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.