Trump and Vance, Tanking in Polls, Pick a Fight With Andy Beshear

J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are attacking Andy Beshear over comments the Kentucky governor made on MSNBC Tuesday morning.

“I mean, think about what some people have had to go through because of these laws,” Beshear told Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe regarding Republican states’ laws against abortion.

“J.D. Vance calls pregnancy resulting from rape ‘inconvenient.’ Inconvenience is traffic. Make him go through this,” Beshear added.

The Trump-Vance campaign seized on the words and took them out of context, claiming that Beshear actually called for Vance’s family members to be raped. Vance’s spokesperson William Martin called for Kamala Harris to “immediately repudiate” Beshear’s comments.

The Republican vice presidential nominee chimed in himself, calling Beshear a “disgusting person.”

It’s pretty clear that the Trump campaign is deliberately misinterpreting Beshear’s words, looking to make an issue when in reality, Beshear was accusing Vance of downplaying pregnancies resulting from rape. Recent polls have shown that while the Harris-Walz campaign is surging, Trump and Vance are going in the opposite direction.

Vance could be attacking Beshear as a way to distract from his own views on abortion. Last week, he said that “normal” women don’t care about their reproductive rights, and, long before that, he said some weirder things about procreation and women who don’t have children. In any case, Vance and Trump have struggled to land any effective attack or criticism against Harris or her running mate, Tim Walz, so expect to see them try to manufacture more controversies as the election draws nearer.

He may not be in office, but Donald Trump has been speaking with the powers that be about Israel’s war on Gaza—but it’s not in an effort to end the genocide.

Instead, Trump has allegedly been talking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avert a cease-fire deal, fearing that doing so could help Vice President Kamala Harris win in November, according to PBS.

“The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the Prime Minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign,” said PBS’s Judy Woodruff Monday night. “So, I don’t know where—who knows whether that will come about or not, but I have to think that the Harris campaign would like for President Biden to do what presidents do, and that’s to work on that one.”

Woodruff clarified on Wednesday that the anecdote was not based on her original reporting, but rather on an an Axios story last week that cited two U.S. sources as claiming that Trump and Netanyahu had spoken on the phone about cease-fire and Gaza hostage talks. Netanyahu’s office and Trump both separately denied the report.

“I did encourage him to get this over with. You want to get it over with fast. Have victory, get your victory, and get it over with. It has to stop, the killing has to stop,” Trump said at a New Jersey press conference on Thursday, referring to their meeting at Mar-a-Lago last month. But he also criticized cease-fire demands.

During Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, the president promised that his administration is working around the clock to bring “humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” “peace and security to the Middle East,” and to deliver a “cease-fire” and an end to the war.

The president also nodded to the more than 3,500 protesters who took to the streets of Chicago on Monday, demanding an immediate cease-fire to the war, claiming that the demonstrators “have a point.”* The war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians since it began 10 months ago.

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who escaped the besieged country in December, reported on Monday that the humanitarian area in south Gaza is little more than 14 square miles.

“Crammed in it are more than 1.8 million people, with no water, no electricity, no food, no clinics or pharmacies, and no shelters,” he wrote, lamenting in a separate post that he cannot “understand how this government continues to fund the genocide but cannot put an end to it” and “force the aggressors to stop dropping bombs.”

* This piece has been updated to clarify the number of protesters at the DNC.

This piece has been updated with Woodruff’s statement on Wednesday.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign is sinking fast. Federal Election Commission filings indicated that the fringe political candidate spent more than he brought into the campaign in July, with more than half of his donations coming out of the pocket of his running mate Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.

But shortly after the dire news broke, Shanahan revealed precisely why the conspiracy theorist has remained on the ballot so long, despite his abysmal polling.

“I’ve got to keep focusing on what matters the most outside of party lines. I need to focus on a vision that goes beyond November,” Shanahan told Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory podcast, adding that there are “benefits” to staying in the race, including official party recognition if their campaign secures more than five percent of the vote. That could translate into a stronger third party in the next election cycle, thanks to public funds that could provide up to $13.5 million dollars to the fledgling political group.

“That means that we could position for a real third-party election in 2028, where we don’t have to go around and spend tens of millions of dollars on ballot access, which means that we can spend all of that time and money campaigning,” Shanahan said.

But there’s an entirely different outlook for the Kennedy campaign should they decide to pull out—and, according to Shanahan, it would all be for the benefit of one candidate.

“There’s two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump,” she said. “Or, we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump.”

That latter option would require explaining to all of Kennedy’s supporters why the alternative political pairing have, after all their efforts, ultimately bent the knee to the two-party system. And while that wouldn’t pave the way for more political representation for everyday Americans, it could translate into administration positions for Kennedy and Shanahan. In fact, Trump already floated the idea in July, pitching that Kennedy—a notorious vaccine skeptic—could lead the Health and Human Services Department should the Republican nominee win in November.

“Not an easy decision,” Shanahan said.

Conservatives are freaking out about Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter after she … did nothing but exist.

As Harris’s husband and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff watched on at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, his children Cole and Ella Emhoff stood by his side. Ella, a 25-year-old fashion designer, rocked the Harris-Walz camo hat, campaign swag that was so popular it sold out in just 30 minutes.

As the family shared a proud moment, Republicans zeroed in on Harris and Emhoff’s daughter and began critiquing her looks, her body language, and her love for her dad.

“Totally not weird,” wrote Charlie Kirk, who was already having a rough time at the DNC.

“Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter looks like she is ready to assassinate a former President tonight,” wrote a conservative Twitch streamer, seemingly referring to the shooter who targeted Trump last month.

“This is how Kamala Harris’s step daughter Ella Emhoff dressed to see her step mother during one of the most important moments of her career at the DNC,” wrote right-wing media personality Oli London. (London perhaps shouldn’t talk about looks when he made a name for himself by engaging in extreme ethnic plastic surgery procedures.)

Others went so far as to try to “trans-vestigate” Ella Emhoff and accuse her of being a man.

“This is Kamala’s family. Beyond parody,” the account End Wokeness posted, sharing a normal video of Emhoff speaking with his two children. Again, it’s unclear what exactly is supposed to be weird here.

According to conservatives, when Trump gets touchy with his daughter, it’s normal. But when a daughter hugs her dad in an important moment in their life, it’s strange beyond belief. Totally makes sense!

An online collective of neo-Nazis is using Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast as a recruitment tool, according to an exclusive report published by The Guardian Tuesday.

The Terrorgram collective is a network of neo-Nazis and fascists that produces and disseminates right-wing propaganda using Telegram, encouraging acts of far-right terror and sanctifying those who commit them. 

The collective runs three main Telegram channels that mix mainstream news coverage with far-right content. The mainstream content gives the channels an air of legitimacy as administrators urge users to join group chats where more violent, extreme ideas are pushed, according to a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

The group has reportedly taken over a channel that is linked to Steve Bannon’s podcast, and markets itself as the “official home of the War Room Posse.” In a corresponding group chat, the channel’s administrator claimed that Bannon himself was involved in running the channel, according to ISD. The administrator has garnered more than 63,000 subscribers, only a few hundred short of the official War Room channel, and the channel’s contents have been shared by white nationalist Charlie Kirk to his nearly 170,000 followers. 

The Terrorgram collective disseminates its extremist propaganda to radicalize users and encourage racially charged violence. Nineteen-year-old Juraj Krajčík, who opened fire on people outside a popular LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, killing two people and injuring a third, had published a lengthy creed thanking the Terrorgram for “building the future of the White revolution, one publication at a time.” The U.K. government declared the collective a terrorist group in April.  

The collective is clearly hoping to tap into Bannon’s audience, pulling the already far-right MAGA movement even further into extremism, and Bannon’s platform represents one ripe for a neo-Nazi takeover. 

Bannon, who remains an influential voice on the alt-right, once admitted that he admired Donald Trump because Trump reminded him of Adolf Hitler. Bannon, who worked as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a strategist in Trump’s White House, was the mastermind behind creating the MAGA movement, which he reportedly hoped would rule the United States for hundreds of years. He was ultimately ousted from Trump’s administration after Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Bannon is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for refusing to testify to Congress for his role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign is in financial trouble.

The campaign is spending more money than it is bringing in, according to Federal Election Commission filings. It has $3.9 million in cash on hand, but is nearly $3.5 million in debt. In July, the campaign spent over $7 million while raising only $5.6 million, almost half of which came from RFK Jr.’s running mate Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.

The campaign’s spending remained high despite a cutback on events, according to Politico. Kennedy has not appeared at any public events since the beginning of July, instead sporadically showing up on podcasts and at conferences. Much of the campaign’s funds have gone towards ballot access, Facebook and Google ads, and a security firm run by a longtime associate.

Even with the help of a partnership with the Libertarian Party, the campaign’s fundraising, despite a slight uptick, hasn’t kept up with spending. The fact that Kennedy seems to be relying on Shanahan’s money more than outside donations suggests that he’s not bringing in a lot of new fans, either.

Kennedy seems to be aware of his diminishing fortunes. Last month, the independent candidate spoke with Donald Trump about getting a White House job in exchange for dropping out of the race and endorsing the convicted felon. Kennedy also reached out to the Kamala Harris campaign with a similar proposition, only to be rebuffed, probably because he might actually help her by staying in the race.

RFK Jr.’s campaign was in trouble even before President Biden stepped aside, with Kennedy failing to qualify for the first presidential debate. There were also a series of damaging revelations, from reports of a worm in his brain to the news that he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park to allegations of sexual assault. With diminished polling, all of this begs the question of what the point of Kennedy’s campaign actually is.

Several Republicans are slated to speak at the Democratic National Convention this week, as Democrats attempt to unify forces against a potential second Trump presidency. But on Tuesday, Democrats announced that they had secured one of Donald Trump’s former communications directors, and she’s expected to make a splash with an endorsement of Trump’s political rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham will join the liberal party’s long list of speakers, reported NBC News.

“I never thought I’d be speaking at a Democratic convention. But, after seeing firsthand who Donald Trump really is, and the threat he poses to our country, I feel very strongly about speaking out,” Grisham told NBC. “While I don’t agree with Vice President Harris on everything, I am proud to be supporting her because I know she will defend our freedoms and represent our nation with honesty and integrity.”

Grisham had served as Melania Trump’s chief of staff and press secretary before briefly joining Trump’s administration in 2019. She was the first member of Trump’s team to resign after the January 6 riot on the U.S. Capitol and has since been an outspoken critic of the former president.

“Jan. 6, of course, was my breaking point,” Grisham told NBC News’s Meet the Press in October 2021.

Last week, Grisham made waves when she wholly dismissed the Trump campaign’s new strategy of mini-rallies and hyper-focused press events in an effort to rein in the bloviating populist’s affinity for rambling, ad hominem attacks on Harris, which don’t seem to be doing him any favors with voters.

“I imagine he will do some of them, and maybe for a week he’ll, you know, attempt to stay on message,” Grisham told CNN. “It depends on how tough his staff is being with him, but he will get bored. He doesn’t like those small events; he never has. And he will be demanding to do a large rally sooner rather than later.”

“They want him to be a fake version of himself,” she added. “Donald Trump is a bombastic narcissist, and he loves attention.”

In a wild right-wing technologist update of Thelma and Louise, it seems that both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have officially driven their respective social media companies off of a cliff. But hey, at least they’re going down together?

Trump’s Truth Social stock appears to be in serious jeopardy, according to a new report from Forbes published Saturday. Next month, Trump—who owns well over 50 percent of the company—and other shareholders will finally be able to sell their shares of the volatile stock, but that puts the stock at risk of collapse.

Earlier this month, Truth Social’s stock value plummeted following Trump’s apparent “return” to X, formerly Twitter. It was so bad that even a booming stock market couldn’t save it. This coincided with a poor second quarter earnings report that found the company lost more than $16 million, and raised just $836,900, down 30 percent from $1.2 million a year earlier. That was still far better than the previous quarterly report, which found that the company lost $327.6 million, and only raised $770,500 in revenue.

Truth Social stock has become particularly risky, because its volatility gives it a high chance of heavy selling as soon as it becomes unlocked in September, according to Forbes. This would only worsen if the board allowed Trump to sell his stocks early, capturing the current price instead of whatever they might drop to on the downward trajectory.

As for Elon Musk’s X, not even Trump returning could give it a much-needed boost. The platform’s billionaire technocrat owner has pulled the social media site into historically bad territory, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk acquired X in October 2022 for $44 billion, borrowing $13 billion from several banks, including Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America. Those banks have found themselves unable to quickly offload Musk’s debt to other investors, leaving it stuck on their balance sheets, or “hung” in industry terms, straining their loan books and, in one case, even curbing their compensation.

Apparently, Musk’s X loans have been on the books for so long, they’ve outlived every unsold deal since the 2008 financial crisis, according to data from Pitchbook LCD. While there were more hung deals during the crisis, banks were able to sell or write off their hung debt within 12 months after issuing the loan. Not only is X the longest lasting hung deal since 2008, it’s also reportedly one of the biggest.

While the banks have been able to collect a hefty interest, it’s unclear how Musk will ever repay the principal if X continues on its current trajectory. Last year, X reported that its value had plummeted by more than half, to around $19 billion. When the banks formulated a plan to restructure the loan, X didn’t follow through, according to the Journal.

Unfortunately for Musk, X has been unable to fully capitalize on its recent uptick in user engagement, because Musk went out of his way to make an enemy of all advertisers everywhere, suing a group of advertisers who didn’t want to use his platform filled with blatantly pro-Nazi content.

As Musk’s adversarial streak has continued, officials at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, another bank that shelled out money for the acquisition, downgraded the bank’s internal credit rating on his loan, meaning they don’t think it’s likely they’ll get paid back anytime soon.

A spokesman for the bank told the Journal, “MUFG has had several constructive conversations with Mr. Musk and his leadership team. We anticipate reaching a positive outcome regarding repayment.”

While Musk isn’t in the business of robbing banks, he’s getting pretty close to the outlaw life of Thelma and Louise. One thing has become clear: When Trump and Musk started out on their right-wing social media experiments, they thought they were really goin’ somewhere. But this is it. They’re just going.

Several major lawmakers, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to President Joe Biden, made mention of the atrocities in Gaza during the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday. But among the crowd and behind the scenes, efforts to cover up mention of the genocide were still underway.

During Biden’s speech, a Jewish delegation unfurled a large sign revealing the text “Stop Arming Israel.” The effort was quickly stopped by nearby attendees, who blocked the sign with “We [Heart] Joe” sticks while another attendee in a row above the protesters attempted to snatch the banner away.

Another attendee, two rows away from the protesters, used one of the pro-Biden signs to repeatedly hit a woman wearing a hijab on the head.

“It matters to me so much because I’m a Jew,” Liano Sharon, one of the protesters holding the antiwar sign, told Al Jazeera after being escorted away from the arena. “And I was always brought up to believe that ‘never again’ means never again for anyone, anywhere, ever, period. And that’s not what’s happening right now.”

“What’s happening right now is that we are continuing to fund and support an ongoing genocide, the mass murder of children, and it needs to stop,” Sharon added.

The response is ironic considering that, earlier in the day, the DNC hosted its first panel on Palestinian rights. The war in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.

Far-right activists allied with Donald Trump attempted to attend the Democratic National Convention in an attempt to troll liberals. But instead, they found themselves brutally rebuffed at every turn, broadcasting their own humiliation. 

White nationalist Charlie Kirk showed up at the DNC on Monday. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, is working in tandem with Trump’s campaign, which has outsourced some of its canvassing work to the advocacy arm of the conservative youth organization, Turning Point Action. 

Kirk seemed to have a tough time making friends at the event. Parker Short, president of the Young Democrats of Georgia, immediately approached Kirk, going in on the far-right influencer.

“We have a Republican governor and Republican secretary of state in Georgia that approved our elections, and Donald Trump said that wasn’t constitutional. Donald Trump tried to undermine our Constitution,” Short said, pointing aggressively at Kirk.

“Dude, you’re at a 10. I just walked in. I’m here to just learn,” Kirk said.

“You’re an anti-patriotic, anti-constitutional person crashing our party because you tried to stop our democracy,” Short replied. “Donald Trump called the secretary of state of Georgia and told him to ‘find him some votes.’”

“So let me ask you one question. I just have one question for you,” Kirk said, interrupting him. “What is a woman?”

“Oh my God,” Short replied, starting to walk off. “That is so fucking weird, y’all. Maybe you should meet one!” 

“I’m married to one,” Kirk said after him.

“Same!” Short shouted over his shoulder. 

Kirk posted the video to his own X account, a decision that astounded many online, who thought it was brutally humiliating for the misogynistic right-winger. 

Later, when Kirk tried to approach Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer, he was brutally snubbed.

Kirk wasn’t the only right-wing influencer to attend the Democratic event. Far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who started the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, was also in Chicago on Monday. Posobiec co-wrote the books Unhumans, a violent book that decries all progressives as secret communists and all secret communists as sub-human. If that seems extreme, know that J.D. Vance seems to agree with him—he even helped to promote the book. 

Posobiec attempted to troll protesters and DNC attendees, interviewing them undercover for his show Human Events, which was being broadcast on the far-right network Real America’s Voice. Unfortunately for him, he ran into Amanda Moore, a journalist who spent 11 months undercover with the alt-right. 

“I just want to check,” Posobiec said, approaching Moore and another person. “Are you upset because you couldn’t get into the abortion van on time?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Moore replied. 

“Because I understand they said they ran out of pills, they ran out of vasectomies,” Posobiec said. “Are you so upset because you couldn’t get into the abortion van on time that it’s causing you mental distress and anguish?”  

“I don’t understand why would I need [to get] into the abortion van?” Moore said.

“Oh, because you’re with the guys with the vasectomies, you’re on the vasectomy side of this!” Posobiec said, clearly thinking he had tricked her.

“It’s because I’m not fucking anybody currently. So like, I don’t understand. Do you understand?” Moore said.

“They will cut this if there’s language,” Posobiec said quickly.

“I don’t give a fuck Jack, I’m talking to you,” Moore replied. As the audio of the interview cut in and out, it was clear Moore was taking him to task, as Posobiec hurriedly tried to end the interview. 

“I can, but we can’t, can’t have the language,” Posobiec said. 

“Then walk away, asshole!” Moore shouted.

Posobeic quickly became the troll-ee as opposed to the troller. In another interview clip, inexplicably posted to his show’s account, Posobiec spoke to the person with Moore, an activist who goes by the name Anarchy Princess, who was very plainly messing with him. 

“How many abortions have you had? How many abortions have you had? How many abortions have you had today?” asked Posobiec, ever the deft interviewer. 

“I’m getting paid by George Soros to have an abortion on the stage, with no drugs,” Anarchy Princess replied simply. 

“Which way are you going?” asked Posobiec, another intrepid question.

“What do you mean which way?” she asked. 

“Which type of abortion?” Posobiec responded. 

“What kind of abortions are there, Jack?”

“There’s pills, there’s tools, there’s a number of ways,” Posobiec said, seeming unsure. 

“So, it’s going to be on stage. So, a normal person would think that they would use tools, right? And vacuum it out and do all of that. Like if I took a pill that takes several days, and nothing happens, you won’t see anything. So, you should probably study how female anatomy works,” Anarchy Princess quipped.