Breaking News
Breaking News
from Washington and beyond

Trump Issues New Unhinged Demand on Harris’s 60 Minutes Interview

Donald Trump is melting down over that brutal 60 Minutes burn.

Donald Trump wears a MAGA hat and holds his arms out in front of himself
Scott Olson/Getty Images

After refusing to even do an interview with 60 Minutes, Donald Trump’s campaign is demanding that the CBS show release a full transcript of its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Trump campaign has taken issue with a truncated package that aired on Face the Nation Sunday ahead of the full interview, which showed Harris answering a question one way. But according to Fox News, when the full interview aired the next day, her answer was entirely different.

When host Bill Whitaker asked Harris about the U.S.’s relationship with international war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Face the Nation clip showed that Harris responded, “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

The 60 Minutes interview showed Harris responding quite differently. “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said simply.

The Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, released a statement Tuesday accusing 60 Minutes of “deceptively” editing Harris’s full interview. 

“Why did 60 Minutes choose not to air Kamala’s full word salad, and what else did they choose not to air? The American people deserve the full, unedited transcript from Kamala’s sit-down interview. We call upon 60 Minutes and CBS to release it. What do they, and Kamala, have to hide?” Leavitt said.

It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t even attempt to do the interview, and gave some exceedingly flimsy reasons as to why. 60 Minutes brutally roasted Trump over his baseless excuses for breaking more than 50 years of tradition by not appearing for an interview. It seems that the former president couldn’t handle being fact-checked, nor did he want to face any “tough questions” like the ones that caused him to storm off set in 2020.  

Still, his campaign seems more than willing to nitpick Harris’s performance: Trump went ballistic Wednesday in a post on Truth Social, claiming 60 Minutes had “sliced and diced” Harris’s interview and baselessly insisting she had been hyper-edited into coherency. 

“Lyin’ Kamala’s answers to questions, which were virtually incoherent, over and over again, some by as many as four times in a single sentence or thought, all in an effort, possibly illegal as part of the ‘News Division,’ which must be licensed, to make her look ‘more Presidential,’ or a least, better,” Trump wrote. 

Trump also claimed that the interview violated campaign finance laws and that he had never heard of an interview being edited. However, Trump appeared in an interview that appeared heavily edited on Fox & Friends just three months ago. 

“This is a stain on the reputation of 60 Minutes that is not recoverable—It will always remain with this once storied brand. I have never heard of such a thing being done in ‘News,’” he wrote.

Take a Wild Guess on Where Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible Is From

Donald Trump’s Bible grift is actually imported from a country he constantly claims to hate.

Donald Trump looks down at a Bible in his hands. (This photo is from 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests.)
Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles weren’t actually made in the USA, it seems—they were printed in China.

The Associated Press reports that a Chinese printing company based in Hangzhou shipped 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States in February and March. Three separate shipments cost $342,000, averaging out to less than $3 per Bible. Trump is selling hand-signed copies of his branded Bible for $1,000, and the minimum price for an unsigned copy is $59.99, putting potential sales revenue at close to $7 million.

Trump announced that he was selling the Bibles in partnership with country singer Lee Greenwood in a Truth Social video on March 26, and two days later, 70,000 Bibles arrived at the port of Los Angeles.

The Bibles contain copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance, and one version even memorializes the July 13 assassination attempt against the former president: Trump’s name is on the cover above the phrase, “The Day God Intervened,” likely stamped on after the Bible was printed. Trump has also been hawking assassination-themed sneakers for the last two months, and just like the Bibles, fans can shell out extra cash for hand-signed shoes.

The former president and convicted felon is clearly trying to rake in as much cash as possible by having the Bibles printed in China, saving him the costs of paying American workers. An August financial report shows that he made $300,000 in royalties from the texts. Trump’s fans across the country are helping him out with his blatant grift, with the Oklahoma state superintendent requiring specific criteria for Bibles in the state’s public schools (already constitutionally questionable) that only Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible can fit.

It’s telling that the Bibles are printed in China, which has long been attacked by Trump for hurting American businesses and taking American jobs. On the campaign trail, the former president has been touting his economic plan to institute tariffs against China and other countries. Would that include his Bibles? After all, Trump is all about “America First.”

John Roberts Is Shocked Everyone Hates His Trump Immunity Decision

Donald Trump scored a major win when the Supreme Court dramatically expanded the definition of “immunity.”

Donald Trump and John Roberts shake hands
Leah Millis/Pool/Getty Images

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has spent the months following Donald Trump’s immunity decision in relative distress, despite the fact that he cooked up its majority opinion himself.

The chief justice reportedly never wanted the nation’s highest court to be a cog in the political machine, but the country’s reaction to the monumental decision has skewed his vision, according to a CNN analysis published Tuesday.

Since the court issued its consequential immunity ruling in Trump v. United States at the beginning of July, Roberts has skirted making public speeches, while colleagues and friends described the conservative justice as “especially weary,” the outlet reported.

Public opinion of the institution since the decision has soured. Fewer than half of Americans—approximately 47 percent—expressed favorable views of the Supreme Court in the ruling’s wake, with the majority of positive opinions coming from Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Still, Roberts’s defenders argue that the backlash to the immunity decision was overblown.

“The Trump immunity case is less about Trump and more about not opening the door” to future administrations “coming after previous presidents,” said attorney Erin Murphy, one of Roberts’s former law clerks, at a Georgetown University Law Center session.

And some of Roberts’s longtime friends, such as Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, have insisted that the reconstructed executive power still leaves room for a successful case against Trump.

“The bottom line is clear,” Lazarus wrote in an August essay for The Washington Post. “Whether you are outraged by or sympathetic to the surprising sweep of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, it nevertheless leaves the former president very much open to a successful felony prosecution.”

The case sprang out of Trump’s federal election interference trial as a preemptive defense, with Trump’s lawyers arguing that he could not be tried on conspiracy and obstruction charges due to presidential immunity privileges that he held during office. In a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines, the court ruled that some of the actions Trump was indicted for could be categorized as official acts during his presidency.

Writing the majority opinion, Roberts outlined that the president was not immune from criminal prosecution—except on some occasions.

“The President is not above the law,” Roberts wrote. “But under our system of separated powers, the President may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts.”

Sonia Sotomayor led the liberal justices with a scathing dissent, warning that “the President is now a king above the law.”

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she wrote.

Read Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent to the immunity ruling:

Trumps Is Now Threatening All Immigrants, “Illegal” or Not

Donald Trump is escalating his racist attacks with a dangerous new lie.

Donald Trump claps and speaks
Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump has taken yet another page out of the fascist handbook and decided that immigrants in the United States with legal status aren’t actually legal.

During an interview Tuesday night on Newsmax, Trump said he didn’t care about what legal processes the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, had gone through. They’re still “illegal” to him. 

“I mean, look at Springfield where 30,000 illegal immigrants are dropped, and it was—they may have done it through a certain little trick, but they are illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned. They’re destroying the towns, they’re destroying the whole—they’ll end up destroying the state!” he ranted.

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield are in the country under temporary protected status, which Trump has already pledged to revoke if he is put into office. The Republican presidential nominee’s reckless disregard for legal processes isn’t surprising, but it is alarming, as it widens the field of whom he hopes to displace in his plan to carry out the largest mass deportations in U.S. history. Whether you’re in the country legally or not legally depends entirely on whether you’re a convenient scapegoat for the former president.

Vice presidential nominee JD Vance has also stated that he doesn’t care about the legal status of immigrants. “Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said during a campaign event in North Carolina last month. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

Trump has been not-so-subtly increasing the number of Haitian immigrants in Springfield every time he mentions it. In reality, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield, according to CNN. Using fake numbers, and even faker stories, Trump has repeatedly exaggerated the supposed negative effect of immigrant communities on American cities.  

The Kremlin Throws Trump Under the Bus on Secret Putin Gift

Russian leader Vladimir Putin is admitting the whole truth about those secret Covid-19 tests.

Putin makes a weird face at Donald Trump (face not shown)
Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Donald Trump denies sending Vladimir Putin Covid-19 tests during the height of the pandemic. But Putin himself says it’s all true.

On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed journalist Bob Woodward’s account from his upcoming book, War, that Trump sent the tests, but denied Woodward’s claim that the two had spoken multiple times since Trump left office in 2021.

“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Peskov said in a written response to questions from Bloomberg about the book. “But about the phone calls—it’s not true.”

Trump reportedly sent the tests to Putin amid a shortage of tests in the United States, and Putin told him to keep it a secret for fear of a backlash against Trump from the American public.

“I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin reportedly said to Trump at the time.

Trump’s campaign vehemently denied the report Tuesday, calling Woodward a “total sleazebag,” “an angry, little man,” “a truly demented and deranged man,” and “a boring person with no personality.”

“President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue,” said Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, in a statement.

Kamala Harris and her campaign seized on the report.

“That is just the most recent, stark example of who Donald Trump is,” Harris said Tuesday to talk show host Howard Stern.

People were “scrambling to get these kits,” Harris said. “And this guy who is president of the United States is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator, for his personal use?”

Biden also attacked Trump for the same thing at a fundraiser in Pennsylvania Tuesday.

“Those tests to tell you whether you had Covid were in short supply, so he called his good friend, Putin, not a joke, to make sure he had the tests,” Biden said. “What’s wrong with this guy?”

Trump said at a press conference last month that Ukraine should surrender to Russia and make things “much better,” almost admitting that if he is elected president again, he plans to give Putin whatever he wants. He’s also said that he wants to “use sanctions as little as possible” against countries like Russia, Iran, and China.

Republican Rep. Debunks GOP Hurricane Lies in Incredible Fact-Check

North Carolina Representative Chuck Edwards put out a damning statement on the conspiracy theories being spread by his own party.

Representative Chuck Edwards steeples his fingers together. (Representative Anna Paulina Luna is in the background.)
Anna Rose Layden/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Even Republicans are getting fed up with MAGA’s hurricane conspiracy theories. Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is one of them.

In a press release put out on Tuesday, Edwards condemned the misinformation about Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene that has been circulated online by the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“While it’s true that FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene has not been perfect, there are outrageous rumors that have been circulated online and need to be addressed,” wrote Edwards on X, linking his incredibly thorough fact-check.

Since Helene damaged property and claimed lives across several states, including North Carolina, right-wing misinformation around the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been flying. Some Republicans and conspiracy theorists are accusing the agency of diverting much-needed resources to migrants or concocting the whole natural disaster in order to seize land.

Edwards’s debunking document starts off with him dispelling two outrageous rumors. “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock,” and “Nobody can control the weather.”

Twitter screenshot Jordan Weissmann @JHWeissmann: This press release from a Republican congressman debunking myths about the Helene response is just an incredible document (screenshot of Edwards's press release)

Beyond the truly crazy, the Republican congressman also set the record straight about FEMA’s overall response to the disaster. MAGA has tried to engineer anger over FEMA’s $750 disaster relief checks. “Think of it: We give foreign countries hundreds of billions of dollars and we’re handing North Carolina $750,” said Trump on Saturday. But as Edwards clarifies, the amount “is just the first step of a longer process to provide financial assistance to disaster survivors in need of federal support.”

As Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall Wednesday, all we know for certain is that misinformation will be as prevalent as physical damage.

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

Alina Habba’s Hurricane Helene conspiracies proved too much.

Alina Habba speaks into a microphone while Donald Trump stands behind her
Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images

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.

The Truth About Those “Auto Workers for Trump” at Michigan Event

J.D. Vance recently held a campaign rally in Michigan, but not everyone who showed up really was who they claimed to be.

J.D. Vance claps at a campaign rally
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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.

Trump and JD Vance Hit With Second Terrible Moo Deng Allegation

The 2024 Republican ticket is bad news for the internet’s new favorite star (and all her hippo relatives).

Splitscreen photo of Donald Trump and JD Vance, and photo of Moo Deng with her mouth wide open
Getty x2

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.

Twitter screenshot 💖 @twaniimals: Moo Deng is a princess (two photos of Moo Deng being held under her chin)

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.

Rapist Trump Lied About Claim That FBI Properly Investigated Kavanaugh

A new report details how the Trump White House secretly killed an FBI investigation into the sexual assault allegations against then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Donald Trump stands at the presidential podium and shakes hands with Brett Kavanaugh
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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.