Who’s Afraid of a Hot Microphone? (Trump, Apparently.)

Former President Donald Trump suddenly has a big debate concern: He doesn’t want the microphones to be hot at all times during the upcoming ABC News tilt between he and Vice President Kamala Harris, scheduled for September 10. 

As the presidential campaigns continue to have mini-debates about the debates, here’s a new topic of discussion that has the two camps dissenting: whether mics should be turned on for the entirety of the event, and thus capable of capturing each candidate’s audible reactions throughout the proceedings, or whether they should only be on during each candidate’s appointed time to speak. 

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” the Harris campaign’s senior communications adviser, Brian Fallon, told Politico Playbook on Sunday. 

This is a reversal from the agreement wrought with President Joe Biden’s campaign, who had previously agreed with Trump’s team about the scheduled debates—as well as the muted mics back in June.  

Now, Trump’s campaign is accusing Kamala Harris of trying to change the rules of the debates. “Enough with the games. We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” Jason Miller, senior adviser for Trump, told Playbook Sunday night. “We said no changes to the agreed upon rules.” 

Interestingly, the Trump campaign wanted mics to remain hot throughout the debate back in 2020. Harris’s campaign holds that the microphones should remain on during presidential debates, which is more often the norm, perhaps hoping to highlight Trump’s bad temper and outbursts. 

“Given how shook [Trump] seems by her, he’s very prone to having intemperate outbursts and … I think the campaign would want viewers to hear [that],” said one person familiar with the debate negotiations. 

“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” said Fallon. “We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button.”

Judge Aileen Cannon’s future on Donald Trump’s classified documents case is hanging on by a thread.

On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith will deliver an opening brief to the Eleventh Circuit, initiating an appeal trial to reverse Cannon’s July decision that effectively threw the case out. At the heart of Cannon’s ruling was the conclusion that Smith’s appointment to the special counsel role was unconstitutional, and therefore his work on the case was illegitimate.

“Notably, no other judge to consider the issue has ruled that way, and prosecutions conducted by special counsels have been routine, if infrequent,” wrote former prosecutor Joyce Vance on Sunday in her Substack Civil Disclosure.

The only task before the Eleventh Circuit court will be to determine if Cannon’s ruling was correct or incorrect—after all, the issue at hand is about who can bring the case, not whether the case can be brought at all. It will not touch upon the merits of the special counsel’s case against the former president. Still, Trump’s team will likely try to derail the trial by infusing it with other issues, mainly a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that granted a far-reaching expansion of presidential immunity.

“That issue isn’t properly before the court on this appeal, and the Eleventh Circuit applies very strict rules about only hearing issues that are,” Vance wrote. “We’ll see if that holds up in Trump’s case, as it should.”

“But we’ll likely see the word immunity more than once in Trump’s brief, even though this is only supposed to be the government’s appeal of the Judge’s decision against them, dismissing the case because Judge Cannon believes that the Special Counsel’s appointment was unconstitutional,” she added.

If the government wins the appeal, they will be able to ask the court to assign a new judge to the trial. Though, ultimately, the future of the classified documents trial is contingent on the outcome of the November election. Should Trump lose, the case will move forward regardless of whether or not the government wins the appeal. But should he win, Trump could use his presidential powers to wipe the federal case off the map.

The right wing is trying to bring back birtherism (the dumb kind) for Kamala Harris. Pro-Trump influencer and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer tried to start a conspiracy on X (formerly Twitter, the company whose doors she once handcuffed herself to for reasons beyond understanding) Sunday night, posting immigration documents and accusing Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, of committing immigration fraud.

Loomer claimed that the forms she surfaced show that Harris’s mother failed to account for one of her two children on the documents, an omission Loomer said was tantamount to fraud. Unfortunately for the would-be sleuth, her handle on the paper trail was shoddy; as X’s users quickly documented in a Community Note, Loomer had made an omission of her own: The second page of the form in question showed that it was filed months before her second child, Maya Harris, was born.

Loomer hasn’t acknowledged the correction on X, and has continued to post nonstop since Sunday—promoting Donald Trump and trying to drum up other controversies. This hasn’t stopped others on the social media platform from pointing out her (deliberate?) error.

Loomer has a reputation not only for bigotry, but for trafficking in conspiracy theories that have little, if any, basis in the truth. In July, she accused gun violence survivor and former Representative Gabby Giffords of being “brain dead” and having her husband, Senator Mark Kelly, write social media posts for her. This was easily disproved by Giffords’s campaign appearances on behalf of Harris, as well as her speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, Loomer was banned from the site, only for Musk to reinstate her. The noted Islamophobe is a favorite of Donald Trump Jr., who has recommended her as a possible White House press secretary if his father gets elected in November. But, she also has her enemies on the right, including Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has called her “mentally unstable and a documented liar.”

As Trump and the MAGA movement desperately try to come up with effective attacks against Harris, it seems that conspiracies of old, used against Barack Obama, are getting recycled in the hopes that they’ll hurt her image. So far, they have been easily parried.

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.

Senator Lindsay Graham struggled to justify Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior on Sunday, including the former president’s brutal dismissal of his longtime ally.

During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper confronted Graham with Trump’s dismissive comments about him.

Last week, Graham had told Meet the Press that Trump “the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.” Tapper told Graham that Trump had responded to his urging to focus on policy, and played a clip of the former president speaking about the South Carolina Republican.

“Look, I like Lindsey. I don’t care what he says, okay?” Trump said during a CBS exclusive interview. “Lindsey wouldn’t have been elected if I didn’t endorse him. So you know, South Carolina—Lindsey’s my friend—but if I didn’t endorse, he would’ve had no chance of getting elected.”

Graham chuckled awkwardly when faced with Trump’s harsh dismissal.

“Well, I talked to him a couple of days ago now, and all I can say is that President Trump, when he was president of our country, we had the most secure border in 40 years, gas was at $1.87, Russia wasn’t invading Ukraine, the Arabs were making peace with the Israelis. He’s got a lot to be proud of,” Graham replied, continuing to heap praise on the Republican nominee.

“Me and him are good,” Graham added, attempting to sidestep Trump’s derisive response. “We’re going to be together. I’m going to Georgia with him. We’re going to try to have a unity event in Georgia to bring this whole party together. I will be by his side in this election. I am proud of what he did as our president. I look forward to him coming back.”

Throughout his interview, however, Graham continued to express significant differences of opinion from the candidate he was desperately backing. At one point, Tapper asked Graham, a staunch anti-abortion Republican, to respond to a post on Truth Social where Trump promised his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

“What exactly is Donald Trump going to do to help women’s reproductive rights’” Tapper asked.

Graham couldn’t account for the president’s statement at all. “I don’t know, you need to ask him about that,” Graham replied, insisting that Trump was a “very good pro-life president.”

“He’s gonna leave the abortion issue to the states. He doesn’t believe there is a role for the federal government, my position has always been to be against late-term abortion. It’s a state issue—up to a point,” Graham said. He added that he had a bill that banned abortion after 15 weeks, which is not late-term. That bill was so unpopular, even within his own party, that it never made it to a floor vote.

Trump’s sudden, and baseless, declaration to advocate for women’s health has led to backlash from his anti-abortion supporters, who feel they have been abandoned by the Republican Party platform as it moves further from a federal ban. On Sunday, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said that Trump would veto a national abortion ban.

Tapper also questioned Graham about an upcoming gala to support January 6 rioters, which is set to be held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It’s unclear as of yet whether Trump will actually attend the event.

“Do you think it’s a mistake for him to go, and is it a mistake for this event to be taking place at Bedminster at all?” Tapper asked.

Graham said that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol “should go to jail, they committed a crime.” But he tried to equate Trump’s support for the rioters to Kamala Harris’s efforts to raise bail money for protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the riots over the death of George Floyd.

“So, when it comes to the parties condoning violence, I would say we both should knock it off in that regard,” Graham said.

When pressed on whether Trump should allow the fundraiser, Graham once again couldn’t explain the actions of the candidate he’d come to praise.

“Well, I’ll let him—there are people being held I think that have had their due process rights violated, quite frankly they haven’t been brought to trial yet, I don’t like that very much,” Graham said. “But I’ll leave it up to him, as to what caused his support.”

Donald Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to, once again, escape debating Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a late-night post to Truth Social, Trump questioned why he would participate in the September 10 debate on ABC, which he agreed to earlier this month while announcing his intention to participate in two other debates, as well.

“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s(K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump wrote. “Will panelist Donna Brazil give the questions to the Marxist Candidate like she did for Crooked Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s  best friend, who heads up ABC, do likewise.” 

“Where is Liddle’ George Slopadopolus hanging out now?” he continued. “Will he be involved. They’ve got a lot of questions to answer!!! Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”

CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins said she was unsurprised by the development. Speaking on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday, Collins shared that sources close to Trump had revealed that the former president is “really struggling” with the idea of going up against the former prosecutor.

“I still think it’s an open question, whether or not it happens,” Collins said. “I think Trump is nervous about it. I think Trump—I talk to a lot of sources in his world. I think he has really struggled with it. It’s not just a narrative or a talking point from Democrats. He really has struggled with how to combat her.” 

But actually failing to participate could be visually catastrophic for the supposed strongman candidate.

“I think it’s difficult, if not impossible, for him to pull out because his campaign manager had cards printed that said ‘anywhere, time, any place’ for President Biden,” Collins continued. “And it would look weak. But I don’t think he’s looking forward to it at this point.”

The announcement is the second time in a matter of weeks that Trump has reversed course on debating Harris. Earlier this month, Trump said that he had “terminated” the September 10 ABC News showdown over the fact that the Democratic nominee had changed when he had only agreed to debate “Sleepy Joe Biden.” In its place, Trump offered an alternative debate on Fox News in front of a live crowd, which Harris’s campaign did not sign up to.

But that didn’t go over well with his base. In the following days, Second Amendment activists and white supremacists pulled support from the MAGA nominee, and Truth Social users got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending on the Trumpian platform after the news broke. 

As of the time of publication, “#TrumpIsACoward” is trending on X (formerly Twitter).