Trump’s Cop-Backed Rant Against Kamala Harris May Have Broken Law

During a campaign event with Michigan law enforcement earlier this week, Donald Trump didn’t just refuse to take questions. He may have enabled a crime.

At the event on Tuesday at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in the city of Howell, Trump dodged reporters, told lies about rising crime rates, and fearmongered about a “Kamala crime wave” occurring at levels “nobody has ever seen before.” Livingston officers stood behind him, alongside sheriff’s vehicles and a banner reading, “Michigan is Trump Country.”

As the Detroit Metro Times notes, it is against state law to use public resources to support a candidate for office. The Michigan Bureau of Elections is now reviewing two complaints that allege the sheriff’s office violated the law. In a video posted days before the event, Sheriff Michael Murphy offered this preemptive defense: “Let me make a couple of things clear: One, this is not a political event. This is a press conference.”

But Trump only took one question before leaving the event. Trump “can call it a press conference, but he was clearly advocating for his election as president. That was a campaign event, and what the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department did was illegal,” lawyer Mark Brewer, a former Michigan Democratic Party chair, told the Michigan Advance. “They held it in a public building, which was obviously cleaned up for Trump, and then they staged the vehicles behind him. And then you have uniformed officers there, as well. Those are all public resources.”

The Michigan Campaign Finance Act states that such a crime is punishable by up to 93 days in jail.

Donald Trump is trying to brush off the fact that he shared A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign to his Truth Social account earlier this week, now claiming that he doesn’t know “anything about them.”

“I don’t know anything about them, other than somebody else generated them,” Trump told Fox Business correspondent Gary Trimble after his campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday. “I didn’t generate them.”

One fabricated image shared by Trump of the notoriously litigious pop star had Swift clad in red, white, and blue, posing like Uncle Sam before an American flag emblazoned with the text: “Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump.”

“I accept!” Trump captioned the image.

Another Swift-related post shared by the former president depicted a group of women marching in “Swifties for Trump” shirts (the post was labeled satire by its creator).

If Trump truly can’t tell the difference between an A.I. generated image and a genuine photograph, especially one that’s doctored to illustrate a campaign endorsement, then that’s a significant problem. But it’s far from the only A.I.-generated image that Trump has shared in recent weeks. Shortly after he began posting to his Twitter account—the first time he’d done so in earnest since the January 6 riot—the former president shared an A.I.-generated video of himself and X owner Elon Musk dancing.

Still, Trump warned Trimble, “A.I. is always very dangerous.”

“Somebody came out. They said, ‘Oh look at this,’” Trump attempted to explain to the reporter on Wednesday. “These were all made up by other people. A.I. is always very dangerous in that way.”

It’s not the first time this summer that Trump has obsessed over Swift. During a closed-door meeting between Trump and House Republicans in June—his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection—Trump insisted on discussing the pop phenom, lamenting that she might endorse President Joe Biden while he was still in the race. Days before the meeting, Variety reported that Trump had spoken at length about Swift in a one-on-one interview, describing her as “unusually beautiful.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Stephen Colbert on Thursday that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is driving Donald Trump and J.D. Vance “nuts.”

“I think that Trump and Vance, they think they have some kind of like, monopoly over masculinity,” Ocasio-Cortez said on The Late Show.

The Republican nominees have been freaking out ever since Walz first called them “weird” a few weeks ago, and have responded by desperately attacking the Minnesota governor’s son, wife, military history, and governing record.

“Walz has kinda shown up—he’s a football coach, he was the head of the gay-straight alliance as the football coach,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “And he’s like, ‘Actually, this stuff is weird, and why are you acting like that?’ And I think it’s driving them nuts, because he’s showing another way to be an upright man in America.”

The Colbert crowd roared in approval.

Speaking earlier this week in Pennsylvania, and definitely not at all rattled by these attacks, Trump assured his followers that he is the normal one. Referring to Walz, he said, “This whack job said we are weird, that J.D. and I are weird. I think we are extremely normal people—like you!”

But Trump seems especially keen on deflecting the insult from himself, not Vance. According to The New York Times, a GOP donor at an August 2 fundraiser asked about the “weird” label, to which Trump replied: “Not about me. They’re saying that about J.D.”

Amid a year of legal woes that added up to roughly half a billion dollars, Donald Trump has been leeching cash from an eyebrow-raising source: his campaign.

According to a CNN analysis of federal campaign finance data, Trump and associated political groups have funneled more than $28 million in campaign donations into his businesses since he first ran for office in 2015.

Other Republicans are reportedly also using their campaign budgets on Trump’s businesses in order to earn favor with the conservative populist. Republican candidates and conservative investors, including Bernie Moreno, former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, and Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake, have spent more on Trump’s businesses this year than at any point since 2016, reported CNN. Those expenses added up by way of “Mar-a-Lago fundraisers, stays at Trump’s hotels, and flights on the former president’s private jet,” the outlet reported.

Federal campaigns and PACs spent nearly $3.2 million on Trump properties in the first half of 2024 alone, though 80 percent of that came from Trump’s own campaign funds as well as political groups aligned with the Republican presidential nominee, reported CNN.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, told CNN that “committees are paying the fair market rate for all venues and services” offered by Trump businesses.

But campaign finance experts see the trend as yet another signal that the Republican Party has completely bent the knee to the former reality TV star.

“He’s clearly now in complete control of the Republican Party,” Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, told CNN. “Patronizing his businesses has become one of the accepted ways that candidates and public officials express their loyalty to the party’s leader.”

Donald Trump once referred to cryptocurrencies as a scam, but as of this week, he appears to be all in on the digital coin.

On Thursday, the Republican nominee and his family announced the creation of “The Trump DeFi Project”—short for decentralized finance—to platform cryptocurrencies.

“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote online in a post echoed by his son, Don Jr. “It’s time we take a stand—together.”

Few details are known about the Trump DeFi project, including its official launch date or its purpose, but the “official” Telegram channel of the project, “The DeFiant Ones,” promises updates in the coming days.

Trump has increasingly tried to frame himself as a pro-crypto candidate in this election cycle. At a Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk. But the former president’s recent investments would show that his change of heart on the digital assets isn’t all an act. Financial disclosures released earlier this month show that Trump has $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. He’s also kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.

Trump listed his social media platform, Truth Social, at more than $50 million. Trump owns nearly 65 percent of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which is quickly tanking in value.