Trump Is Already Preparing for J.D. Vance to Lose the V.P. Debate

Donald Trump is already explaining away J.D. Vance’s performance during the vice presidential debate, and it hasn’t even happened yet. 

During an interview on Fox Business Monday, Kellyanne Conway asked Trump whether he would consider doing another debate. 

The former president tried to downplay his outright refusal to go head-to-head with Kamala Harris again, and implied that Vance would face the same treatment Tuesday night. 

“I would love to have two or three more debates, I like it, I enjoy it. But they’re so rigged and so stacked,” Trump said. “You’ll see it tomorrow with J.D., it’ll be stacked.”

Trump has used a similar playbook to undermine the outcomes of his own debates, both before and after they happened. Before the first presidential debate in June, the Republican nominee attacked CNN’s hosts, and then walked back his claims after they didn’t fact-check him on air. 

Before his debate with Harris, he claimed that ABC News would be biased against him. He and his MAGA acolytes continued to insist this was the case after the debate moderators fact-checked him on air for his outlandish lies about babies being aborted after they’re already born and Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Now Trump is claiming the debate will be rigged as a safety net for Vance, who has his own problems with the truth to contend with. CBS News, which is hosting the debate, said that it will be up to the candidates to fact-check each other. 

Conway went on to say that when asked about doing a second debate, Trump “said no, but he didn’t totally say no,” according to The Hill. Crucially, in Trump speak, that was a definite no.

Harris previously accepted CNN’s invitation to  appear in another presidential debate on October 23, but Trump claimed last week that it was “too late” for another debate because early voting had already begun in some states. Before that, Trump had a different excuse, declaring that he wouldn’t seek a rematch because only someone “beaten” would ask for one. Instead, the former president has run scared from a second matchup. 

The vice presidential debate will take place at 9 p.m. at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York.

On Saturday, a 43-foot-tall nude statue of Donald Trump was installed near Interstate 15 just outside of Las Vegas, immediately drawing a backlash from the former president’s supporters.

The foam-and-rebar art installation, weighing about 6,000 pounds, is titled Crooked and Obscene and is expected to travel to other cities, although dates and cities for the tour have not been announced, according to The Wrap.

The artists behind the “anatomically correct” statue, who want to stay anonymous, said in a statement that the former president’s nudity was “intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability, and the public personas of political figures.” But Republicans, as one might expect, are livid.

“While families drive through Las Vegas, they are forced to view this offensive marionette, designed intentionally for shock value rather than meaningful dialogue,” the Nevada Republican Party said in a statement, according to The Telegraph.

Right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong posted on X that Trump, if elected president, “should jail everyone who was a part of this effigy’s creation.”

Fellow right-wing conspiracy theorist Catturd (real name Phillip Buchanan) called the people behind the statue “demons,” piggybacking on yet another right-wing influencer’s post calling the art piece “POLITICAL VIOLENCE.”

While these right-wing figures are freaking out, this isn’t even the first instance where a nude Trump statue has been erected. In 2016, just before the election, five small naked Trump statues went up on street corners in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York City, only to be taken down by local authorities because the artist didn’t secure a permit.

The artists behind this latest art project are pretty tight-lipped, so there’s no word on whether they secured a permit themselves. On a related note, Trump on Sunday told supporters in Wisconsin that if he wasn’t campaigning, “I could’ve been sunbathing on the beach. You have never seen a body so beautiful. Much better than Sleepy Joe.” He probably won’t like this statue, though, and definitely won’t add it to his NFT trading card collection.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is begging the federal government to urgently “send the funds” to help the American Southeast recover in the wake of Hurricane Helene, even though she herself stood in the way of emergency relief funds just last week.

“The storm was supposed to come directly across my district, but when it came through Georgia, it went to the east, and we mainly just got a lot of rain,” Greene told Real America’s Voice’s Terrance Bates. “When we go back to Washington, we will be working hard to make sure that states like Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina get the funding that they need.”

Greene was one of 82 Republicans who voted last week against a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. If she had been successful, the government would have been in shutdown mode from Tuesday onward, preventing any region from receiving the critical assistance.

“We’ve already signed a letter,” Greene told Bates. “We sent that letter to Joe Biden requesting relief that Brian Kemp, our governor, has already requested. So our entire delegation in Georgia has signed onto that letter.”

“We need them to step in and send the funds and the relief that these people deserve,” she added.

But Greene’s public demands ring a little hollow. During the storm, she was spotted gleefully attending a football game alongside Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, while Kemp revealed earlier Monday that President Joe Biden had called him over the weekend to assess the state’s needs.

Greene also took the opportunity to take a stab at the Biden administration, even while lobbying for federal aid from the executive branch.

“President Trump is a man of action,” she told the right-wing network. “We don’t need a sleepy Joe in the White House. We don’t need Kamala Harris, who they’re propping up.”

Donald Trump flailed Monday when asked to produce any evidence to support his claim that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were purposefully withholding aid from people affected by Hurricane Helene.

Trump suggested in a Truth Social post earlier Monday that he’d received “reports” from North Carolina claiming that the Biden administration and Democratic Governor Roy Cooper were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas” in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The western region of North Carolina is currently experiencing severe flooding.

MSNBC reporter Garrett Haake attempted to press Trump during a stop in Valdosta, Georgia, asking him what, if any, evidence he had to back up his outlandish claim.

“Take a look,” Trump responded, walking away.

Haake translated the flippant response to mean, “essentially, I’ve got nothing to show you right now, why don’t you go find it yourself.”

So in short, Trump has absolutely no evidence, and these so-called “reports” seem even less legitimate than the debunked ones claiming that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets.

In a second post about hurricane relief, Trump claimed that Biden and Harris had “left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South.”

Trump also claimed that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, with whom he has his own uneasy alliance, had a “hard time” reaching Biden to discuss disaster relief, and that the president had been “very non-responsive.” That was also a lie.

Kemp said that he’d already spoken to Biden. “The president just called me yesterday afternoon. I missed him, and called him right back,” Kemp said Monday. “And he just said, ‘What do you need?’”

It’s taken the Republican nominee no time at all to pull focus away from disaster relief, trying instead to enrage voters in two key battleground states responding to a deadly natural disaster.

A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban.

Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney quoted “liberty” in a ruling that rejected the controversial ban outlawing abortion after six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant. Abortions in the state will now be allowed until 22 weeks, as they were before the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law the six-week ban.

McBurney had some choice words for politicians in his ruling, writing, “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

He added, “our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty’ demonstrates that liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”

The state law prohibited abortions after six weeks, based on the misleading notion that a “heartbeat” could be detected in an embryo around that time. In reality, an embryo does not have a heart at six weeks, let alone cardiac activity. A fetus is also not viable outside the body till much later in a pregnancy.

McBurney got the chance to rule on the law after it was sent back to Fulton County court by the state Supreme Court last year.

Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban killed at least two women since its passage and caused Georgia’s monthly abortion totals to drop by roughly half.

This story has been updated.

In just three days, Hurricane Helene gas killed at least 119 people as it trailed its way along the Southeast, making it one of the deadliest storms in modern U.S. history.

The real scope of devastation is difficult to define before such an unprecedented hurricane hits land, but it’s not impossible to predict a storm’s scale, timing, and general path. Somehow, that information isn’t obvious to Donald Trump, who, after surveying some of the storm’s devastation in Georgia, told reporters Monday that “nobody” could have forecast Helene.

“That’s a big one. And the devastation wrought by this storm is incredible,” Trump said during a presser in Valdosta, Georgia. “It’s so extensive, nobody thought this would be happening, especially now it’s so late in the season for the hurricanes.”

It is, of course, not late in the season for hurricanes: September tends to be the most active month in the calendar year for the superstorms.

But Trump’s own policy proposals are likely to keep him—and every other American—from obtaining such life-saving weather forecasts and emergency weather alerts in the future. Trump has touted elements of Project 2025, a 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto that proposes completely demolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose responsibilities as a federal agency include tracking the weather and predicting hurricanes.

“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the far-right proposal reads on page 664.

That would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions that would include crucial national weather alert systems for emergencies such as flash flooding, extreme heat, earthquakes, or otherwise.

Trump has spent months trying to distance his campaign from Project 2025, but a flurry of the Republican presidential nominee’s recent comments, which include supporting demolishing the Department of Education, have practically glued himself to its policy points.

Rudolph Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline Rose Giuliani, endorsed Kamala Harris Monday, writing for Vanity Fair about how she has watched her father’s life “crumble since he joined forces with [Donald] Trump.”

Caroline Giuliani wrote an article for the magazine warning of the dangers of another Trump presidency, saying his first term “was the worst thing that ever happened to my dad, to my family, and to our nation’s modern history.”

“The consequences will only be more severe—and irreversible—a second time around. Thanks to the extremist Supreme Court he stacked, Trump would take office with full immunity: no checks on his power whatsoever,” Giuliani said. “If the president isn’t going to be subject to the law like every other citizen, which remains incomprehensible to me, then our president had better have a moral compass.”

The article carries the headline “Trump Took My Dad From Me. Please Don’t Let Him Take Our Country, Too,” and Giuliani not only mentions the danger that Trump presents to the country, but also how her father’s work for the former president and convicted felon has brought him down and hurt their relationship.

“I spent a lot of my life wishing my father had less power. But I never wanted it to happen like this. And selfishly, the deeper my dad gets stuck in the quicksand of his problems, the more fleeting our opportunities to connect as father and daughter become,” Giuliani said, alluding to her father’s financial and legal difficulties.

“After months of feeling the type of sorrow that comes from the death of a loved one, it dawned on me that I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too,” Giuliani wrote. 

Giuliani also praised Harris for her understanding of the climate crisis and her support for reproductive rights, calling the vice president “a life-long public servant who has spent her career upholding justice and fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.” 

Endorsing Harris is a big step for the daughter of a close confidant of Trump who also served as his lawyer. But as she wrote, Rudy Giuliani’s work for Trump has indeed imploded his life. He has been disbarred in Washington, D.C., and New York state. He’s on the verge of losing his assets thanks to a defamation lawsuit from Georgia poll workers and is facing criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona for election interference, as well as a pending sexual harassment lawsuit from one of his former assistants. Now, his daughter is openly expressing her sadness and shame over his support for Trump and where it has taken him. Will he listen to her?

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.