Harris Scores Major Win in Crucial State in Clear Sign of Momentum

It’s officially anybody’s game in North Carolina, a key battleground state.

The Tar Heel State is looking at a “toss up” between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, according to the Cook Political Report out Tuesday—a change from its previous “leaning Republican” status.

It’s not clear that Harris is picking up any Trump voters, moreso that she is shoring up support among Democratic and independent voters, gaining 13 points with each group.

Across the board, it seems that North Carolina is slipping further out of the grasp of Republicans. Sabato’s Crystal Ball has also recently updated its rating of North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, from “toss-up” to “leaning Democratic,” signaling a slight shift in the race for Josh Stein over Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, the MAGA acolyte who once proclaimed that “some folks need killing!”

The Trump team has been forced to play defense in North Carolina, which the former president won by an extremely thin margin of 1.34 percent in 2020. Since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Trump has made three campaign stops in North Carolina. Earlier this month, Trump appeared at a messaging event in Asheville, which predictably devolved into his usual word salad and ad hominem attacks against Harris. In Asheboro, Trump repeatedly complained about his team’s desperate attempts to keep him on topic.

Harris debuted her economic agenda at an invite-only rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, and another event was canceled due to inclement weather. That trip was her eighth visit to the state in a year, having visited twice previously as part of Biden’s campaign.

Fox News’s Jesse Watters still has some more chauvinistic insults in the tank for Vice President Kamala Harris.

During a monologue on his show Tuesday night, Watters questioned if voters were willing to “gamble our country away on a frightened woman,” referring to none other than the storied former prosecutor.

“Democrats haven’t decided what Kamala Harris believes in,” Watters said. “They haven’t decided. Is she a Joe Biden Democrat or a Trump Republican? Is she Joe Biden’s vice president or just a former prosecutor? Is she the border czar or not?”

“Kamala Harris pretends to be somebody she’s not and doesn’t know what she wants to do until her campaign tells her,” Watters continued. “When world leaders stood across the poker table from Kamala Harris, they smell fear. They know her tells.”

“Are you gonna gamble our country away on a frightened woman too insecure to tell us who she is?” he probed.

On Monday, Watters disturbed even his fellow The Five co-hosts with his gross remarks. They called him out on-air for saying that Harris would “get paralyzed in the situation room while the generals have their way with her.”

The lurid language ushered an immediate reprimand from Jeanine Pirro and Dana Perino, with Pirro telling the Fox staple to “take it back.” But instead of listening, Watters opted to double down, insisting (with a smirk) during Tuesday afternoon’s episode of The Five that he didn’t mean anything sexual by it.

Yet another rant about childless people has been uncovered from the J.D. Vance vault. This time, an audio recording from 2021 showcases Vance making rude remarks about childless teachers, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

“So many leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they are people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said. “Randi Weingarten, who is the head of the most powerful teacher’s union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child.”

Speaking at a Center for Christian Virtue leadership forum in 2021, Vance went on to add that if Weingarten “wants to brainwash or destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”

For the record, Weingarten does have a family of her own. Her wife is a stepmom of two children, but that hasn’t stopped other conservatives, such as Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, from criticizing the union leader with the same talking point.

Weingarten, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last week and whose union endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, took to X to respond to the rude remarks. “Gross! JD Vance’s comments are sad and insulting to millions of modern families, and school teachers including Catholic nuns, none of whom should be targeted for their family decisions,” she said.

(The AFT has sponsored or co-sponsored TNR events in the recent past.)

Donald Trump was easily taken advantage of by foreign leaders, according to a new book by one of the former president’s ex–national security advisers.

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 administration between February 2017 to April 2018. McMaster has given new insight into just how easy it was for foreign leaders to outwit Trump, who has been desperate to paint himself as a strongman on the international stage.

According to The New York Times, McMaster wrote that he once tried to prepare Trump for a trip to China in November 2017, the “most consequential” stop on the former president’s tour through Asia. McMaster recalled attempting to explain to Trump that Chinese President Xi Jinping would attempt to get Trump to say things that were good for China, but not in the best interest of the U.S. and its allies. McMaster warned Trump to steel himself, and the former president seemed to understand.

When it came time to meet with Xi, however, everything came apart. Trump ended up mindlessly agreeing with Xi that South Korea’s military exercises were “provocative” and a “waste of time.” Trump also suggested that China might have a legitimate claim to the Senkaku Islands, which have been controlled by Japan since 1895.

Dismayed, McMaster wrote a note to Trump’s chief of staff, General John Kelly, bluntly stating that Xi “ate our lunch.”

McMaster also wrote that he’d once been asked by Trump to deliver a fawning message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, scrawled across a New York Post article that reported Putin had slammed the U.S. political system but found Trump notably compliant. “I have no disappointment at all,” Putin reportedly said about Trump.

McMaster refused to pass on the note, later telling a furious Trump that it would “reinforce the narrative that you are somehow in the Kremlin’s pocket.”

McMaster wrote that 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.

And in an interview on CNN earlier this week, McMaster said that Trump forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 members of the Taliban, as part of his negotiations for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

California has not voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988, but Donald Trump believes in a (higher) power that could change that.

During an hour-long interview with Dr. Phil released Tuesday, in which the Republican presidential nominee rehashed his favorite talking points, including denigrating Vice President Kamala Harris as a Marxist, Trump seemingly set the stage to challenge California on voter fraud allegations. He claimed that he could win the Golden State if “Jesus came down” and counted the “honest” votes.

“It shouldn’t be allowed. It’s a whole different mindset,” Trump said, referring to mail-in ballots. “Republicans like to go in there Tuesday and vote. And that’s been for, you know, a long time, many years, decades, decades. It’s a custom almost. It’s a family custom. It’s a beautiful thing.”

But, according to Trump, Democrats “play a different game.”

“You have ballot harvesting, but you also have people getting ballots. In California, you have people getting seven ballots. Democrats,” he said, arguing that he “automatically” lost California because he was a Republican.

“I guarantee if Jesus came down and was the vote counter I would win California, OK?” said Trump. “In other words, if we had an honest vote counter—a really honest vote counter—I’d do great with the Hispanics. Great. At a level that no Republican’s ever done. But if we had an honest vote counter I would win California.”

“I go around California, they have Trump signs all over the place,” he continued. “It’s a very dishonest—everything is mail-in.”