Trump Just Made His Most Extreme Threat Yet for If He Loses Election

Donald Trump elaborated on a shocking threat during his visit to Racine, Wisconsin, Tuesday, warning the crowd that the country will be pushed into World War III if he isn’t re-elected in November.

“Under Crooked Joe Biden, the world is in flames, our border is overrun, inflation is raging, Europe is in total chaos, the Middle East is exploding, Iran is emboldened, China is on the march, and the worst, most incompetent, most corrupt president in history is going to drag us into World War III,” Trump said.

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee had previously used the bleak image while speaking to attendees at CPAC in February, framing a Biden-led U.S. as not just causing the imagined international war, but also losing it.

“We won’t even be in World War III, we’ll be losing World War III with weapons the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said at the Nazi-attended conservative conference. “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed. And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me. It’s true.”

In a Senate hearing Tuesday, Senator Josh Hawley attacked Boeing CEO David Calhoun and urged him to resign.

Hawley grilled the executive on his pay, which this year is $32.8 million, and listed the Boeing disasters of the past year, which are numerous.

“You’re not focused on safety, you’re not focused on quality, you’re not focused on transparency, all of this is on the record,” Hawley said. “But actually, you’re focused on exactly what you were hired to do, which is that you’re cutting corners, you are eliminating safety procedures, you are sticking it to your employees, you are cutting back jobs because you’re trying to squeeze every piece of profit out of this company.”

“You’re strip-mining Boeing. It was one of the greatest American companies ever. It has employed thousands of people in my state, and you are strip-mining it for profit and shareholder value, and you’re being rewarded for it,” Hawley added.

The Missouri Republican certainly sounded like he was saying all of the right things when it comes to Boeing, which has had several scandals over the past several years, particularly with the many involving the 737 MAX plane. But, Hawley’s tough talk belies his record on corporate oversight, which has mostly concerned deregulation and attacking so-called “woke corporations.”

But Boeing is an easy target unpopular with most Americans these days thanks to the bad press over its disasters and the many whistleblowers that have come forward. Hawley has shown similar opportunism after rail disasters, despite receiving thousands in campaign contributions from the railroad industry. Perhaps the senator is worried about his own travel or about his challenger in November’s election, populist Democrat and Marine Corps veteran Lucas Kunce. Whatever the reason, Hawley unfortunately made a great point in his questioning Tuesday. Now, if only it would be followed by regulatory action, which isn’t either Hawley or his Republican colleagues’ strong suit.

Republican Senator Pete Ricketts on Tuesday killed a measure to ban bump stocks—before he and the rest of his colleagues could be embarrassed in a vote on the legislation.

The measure followed a controversial ruling delivered by the Supreme Court last Friday that overturned a ban enacted by Trump. But the Republican senator from Nebraska objected to the bill before a vote could be held, shooting down any hopes of maintaining a ban on the lethal accessory.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer brought the legislation to the floor Tuesday afternoon seeking unanimous consent, which allows a bill to pass so long as there are no votes against it.

“What today’s bill does is return things to the status quo set by Donald Trump, saying bump stocks are dangerous and should be prohibited,” Schumer said Tuesday morning ahead of the floor vote.

“If Republicans block this bill today after claiming to support bump stock bans in years past, shame on them,” Schumer said ahead of the bump stock ban vote on Tuesday afternoon, noting that the “MAGA Supreme Court” went even further to the right than Trump himself. In response to the bill’s introduction, Ricketts wrote it off as “the summer of show vote” by Senate Democrats and claimed the bill would not pass because “some people in this building still believe in the Constitution that affords people in this country their right to own a gun,” seemingly believing a bump stock attachment is a gun.

“I’m going to keep pushing this bill to get this done. I’m going to keep working with anyone who wants to do this, to ban bump stocks in this country once and for all,” vowed Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in response to Ricketts’s block on the bill.

Republicans were expected to vote against the measure en masse, including those who previously said they would support a bump stock ban.

Bump stocks and sales of bump stocks were banned in 2018 by the Department of Justice at the behest of Trump, which reclassified the lethal accessory used in mass shootings under the federal definition of a “machinegun.” Trump’s ban followed the October 2017 Las Vegas massacre where a gunman using an AR-15 altered with a bump stock fired more than 1,000 rounds at concertgoers over the course of 11 minutes, killing 59 people and injuring more than 500.

Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, which stunned survivors of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, ruled on the basis that bump stocks don’t convert rifles into machine guns because a machine gun allows for continuous shooting while a bump stock allows a shooter to “rapidly re-engage the trigger.” The splitting-hairs distinction conveniently ignored that a bump stock converts the number of bullets that can be shot per minute from “however quickly you can pull the trigger” up to 400 to 800 bullets per minute.

“There’s no law enforcement application for a bump stock. There’s no military application for a bump stock. There’s no self-defense application for a bump stock. These things are, like, tailor-made for mass shootings,” Senator Martin Heinrich said on Tuesday ahead of the vote.

Jeff Bezos finally broke his silence on the widespread backlash to two new hirings at The Washington Post.

In a memo to the paper’s top personnel on Tuesday, the billionaire technocrat backed the new CEO Will Lewis, a former lieutenant to right-wing media mogul Richard Murdoch, whose controversial appointment at the Post has made waves across the industry in the wake of reporting on his shady journalistic practices. 

“I know you’ve already heard this from Will, but I wanted to also weigh in directly: the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change,” Bezos wrote in his message to staff. “To be sure, it can’t be business as usual at The Post. The world is evolving rapidly and we do need to change as a business.”

“You have my full commitment on maintaining the quality, ethics, and standards we all believe in,” Bezos wrote. Unfortunately, those words aren’t the most comforting, as the dirt on Lewis continues to pile up.  

Lewis was named as a central figure in a phone hacking cover-up at Murdoch’s News U.K., and continually hounded NPR’s media reporter David Folkenflik, urging him not to report on Lewis’s involvement ahead of his taking the reins at the Post. When the story did eventually break, Lewis allegedly pressured executive editor Sally Buzbee not to follow up on any developments to the story, downplaying its significance. Buzbee left her role as a result of restructuring under Lewis, but some of her former colleagues reportedly believe that Lewis’s pressure was to blame for her ouster. 

The message from the paper’s billionaire owner comes just days after the Post reported that Robert Winnett, Buzbee’s replacement, also had a hand in ethically murky reporting. Winnett is a former colleague of Lewis’s at the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, whom Lewis tapped to lead news coverage after the 2024 elections. Winnett and Lewis allegedly published reporting that relied on fraudulently obtained phone and company records, according to The New York Times.

A former Sunday Times reporter, Peter Koenig, said Lewis assigned him to write a story based on stolen phone records. “His ambition outran his ethics,” Koenig told The New York Times. 

It’s unclear yet how Bezos can possibly rein in his new CEO’s soaring ambition to rebuild the paper, before it speeds past the Post’s ethics. But it’s easy enough to shoot a quick email from your yacht in Mykonos, and save the tough questions for when you’re back in the states. 

Donald Trump is taking aim at business leaders, saying they should be fired if they don’t support him.

In two long Truth Social posts on Tuesday quoting a Wall Street Journal article, Trump said “Business Executives and Shareholder Representatives should be 100% behind Donald Trump! Anybody that’s not should be FIRED for incompetence!”

Lately, Trump has attempted to line up the CEO and executive crowd behind him, but this is the first time he seems to have openly threatened them. Last week, he met with at least 80 CEOs, promising tax cuts and scaled-back business regulations if he’s elected president. Accounts of that meeting did not have the convicted felon and former president coming off well, with Trump reportedly rambling all over the place on different topics.

“These were people who, I think, might have been actually predisposed to him,” said CNBC’s Ross Sorkin. “And [they] actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him, actually predisposed to thinking ‘This is not necessarily—’ as one person said, ‘this may not be any different or better than a Biden thought, if you’re thinking that way.’”

Trump also proposed a plan to cut the federal corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 21 percent, which didn’t bring a lot of excitement from the audience. One attendee described the idea as “We’re going to give you more of the same for the next four years.”

Previously, Trump also tried to win over the support of oil and gas executives, reportedly promising them changes in policies if they contributed to his campaign.

Perhaps Trump’s recent posts came about because these meetings aren’t getting him the support he was seeking, and he sought to strike back at the CEOs. Maybe he thought they didn’t like his idea of leaving worker tips untaxed. Or maybe he got tired of proposing outrageous deals in exchange for total support, and decided an implicit threat would work better.

Whatever the case, it’s not likely that the richest and most powerful business leaders in America will respond kindly to Trump saying “support me or else!” Even if they do support him, history doesn’t look kindly upon business leaders who throw their support behind (wanna-be) dictators and autocrats.