Georgia’s Republican Governor Shuts Down Trump’s Hurricane Conspiracy

In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s destruction, Donald Trump is eager to spread rumors about President Joe Biden’s inaction. The problem is, at least one Republican politician on the front lines is willing to call Trump out on his lies.

On Monday, Trump visited Georgia, one of the six states seriously hit by the natural disaster, and claimed that while Governor Brian Kemp was “doing a very good job,” he was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone.”

“I guess they’re not being responsive, the federal government is not being responsive,” he continued. “They’re having a very hard time getting the president on the phone. He won’t get on it.” While it’s true that the federal response to the hurricane leaves much to be desired, Trump was stretching the truth when he said that Kemp hadn’t heard from Biden.

Just a few hours earlier on Monday, Kemp told press that Biden called yesterday afternoon and asked the Georgia governor what further support his state needed. Biden last week also declared a state of emergency in Georgia, approving federal disaster assistance for the state.

As Trump tours Georgia and North Carolina, Republicans continue to slam Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for not showing face in disaster zones. But perhaps while roads remain closed and many remain without power, it’s a better use of resources for the federal government to provide actual disaster relief, rather than divert resources for a tour bus. At least, that’s what many residents in Georgia thought about Trump’s publicity stunt Monday.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s lawyer is trying to get his federal bribery allegations dismissed by arguing that even if the mayor did accept gifts and favors from one Turkish official for years, it didn’t constitute bribery because it happened before Adams was elected mayor.

Alex Spiro, Adams’s attorney with a long list of celebrity clients, argued in a filing Monday that the bribery charge against Adams should be dismissed. He argued that the alleged scheme did not satisfy the definition of bribery because Adams’s agreement to receive free and discounted travel and accommodations from a senior Turkish official was not quid pro quo in exchange for an official act.

Rather, Spiro argued that Adams’s indictment simply alleged that he had “agreed to generally assist with the ‘operation’ or ‘regulation’ of a Turkish consulate building in Manhattan, where he had no authority whatsoever, in exchange for travel benefits.”

Spiro cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in Snyder v. United States in June, which found that it is not illegal under federal anti-bribery law for state and local officials to accept gratuities for acts they have already taken. This decision, which overturned the conviction of a former Indiana mayor, substantially weakened the government’s ability to pursue federal anti-bribery complaints and challenge corruption.

According to the indictment, Adams had been receiving benefits in the form of travel perks and straw-man donations long before the Turkish official allegedly tried to cash in on them. But Spiro argued that because one favor did not directly result in another, Adams’s alleged behavior does not constitute bribery, as the government accused in the indictment.

During a press conference Monday, Spiro tried to downplay the allegations against Adams, while seeming to confirm that the mayor had in fact received travel perks, as alleged.

“In the events in question, Mayor Adams was the Brooklyn borough president. He was not the mayor, he wasn’t even the mayor-elect, and the position of Brooklyn borough president does not have vast powers,” Spiro said. “It has, frankly, very little.”

Spiro made no mention of allegations that those very same Turkish officials, who had allegedly given Adams so many freebies, had helped to illegally fund his ascendancy to a higher office.

Adams, who was once lauded as the future of the Democratic Party, has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals. He was also charged with one count of wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and one count of bribery.

Hurricane Helene has devastated much of the American Southeast, and yet Donald Trump thinks it’s a good time to push a new conspiracy theory against Democrats.

The former president posted a long message on Truth Social Monday that he was headed to Georgia “to pay my respects and bring lots of relief material, including fuel, equipment, water, and other things, to the State.”

But he added an unproven accusation to the end of that message, claiming that he received reports of “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of [North Carolina], going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”

Trump didn’t elaborate on where these “reports” were coming from, which don’t seem to have any factual basis. Much of North Carolina votes Republican, so it would be near impossible for any relief efforts to occur that would neglect conservatives. Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor since 2017, has deployed the National Guard and undertaken statewide efforts to help those affected by the hurricane, which has hit his state hardest, killing nearly 50 people and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power.

President Biden has pledged “every available resource, as fast as possible, to your communities, to rescue, recover, and to begin rebuilding,” and even plans to visit communities affected by the hurricane later this week. On Sunday, Biden approved disaster declarations for both Florida and North Carolina, which allows immediate access to emergency funds for recovery efforts.

Trump is clearly attempting to play politics with a natural disaster in a state where Kamala Harris is polling neck and neck with him. It’s a disturbing and familiar move for the former president, who, while in office, sought to withhold federal help from areas where people didn’t support him.

As president, Trump deliberately downplayed the damage from wildfires in Oregon and California, and said he didn’t want “another single dollar going to [Puerto Rico],” even as the U.S. territory struggled to recover from Hurricane Maria. Perhaps he doesn’t think the public remembers how he handled those disasters and thinks projecting his old actions onto Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democrats is a winning strategy. In any case, it does nothing to help people trying to recover from Hurricane Helene.

After spending nine years on the campaign trail and four years in the Oval Office, Donald Trump still doesn’t seem to have a comprehensive health care plan for the American people—at least, that’s according to some of the Republican presidential nominee’s own allies.

Speaking with Fox Business on Monday, Republican Representative Greg Murphy claimed that attacks by the Democrats on the MAGA leader’s health care plans were futile, almost entirely because Trump and his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, don’t actually have a “full, fleshed-out plan.”

“The Harris campaign has just released this new report, it came out this morning, they’re calling it ‘The Trump-Vance Concept of Healthcare: A plan to rip away coverage from people with preexisting conditions and raise costs for millions,’” said guest host Cheryl Casone. “We’re now starting to have that conversation about health care, which is still a main issue for voters across this country. What do you make of the campaign doing this?”

“Well, Kamala and her crew, it’s absolute nonsense. There’s not a full, fleshed-out plan by the president or J.D. Vance, and for them to come out with a book of fiction, they’re just a bunch of damn liars,” Murphy retorted.

“We’re going to have to go through—what’s happened since Obamacare has come out, care is infinitely more access—expensive, it’s less accessible, and it’s been an absolute disaster,” he continued, calling for tighter regulation of the medical industry. “The only people who have benefited are insurance companies.”

Obamacare—also known as the Affordable Care Act—provided more than 20 million Americans with health care coverage. For impact reference, that’s millions more people than live in any state other than New York, Florida, Texas, or California.

As Hurricane Helene made landfall, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was busy watching football with Donald Trump.

Greene traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to join the former president at the Alabama-Georgia college football game.

And the worst person you know has unfortunately made a good point.

“Instead of being in Georgia to help the people of her state, MTG blew them off and decided to go to the football game in Alabama yesterday instead,” wrote Loomer on X Sunday morning. “It speaks volumes to her lack of focus as a Congresswoman and it really shows she is more interested in fan fare as opposed to helping people in her state.”

The two women have been feuding publicly since Greene and other Republicans warned Trump last month to distance himself from Loomer, whom they see as an unhinged conspiracy theorist and a liability to the party. After Greene called out Loomer’s recent racist comments about Vice President Kamala Harris, as Loomer attended a September 11 commemoration event with Trump, Loomer called the Georgia representative “extremely jealous and vindictive,” among other insults.

Hurricane Helene has left at least 25 Georgians dead and millions without essential utilities. At least 102 people have died across six states, and hundreds are missing as towns as roads remain closed and many homes remain without power.

Meanwhile, Republicans are taking the opportunity to slam President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for not yet visiting impacted states, which are in the midst of disaster response. Biden has already said he will visit areas devastated by the hurricane this week as long as it doesn’t disrupt rescue and recovery operations. Trump will visit North Carolina later this week and Georgia on Monday, without Greene by his side.

At an Erie, Pennsylvania, rally Sunday, Donald Trump let slip how he really feels about workers, telling his crowd of well-wishers how much he hated paying overtime at his companies.

“I know a lot about overtime. I hated to give overtime, I hated it. I’d get other people—I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay,” Trump said, basically admitting to wage theft and hiring scabs.

Kamala Harris’s campaign immediately attacked Trump’s statement, with a spokesperson telling The Daily Beast that “Donald Trump is finally owning up to it: He’s built an entire career on screwing over workers. It’s exactly what he did in the White House—trying to rip away tips and overtime pay for millions of workers–and exactly what he plans to do in a second term.”

Indeed, Trump’s statement exposes the truth behind the GOP effort to woo working-class voters. The former president’s running mate, J.D. Vance, along with fellow Senator Marco Rubio and others, have long made token statements supporting workers and unions. But, as with Trump, it doesn’t take much to reveal these statements as hollow.

Conservatives actively work against unions and organizing, voting against pro-labor bills in Congress, with Republican-led states seeking to undermine organized labor with so-called “right-to-work” bills. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien caused a stir by speaking at the Republican National Convention over the summer, only for his speech to be met with crickets from the audience when he criticized corporations and championed union rights. 

The Trump campaign, along with Republicans in recent years, has made inroads with working-class voters, even polling well with them. But as The New Republic’s Timothy Noah points out, every time the Republican Party regains control of the House of Representatives, it changes the Education and Labor Committee’s name to the “Education and the Workforce” Committee, going out of its way to dissociate itself from organized labor.

Republicans, including the ones who feign support for workers like Vance and Rubio, also oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would ease restrictions on forming a union, strengthen protections for labor unions, and eliminate right-to-work laws. Trump was anti-union long before his Saturday speech, going back to before his time as president. Democrats and those who support workers’ rights need to sound the alarm to prevent Trump and the GOP from making the lives of working people much, much worse.

North Carolina may struggle to send out mail-in ballots following the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Helene and chaos wrought by former presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. 

The United States Postal Service announced Sunday that operations at more than two dozen facilities across North Carolina had been suspended due to the effects of Hurricane Helene. The Category 4 storm has caused widespread flooding, killing more than 100 people across several Southern states. 

North Carolina’s early voting had previously been delayed by Kennedy’s efforts to have his name removed from the ballot, after more than one million ballots had already been printed. 

Although Kennedy’s request was denied at first, the state Supreme Court ultimately ordered that the ballots be reprinted, delaying the beginning of early voting by two weeks, costing the state thousands of dollars, and shortening the legally required voting period.  

Kennedy has plainly stated that he intends to get his name off the ballot in states where its presence would detract from Donald Trump—such as North Carolina, a key battleground state. 

As a result of Kennedy’s plot to see Trump elected president, military ballots for the state were sent out on September 20, and roughly 190,000 absentee ballots were mailed out on September 24. Now it’s unclear when these ballots will arrive with voters.

Hurricane Helene demonstrates the existential threat of a changing climate to a democratically held election. This catastrophic storm could have other effects on election administration by potentially destroying voters’ ballots, displacing poll workers, and damaging voting sites.

North Carolina’s voter ID law does contain an exemption for victims of a natural disaster within 100 days of an election who cannot produce identification. 

Last week, the North Carolina state Board of Elections announced that it had removed 747,274 names from its voter rolls since 2023, mostly people who had moved from one county to another and people who had not voted in the last two federal elections, according to WECT. 

Donald Trump is continuing to hitch himself to Project 2025’s policy proposals, even after he spent months working to publicly disavow the Christian nationalist manifesto.

During a campaign stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, the Republican presidential nominee reiterated a key talking point of the 920-page executive branch blueprint: dismantling the Department of Education. But this time, Trump offered the radical policy shift with a candid dismissal, asking the crowd, “What the hell do you have to lose?”

“You know I’m gonna take the Department of Education, close it in Washington, let the states run their own education,” he said. “Very important. Because we spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world by far, and yet we’re ranked at the bottom of every list.”

Neither of those points are true. A 2023 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that while the U.S. did spend 38 percent more per student than the average of other member countries, it still ranked behind Luxembourg, Norway, Austria, and the Republic of Korea for its per-pupil spending. And America’s education system doesn’t rank last, either—instead, it ranks twenty-second out of 41 countries, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Index.

“So, you know the expression? What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump added, shortly before blaming the current state of America’s education system on incoming migrants.

Last week, Trump shared his vision for the country’s education system without the massive federal agency guiding it. According to him, some states will “do very good,” while others will, admittedly, be “terrible.”

“We’re going to have 35 like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump told 5,000 people in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”

Project 2025 has advanced seemingly outrageous policy positions, including dismantling wholesale staples of the executive branch such as the Department of Education. It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

In July, Trump claimed that he “knew nothing about Project 2025” and had “no idea who is behind it.”

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

After a judge ordered that Alex Jones’s media company, including his infamous InfoWars, be sold for parts, the conservative conspiracy theorist begged his followers to buy the assets so he could continue the show.

However, in doing so, Jones invited his enemies to do just the same.

According to reporting by Semafor, multiple left-leaning media companies and nonprofit organizations are interested in courting benefactors to help them acquire Jones’s website, social media, and equipment. One of those groups is media watchdog group Media Matters for America, which said they’d explore bidding on InfoWars.

“We are diligently considering this acquisition,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of MMFA in an email to Semafor. “As we saw with the Tucker tapes, the archives could contain unbroadcasted material that ends up having real news value—not schadenfreude—but actually useful information.”

A handful of other left-leaning media companies have shown similar interest in courting donors to aid in an acquisition, including the Texas-based digital publication The Barbed Wire. Earlier this week, Brian Krassenstein also said he would submit a bid. “Once I win it, I will call it MissInfoWars and rehire Alex Jones, but make him dress up as ‘Alexa Jones’ and tell fairy tales,” he wrote on X earlier this week. When asked about his plan to buy the site, Krassenstein told Semafor it was a joke and out of his budget but added, “Maybe we will get lucky.”

Jones must sell his assets to pay off the nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional distress judgments owed to families affected by the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, after he called victims and their parents “crisis actors.”

Much of InfoWars will go up for sale November 13, with the remaining assets being sold in December so both Jones and his enemies have time to get organized for the auction. In the meantime, Jones might have luck continuing to bug billionaire and friend Elon Musk to help him out.

Donald Trump tried to blame Joe Biden for the small crowd size at one of his rallies this weekend.

A Trump rally in Wisconsin on Saturday was moved to an indoor location at the last minute, after the Secret Service said it could not properly staff an outdoor event, given that many of its agents were in New York providing security to dignitaries at the U.N. General Assembly.

Trump provided his own spin on the proceedings during a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday. The Republican nominee claimed that plans for a large rally the day before had been scrapped because the Biden administration “would not let us have the people” necessary to guard the event.

The former president claimed he’d been prevented from holding an outdoor rally in front of the 50,000 people who allegedly showed up, and instead had to settle for a smaller 1,000-person rally inside. So 49,000 people had just gone home, then? (The average size of a Trump rally is 5,600 people.)

“But we had 50,000 people that showed up, but they didn’t want me to be outside. They said they couldn’t get us enough people because they were guarding the United Nations, and Iran, the president of Iran is here,” Trump said, as the crowd booed.

During the presidential debate earlier this month, Kamala Harris urged viewers to attend a Trump rally and see for themselves that Trump’s crowds were smaller and attendees often left early due to “exhaustion and boredom.”

This line of attack seemed to get under Trump’s skin, to the point that he’s now trying to explain away the phenomenon. Trump claimed that people don’t “ever leave” his events, and that when they do, he finishes his speeches quickly. Many of Trump’s speeches, regardless of how late they start, can stretch on for upward of an hour.

Even in Erie, however, rallygoers standing behind Trump could be seen leaving the event early.