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.