Kamala Wins Major Endorsement From Republicans in Key Swing State

Republicans in Arizona who oppose Donald Trump are forming a new task force to reach out to other GOP voters in the swing state who feel alienated by the MAGA movement.

The Republican mayor of Mesa, John Giles, appeared at a press conference Monday to launch a new advisory committee to “engage Trump-skeptical Republican voters,” according to Harris’s campaign.

“I think the time has come for us as Arizona Republicans to admit the obvious, and to start saying the quiet part out loud, which is that our party’s nominee is not qualified for office,” Giles said, joined onstage by other Republicans.

Giles endorsed Harris over Trump last week in an opinion column in The Arizona Republic. “Now more than ever, we need leaders who will put country over party,” Giles wrote.

Former state Republican Representative Robin Shaw also voiced her support for Harris at the event Monday. “It is time to put partisan loyalties aside, and vote for the leadership that will truly represent who we want to be in the eyes of the world. Character matters,” Shaw said.

The event is part of Republicans for Harris, a new program announced Sunday by Harris’s presidential campaign. Similar events are scheduled to take place Monday in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

The rollout of the “campaign within a campaign” seeking to court anti-Trump Republicans also included endorsements from 25 prominent GOP members from across the country, including former governors, lawmakers, and former Trump administration officials.

Former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who is also from Arizona, said she would be backing Harris.

“I might not agree with Vice President Kamala Harris on everything, but I know that she will fight for our freedom, protect our democracy and represent America with honor and dignity on the world stage,” Grisham said in a statement.

Harris’s campaign is hoping to capture moderate Republicans, whom Trump has actively sought to remove from his party. Trump also previously claimed that his party is probably 100 percent MAGA, but that’s obviously not the case.

In a swing state such as Arizona, that difference could prove to be important.

Democrat Ruben Gallego, who is running against MAGA Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate race, released a list of 39 prominent Arizona Republican and independent voters who had pledged to support him. Several included on the list were former aides to the late Senator John McCain, an outspoken Trump critic. Giles also announced his support of Gallego.

“I cannot in good conscience stand on the sidelines while extremists like Kari Lake, who have hijacked our party for the sake of personal gain, undermine the very fabric of what makes America exceptional,” said Giles in a statement released alongside Gallego’s list of endorsements.

A new poll released Monday—seemingly the first large-sample poll of Latinos since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee—found that Harris holds a nearly 14-point lead over Trump among Hispanics in Arizona.

As Kamala Harris continues to out-fundraise Donald Trump by double margins and Trump continues to pay millions in legal fees, the former president has to find some way to line his pockets.

Trump, therefore, is hiking the membership fee of his Mar-a-Lago club to $1 million per person, from a previous rate of $700,000. The application for membership will open October 1, conveniently ahead of the 2024 election.

“Of course, the people who are most interested in this are going to look at it as a really sound investment. Why not pay a million dollars and talk to the president?” Robert Weissman of the nonprofit Public Citizen told The Guardian.

The price gouging was announced last month by Mar-a-Lago’s longtime manager Bernd Lembcke in an interview with Bloomberg. Only four spots are available, “so we are not desperate,” said Lembcke.

The list of 500 Mar-a-Lago members is not public, but at least eight past or present members of  Trump’s clubs were appointed to the Trump administration, USA Today reported in 2019, with some going on to become ambassadors to Romania, South Africa, Dominican Republic, and Hungary, despite some having no relevant experience.

In the interview with Bloomberg, Trump bragged that when he began at Mar-a-Lago, memberships were priced at only $25,000. If that were true, the rate would have increased 3,900 percent since 1985. Talk about inflation!

Representative Byron Donalds thinks that Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity is up for discussion and Donald Trump’s attacks on her race make total sense.

In an interview on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Donalds called criticism of Trump for questioning Harris’s racial identity “a phony controversy.”

“I don’t really care, most people don’t, but if we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was [the Associated Press] that said she was the first Indian American United States senator. It was actually played up a lot,” Donalds said.

Stephanopoulos challenged the congressman.

“And you just repeated the slur again. If it doesn’t matter, why do you all keep questioning her identity? She’s always identified as a Black woman. She is biracial. She has a Jamaican father and Indian mother. She’s always identified as both. Why are you questioning that?” Stephanopoulos replied.

“There are a lot of people who are trying to figure this out, but again, that’s a side issue, not the main issue,” Donalds said, claiming the issue was being widely discussed on social media. Stephanopoulos interrupted and said over Daniels, “You just did it again. Why do you insist on questioning her racial identity?”

Donalds kept coming back to the issue, but Stephanopoulos kept calling him out on it.

“Every single time you repeat the slur,” Stephanopoulos said. “That’s exactly my point.”

Trump and his Republican allies continue to defend questioning Harris’s Black and Indian identities despite the fact that it makes them look bad and isn’t likely to win them any popular support. Even other Republicans think the attacks hurt Trump’s standing. Donalds himself has spearheaded events meant to draw Black support to the Trump campaign, only for them to fail badly. If he keeps defending Trump in this way, not only will Trump’s prospects be hurt, but his will be too.

Despite spending the better part of the last month aggressively distancing his campaign from Project 2025, Donald Trump will likely give a chief architect of the far-right policy blueprint a key role in his administration should he win in November.

Russell Vought “is likely” to be appointed to a high-ranking position in a second Trump administration, the Associated Press reported Monday. Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021, has been working on a 180-day “transition playbook” to expedite Project 2025’s implementation into the federal government.

That position could be as major as managing Trump’s White House, as rumors swirl that Vought is in the running to be Trump’s chief of staff.

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy and has been boosted by key allies, including former advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. The 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto has advanced seemingly outrageous policy positions, including dismantling wholesale staples of the executive branch, such as the Department of Education. It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, a national ban on pornography, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

On July 5, Trump claimed that he “knew nothing about Project 2025” and had “no idea who is behind it.”

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Despite Vought’s apparent opportunities at the top of a possible second Trump administration, the Republican nominee’s message was a clear attempt to obscure the fact that his own super PACs have run ads highlighting Project 2025’s policy goals. And as much as Trump has tried to distance himself from the conservative apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November.

But they may have more on the way: in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

“Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state,” Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, told Axios at the time.

Regardless, senior Trump advisers have warned news outlets against reporting on the connections, repeatedly insisting that Project 2025 has no affiliation or involvement with the Trump campaign, and have instead pointed to Agenda47 as Trump’s official platform. They do not offer an explanation as to why Agenda47 is almost identical to Project 2025.

Usha Vance tried to walk back her husband’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” but couldn’t quite explain away his misogynistic rhetoric.

In a taped interview that aired on Fox & Friends Monday, Vance spun her own toned-down interpretation of J.D. Vance calling Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies” who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” She said that, unlike everyone else, she’d actually paid attention to the “context” of his quote.

“The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning,” said Usha.

“And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things, and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder,” Usha continued.

“And we should be asking ourselves, ‘Why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents?’”

Despite what his wife insisted, Vance’s statement was not just a quip. It was specifically an attack on Democratic leaders without biological children. He even listed them.

“It’s just a basic fact—you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Vance has since claimed that the remark was a “sarcastic comment” that was taken “out of context” by Democrats—but his claim was integral to a tax policy he once proposed that would levy higher taxes on childless adults to “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad.”

He also has a long documented history of disparaging people without children. During a podcast interview in 2020, Vance said childless people, particularly those in positions of leadership, were “more sociopathic” than people with children and were making the U.S. “less mentally stable.”

In response to those who were offended by her husband’s comment, Usha said J.D. would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really was struggling with that.”

“Let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have, and engage with it and understand, for those of us who do have families, for the many of us who want to have families and for whom it’s really hard. What can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it easier to live in 2024?” she said.

Meanwhile, last week, J.D. Vance skipped a Senate vote on a $78 billion tax-cut package, which included expansions to a $2,000 child tax credit that would have benefitted an estimated 16 million children.

Vance also previously voted against the Right to IVF Act in June, which would have protected accessibility and affordability to the service nationwide—and might’ve made the lives of Americans trying to have kids a lot easier.