Kamala Nabs Major Endorsement Over Trump

The United Auto Workers announced Wednesday that their union would endorse Kamala Harris for president.

The union’s executive board came to the decision because of “the Biden-Harris administration’s proven track record of standing with the UAW and delivering major gains for the working class,” according to a press release from the union.

“Our job in this election is to defeat Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris to build on her proven track record of delivering for the working class,” said UAW President Shawn Fain in the statement. “We stand at a crossroads in this country. We can put a billionaire back in office who stands against everything our union stands for, or we can elect Kamala Harris who will stand shoulder to shoulder with us in our war on corporate greed.”

Following President Joe Biden’s endorsement of Harris, many unions, including the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, or IBEW, and the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, rushed to back Harris. But the UAW held off.

Fain even took heat when he appeared on MSNBC to say his union was “not going to rush” its Harris endorsement without the approval of the union members. The union had previously endorsed Biden in January.

In the UAW’s announcement, the union cited Harris’s commitment to workers on the picket line and in her voting records. “Kamala Harris walked the picket line with striking autoworkers in 2019, has taken on corporate price-gouging and profiteering, and has spoken out and voted against unfair trade deals that hurt the American worker like NAFTA and NAFTA 2.0, the USMCA,” the statement said.

Harris will head to Detroit on August 7 to rally with UAW members and Michigan voters. During that time, she will also meet directly with union members about the issues facing Michigan workers.

“This campaign is bringing together people from all walks of life, building a movement that can defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box,” said Fain. “For our one million active and retired members, the choice is clear: We will elect Kamala Harris to be our next President this November.”

Former President Donald Trump suggested Vice President Kamala Harris had suddenly turned Black, during an interview Wednesday at a convention for the National Association of Black Journalists.

Trump appeared onstage more than an hour late to take part in a conversation conducted by ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, and Semafor’s political reporter Kadia Goba.

Scott didn’t hold back when it came to asking Trump about his party’s attacks on Harris as a “DEI” candidate. “Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a Black woman?” Scott asked.

“Well, I can say no, I think it’s maybe a little bit different,” Trump said. “I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black.”

“So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?” Trump asked, noting that he’d respect “either one.”

“She was Indian all the way, and then suddenly she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said. The audience let out a collective gasp and incredulous laughs. He went on to criticize Scott for her “hostile, nasty tone,” before turning his attention to fawn over Faulkner.

As the interview proceeded, Trump was simultaneously fact-checked online in collaboration with Politifact. The slogan of the weekend’s convention was “Winds of Change: Journalism Over Disinformation.”

Before the interview started, Trump posted on Truth Social, whining that he had to attend the event in Chicago, while Harris had opted to attend virtually.

“They told me and Crazy Kamala Harris that you could not do this Event with ZOOM—It is not allowed or acceptable! She declined, and I am getting ready to land in Chicago in order to be there. Now I am told that she is doing the Event on ZOOM,” Trump wrote. “WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?”

Just when J.D. Vance thought his polling numbers couldn’t get worse, they have.

Vance’s net negative favorability rating was a major topic of discussion during a Tuesday night CNN roundtable. According to this week’s ABC News/IPSOS polling, Donald Trump’s running mate is polling at a staggeringly low minus 15 points.

“It’s the worst vice presidential pick of my lifetime,” said CNN’s Harry Enten. Last week, coming out of the Republican National Convention, Vance had a negative six-point favorability rating that has more than doubled this week. According to the Enten, the senator is the first vice presidential candidate to average a net negative favorability rating.

Enten is only 36, so he expanded the range a little bit: He posited that Vance was the worst vice presidential candidate since 1972, when George McGovern chose Thomas Eagleton.

“He got replaced,” Enten noted of Eagleton.

During the CNN segment, former South Carolina state Representative Bakari Sellers called Vance “the Sarah Palin of Dan Quayles.” But as Enten pointed out last week, both former vice presidential picks began with positive favorability ratings: Quayle with 15 points and Palin with 26 points.

“He is historically unpopular, even more so than V.P. nominees who of course went on to infamy,” Enten said of the Ohio Republican.

Vance also won’t be saved by his home state or by the Rust Belt, where last week he polled even worse at minus 16 points, according to a CNN/SSRS poll, with 44 percent of people saying they have an unfavorable view of the senator.

After one of the heads of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down on Tuesday, there was an immediate backlash from the right against Trump campaign staff.

The conservative manifesto has drawn a lot of criticism and attacks from Democrats, with Trump even taking issue with some of its extreme policy items, particularly its restrictions on abortion rights. But several right-wing personalities are directing their aim at Trump advisers for pushing out Dans, concerned that the move is a signal Trump is abandoning the project.

Mike Cernovich specifically targeted Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s campaign managers, in several posts on X (formerly Twitter).

Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief of The Federalist, and Chris Lonsdale, a Missouri state representative, also jumped in to attack Trump staff. 

The gleeful email that LaCivita and Trump’s other campaign manager, Susie Wiles, sent out Tuesday celebrating “Project 2025’s demise” appears to have provoked anger from many on the right. They are refusing to believe reports that Trump himself is annoyed that the project has received so much attention, or that he resents the implication that the project is behind his policies and choosing his presidential staff.

None of this can change the fact that Trump and his campaign have extensive ties to Project 2025. Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance even wrote the foreword to a book by one of its lead architects, Kevin Roberts, who was very happy when Trump chose Vance as his running mate. Meanwhile, all of the infighting over how much influence the project actually has will only make Republicans look weirder.

January 6 defendant David Brian Howard claims that Fox News played a significant role in his radicalization and eventual participation in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Howard was arrested on charges of breaching the Capitol and is set to face sentencing on Friday. According to court documents shared by CBS’s congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, Howard is “seeking mercy at sentencing” by noting that he was influenced by Fox News’s lies about the 2020 election.

The defendant “is/was simply a small-town man who between the years of 2014 and 2020 followed the media and news which much of his small community seemed to follow—Fox News,” the document read. While Howard “bought the lies sold to him and millions of others for many years and especially in the wake of the 2020 election,” the defense noted he has since had a change of heart, and is now “horrified by their ongoing misinformation, influence and affect and veers away from any of that.”

“Mr. Howard had no intention, ever, of engaging in the actions which led to his arrest. He came to Washington, DC, from Dallas (via Miami), on January 6th alone because he was led to believe—from his local media and large swaths of the community around him at home—that his vote for Mr. Trump in 2020 had been stolen; that the election had been stolen.”

Howard’s argument echoes that of critics who have placed some of the blame for the events of January 6 on Fox.

Media journalist Brian Stelter, for example, has argued that the Capitol riot was the culmination of “something that actually built up for months and months,” fed in no small part by the Big Lie narratives peddled by the conservative network. “We know that some rioters bought plane tickets and flew to Washington because of what they were being told on television, because of the lies that were being spread on television. I think it’s an underappreciated part of the story,” Stelter said on MSNBC in January.