Even Fox News Had to Fact-Check Team Trump’s Hurricane Lies

The lies Donald Trump’s campaign is spewing have become so extreme that even Fox News has started calling them out.

Trump’s attorney Alina Habba appeared on Fox News Tuesday to address the White House’s comments on Trump spreading misinformation about the federal government’s hurricane relief efforts.

“Let’s talk about facts,” Habba offered, but instead, she started to criticize Kamala Harris for appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast. Habba then spread a gruesome piece of misinformation.

“There are still people missing, there are babies floating in the water, and we’re on podcasts? That’s what the Harris team is doing,” Habba claimed.

“Where did you see that report of a baby floating in the water?” interjected host Martha McCallum.

“We have absolutely heard there are children floating,” replied Habba, clearly unprepared to provide any evidence to support her talking point.

“There’s missing bodies, dead bodies, we know that. There are dead people, up to uh, 200 …” Habba sputtered as she tried to back up her baseless claim. “This is the problem. It’s not misinformation, it’s fact.”

Earlier Tuesday, FEMA director Deanne Criswell hit back at Trump’s repeated claims that there has been no on-the-ground presence in areas hit by Hurricane Helene and inadequate recovery aid, calling the accusation “completely false.”

But that hasn’t stopped Trump, who took to Truth Social Tuesday to brand the Biden administration’s response “THE WORST RESPONSE TO A STORM OR HURRICANE DISASTER IN U.S. HISTORY.”

On Monday, Trump made such extreme claims on Fox News that host Laura Ingraham repeatedly corrected him as he discussed federal hurricane relief.

Trump tried to criticize Harris’s response to Helene but kept coming up short when it came to actual reasons to complain. When Trump tried to whine that Harris was only offering $750 to victims, Ingraham had to interject that the funds were “for immediate needs.” When Trump said that Harris should go to the areas affected, such as North Carolina, Ingraham cut in to say that “she was there today, for three hours, I believe.”

Trump’s rampant lies have gotten so bad that even Republican lawmakers have had to start fact-checking the presidential nominee for their own party. Representative Chuck Edwards published a list Tuesday titled “Debunking Helene Response Myths.”

“FEMA is NOT only providing $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery,” the release from Edwards’s office said, debunking Trump’s complaint. The list also clarified that FEMA had not diverted funding to the border or foreign aid and that the agency was not going to run out of money.

It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all.

The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry.

It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry.

And just like on Tuesday, one person at last year’s event holding a “Union Members for Trump” told Mauger, who also covered that event, that she wasn’t in the union. Another person holding an “Auto Workers for Trump” sign told Mauger that he wasn’t an autoworker. The United Auto Workers at the time were on strike, and Trump’s actions seemed to show that he didn’t support them.

Vance’s rally on Tuesday was held in a heavily Democratic area in the battleground state, and he attacked President Biden and Kamala Harris’s efforts to help General Motors build more electric vehicles as “table scraps.” But the presence of fake autoworkers there raises the question of whether the people who attended the rally were local.

Trump’s campaign has been mocked and criticized for using fake A.I. images to claim support from Black voters as well as Taylor Swift fans. In the latter case, it backfired and led to Swift herself endorsing Harris, right after Trump’s first (and possibly only) debate with Harris. Will Tuesday’s attempt to inflate Trump and Vance’s support among autoworkers help them win the state of Michigan next month? Some of the latest polls have them trailing Harris in the state.

Donald Trump and JD Vance are busy making more enemies: this time, fans of famous baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng.

Moo Deng, the adorable viral star who lives at Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand, is a pygmy hippopotamus, a protected species. Hippos like her are still targets of hunters, and this week, it was revealed that a big-game trophy hunting group endorsed Donald Trump.

According to a deep dive by Meidas News, the Safari Club International, or SCI, which has demonstrated ties to Trump and Vance, has a record book that proves that its members have hunted Moo Deng’s species. “[The pygmy hippo] is a very wary, alert animal that has proven extremely difficult to hunt by normal methods,” SCI’s record book reads. The group of hunters has more than 40,000 members and 180 local chapters.

After the Trump endorsement news, Meidas News again reported the GOP’s second controversial Moo Deng story.

In a recent podcast with SCI, Vance defended trophy hunters who target endangered and threatened species, arguing that they care about animals “more than people who never spend any real time in the environment,” and discussed the Republican culture war on gray wolves. But Vance’s ties go even deeper: The group also organized a fishing trip with Vance before the podcast recording.

Trump visited the SCI HQ in June, where he met with the “Hunters’ Embassy to discuss our shared fight to protect and promote the right to hunt,” according to SCI.

The group is encouraging and organizing their group of hunters to vote in November. Perhaps Moo Deng’s fans can do the same.

The White House under sexual abuser Donald Trump secretly worked to suppress an FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh while his Supreme Court nomination was under consideration by the Senate.

In September 2018, when Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, Trump promised that the FBI would have “free rein” to fully investigate the claims, adding that the bureau was “talking to everybody.”

“I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion,” Trump posted on Twitter at the time. However, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Trump’s assertions were all a farce, citing a new report by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Whitehouse’s report states that the FBI was directed to conduct a limited investigation in only a week, and requested “additional guidance” from the White House. But Trump administration officials never provided any authorization for a deeper probe into the allegations against Kavanaugh.

Messages to the FBI’s tip line about Kavanaugh were sent to the White House but weren’t investigated, and the FBI wasn’t provided written instructions for the background investigation ordered by the Trump administration, according to the report. The bureau was told by the White House to interview 10 potential witnesses, yet wasn’t given the ability to pursue any corroborating evidence, which some senators cited in their votes to confirm Kavnaugh to the Supreme Court. The FBI didn’t even speak directly to either Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Senate that Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school over 30 years before.

“The congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: The FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” said Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, lawyers for Ford.

Another woman, Deborah Ramirez, alleged in a New Yorker story at the time that Kavanaugh shoved his penis into her face when the two were Yale University students in the early 1980s.

“It’s really disappointing since our client was so candid about something that was a pretty awful experience,” said John Clune, an attorney representing Ramirez.

Trump today brags about his appointments to the Supreme Court and how they overturned Roe v. Wade, severely restricting abortion rights in many states around the country. And it seems that, even as he publicly claimed to be listening to allegations that Kavanaugh had a history of sexual assault, his staff were ignoring them to make their own rapist boss happy.

There have been at least 50 school shootings across the United States in 2024, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. But the Republican presidential ticket doesn’t seem to have any solutions for preventing future violence.

Instead, JD Vance transparently dodged a direct question Tuesday from a reporter with The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan campus newspaper, on the sensitive topic, choosing instead to ramble extensively about paltry school rivalries.

“Why should students in Michigan cast their vote for the Trump-Vance ticket, and additionally, how will your administration support students specifically concerning gun violence when you have rejected calls for tougher gun laws and bans on bump stocks?” the student reporter asked, to jeering and booing from the MAGA crowd. “Essentially, why should students concerned about their safety on campus vote for you?”

It quickly became clear that Vance had no intention of actually answering the question.

“First, let’s be honest here, I don’t know if an Ohio State graduate is the best messenger to University of Michigan students,” Vance said to cheers. “In fact—maybe, we should just get a clip of me saying something nice about Kamala Harris out to the University of Michigan because maybe then they’d all vote for Donald J. Trump if you just told them I was a Buckeye.

“I’m always a little nervous about injecting myself into the OSU-Michigan rivalry,” he continued, still skirting any mention of taking legitimate action to halt the senseless violence.

“All kidding aside, look, we all care about the country,” Vance said. “And that’s why I  think every person in this room is going to help me make Donald J. Trump the next president of the United States.”

Vance then attempted to lure in listening students with promises of creating more jobs in their hometowns and vaguely addressing the housing crisis—though that baseless future wouldn’t help their situation if they found themselves in the crossfire of another shooting.

Minutes later, Vance actually did have some words to share about the topic at hand.

“What I have said is that upwards of 90 percent of the gun crime that’s committed in this country is committed using an illegally obtained firearm,” Vance said.

In reality, a 2023 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, found that the vast majority of guns used in crimes—roughly 99 percent—were purchased legally from a dealer, pawnbroker, or direct from a gun manufacturer, even if they were stolen and used in crimes later.

Vance has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, which spent nearly half a million dollars in Ohio to help elect him to his Senate seat in 2022. The MAGA Republican has also promised to abolish the ATF, which oversees the $9 billion gun industry.

Ultimately, according to Vance, the “best way to reduce gun crime” has nothing to do with limiting the amount of weapons in the country, no matter how destructive or army-ready they are. Instead, the obvious solution is the retroactive one: to “lock up people who are committing violence against their fellow citizens.”

“That’s the most important thing,” Vance told the jubilant crowd.