Trump Marks October 7 Anniversary With Vile, Shameless Comments

On the one year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the ensuing one year of Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, Donald Trump took the opportunity to attack Jewish people for not supporting him enough, and to wonder aloud about developing Gaza’s real estate.

Trump called into the New York radio show Sid & Friends Monday morning, bragging that “nobody’s done more for the Jewish people than I have.”

“No person has ever been better to the Jewish people, probably no person, period, to the Jewish people and Israel,” Trump said.

The former president was on the same tack on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, talking about how much, in his eyes, he did for Israel during his four years as president.

“I think Israel has to do one thing: They have to get smart about Trump,” he said. “I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not a reciprocal, as they say. Not reciprocal.”

As one might expect, his comments didn’t go over well on social media.

Also on the podcast, Hewitt asked Trump if Gaza, which has been devastated by a brutal Israeli assault on the territory that has completely wiped out its infrastructure and claimed at least 41,000 Palestinian lives, could be “Monaco if it was rebuilt the right way.”

Trump answered the absurd question by claiming, “It could be better than Monaco, it has the best location in the Middle East, that best water, the best everything it’s got. It is the best.”

“They never took advantage of it as a developer. It could be the most beautiful place, the weather, the water, the whole thing, that climate. It could be so beautiful. It could be the best thing in the Middle East, but it could be one of the best places in the world,” Trump added.

Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has spoken openly about the redevelopment prospects of “waterfront property” in Gaza, so perhaps Trump has discussed the idea with him. However, it’s quite callous to minimize the conflict as a mere real estate issue, after a year in which 1.9 million Palestinians (nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population) have been driven from their homes and 66 percent of the territory’s buildings have been destroyed.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s alleged pursuit of being apolitical has veered straight into the hyper political.

The Republican governor has reportedly been avoiding calls from Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of Hurricane Helene on the basis that the emergency relief calls “seemed political,” according to an aide close to DeSantis that spoke with NBC News.

“Kamala was trying to reach out, and we didn’t answer,” the unidentified source told NBC News.

The same aide told the outlet that they were not aware of any direct communication between DeSantis and President Joe Biden. Instead, DeSantis has been in contact with Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, Director Deanne Criswell.

When asked whether the White House believed that politics were seeping into the storm response, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told NBC News that it was “for the governor to speak to,” adding that the executive office had invited DeSantis to survey the damage from Hurricane Helene alongside Biden last week.

“It was his decision … to not attend or not be there with the president.... It is up to him,” Jean-Pierre said. “We are doing our part, in the Biden-Harris administration, working—obviously FEMA is work—is on the ground, all hands on deck, whole of government. Robust approach here. And so, again, that’s for Governor DeSantis to speak to.”

Across the six states that the Category 4 storm hit, at least 231 people have been reported dead, making Helene one of the deadliest recorded storms in U.S. history. Overall, Helene has been described by weather forecast offices as “one of the most significant weather events” to hit the area “in the modern era.”

But in the aftermath of that storm, another potentially devastating hurricane looms on the horizon: Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm scheduled to hit the west coast of the Sunshine State by Wednesday evening. In light of the imminent catastrophe, DeSantis has taken another suspiciously politicized route, opting not to alter the state’s voting procedures, refusing to extend the deadline for voter registration and instead curtly offering that fleeing or bunkering denizens should spend their time applying to vote now.

Extreme weather is already wreaking havoc on voting ahead of the election. Hurricane Helene upended postal service in North Carolina, potentially delaying early and mail-in voting in the crucial swing state.

Meanwhile, Republicans across the country have elevated false claims launched by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, insisting that the Biden administration diverted emergency relief funds from FEMA to aid immigration efforts.

FEMA has roundly rejected those charges, stating that the MAGA-launched rumor is “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” Criswell said on Sunday. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

In an unfortunate back and forth, the Georgia Supreme Court has reinstated a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The ban will remain in place as the high court reviews the state’s appeal against a lower court ruling striking the law.

The Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, or the LIFE Act, will take effect again at 5 p.m. Monday, making abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant.

This decision comes just one week after a Fulton County Superior Judge overturned the Georgia law, arguing that it was unconstitutional and issuing a dire warning on how the ban could set up a dystopian world similar to the one portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Last week, Judge Robert McBurney wrote that: “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.”

The lower judge’s ruling allowed abortion until 22 weeks, as was legal before the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, giving clinics a chance to expand their abortion options for the past week.

“We know that several providers in Georgia were able to resume abortion care really quickly,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of the National Abortion Federation, told The New York Times. “It speaks to the resilience of the providers in Georgia. They were really overwhelmed by the amount of people who immediately came to them for care.”

The constant back and forth in the courts is sure to fuel confusion in the state about what is and isn’t legal.

Meanwhile, JD Vance is playing dumb about reproductive rights in Georgia, saying he doesn’t know which side he is on.

Donald Trump went beyond his usual racism and seemed to embrace eugenics Monday morning.

Speaking on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Trump ranted against Kamala Harris, claiming that “she wants to go into a Communist Party–type system.” He then attacked her for supposedly allowing serial murderers into America through open borders, “now happily living in the United States.” But Trump didn’t stop there.

“You know now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes, and we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” Trump told Hewitt.

Attaching genetics to crime is another way for Trump to make racist claims about immigrants to the United States, implying that some ethnicities are predisposed to killing. It fits into what he’s said about different populations in the past, such as in 2018, when he referred to immigrants from Haiti and African nations as “people from shithole countries.”

Trump began his political career by complaining that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And earlier this year, Trump complained to wealthy donors at a fundraiser in Florida that immigrants weren’t coming from “nice” countries “like Denmark,” in effect saying that he’d prefer only white immigrants in the United States.

The former president has spread racist lies against immigrants during his current campaign, in particular against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. He has said that he wants to institute “bloody” mass deportations of immigrants if he returns to the White House. But blaming their “genes” is new, and is a reminder that he doesn’t seem to think being compared to Adolf Hitler, the most infamous eugenicist, is a bad thing. Was his latest remark inspired by the long list of things he likes about Hitler?

Another massive hurricane is barrelling toward Florida’s coastline, but that doesn’t mean the state is shifting its standards to help its denizens prepare for Election Day.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will reportedly not be extending the Sunshine State’s deadline for registering to vote, according to the Orlando Sentinel’s Jeffrey Schweers, despite the fact that much of the state is preparing for or fleeing the imminent Category 5 storm due to hit its west coast this week.

“There is nothing inhibiting people from registering today,” DeSantis told the publication.

Last week, DeSantis issued an executive order allowing local election officials to change early voting sites and set up consolidated voting centers in areas ravaged by the last major weather event to rip through Florida, Hurricane Helene, which displaced thousands of voters and poll workers late last month. The executive order also loosened restrictions on mail-in ballot requests and allowed state employees to take paid leave to work as poll workers on Election Day, according to CBS News.

But DeSantis’s rigidity on the threat posed by the oncoming hurricane doesn’t come from a place of ignorance. So far, the Republican governor has issued a state of emergency for 51 of Florida’s 67 counties. “A major hurricane is the most likely outcome,” DeSantis said on Sunday while expanding the ordinance. “This is not a good track for the state of Florida.”

The brunt of Hurricane Milton is scheduled to slam the west side of the state by Wednesday evening, but the rain has already begun. Rainfall could reach totals of five to 10 inches, with localized totals adding up to 15 inches across regions of the Florida peninsula and the Florida Keys, threatening minor to moderate river flooding, hurricane center specialist Eric Blake told USA Today.

“Regardless of the details, there is increasing confidence that a powerful hurricane with life-threatening hazards will be affecting portions of the Florida west coast around the middle of this week,” the hurricane center said Sunday.

Extreme weather is already wreaking havoc on voting ahead of the election. Hurricane Helene has upended postal service in North Carolina, potentially delaying early and mail-in voting in the crucial swing state.