Idiot Trump Just Landed Himself Another Legal Battle

Donald Trump just lost the ability to use yet another song from a musician who wants nothing to do with his divisive, hateful rallies.

The family of Isaac Hayes announced a sprawling lawsuit on Sunday, slamming the Republican presidential nominee for 134 counts of copyright infringement related to repeatedly using Hayes’s song “Hold On I’m Coming” at numerous campaign rallies between 2022 and 2024.

“We demand the cessation of use, removal of all related videos, a public disclaimer, and payment of $3 million in licensing fees by August 16, 2024,” announced Hayes’s son, Isaac Hayes III, on social media. “Failure to comply will result in further legal action.”

Isaac Hayes III explained Saturday on social media that his family had repeatedly asked Trump, his team, and the RNC not to use the song, but their requests went unheeded.

“Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric,” Hayes wrote on X.

The family has issued a cease and desist against further use of the song and has demanded that Trump, his campaign, and the RNC “remove all videos featuring the song and” issue a statement affirming that they never received authorization to play the song. The suit also demands that Trump issue a check for $3 million in licensing fees, according to legal documents shared by the estate.

“The normal fee for these infringements will be 10 times as much if we litigate, starting at $150,000 per use,” the documents read, describing the $3 million price tag as “very discounted.”

Trump has until Friday to respond to the notice before the family says it will “proceed with litigation.”

But that wasn’t the only musical loss for the Trump campaign over the weekend. On Sunday, Celine Dion’s team clarified on Instagram that it did not approve of or endorse Trump’s use of Dion’s song “My Heart Will Go On” at a rally in Montana.

“… And really, THAT song?” they added.

Hayes and Dion join a long list of artists who have yanked their rights away from Trump, including Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, the Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, the Village People, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Donald Trump has taken his size insecurity to the next level, falsely accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to make a crowd appear bigger in photos and videos.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Michigan on Wednesday, where they were reportedly greeted by a crowd of 15,000 people. Only, Trump and his cronies are pushing the conspiracy theory that it never even happened.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday night.

Trump wrote his thoughts above a screenshotted post from conservative commentator Chuck Callesto, a font of misinformation whose faux–breaking news posts are regularly seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

Trump claimed that Harris had been outed by an airport maintenance worker and that the rumor had been “confirmed by the reflection” in the finish of the plane, which did not appear to show the crowd.

“She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING—And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box,” Trump wrote.

Trump argued that Harris should be “disqualified” for election interference, over the use of the image. “Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING,” Trump wrote.

Like many of Trump’s accusations, this conspiracy theory is actually an admission.

Ever since he lied about the crowd size at his inauguration, Trump has continued to establish himself as an unreliable source for numbers of any kind. In May, his campaign pushed the false claim that his rally in the Bronx had attracted a crowd of 25,000 people, while in reality it was more like 1,000.

One thing is for certain: Trump cares a lot about appearances. Apparently, he even has a weird habit of waving at no one as he boards his plane.

The Republican presidential nominee’s sensitivity to Harris’s groundswell of popularity comes just as his running mate, J.D. Vance, trailed Harris and Walz across the country, attracting meager crowds just miles away from Harris’s massive gatherings.

Trump’s ravings were easily answered by actual journalists and photographers who had covered the event, whose reporting revealed a sizable crowd inside a packed airplane hangar, with many rallygoers spilling out onto the tarmac.

Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley specializing in digital forensics, said he analyzed the image for evidence of A.I. generation. “While the lack of evidence of manipulation is not evidence the image is real. We find no evidence that this image is AI-generated or digitally altered,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Harris’s campaign hit back at Trump on Sunday night, claiming that the image was genuine. “1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” the Harris campaign wrote in a post on X. “2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week.… Low energy?”

Renowned white supremacist and Charlottesville protester Nick Fuentes personally attacked J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha, last month for her Indian heritage, claiming that the Republican vice presidential pick “clearly doesn’t value his racial identity” and is unlikely to be a “defender of white identity” due to his wife’s ethnicity.

But even that isn’t enough for Vance to take a stand against the racist rhetoric.

In a sitdown interview with ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, Vance continued to defend a dinner between Donald Trump, Fuentes, and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, falsely insisting that Trump had “issued plenty of condemnations” on Fuentes while agreeing that the Hitler-loving livestreamer’s comments about his wife amounted to “racist garbage.”

After ABC’s Jonathan Karl pushed back, Vance claimed that Trump “doesn’t know anything about” Fuentes and “frankly, doesn’t care.” (Trump had shared clips from Fuentes’s internet show before the dinner took place.)

Instead, what matters to Vance is how Trump personally treats his wife—not the fact that the Republican presidential nominee entertains political rhetoric that makes the country significantly less safe for people of color.

“The one thing I like about Donald Trump is he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views,” Vance said. “Donald Trump has spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful, and jokes around with her a little bit.

“I’m not at all worried about Donald Trump,” Vance continued. “I’m worried sometimes about these ridiculous attacks. This is what you sign up for when you come into politics. I wish people would keep it focused on me. They’re gonna say what they’re gonna say. My wife’s tough enough to handle it, and that’s a good thing.”

The interview came just two days after Fuentes shockingly revoked his support for Trump, announcing on social media that he and his allies were declaring a “groyper war” against the Trump campaign over the belief that the candidate was headed toward a “catastrophic loss.”

Fuentes’s renunciation hits the Trump campaign at the same time as a slip in support from white men, according to recent polls, despite Trump’s attempts to pander to them this election cycle.

After being absent for nearly a year, Donald Trump returned to X (formerly Twitter) early Monday morning, posting a new campaign ad shortly before 3 a.m. E.T.

The post and campaign ad used a question taken from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign for president, when he asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Trump’s post makes this point by also claiming, “Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We’re a nation in decline.”

Trump was banned from Twitter more than three years ago following the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Shortly after acquiring the microblogging service, Elon Musk reinstated Trump to the platform in November 2022. But Trump refrained from posting to the platform, except for posting his Georgia mug shot in 2023 after being indicted on election interference charges. Commentators have speculated that he was either deliberately focusing on his own social network, Truth Social, or he has some legal requirement to post on his own social network.

So why has he posted on X after so long? Perhaps he’s desperate after plummeting in the polls thanks to the surging Kamala Harris campaign. He’s lost a lot of ground in the last month after President Biden withdrew from the race and after Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate has done him few, if any, favors, inviting attacks from Democrats calling Republicans weird.

Trump’s time on Twitter, from the start of his 2016 presidential campaign through his four years as president, was marked by belligerence, schoolyard insults against his opponents, and incitement of violence. From Trump’s standpoint, his four years as president were probably the peak of his political career, so maybe he’s desperately trying to bring the old magic to revive his flagging fortunes and make himself feel better. Maybe Musk asked him to post again in advance of his interview with the egotistical tech mogul Monday night. Or maybe he’s returning to X because his own social network is losing a lot of money.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is trying to draw the support of Arab and Muslim American voters with a Palestinian American running mate.

NBC News reports that Stein has been looking for a vice presidential candidate to take advantage of the frustrations from Muslim and Arab Americans over Democratic Party support for Israel in its brutal war on Gaza. 

Since the start of the war in October, President Biden has given unequivocal support to Israel, costing the Democratic Party support from Muslim and Arab Americans, who not only are a key part of its base but also make up a large number of voters in Michigan, a battleground state. Calls for a cease-fire have not brought one about, and the war has stretched for 10 months and caused a massive humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Stein has spoken with three prominent Arab Americans as potential candidates: Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American comedian and activist; and Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, who, at age 34, is constitutionally ineligible to be vice president. 

Zahr, who lives in Dearborn, said that he was initially open to voting for Vice President Kamala Harris but lost enthusiasm after she “disrespectfully” shut down protesters who interrupted her at a Detroit campaign rally, and after an aide said that she would not support an arms embargo against Israel.

“She could have said, ‘I hear you, we’re going to address this, and if you want it to get better, elect me instead of Donald Trump,’” Zahr told NBC. “But instead she suggested we want to help get Trump elected … as if we owe her something and she doesn’t owe us.”

Zahr is one individual, but there are likely many other Muslim and Arab Americans who were dismayed by Harris’s response to the protesters and who would like to see a change in U.S. policy toward Israel, including an end to weapons shipments. If Stein makes a big overture by putting an Arab or Palestinian American on her ticket, it could draw away enough voters to tip the balance in Michigan.

Plus, it’s not just Muslims and Arab Americans who care about Palestine: Young Americans of all backgrounds have seen the destruction and violence and want things to change. Can Harris convince them that she will end the war and change policy, or will a third-party candidate like Stein get their votes?