Why Is Trump Urging His Supporters Not to Vote This Election?

On Fox News Thursday morning, Donald Trump had a weird instruction for his supporters: they don’t have to vote.

“My instruction: We don’t need the votes, I have so many votes,” Trump said on Fox & Friends before going on a rant about how much support he has in Florida.

Trump’s message was preceded by talking about how his campaign had lawyers at “every poll booth,” suggesting that he thinks that he can legally get the election outcome he wants. He said something similar in October, too, when he told supporters at a New Hampshire rally, “You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting—we got plenty of votes.”

At that time, Trump also told his supporters to “get out there and watch those voters!” If he’s using the same words now, it could mean that he wants to encourage voter intimidation at the polls. It would go with the new Republican Party platform he’s pushed, which makes veiled threats to “secure our elections.”

It’s another example of how Trump and MAGA are attempting to undermine faith in the coming election. Trump lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020, so he might be making a preemptive strike at the legitimacy of the results should he lose the popular vote a third time. Still, it’s not clear why he’s telling his supporters not to vote at all. Perhaps it’s another example of the former president and convicted felon’s cognitive decline.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has chosen cruelty, emboldened by the conservative Supreme Court.  

Following the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision on Grants Pass v. Johnson in June, which essentially criminalized homelessness, Newsom issued an executive order Thursday for the removal of homeless encampments throughout his state. 

Newsom urged local governments to destroy the encampments, where tens of thousands of unsheltered Californians live, “with urgency and dignity.”

“We are done,” said Newsom. “It’s time to move with urgency to clean up these sites.”

California accounts for nearly one-third of all people experiencing homelessness in the country, and 49 percent of unsheltered people, or those sleeping without a roof over their head, per federal data.

Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, cities and localities were supposed to provide an offer to shelter, and have available shelter beds, before clearing homeless encampments. Now an offer to shelter is not necessary before cops and bulldozers roll in. 

According to a January 2023 point-in-time count, which often undercounts the number of homeless people, California had approximately 180,000 homeless individuals and roughly 70,000 beds available, meaning that 110,000 people had nowhere to go. 

In Thursday’s press release, Newsom directed agencies to follow the “blueprint” set by the California Department of Transportation’s, or Caltrans, existing encampment policy, which has “resolved more than 11,000 encampments” since 2021. Newsom claims that Caltrans will store personal property cleared during the encampment for a limited period of time. But a recent investigation from Type Investigations shows that, in reality, it is nearly impossible for homeless people to recover their stolen belongings. 

Meanwhile, private contractors can make millions of dollars clearing a single camp. 

This executive order is exactly what homeless advocates and unhoused people feared would happen following the Supreme Court’s ruling. 

It’s not clear if all localities will follow Newsom’s order. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, for instance, has shown hesitancy to further criminalize the homeless following the Grants Pass decision. 

“This ruling must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail,” she said. 

Meanwhile, San Francisco Mayor London Breed cheered on the ruling, saying the city planned to be “very aggressive and assertive in moving encampments.” Similarly (and horrifyingly), the Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris warned, “I’m warming up the bulldozer.” 

Some Republicans are starting to seriously regret Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.

It’s been only one week since Vance was nominated at the Republican National Convention, and already his own party members are expressing severe doubts about Trump’s pick. The former president’s allies have acknowledged that nominating Vance was the product of Trump’s absolute certainty that he would be able to defeat Joe Biden in November. While Vance wouldn’t do much for swing voters or independents, he would likely shore up support among Trump’s base.

But ever since Biden passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s new presumptive nominee, Republicans have begun to sour on Vance.

“The road got a lot harder. He was the only pick that wasn’t the safe pick. And I think everyone has now realized that,” one House Republican told Axios Thursday, under the condition of anonymity.

Another House Republican told Axios that Vance “doesn’t add much.”

“And now with Kamala at the top, the capacity to have expanded the map a little bit ... would have been much more beneficial,” the GOP lawmaker said.

It’s not just Republican lawmakers who are feeling buyer’s remorse. A CNN poll found that Vance was the least liked vice presidential nominee for a nonincumbent following his party’s convention since 1980.

Since being nominated last week, Vance has marred the Trump ticket with his awkward jokes about diet soda, sexist comments about “childless cat ladies,” and humiliating rumors about having sex with a couch. Vance has been so embroiled in gaffes, he hasn’t even really gotten to expound on any of his “new right” ideas, such as his phony brand of conservative economic populism, or creepy pronatalism, or terrifying techo-authoritarianism.

Trump’s campaign, however, released a statement doubling down on the former president’s increasingly unpopular pick.

“President Trump is thrilled with the choice he made with Senator Vance, and they are the perfect team to take back the White House,” said campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, according to Axios.

After Donald Trump’s bizarre attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris in a phone interview on Fox News Thursday morning, her campaign fired back with a blistering response of its own.

The Harris campaign sent out an email minutes later with the subject line “Statement on a 78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance,” wondering “is Donald Trump ok?” They called out Trump for “lying and making threats,” praising abortion bans while criticizing mail-in-voting, and being “old and quite weird.”

The email also notes, “If anyone wants an alternative, Kamala Harris is offering one.”

It’s a quick and snarky response that is sure to land well with Democrats and younger voters. Harris already scored points against Trump when she kicked off her campaign Monday, highlighting her history as a prosecutor against Trump’s legally questionable record. These biting criticisms of Trump seem to have set off his meltdown Thursday.

In the Fox News appearance the email referred to, Trump was not happy about Harris’s Monday speech, calling it “disgusting.”

“They say, ‘Sir, be nice. You just got hit with a bullet. Maybe he’s changed. Be nice,’ and I’d love to be nice, but I’m dealing against real garbage when you hear that,” Trump said. He went on to connect Harris’s criticism to the many legal cases against him.

“When you hear that they’ve weaponized the justice system against me, they’ve indicted me four times. They’ve pushed other lawsuits on. To me, it’s never happened in this country,” Trump ranted. “This is like a third-world country, what they’ve done, a banana republic. Every single court case that I have is pushed on by them.”

If this is how Trump will respond to future attacks from the Harris campaign, it probably won’t do anything beyond the MAGA base. Trump’s complaints about the cases against him didn’t land earlier this year, and they probably won’t pick up steam by including Harris.

The Trump campaign has already resorted to making racist attacks against Harris by calling her a “DEI candidate” and claiming she was soft on crime as a prosecutor. Meanwhile, he keeps making things worse for himself. At a rally Wednesday, he confused Harris with his old opponent Nikki Haley. If Harris can keep landing attacks like this, and Trump keeps making bizarre gaffes, the Democrats could go into Election Day with all of the momentum.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday that it is not clear whether Donald Trump was struck by a bullet during the assassination attempt against him earlier this month.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Wray testified about the agency’s investigation into the attempted assassination, expressing uncertainty about the nature of the injury Trump suffered to his ear.

At one point, Republican Representative Kevin Kiley asked, “How close did the assassin’s bullet come to killing President Trump?” Wray responded that he didn’t know the actual distance, but “my understanding is that either [the bullet] or some shrapnel is what grazed his ear.”

Later in the hearing, Wray replied to a question from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan about where the eight bullets fired by Thomas Crooks went. “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray again said. However, in affirming that the FBI “accounted for” all of the shots, he added, “I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.”

Over the weekend, Trump told a Michigan crowd, “I took a bullet for democracy.” The same day, Axios reported on a memo, written by Trump’s former White House physician and shared by his campaign, that stated the bullet struck Trump’s ear, coming “less than a quarter of an inch from entering [Trump’s] head” and “produc[ing] a 2 cm wide wound.”

While Wray revealed, among other information, that Crooks researched the killing of JFK and flew a drone over the site prior to his attempt on Trump’s life, his remarks about the basic facts surrounding the former president’s injury show that uncertainty still looms over our understanding of the event.

Wray told the committee, “There’s a whole lot of work underway and still a lot of work to do, and our understanding of what happened and why will continue to evolve.”