“Hunting FEMA”: Trump’s Hurricane Lies Spark Terrifying Threat

Donald Trump’s baseless attacks against federal relief efforts for Hurricane Helene came to life over the weekend, when officials in North Carolina reported encountering truckloads of militia members “out hunting FEMA.”

An official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is assisting in relief efforts in North Carolina, sent several federal agencies an urgent warning Saturday afternoon, according to The Washington Post.

“FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately,” the official said.

FEMA’s message warned that National Guard troops “had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying they were out hunting FEMA.”

The Forest Service official told the Post that responders had been relocated to a “safe area” but that the incident had paused efforts to clear roads of debris, deliver supplies, and aid in search and rescue operations.

This incident follows weeks of toxic misinformation about federal assistance amplified by Trump and other MAGA Republicans. The Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly criticized federal relief efforts, and falsely claimed that $1 billion was redirected away from FEMA to help undocumented immigrants.

This incident also comes shortly after MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene boosted an antisemitic conspiracy theory positing that the government controls the weather, which then was echoed in slews of antisemitic attacks against FEMA’s Director Jaclyn Rothenberg.

On Friday, Trump took to Truth Social to claim that North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and other Democratic leaders “were blocking people and money from coming into North Carolina to help people in desperate need.”

Cooper slammed Trump’s claim, calling it a “flat out lie.”

“We’re working with all partners around the clock to get help to people. Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories have hurt the morale of first responders and people who lost everything, helped scam artists and put government and rescue workers in danger,” Cooper wrote in a post on X.

It seems Trump’s words have the potential to hurt more than morale, as residents are now reportedly taking up arms against relief workers. In the end, Trump’s own conspiracies are preventing the swift recovery of the region, which, ironically, is mostly home to his own supporters.

A MAGA influencer is trying to spread a nasty rumor about Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. The issue is it reads more like fan fiction than facts.

“DocNetyoutube,” whom Washington Post media reporter Will Sommer describes as “an up-and-coming new player in the ‘making things up’ corner of online Trumpworld,” claims he has proof that Walz sexually assaulted a student during his time as a high school teacher.

In a series of “drops,” a term popular in the QAnon community, DocNetyoutube on Sunday posted several alleged screenshots of communications between himself and Walz’s anonymous victim. But the posts have several red flags about their authenticity.

The email dates are formatted in an inconsistent way, with misplaced commas and strange text alignment. Another clue is what appears to be a typing cursor that still appears on the screenshots, indicating that the internet personality most likely wrote them himself.

Much of DocNetyoutube’s conspiracy hinges on him breaking the news of a student who went to a concert with Walz and his wife while the couple were teachers at the same Nebraska school. The story isn’t new. The New York Times published this story in August, noting that after the anonymous gay student confided in them, the couple took them to an Indigo Girls concert, a rare queer-friendly event in the area.

But on Sunday, the MAGA conspiratorial account tried to claim that the media was “trying to get out in front of this story,” instead of acknowledging that he was publishing old news. The internet personality claimed to have a “statement from the victim” to prove the legitimacy of the posts. The anonymous statement noted that Walz has a Chinese symbol tattooed on his upper thigh. “I remember he explained to me what it meant, but I do not recall at this time,” the supposed student wrote in the statement. In the comments on X, MAGA users quickly spun out about whether Walz could have gotten that tattoo laser removed or could have done a skin graft procedure. Very normal stuff.

Baselessly calling Walz a groomer is nothing new. Laura Loomer has previously spread similarly vague allegations against Walz. “There’s a reason why he shakes his wife’s hand and panders to the gay community, and it’s not because he’s awkward.… It will all come out,” she wrote on X in August, citing no evidence.

Several X-verified QAnon accounts have also spread the claims far and wide, boosted by Elon Musk’s algorithm. Earlier this month, the pro-QAnon podcast “RedPill78” interviewed an anonymous man who alleged he was a former foreign exchange student at Walz’s high school who was inappropriately touched by the Democrat.

Previously, terminally online Republicans also tried to push the narrative that Walz was grooming children by being the faculty adviser of the newly formed Gay-Straight Alliance at his Minnesota school. In reality, queer students appreciated his support. “It was important to have a person who was so well-liked on campus, a football coach who had served in the military,” one former student at the school told The New York Times. “Having Tim Walz as the adviser of the Gay-Straight Alliance made me feel safe coming to school.”

Since that talking point didn’t stick, it appears they had to escalate. Of course credible assault allegations should always be taken seriously. But if Republicans don’t want to vote for someone who has touched someone inappropriately, perhaps they shouldn’t vote for the convicted rapist.

At a campaign rally in Arizona Sunday, Donald Trump denied reports that he is showing signs of cognitive decline, attacking critics for singling out his mispronunciations.

“They watch for weeks and weeks. For weeks and weeks, I’m up here ranting and raving. Last night, a hundred thousand people. Flawless. Ranting and raving. I’m ranting and raving. Not a mistake. And then, I’ll be at a little thing and I’ll say something a little bit like ‘The.’ I’ll say ‘duh.’ They’ll say he’s cognitively impaired,” Trump said.

“No, I’ll let you know when I will be. I will be someday, we all will be someday, but I’ll be the first to let you know,” Trump added.

Trump has in fact continued to sound more erratic and bizarre as the presidential race enters its final weeks. At a Wisconsin rally just over a week ago, he compared himself to a fly, struggled to pronounce words like “Midwestern” and “evangelicals,” and spread misinformation about Hurricane Helene. In a New York rally in September, he stumbled over words like “migrants” and “Russia” and had trouble stringing sentences together.

His cognitive decline was evident to everyone watching the first (and almost certainly last) presidential debate with Kamala Harris, where Trump went on long-winded rants unrelated to the questions asked.

Trump’s speech patterns and alertness look very different from eight years ago, and psychology researchers see compelling evidence that Trump is significantly less sharp than he was at the start of his presidency, with increasingly incoherent speech. The media is finally starting to give the issue attention, which probably prompted the media-obsessed former president to bring up his cognitive decline at his rally. But will all of this evidence convince voters that Trump should not return to the White House? Right now, polls are showing the race between Trump and Harris to be nearly deadlocked.

Looks like Donald Trump has echoed JD Vance’s outlandish anti-immigrant smear … again.

During his rally in Coachella, California, Saturday, Trump whined that the number of students from “illegal immigrant-headed households” had increased in Los Angeles, according to the Desert Sun.

Trump’s new grievance directly echoed a seemingly new talking point Vance delivered last week, blaming the school-age children of undocumented immigrants for a decline in the quality of American education. And in doing so, he has put a target on the back of every brown child in Los Angeles, regardless of their citizenship status.

During a rally in Detroit last week, Vance baselessly claimed that there were 85,000 children of undocumented immigrants placing a strain on schools in Michigan. While it’s also unclear where Vance got “85,000” from, the number does appear on the Higher Education Immigration Portal, which states that there are 85,000 second-generation immigrant students attending higher education institutions in Michigan—a figure completely unrelated to Vance’s claim.

“Think about what it does to a poor schoolteacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English,” Vance said. “Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Last month, the former president was quick to pick up on another of Vance’s baseless nativist talking points: a right-wing rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had begun eating their neighbors’ pets. Even as the racist rumors were debunked, the Republican ticket continued to push the outlandish claims, and made Springfield the epicenter of their arguments about illegal immigration—even though the Haitian immigrants they were smearing are in the country legally.

It seems that Trump has now latched onto another of Vance’s reckless, unsubstantiated claims, which has placed a target on the back of children, of all people. Trump’s remark came amid a virulently anti-immigrant tirade in which he called the United States “occupied America,” and bemoaned a so-called “invasion” by undocumented immigrants.

With less than 30 days on the clock, Donald Trump’s full attention is geared toward Election Day. But the specifics of his vision are veering into dangerous territory.

Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, the Republican presidential nominee claimed that the real Election Day issue is the “enemy from within.”

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said, deflecting Bartiromo’s baseless suggestion that Chinese immigrants in the country—or rapists—would interfere in the outcome of the election. “Not even the people that have come in and destroying our country, by the way, totally destroying our country.

“We have some very bad people,” Trump continued. “We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the—and it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

It’s not the first time Trump—or his allies—have threatened military action in order to achieve their goals.

Last week, Steve Bannon’s temporary War Room substitute host Natalie Winters vowed that Trump’s postelection retribution tour will involve prosecuting his enemies for treason, including some members of his former administration, such as retired U.S. Army general and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley.

And Trump himself has leveraged the authoritarian rhetoric before, as well. Speaking with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro in September 2020, Trump warned that he would use force against Democrats if they chose to protest in the streets following his potential win on Election Day.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that, if we want,” Trump said at the time, according to Politico.

“Look, it’s called insurrection,” he continued. “We just send in, and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes.”

Of course, Trump did not send in the military to rein in the insurrection—carried out by his own followers after he lost.

Thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters reportedly found themselves stranded Saturday night after the former president’s rally in Coachella, California.

Attendees were bussed roughly five miles from parking to the venue at Calhoun Ranch, where Trump delivered a rambling 80-minute speech in scorching desert heat, during which several attendees required emergency medical attention. 

During his speech, Trump made several wild remarks against the state and its residents. He vowed to withhold aid from California if Governor Gavin Newsom didn’t comply with his demands to upend water conservation in the state. 

Once the day’s speeches were over, rallygoers found themselves stranded in the dark without enough buses to carry them back to their cars, according to The Independent. 

“This isn’t normal,” said one attendee, in a video on X shared by the account BlueDream. 

“Apparently the buses are no longer coming, or at least, there used to be like 20 buses when we were being brought here, but now there’s only like three buses operating, and it’s an absolute …” the speaker sighed as he walked past the large crowd waiting by the road. “It’s just chaos. Absolute chaos. All of us are stranded here. Everyone’s stranded here.”

One rally attendee, Wesley Johnson, took to X to detail the chaos and confusion two hours after the rally had concluded, when he and other rallygoers still waited to be assisted. 

“Parking lot is a two-hour walk. Countless elderly stranded here and can’t walk anymore. No restroom facilities accessible anymore,” he wrote.

Johnson eventually deleted his X posts about the incident, writing that “I was hoping some help would come from it, but all it did was cause drama.”

He explained that bus drivers told him they had difficulties finding places to refuel in the area and that some had become stranded themselves. “They and the Sheriffs were all just as confused as we were,” Johnson wrote. “My story stands, but the drama got out of hand.”

The Riverside sheriff’s office referred The New Republic’s questions about the logistics of the event, which included the shuttle buses, to Trump’s campaign team. 

In a post on Truth Social after the disastrous rally, Trump falsely claimed that “100,000” people attended his rally. The permit for the event revealed that the rally only had a capacity for 15,000.   

Before Trump’s rally began, a man was arrested at a security checkpoint outside the venue, carrying a shotgun, a loaded handgun, ammunition, and several fake passports.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has once again evoked Nazi rhetoric.

At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday, the Republican presidential nominee weaponized violent and dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, referring to them as the “enemy from within” while advocating for harsher criminal punishments for the vulnerable demographic, including promising the death penalty.

“But I protect you from outside enemies. But you know I always say, we have the outside enemies, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un … if you have a smart president it’s no problem,” Trump said. “It’s the enemy from within.

“All the scum we have to deal with that hate our country,” he continued. “That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.… Everyday Americans like Cindy are living in fear all because Kamala Harris decided to empty the slums and prison cells of Caracas, and many other places. Happening all over the world.”

That is, on its face, untrue. But according to Trump, that (falsely) means crime is down in the rest of the world as a result.

“Every country, you know, prison populations all over the world are down. Crime all over the world is down. Because they take the world’s criminals, gang members, drug dealers, and they deposit them into the United States. Bus after bus after bus,” Trump said to a cacophony of boos from the crowd of his supporters.

The world’s prison population has, statistically, gone up by more than 25 percent since the year 2000, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“They took the criminals out of Caracas, and they put them along your border, and they said if you ever come back, we’re going to kill you,” Trump said.

“Think of that!” he continued. “We have to live with these animals. But we won’t live with them for long!”

At that, one person in the crowd shouted, “Kill them!”

In the same speech, Trump called for the expeditious “removal of these savage gangs,” promising that, if elected, he would appoint “elite squads” to conduct mass deportations. He also vowed to enforce the death penalty for “any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”

Last year, the MAGA leader leaned on appalling language that immediately echoed Adolf Hitler’s fascistic rhetoric designed to dehumanize his enemies. Trump referred to his political rivals—the GOP-anointed “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs”—as “vermin,” and claimed that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”

Donald Trump invented some more fanfiction about the presidential election Friday, imagining a world where Kamala Harris was replaced as the Democratic candidate.

During a scattered anti-immigrant rant at a rally in Aurora, Colorado, Trump seemed particularly out of it as he cascaded from one subject to another, turning suddenly back to his complaint that Harris should not have replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

“She shouldn’t be the one who was chosen anyway, because she is, in fact, by the way they chose her, a threat to democracy,” Trump said.

“And just in case you didn’t know it: Biden … hates her,” Trump shouted.

“I believe there is a small possibility—very small, like 1 percent—there is a 1 percent possibility he hates her more than he hates Donald Trump. I think he hates her,” he rambled.

“He went way, way down. And I thought it was over. And then—it’s like a fighter—then they put a new person in, her. And we don’t know anything about her. We have to—and now we learned, and now the people are learning, and she’s crashing like a rock,” Trump babbled.

The former president had clearly lost his train of thought before perking up again.

“Uh oh! I just thought. Just a thought—from a very brilliant mind—they might want to put a third person in tha—oh, no!

“Please be nice to Kamala, to my people, I’m telling,” Trump said incoherently, implying that she might exit the race if they were too hard on her. (This would be impossible, as both parties have passed the deadline to change their ticket lineup.) “Everybody that’s on the Trump team, be—be nice to Kamala! Because they’re going to put in a third person.

“Let’s see, who are they gonna put in next?” Trump asked the crowd, which shouted names in reply.

“They keep saying ‘Hillary,’” Trump said, feigning shock. “Hillary’s coming! Hillary’s back!”

Trump went on to whine that Hillary Clinton had “serious Trump Derangement Syndrome,” because she still speaks about the 2016 presidential election, which Trump had already talked about during his speech that day. “She talks about it all the time,” he whined.

Then Trump actually tried to brag about how outrageously off-topic his rant had become.

“Isn’t it fun. Isn’t it nice—cause I haven’t looked at these stupid things in about 15 minutes—isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t need a teleprompter? Isn’t that nice?” he asked.

If anything, Trump’s winding speech should be a warning about the risks of not using a teleprompter.

Despite the fact that his state is still recovering from Hurricane Helene, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper was forced to use his time to debunk misinformation spread by Donald Trump Friday afternoon.

Trump posted on Truth Social earlier on Friday that Cooper, along with “Democrats in Washington,” were blocking aid from coming into the state to help people in need, including President Biden and Kamala Harris, saying, “It’s all over the place—A HORRIBLE SITUATION.

“I will make it up to everyone when we take Office on January 20th. HOLD ON, I’M COMING!” Trump’s post read, showing that the post wasn’t so much about aid as it was about scaring up votes in North Carolina.

Cooper responded on X with a screenshot of Trump’s post, pointing out that it was “a flat out lie.”

“We’re working with all partners around the clock to get help to people. Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories have hurt the morale of first responders and people who lost everything, helped scam artists and put government and rescue workers in danger,” Cooper said.

Trump has been pushing the conspiracy that Democrats are hurting Republicans by withholding aid since Hurricane Helene struck the southeastern U.S. in late September. But his rhetoric has ended up hurting his supporters and some of the people hit hardest by the storm, as many people have stopped requesting badly needed help from the government.

Trump on Friday also hinted at the far-right conspiracy that the federal government is controlling the weather. Some local Republicans have pushed back against these lies, including Representative Chuck Edwards, and President Biden has also called out the “onslaught of lies.”

But Trump and other Republicans keep repeating the false claims because they see political opportunity in them, no matter how often they are debunked or how many people are put at risk. With the election less than a month away, Cooper and other leaders not only have to deal with logistical problems with hurricane aid but also human obstacles led by Trump.

Before Donald Trump had even taken the stage Friday, venomous anti-immigrant sentiment ran wild at the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign rally in Aurora, Colorado.

Trump has falsely and repeatedly claimed that Tren de Aguas, a Venezuelan gang, had taken over an apartment building in Aurora. In reality, the police said there was no evidence it had been taken over, and residents claimed it had been left destitute by a predatory management company.

Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert helped open the event, spewing vitriolic anti-immigrant messages in front of a backdrop that read, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” and “END MIGRANT CRIME.”

Miller, the ghoulish white nationalist behind the Trump administration’s most hard-line immigration policies, went on a racist tirade about undocumented immigrants.

“Look at all of these photos around me. Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with?” Miller asked the crowd.

While Miller was specifically gesturing to two large photographs of Jose Miguel Reyes-Perez and Juan Carlos Mejia-Espana, who have been identified as undocumented members of Tren de Aguas, his rhetoric echoed the “great replacement theory,” which laments the changing demographics of the U.S. through immigration.

The crowd replied with an enthusiastic “No!” to Miller’s blatant race-baiting.

“Are these the neighbors that you want, in your city?” Miller continued. “No, these are the criminal migrants that Kamala Harris brought into your community. And as swiftly as they came, Donald Trump will send. Them. Back.”

Miller has previously endorsed a theory called “remigration” which, unlike deportation, refers to the forcible removal of non–ethnically European immigrants and their families, regardless of their actual citizenship.

Boebert, for her part, was quick to double down on her own racist fearmongering. Last month, she spread more anti-immigrant misinformation about Aurora, claiming that she and other lawmakers had “confirmed” reports that members of Tren de Aguas had committed “human trafficking and sexual abuse of minors” at another apartment building in the area.

However, as Kyle Clark of Next9 News pointed out, claims of sexual abuse of minors were seemingly new and unconnected to any recent arrests in the area. Clark exposed that the report Boebert was referring to had relied on a “third-hand anonymous claim” to make that allegation.

It seems, a month later, Boebert was still pretty upset about the brutal fact-check.

“In Colorado, we don’t need Kyle Clark and 9News to tell us what’s happening in our own backyard,” Boebert said as the crowd booed wildly.

“Our backyard is looking like an episode of Narcos!” she shouted, as the crowd fell silent at the lame joke.