J.D. Vance’s 2020 Black Lives Matter Lie Shows the Threat He Really Is

Following the 2020 George Floyd uprising, J.D. Vance peddled an unhinged conspiracy about Black Lives Matter: Amazon funded the protests to burn down its competition.

On Thursday, the Christian Science Monitor reported that in 2021, Vance attended a conference hosted by right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, where he claimed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos funded Black Lives Matter to encourage private property destruction during the protests of summer 2020.

“Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” he declared.

Vance pushed a conspiracy about “woke capital” and called Bezos “one of the largest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

“Woke capital is when companies and businesses are more invested in a movement like BLM than they are in traditional American principles,” said Vance, pushing the far-right’s favorite diversity, equity, and inclusion conspiracy. “If you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefiting financially from it.”

Amazon did donate $10 million to a range of social justice organizations about two months after the murder of Floyd, but categorizing the megacompany as “one of the largest funders” of the racial justice movement is pure disinformation.

In the speech, Vance also categorized companies supporting abortion rights as corporations being “so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children.”

When asked for comment by the Christian Science Monitor, Vance didn’t back away from the conspiracy. “Jeff Bezos’s companies promoted and donated to Black Lives Matter as BLM protestors destroyed countless brick and mortar businesses across the country—the very businesses that Amazon counts as direct competitors,” a Vance spokesman wrote. “Woke billionaires like Bezos have taken over corporations across the country and turned them against the American people. Senator Vance is absolutely right to call them out and will continue to do so.”

Donald Trump’s latest hire is proof that the former president is hoping to get the band that first got him to the White House back together.

The Trump campaign has hired Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s campaign manager ahead of the 2016 presidential election, to advise its senior leadership team. Lewandowski will reportedly serve above Trump’s co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, amid swirling rumors that the two have become the most vulnerable members of Trump’s team.

Lewandowski was viewed as a fierce defender of Trump’s unorthodox approach to campaigning, according to The New York Times. When Trump was urged to soften his message to appeal to moderates, Lewandowski adopted the motto “Let Trump Be Trump.”

This nonstrategy stands in stark contrast to the current state of the race, in which Trump’s allies have begun urging him to stop making personal attacks against his opponent and stay on message. As such, Lewandowski’s hiring could signal Trump pushing back on his team’s attempts to get him to focus on policy rather than his typical grandstanding.

Lewandowski’s reputation precedes him. In March 2016, Lewandowski was arrested for intentionally grabbing and bruising the arm of a female reporter. He was charged with misdemeanor battery.

The charges were ultimately dropped because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. Trump defended him, telling reporters at the time, “I think it’s a very, very sad day in this country when a man could be destroyed over something like that.”

Trump, whose catchphrase is literally “You’re fired,” claimed that he couldn’t just “discard people.” Lewandowski was fired from the campaign three months later.

While the split was “amicable,” Lewandowski had been subject to several unfavorable headlines and reportedly had a contentious relationship with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. Trump later expressed regret about firing his campaign manager.

After the election, Lewandowski went on to lead the pro-Trump Make America Great Again super PAC, but he was ousted from that organization in 2021 after he was accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward a Trump donor. Lewandowski has remained an informal Trump adviser.

Lewandowski also co-wrote a book about working on Trump’s campaign, predictably titled Let Trump Be Trump. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard described the book as “repetitive, sycophantic, and self-serving.” It simultaneously painted Lewandowski as the true architect of the Trump campaign’s success in 2016 while remaining effusively complimentary of the wrathful, tantrum-having candidate at its center.

LaCivita and Wiles also announced that Alex Pfeiffer and Alex Bruesewitz, top officials at the MAGA Inc. super PAC, would be joining the Trump team. Earlier this week, the Trump campaign announced that it had hired that super PAC’s leader, Taylor Budowich, who is also a former Trump aide.

The campaign has also brought aboard Tim Murtaugh, who was the communications director on Trump’s failed 2020 reelection campaign.

Donald Trump’s campaign advisers may be getting worried.

As the campaign has struggled to land any sort of attack against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, criticism has come inside and outside the campaign from dissatisfied conservatives, and advisers are being forced to downplay dissension within the ranks.

“As President Trump said, he thinks Ms Wiles and Mr LaCivita are doing a phenomenal job and any rumors to the contrary are false and not rooted in reality,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement to The Guardian regarding the status of campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who have recently become the subject of a far-right campaign to have Trump fire them.

“This campaign is focused on winning, and anyone not focused on electing President Trump and defeating Kamala Harris is doing nothing but hurting every American. Detractors and lobbyists are waging a destructive battle of rumor and innuendo, and they are well known and will be remembered,” the statement added.

But that’s not likely to quiet detractors, especially with the news Thursday that Corey Lewandowski, a Trump 2016 campaign veteran, will be rejoining the campaign at a level above LaCivita and Wiles. Earlier this month, Trump and his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump met with Kellyanne Conway, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser and later campaign manager, to discuss strategy.

That meeting didn’t go over well inside the current Trump campaign, with advisers seeing Conway as intruding on the campaign and possibly even wishing to take over, according to The Guardian’s sources. While Trump played down the meeting and called out Conway’s Ukraine lobbying and 2023 idea for a 15-week abortion ban, there are still nervous vibes within the campaign.

In 2016, Trump made late changes to his campaign staff and won the election, but in 2020, he did the same and lost. Right now, the former president and convicted felon is having trouble staying on message, worrying Republican lawmakers. He’s also obsessed with recruiting poll watchers and observers, which could hurt the GOP ground game. Will Trump overcome these issues by the time November rolls around?

A key author of Project 2025 was caught in a secret recording bragging about how close he is to Donald Trump and admitting his love of “Christian nation-ism.”

Russell Vought, who is reportedly in line for chief of staff in a second Trump administration, said that his group, the Center for Renewing America, is leading the charge drafting executive orders and policy memos to help Trump immediately take action upon entering the Oval Office. He was caught on camera by two undercover British journalists from the nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting, which published the secret recording on Thursday.

Vought revealed his group plans to create “shadow” agencies to implement its draconian vision to solidify the “Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

“We’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” said Vought.

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” he said. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

The investigative reporters secretly recorded their nearly two-hour conversation with Vought, who served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee and recently helped to rewrite the official GOP platform. Vought, former Office of Management and Budget director under Trump, said he has personally been in talks with the former president over recent months and even received a personal “assignment.”

“He’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it,” Vought continued, saying that Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”

Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, is one of the many right-wing groups that are a part of Project 2025; Vought authored the chapter discussing the executive office of the president in the 900-page master plan. Trump has been trying to deny the influence of Project 2025 on his campaign.

“President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the campaign, told CNN in response to the latest report.

But Vought wasn’t bothered. “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious, distancing himself from a brand,” he said in the secretly recorded interview. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

Donald Trump is looking for one more get-out-of-jail free card, but the last-ditch effort is unlikely to work this time.

The convicted felon asked New York Justice Juan Merchan one more time on Wednesday to delay his New York hush-money criminal sentencing until after the November election. The historic event—which marks the first criminal sentencing of a former U.S. president—is currently scheduled for September 18.

In a pre-motion letter to the judge, Trump’s legal team suggested that delaying the sentencing would mitigate the “appearances of impropriety.” The letter pointed to Merchan’s daughter’s prior work for Democratic candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, and her business partner’s contributions to the Harris-Walz campaign, notably those made by Michael Nellis, the founder of Authentic Campaigns.

“Sentencing is currently scheduled to occur after the commencement of early voting in the Presidential election,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote. “By adjourning the sentencing until after that election—which is of paramount importance to the entire Nation, including tens of millions of people who do not share the views of Authentic, its executives, and its clients—the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings.”

“There is no basis for continuing to rush,” he added.

Merchan seems the least likely of Trump’s trial judges to offer him any favors, especially after enduring Trump’s endless mud-slinging throughout the grueling, seven-week trial. Trump’s attacks were primarily aimed at a gag order on the former president, which prevented him from targeting witnesses, jurors, courtroom staff, and their family in his venomous statements to the press—but did not prevent him from hurling vitriol at Merchan.

Trump repeatedly falsely claimed Merchan was violating his First Amendment right to free speech, but despite the constant heat, Merchan never broke. Appellate lawyers described Merchan’s behavior throughout the trial as “flawless” and have predicted that the attacks wouldn’t play well for Trump’s numerous appeals.

But if their background weren’t enough of an indication of how Wednesday’s request will proceed, another recent filing by Merchan might shed some light. The day before Trump filed his latest plea, Merchan plainly rejected an even bolder petition calling for his recusal from the wrapped New York case.

“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” Merchan wrote in his ruling posted Wednesday, noting that Trump’s arguments were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims.”