Panicking Trump Is Sure to Freak Out Over Harris’s Speech Ratings

The election is still almost three months off, but Vice President Kamala Harris bested Donald Trump in at least one race that’s sure to eat away at the former reality TV star: the ratings game.

Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention captured the attention of 15 million people Thursday night, approximately 20 percent more than the 12.3 million who tuned into the last night of the Republican National Convention to hear Trump accept his party’s nomination.

Several top swing state markets also favored Harris. More viewers tuned in to the vice president’s speech in Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Philadelphia, the last of which saw a 50 percentage point increase over people who watched the last night of the RNC, according to the president of insights and analytics for Fox Entertainment, Mike Mulvihill.

“WEST PALM BEACH was the top market for Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech with a 20.2 rating,” Mulvihill wrote in a separate post. “West Palm was also the top market for Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last month (19.9).”

It is possible, though, that the entirety of the Republican National Convention got more viewers than its liberal alternative.

“All week the DNC has had big leads in the overnights and the margins have narrowed in the final nationals,” Mulvihill said. “The 17% gap for last night’s full show is close enough that you can’t rule out the possibility of the RNC having the bigger national audience.”

In a bizarre exit-not-exit speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Friday that he is not terminating his campaign but simply “suspending” it, and expects to remain on the ballot in several states.

The independent candidate was expected to officially announce his withdrawal from the race and endorse Republican nominee Donald Trump during a press conference, but he threw everyone a curveball by opting to remain in the race.

“In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many issues,” Kennedy said of Trump, recalling a series of calls and meetings that the two had following the attempted assassination on Trump’s life.

The news of the endorsement broke shortly before Kennedy appeared for the delayed presser, revealing itself by way of a Pennsylvania court filing caught by the Associated Press.

“In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” Kennedy said, citing his family’s political dynasty. “I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our [government.]”

The 70-year-old spent the majority of his exit speech lamenting the current state of the Democratic Party and its decision to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris, all while reiterating falsehoods and talking points touted by Trump via his Truth Social feed.

Kennedy explained he intends to withdraw his name from the ballot of battleground states, but remain on the ballot in other states in an effort to divert votes away from Harris and boost Trump.

“Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, primarily. And these are the principles that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” Kennedy said, citing free speech, the Ukraine war, and the “war on our children.”

It remains to be seen exactly how Kennedy’s supporters will be distributed between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Kennedy had retained less than three percent of the vote as of Friday, according to aggregated polling data from The Hill.

The Kennedy family issued a statement against the independent candidate before the presser ended.

“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride,” the letter, signed by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy, and Rory Kennedy, read. “We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Kennedy’s endorsement of the Republican nominee may not come as a surprise to those who remember that the pair held a controversial phone call in July in which the former president floated the idea that Kennedy—a notorious vaccine skeptic—could lead the Health and Human Services Department should Trump win in November. (That call was, fascinatingly, leaked by Kennedy’s own son, Bobby Kennedy III.)

Kennedy’s pick for vice president, Nicole Shanahan, who also happened to be one of his primary investors, announced shortly after Kennedy’s speech ended that she approved of the decision.

“You sparked a movement that millions of Americans had been longing for,” Shanahan posted on X. “It has been one of my greatest honors to run this race with you. It has been awe-inspiring to witness the fearlessness you showed in the face of censorship, blatant lies about your character, and even threats against your life. Save our children, Bobby.”

Shanahan’s approval is a dramatic shift from her stance just the day before. On Thursday, Shanahan, also an outspoken anti-vaccine conspiracist, took to the Adam Carolla Show to share that the outbound independent presidential candidate was wavering on his endorsement of Trump.

“The hesitation we have right now in joining forces with Trump is that he has not apologized or publicly come out and said, ‘Operation Warp Speed was my fault,’” Shanahan said, referring to the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. “There was a lot that happened under Donald Trump’s watch that should not have happened and cannot happen again.”

“And if we are going to put our bet with him—and we haven’t, we have not confirmed anything—but we need absolute assurance,” she added.

This story has been updated.

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.”