James Comer’s New Harris Probe Is a Desperate Ploy to Save Trump

Representative James Comer has launched a probe into Vice President Kamala Harris’s involvement with work on the U.S. southern border, in a blatant attempt to help out Donald Trump.

Comer, the House Oversight Committee chair, requested that the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol turn over all correspondence with the vice president’s office, despite the fact that CBP has little to do with addressing the root causes of immigration and more to do with the day-to-day processing and vetting of migrants who arrive at the southern border.

In his letter, Comer admitted that “Vice President Harris focused on the purported ‘root causes of irregular migration’ from Central America,” rather than border security. But to Comer, that only seemed to add to Harris’s complicity in the “border crisis.”

“Central to Vice President Harris’s root causes initiative is an effort ‘to provide $4 billion to the region over four years.’ Vice President Harris has traveled to Central America—to Mexico and Guatemala in 2021 and to Honduras in 2022—more than she has traveled to our own southern border,” Comer wrote.

In his letter to CBP, Comer wrote that it was “unclear what actions, if any, Vice President Harris has taken to fix the border crisis,” according to The Hill.

Since the announcement of Harris’s candidacy, Donald Trump, along with other Republicans, have continued to falsely claim that Harris was the “border czar” who failed to stop an influx in illegal immigration. Comer’s newest probe takes these claims and attempts to drag them into Congress, where they can be debated in front of everyone, including voters. Only this approach hasn’t worked out so well for Comer in the past.

He previously attempted a similar gambit by spearheading an investigation into the Biden family—which crumbled, having not produced any evidence of the president, or his family’s, supposed wrongdoings.

In an interview with Fox News’s Trey Gowdy Sunday night, Comer said that Harris had “failed miserably at the border,” claiming that she had essentially invited people to illegally enter the United States.

“And one thing that we’re trying to find out on the Oversight Committee is the cost of this,” Comer said.

Comer claimed that an influx in immigration had a “huge impact” on Medicaid. In general, undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive Medicaid benefits, although in some states, such as New York, benefits are available to citizens over 65 years of age, regardless of immigration status.

Comer also implied that it cost the government a significant amount of money to transport immigrants across the country. Republicans have previously criticized the Biden administration for flying immigrants away from the border after they’ve been let into the country, a criticism that often overlooks the fact that many of these immigrants are children who cannot be legally kept in border detention facilities for more than 72 hours—a law that was also in place during the Trump administration, according to The Washington Post.

Comer complained that these planes sometimes arrived in the middle of the night. Officials have previously stated that the late-night flights were often done to avoid exposing the identities of the children.

Comer also asserted that immigration placed an immense financial burden on public school systems, a claim stoked by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate group, as well as the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025.

While Republicans have attempted to push the narrative that public schools have become overrun with foreign-born children, undocumented children make up a small percentage of the roughly 50 million students who attend K-12 public schools.

Still, Comer insisted he wanted to run the numbers. “So we want to know the cost, and we want to know exactly what Kamala Harris did other than basically send an open invitation to the world to illegally cross our border,” he said.

But for someone who cares so much about border security, Comer was suspiciously quiet in May when Senate Republicans killed a bipartisan border security bill—at Trump’s behest.

Vice presidential picks don’t normally take center stage during an election year. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, that’s not the case with J.D. Vance.

Democratic attacks on Vance are actually sticking, making the Ohio senator an increasingly unpopular candidate. A pair of polls conducted weeks apart by centrist Democratic pollster Blueprint indicate that Vance’s favorability has fallen from -7 to -11, Semafor reported Monday, with a significant number of voters viewing the vice presidential pick exactly as Democrats describe him: “conservative,” “anti-woman,” and “weird.”

“It’s not just the favorables; it’s what people think of it. It’s how he’s been introduced to the country,” Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for Blueprint, told Semafor. “Everything has gone exactly as bad as Democrats had hoped and Republicans have feared and everyone suspects.”

Vance, who famously authored the New York Times–bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has seen a significant decrease of positive labels by voters since he was announced to the Republican ticket. Descriptive options such as “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” have all gone down among survey participants, according to Semafor.

Most participants were aware of Vance’s strange and off-putting remarks, including an instance in which Vance claimed that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, deriding Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.” Approximately 50 percent of respondents said they were aware of Vance’s comments, while 55 percent said they were bothered by it.

Potential voters were also disturbed by a 2021 interview in which Vance defended a Texas abortion law’s lack of exceptions for instances of rape and incest by claiming that the resulting pregnancies were simply “inconvenient.” Roughly 62 percent of survey participants said they were “bothered” by that description, while 50 percent noted that it “bothers me a lot.”

Trump has attempted to brush off the issue by arguing that, historically, a presidential nominee’s pick for number two has “virtually no impact” on the outcome of the race. But Vance may prove to be the exception, argues The New Republic’s Alex Shephard:

As the race tightens—and Harris is leading in several polls—it’s becoming clear that Donald Trump has slowed down considerably over the last four years. He is very old. He struggles to hold his thoughts together, even by his own standards. And he has considerably less energy than he did even a few years ago. He can’t campaign vigorously. Which means he will have to rely on his running mate—whom everyone seems to hate.

J.D. Vance evidently did some cross-dressing back in law school.

On Sunday, a photo of the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee allegedly wearing a blonde wig and dressed as a woman was posted on X.

It didn’t take long before the picture was trending with the hashtag #SofaLoren, a play on words referring to the false rumor that Vance performed a sexual act with a couch. When The Daily Beast reached out to Vance to see if the photo was real, the campaign did not deny its authenticity and also refused to comment further.

The source of the photo is from one of Vance’s classmates at Yale Law School, Travis Whitfield, who said the picture was taken by a different classmate in 2012, when they were all students. Whitfield sent the photo to podcast host Matt Bernstein, who then uploaded it to X.

“It’s from a group chat of Vance’s fellow classmates and is from a friend of a friend,” Whitfield said to The Daily Beast. “I believe it was grabbed from Facebook and was taken at a Halloween party.”

Whitfield posted on X about where the photo came from, offering proof in the form of the photo’s presence on his phone. Whitfield doesn’t appear to be a Vance supporter, saying in a different post that “from all the sources I’ve heard, JD was actually a good guy in law school. Not sure what happened after though…”

While a funny photo of a politician in a Halloween costume from college normally wouldn’t be a big deal, Vance has a history of attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, using the “groomer” slur against critics of “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. He introduced the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act” in the Senate, which promotes misinformation about transgender health care. Vance also stated that he would vote against codifying same-sex marriage and has promoted so-called “parents’ rights” talking points.

Just on Sunday, he falsely claimed that his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, promotes taking children away from parents who don’t consent to gender-affirming care. The fact that neither he nor the campaign has denied the truth of this photo is telling. In any case, expect this photo to make the late-night TV circuit, or at least persist on social media along with his fictional couch tryst.

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?”