Elon Musk’s X Is Helping Trump Lie About Kamala

Elon Musk may have denied reports that he would donate $45 million a month to Donald Trump’s campaign, but his social media platform appears to be helping the Republican presidential nominee in more covert ways.

Two deepfakes of Vice President Kamala Harris racked up hundreds of thousands of views on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, despite the fact that they appear to violate the website’s own terms of service.

One video, which altered footage of Harris and President Joe Biden on Friday during a historic prisoner swap with Russia, falsely depicted the Democratic presidential nominee as fumbling over her words and repeating the same phrases. Trump then shared the phony video on his account on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday with a caption claiming that Harris is “really DUMB” and “unable to speak properly without a teleprompter.”

“She has an extremely Low IQ, and our Country does not need someone who is unable to put two sentences together,” Trump wrote. “She can’t, and besides, we just got finished with that—His name is Sleepy Joe Biden!”

That clip was then recirculated by an account on X, which copies and pastes Trump’s Truth Social posts verbatim, garnering the attention of hundreds of thousands of viewers before X marked the content as manipulated media.

Trump continued to elevate that lie during a rally in Atlanta that evening, insisting that Harris had a “low IQ” and was like “Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”

Another deepfake of Harris gained momentum after Musk himself shared a doctored audio recording of Harris on July 27 in which she appears to say she’s “the ultimate diversity hire” and accuses anyone of not voting for her as “sexist” and “racist.”

“This is amazing,” Musk wrote alongside a laughing emoji, disseminating the fake audio to his 192 million followers with zero additional context.

That clip has since been viewed by more than 132 million X users, and has not yet been tagged as manipulated media, despite the original poster’s comment that the clip is a parody.

Elsewhere on X, the platform’s A.I. chatbot Grok has been spreading false claims about Harris. Grok stated that Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states, which is untrue. But that didn’t stop millions of people from sharing the claim. Five secretaries of state sent Musk a letter on Monday calling on him to “immediately implement changes” to stop Grok from sharing disinformation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in the news again for all of the wrong reasons: It was revealed on Sunday that he left a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park 10 years ago.

The bizarre news has left people confused and shocked, especially since Kennedy himself admitted his involvement with the bear in an interview with comedian and actress Roseanne Barr that he posted online because The New Yorker was about to break the story.

Kennedy posted the interview with Barr on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one” and tagging The New Yorker’s account.

Kennedy said he saw the dead bear on the side of the road while falconing in New York state one day, and had the idea to skin the bear and refrigerate the meat. So he put the bear in his van and continued falconing, before heading out to dinner and realizing that he had a flight to catch.

“And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he said. But then he remembered that he had an old bicycle in his car, and remembered that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York at the time.

“I said, Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike,” Kennedy said.

At the time, the bear story quickly gained national attention, and in a bizarre twist, The New York Times’ 2014 story on the incident was written by Tatiana Schlossberg, a granddaughter of John F. Kennedy who was then interning at the newspaper.

After news that Kennedy was responsible for putting the bear carcass in the park broke, the internet had a field day with jokes and general bewilderment, helped along by a photo The New Yorker had of Kennedy with his fingers in the carcass’s mouth. He even joked to the magazine, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”

In his quixotic presidential campaign, revelations about Kennedy have ranged from his history of womanizing and sexual assault to his once having a worm in his brain. His conspiracy theories and opposition to vaccines have led to him falling out with the environmental movement, where he was once much admired for his activism. This latest piece of news is already prompting incredulity in media coverage and likely seals Kennedy’s fate as a losing weirdo third-party candidate.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posed for a shocking photograph with a dead bear cub he’d picked up on the side of the road in 2014, shortly before dumping its carcass in Central Park.

A photo published in The New Yorker Monday shows Kennedy sitting in the back of a car, with his hand placed in the mouth of a deceased bear cub. The animal is visibly bloodied from its accident, and Kennedy’s face appears contorted with phony anguish at the bite.

When asked about the photograph, Kennedy told The New Yorker, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”

After showing his furry find off to his friends, Kennedy brought the cub’s body to Manhattan, where he proceeded to mutilate it to make it appear like it’d been killed by a cyclist, according to The New Yorker.

Before the story broke Monday, Kennedy posted a video on X, in which he said that he thought the dead bear would be “funny for people” and “amusing for whoever found it or something,” he said, because of a recent spate of bike accidents in New York City.

Kennedy said he’d originally intended to take the bear cub home, skin it, and keep its meat but had run out of time before having to go to the airport.

Kennedy, who is running as an independent candidate for president of the United States of America, was polling at 5.5 percent Monday, according to Project 538.

In a painful twist for his campaign, Donald Trump now appears to be the belligerent old-man candidate that he had made President Joe Biden out to be.

During a packed rally in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, the Republican presidential nominee had several memorable verbal gaffes, including failing to pronounce simple words correctly and at one point completely glitching out after saying Vice President Kamala Harris’s name.

“Together we will stop Kamala Harris’s nation-wreckting—uh, I’ll tell you what, when you see what she’s done to our nation, she’s wrecking our nation,” Trump said. “The radicalism will take back our country from the worst administration in American history.”

At another point, Trump quoted Harris as saying “Let the violent marbs keep going,” claiming that she wanted to fund “the place” before correcting himself as meaning to say “the police.”

“She will not stop, she said she was endorsing defund the place, and, the police, and she said violent marbs, let the violent mobs keep going,” Trump said.

In reality, and outside of Trump’s twisted memory, Harris told The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2020 that the Black Lives Matter protests were “not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”

Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly boasted about having aced a cognitive exam and has since argued they should be mandatory for all officials running for higher office.

In the years since he “aced” the exam, Trump has invariably tweaked the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That’s despite the fact that the test’s authors claim that none of the three versions in circulation actually have a whale in them.

Donald Trump’s own right-wing social media venture, Truth Social, seemingly turned against him as users got #TrumpIsACoward to trend over the weekend.  

The derisive hashtag made rounds on X (formerly Twitter) before it started trending on Truth Social Sunday, Raw Story reported, after Trump said he’d finally agreed to debate Vice President Kamala Harris—only, it wasn’t the September 10 debate hosted by ABC News that the two candidates had previously agreed to at all. 

Rather, Trump suggested a debate on September 4, hosted by Fox News and moderated by hosts Brett Baier and Martha MacCallum. 

While the conservative media company originally said it was “open to discussion” on the terms, in his post, Trump offered another demand: an arena packed with onlookers to watch him perform—a far cry from the previous debate hosted on CNN, which had no audience.

Trump cited ongoing litigation against ABC News and host George Stephanopolous as his new reason for bailing on ABC News’s debate. 

For weeks, Trump has offered different excuses as to why he can’t debate Harris on the same terms he’d agreed to debate Biden.

On Friday, he argued he didn’t need to debate Harris because he was already leading in the polls—a line that turned out not to be true. A week earlier, he’d had a completely different excuse. His team claimed he couldn’t debate a Democratic candidate who wasn’t officially nominated, or even endorsed by former President Barack Obama. Within hours, Harris had secured Obama’s endorsement. 

Since Harris joined the fray as the presumptive Democratic nominee, it seems more than a few of Trump’s fans have begun questioning his judgment and defecting to greener pastures (writing in Ron Paul).

Michael Tyler, the communications director for Harris’s campaign, responded to Trump’s challenge in a statement Saturday to NBC News. 

“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out. He needs to stop playing games and show up to the debate he already committed to on Sept 10,” Tyler said.

“The Vice President will be there one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime time national audience. We’re happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to. Mr. Anytime, anywhere, anyplace should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th.”

Who would have thought that one of Donald Trump’s biggest slogans would end up biting him in the ass.

Apparently not his campaign team, who opted to stamp “You’re Fired” all over a rally’s official signage in an ironic turn of events for the former reality TV star. The signs used at Trump’s downtown Atlanta rally on Saturday read, in their entirety, “Lyin’ Kamala, You’re Fired!”—but the choice to print the first part of the message in a much smaller font failed to translate well over TV screens.

Instead, millions of Americans witnessed the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees speak in front of hundreds of fans wearing shirts and waving signs that appeared to call for their exit.

Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, spent the rally fearmongering on crime and immigration—including claiming that the “suburbs will be overrun with violent crime and savage foreign gangs” if they don’t win in November—while repeatedly attempting to chip away at Vice President Kamala Harris’s momentum. But still failing to craft an actual campaign against the sudden Democratic presidential nominee, Trump and Vance instead lobbed a flurry of half-baked, kindergarten-grade insults at her.

“She happens to be a really low-IQ individual. We don’t need a low-IQ individual,” Trump said of Harris on Saturday. “She’s Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”

In another portion of the rally, Trump lied that Harris wants “people to stop eating red meat” and wants to “get rid of your cows. No more cows.” He also claimed that she doesn’t want “anyone to say Merry Christmas.”

And, in a shocking side point, Trump chose to congratulate his Russian ally, President Vladimir Putin—not President Joe Biden or any of the U.S. diplomats or allies—on the recent prisoner exchange that brought Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich back after a year-long detention, as well as two other American citizens.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is pushing two simultaneous narratives about Vice President Kamala Harris that, if they actually happened to be true, would just cancel each other out.

Harris and President Joe Biden joined families of three Americans who had been imprisoned in Russia at Joint Base Andrew in Maryland late Thursday night. Biden had helped to facilitate the release of the former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.

Despite the remarkable homecoming, MAGA used the occasion to push its own conspiracy theories about Biden and Harris. RNC Research, an account on X run by Trump’s campaign, posted a video of Biden and Harris on the tarmac.

“Kamala watches Biden shuffle aimlessly across the tarmac and nearly trip up the stairs of the plane (from which the passengers had long disembarked),” the account wrote. “This is the obvious decline Kamala covered up in her thirst for power—the scandal of the century.”

There’s a lot of problems with this post, so let’s go through them one by one. The so-called “decline” the post refers to was Biden boarding the plane to thank the pilots, not wandering into an empty plane with Harris left dumbfounded on the tarmac.

In one sentence, Trump’s campaign suggested both that Harris covered up Biden’s aging to keep him in office and simultaneously hoped that she would be given the reins. In terms of fictionalized evil schemes, one can’t both plot to keep the leader in power and also plot to oust him. Complicity or coup? MAGA Republicans need to pick one bedtime story or the other, but there just isn’t enough time for both.

This post is one small window into the Trump campaign’s scrambled efforts to shift their rhetoric around Harris, whom they are now forced to blame for everything they once tried to pin on Biden. Thursday’s prisoner swap presented a particularly sore spot for Trump, who seemed pretty miffed he wasn’t in on the complex negotiations—but lashing out like this is particularly pathetic.

Republican attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris are becoming too much for some of Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Peter Navarro, an economist who worked in the Trump White House, was guest-hosting Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast Friday, since the other former Trump adviser is serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress. Navarro began panicking over Republicans making personal attacks against Harris’s personal life or the way she laughs, telling them to “shut up.” 

“Do we get women when we call Kamala a slut or make fun of her cackle, Ted Cruz?” Navarro asked, picking a fight with the Texas senator. “We do not. Shut up. That gets us nowhere!”

“Women, when they hear that crap, are resentful, particularly of old white men pulling that crap. Shut up,” Navarro, who is himself an old white man who served a four-month sentence in prison for contempt of Congress, added.

Navarro didn’t mention Trump by name, but Trump has been calling Harris “laughing Kamala” and alluding to her personal life in different smears. His mention of “old white men” may also be taking into account Trump’s racial attacks, particularly on Wednesday when the former president spoke at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. While some Republicans have disapproved of those comments, others have defended Trump.

The more Republicans make these attacks, the more it makes them look bad and strengthens Democrats’ effective attacks on GOP weirdness. Even an important figure in the world of MAGA like Navarro can see this backfiring. Still, he didn’t mention Trump by name, and the GOP will continue to follow the lead of the former president and convicted felon. Will Trump take the hint, or put the GOP in a deep hole as November approaches?

Former President Donald Trump’s newest excuse for why he won’t debate Vice President Kamala Harris just doesn’t have the numbers to back it up.

During an interview on Fox Business Friday morning, host Maria Bartiromo asked Trump if he would consider going head-to-head with Harris.

“Well, I want to. And we’re leading in the polls, it seems, by quite a bit, still. She’s better than he is, but ultimately I think she’ll be worse than him,” Trump said, referring to President Joe Biden.

“I mean, right now I say, why should I do a debate?” Trump said. “I’m leading in the polls. And, everybody knows her, everybody knows me.”

Trump doesn’t think he needs to debate Harris because he’s already beating her, but it’s not actually clear that that’s the case. Several national polls released this week found that Harris was polling ahead of Trump.

A poll conducted by RMG Research between July 29 and 31 and published Friday found that Harris was leading by a whopping five points at 47 percent, compared to Trump’s 42 percent. A YouGov/The Economist poll, which surveyed people between July 27 and 30, found that Harris was beating Trump by two points, 46 percent to 44 percent.

A Leger survey published Wednesday, which was conducted between July 26 and 28, found that Harris was beating Trump 49 percent to 46 percent. A Civiqs poll published Wednesday for the Daily Kos found that Harris was ahead by four points, with her sitting at 49 percent to his 45 percent. These are just a few of the polls that have placed Harris ahead of Trump.

Project 538, which aggregates national poll results, including some of those listed above, found that Harris was squarely ahead, polling at 45 percent to Trump’s 43 percent. Over the course of the week, Harris has successfully widened the gap between her and Trump.

This isn’t the first time Trump’s excuse for getting out of a debate has evaporated right in front of him. Trump’s team previously said that they would not schedule any more presidential debates until the Democrats formally nominated their candidate, specifically citing Harris’s lack of support from former President Barack Obama. Within hours, she had secured Obama’s endorsement.

Harris’s campaign released a statement in response to Trump’s newest lame excuse. “Donald Trump needs to man up. He’s got no problem spreading lies and hateful garbage at his rallies or in interviews with right-wing commentators. But he’s apparently too scared to do it sitting across the stage from the Vice President of the United States,” the statement said.

Harris’s campaign has insisted that she will be attending the presidential debate hosted by ABC News, which is scheduled for September 10, regardless of whether her opponent deigns to appear.

“She’ll be waiting there to see if he shows up,” the statement said.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many House Democrats have a favorite to be Kamala Harris’s running mate: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

The Hill reports that several Democrats have been advocating for Walz, who was a member of Congress himself from 2006 until 2019 and was well liked among his fellow Democrats. That includes the former House speaker, who was instrumental in convincing Joe Biden to withdraw from the race and gave a lot of early support to Harris.

One source told The Hill that Pelosi “is always especially fond of former House colleagues” when asked about Harris’s running mate, a nod to Walz.

Other House Democrats echoed the sentiment. “My sentimental favorite is Tim Walz,” said Representative Jim McGovern. “He was a great member of Congress. The people I know in Minnesota tell me he’s a great governor.… But more importantly, he’s a good guy. He’s down to earth, he’s the real deal, there’s nothing phony about him, and he calls ‘em as he sees ‘em, and he tells it like it is, and I appreciate the candor.”

“I want somebody who’s really strongly pro-labor and understands labor, because this is a big part of the working-class agenda and making sure that we win working-class votes,” Representative Pramila Jayapal said. “I really like Governor Walz. I like the things that he’s been able to do. I like that he’s from a rural town; I like that he’s got a military background.”

Walz’s popularity has grown since the vice president entered the race more than two weeks ago. He’s made successful critiques of Republicans like J.D. Vance and held his own against the right wing on Fox News. If Pelosi is in favor of Walz joining Harris’s ticket, that could be a deciding factor and make many Democrats, whether elected or rank-and-file, very happy.