Trump Gets Worst News About Harris Yet in Shocking New Poll

Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t just caught up to Donald Trump—she’s actually taking some small leads.

According to an NPR analysis of FiveThirtyEight aggregated polling data published Monday, the Democratic presidential nominee has increased her advantage in battleground states. Several states that were previously reported to vote “likely Republican” in the upcoming election—including Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona—are now all considered toss-ups. Other states that were assured to vote Republican, such as Florida, now seem slightly less enthused by the Republican ticket.

Two states that served as tipping points in the 2016 election, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, have transitioned from “toss-up” status to likely Democratic supporters. Harris holds an average lead of about three points in Wisconsin, as well as Michigan, while she has just a one-point lead in Pennsylvania.

Of course, now is not the time to assume that Harris has the election in the bag. The Democrat’s leads are mostly within the poll’s margin of error, and besides that, pre-election polling in the last two cycles has failed to capture the quiet zeitgeist in favor of Trump. As such, Democratic pollsters have warned voters not to get too cozy ahead of November.

“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” president of pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward Chauncey McLean, who rarely talks publicly, told Reuters last week.

Margie Omero, a partner at the Democratic polling firm GBAO Strategies, expressed a similar sentiment to Politico. “It’s still a very tough race, and that feels consistent with everything we know,” Omero said.

Still, former Trump administration officials were quick to celebrate the shifting tide. On Friday, former Trump Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham shared a Trump tweet bragging that a Rasmussen poll had placed him five percentage points ahead of Harris.

“Rasmussen was the only poll he asked about/we told him about because it was always in his favor,” Grisham posted with a laugh emoji. “There could have been 35 polls saying he was losing & all he cared about was Rasmussen. We used it as a way to keep him happy. #TheEmperorHasNoClothes”

Donald Trump once pitched blowing up drugs in Mexico, according to his ex–national security adviser, who detailed the former president’s “outlandish” ideas for defense in a forthcoming book.

In At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster detailed the inner workings of the Trump White House, slamming meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” where Trump made particularly “outlandish” suggestions, according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the book before its release Wednesday. McMaster served in Trump’s White House from February 2017 to April 2018.

When speaking about narcotics in Mexico, Trump once asked, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” according to McMaster. Another time, the former president wondered, “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”

This isn’t the first time Trump has decided bombs could solve all problems. In 2019, Axios reported that Trump had suggested multiple times that security officials use nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the U.S.

McMaster wrote that Trump’s advisers would continue to praise him no matter how bad his ideas were, saying things like, “Your instincts are always right,” and, “No one has ever been treated so badly by the press.”

McMaster also described Steve Bannon as Trump’s “fawning court jester,” who was able to take advantage of “Trump’s anxiety and sense of beleaguerment … with stories, mainly about who was out to get him and what he could do to ‘counterpunch.’”

“I knew that to fulfill my duty, I would have to tell Trump what he didn’t want to hear,” McMaster wrote. He said that one of the issues on which he most regularly disagreed with Trump was Russia, specifically Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which Trump vehemently denied.

“I wished that Trump could separate the issue of Russian election meddling from the legitimacy of his presidency,” McMaster wrote. “He could have said, ‘Yes, they attacked the election. But Russia doesn’t care who wins our elections. What they want to do is pit Americans against one another.’”

McMaster explained that Trump’s “deep sense of aggrievement” prevented him from making this kind of distinction.

McMaster wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin, “a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery,” attempting to create a rift between Trump and those on his staff who sought a tougher stance against Russia. McMaster warned the former president that Putin “was not and would never be Trump’s friend,” but Trump didn’t take the straight talk very well.

A source told CNN that Trump had referred to McMaster’s briefings as gruff and condescending. Politico reported that Trump once interrupted McMaster during a briefing, crying, “Look at this guy, he’s so serious!”

In February 2018, McMaster’s determination to hold Russia to account went too far, and he found himself in hot water with his boss.

McMaster publicly stated that the FBI’s indictment of several Russian intelligence officers for interfering with the 2016 presidential election was “incontrovertible” evidence of Russian tampering—but Trump couldn’t handle anyone questioning the results of the election that had placed him in the White House.

“General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems,” Trump tweeted at the time. “Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

McMaster resigned a few months later and was replaced by John Bolton, who wrote his own scathing rebuke of his former boss. Bolton recently said that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”

While McMaster had skirted away from outright criticisms of his former boss in his previous published works, his post–January 6 account is blistering by comparison.

On January 6, 2021, Trump’s “ego and love of self … drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation,” McMaster wrote.

An extremely gross story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hobby of picking up dead animals resurfaced over the weekend—and this one is even more gag-worthy than the last.

In a 2012 interview with Town & Country, Kick Kennedy spoke about a wild excursion she’d taken with her father when she was six years old.

The two traveled to Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, not far from the Kennedy compound, after hearing that a whale had washed ashore. According to Kick, her father had rushed to the scene with a chainsaw, where he cut off the whale’s head. He then proceeded to tie it to the roof of his family’s minivan and drive it five hours back to Mount Kisco, New York.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told the outlet. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Last month, Kennedy tried to get ahead of a wild story about picking up a bear cub carcass off the side of the road, and then ditching the body in Central Park when he didn’t have time to take it home, and mutilating it to make it look like it had been hit by a biker because he thought it would be funny. After the story broke, Kennedy told a group of reporters that he picked up roadkill his “whole life” and has a “freezer full of it.” That seems more and more true every day.

While it’s not clear that it’s the same vehicle, in a 2023 interview with Kennedy, New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi noted that Kennedy’s “dog car”—a beat up Toyota minivan—smelled so rank she thought that she “might pass out after about 15 seconds riding shotgun.”

Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump on Friday. While he did not formally end his own campaign, he bizarrely “suspended” it, saying that he expected to remain on the ballot in several states to divert votes away from Harris and boost Trump—confirming what his own campaign had previously claimed and then denied: Kennedy’s unserious presidential run was never anything more than an attempted spoiler for the Democratic candidate.

A one-on-one interview with Meet the Press has done absolutely nothing for J.D. Vance’s likability problem.

NBC’s Kristen Welker sat down with Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick on Sunday, but questions Vance could have used to clear the air with voters were instead used as opportunities to double down on how weird and alienating the fairly unpopular candidate is.

Vance—who has famously likened abortion to murder—insisted that the “childless cat lady” comment he made about Democratic leadership in 2021 was intended to be about wanting to give women more “choices.” Still, he doesn’t regret it.

“You’re calling it a sarcastic comment, and yet some women, and you got the feedback in real time, felt like it was a gut punch to them personally. Do you regret making that comment?” asked Welker.

“Look, I regret, certainly, that a lot of people took it the wrong way, and I certainly regret that the DNC and Kamala Harris lied about it—” Vance started, before Welker interjected to clarify if he regretted saying it.

“Look, Kristen, I’m going to say things from time to time that people disagree with,” Vance said. “I’m a real person. I’m going to make jokes, I’m going to say things sarcastically. And I think it’s important that we focus on the policy.”

“I think it’s most important to actually be the person I actually am,” Vance continued, later commenting that he believed that making the abrasively misogynistic remark was in line with him being a “normal human being.”

“I have a lot of regrets, Kristen, but making a joke three years ago was not in the Top 10 on the list,” Vance added.

In another portion of the interview, Vance seemingly had no response to a question about why Trump is undermining the integrity of the 2024 election before it has even occurred.

“Why is Donald Trump casting doubt on the election before it’s even happened?” Welker asked.

“I don’t think that’s what Donald Trump is doing,” Vance said.

“That’s what he’s doing,” Welker said.

“I think that what he’s saying is that we want to pursue a set of policies in the Republican Party that make it easier for every legal ballot to be cast and counted, but make it harder for illegally cast ballots to be counted,” Vance continued, arguing for reforming election laws by way of the judicial system. “Now, we can disagree about how many of those there are, whether there are a few hundred, a few thousand, maybe more.”

“Do you have faith that the 2024 election will be free and fair?” asked Welker.

“I do, Kristen,” Vance said. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair. And we’re going to do everything that we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure, again, legal ballots get counted. But I feel very good about where we are. I think we’re going to win this race, and I think we’re going to win it in a very good election.”

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, despite what Vance and Trump continue to insist. Vance has also previously stated, including during the current campaign, that it’s up to the candidates to win the support of voters, as opposed to bringing doubt and suspicion to the process in which ballots are counted.

Donald Trump has accidentally invented yet another new word: “powerfulnnz.”

During an early Sunday morning posting spree on Truth Social, Trump wanted to congratulate border agents while slamming Kamala Harris, but his (short) fingers got tripped up.

“These are great patriots who work their hearts out to have a Strong and Powerfulnnz Border, only to be harassed by Border Czar Kamala Harris, who wants the,” Trump wrote, before giving up mid-sentence.

Though he ultimately deleted the post, the digital footprint remains.

The blunder may remind Americans of the infamous “covfefe” typo in 2017, when Trump typed, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” then abruptly stopped.