashing their spouses to make the pitch on their behalf.”
Male GOP candidates who are worried about getting dragged down by the abortion issue in November are putting their wives front and center in their campaign ads. That’s hardly a new phenomenon — candidates have showcased the stereotypical [husband + wife + at least two children + probably a dog or two] family photo for ages — but the Republican angst about Dobbs is so acute, at least one candidate resorted to faking an entire family for his ads.
These GOP ads included anodyne images of “women in softly lit living rooms and pristine kitchens vouching for their husbands’ characters,” “a wholesome family gathering around the dining room table,” and moms “driving S.U.V.s with young children in the back seat as they stop for gas and groceries, talking about how their husbands are champions for their families, and can be champions for yours, too.” [….]
So what do you do if you’re running for Congress with an R after your name but don’t have your own wife and kids?
If you’re Derrick Anderson, a candidate running in an open race for Virginia’s seventh congressional district, you borrow a wife and daughters from a friend.
From the Times report:
The campaign of Derrick Anderson, a former Army Green Beret who is running in a competitive race for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District, has posted footage of him posing with a woman and her three daughters in what looks like a photo that might be used for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for potential use in a campaign ad, Mr. Anderson is seated around the dining room table with the same woman and three girls, chatting and smiling.
But the people are not relatives. They are the wife and children of a longtime friend. Mr. Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged, does not have any children of his own. His campaign website says he lives with his dog and does not display any of the photos.
Isn’t it strange that Trump is never accompanied by his wife and family, but the media never mentions it?
That’s it for me today. Please take care, especially if you are/were in the path of Helene.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.
But the confirmation that Trump keeps speaking to Putin is important for several other reasons.
The result was a wide-ranging, policy-heavy back and forth that often pushed Walz and Vance to play defense for the presidential nominees, affording them little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters just weeks before they head to the polls.
Vance dismissed the argument that courts had already rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. “You can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically,” Vance told Douthat. “And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”
On Tuesday, the Carter Center shared excerpts of messages of support from 
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