JD Vance Serves Up Word Salad as He Swerves on Crucial Trump Question

For weeks, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has skirted and dodged answering whether he believes that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But on Wednesday, Vance offered his most eyebrow-raising take thus far: “Not by the words that I would use.”

Speaking before a crowd in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the MAGA movement’s second-in-command insisted that he had already answered the question when it was posed to him in dozens of previous interviews. In a word-salad reply, Vance refused to yield to the idea that Trump had not secured the presidency in 2020—but he also suggested that Trump may not have lost at all.

“I think there were serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance said.

Vance isn’t the only MAGA ally still holding out on the 2020 election results in the waning days of the 2024 race. Speaking with NBC News’s Meet the Press on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson couldn’t help but qualify his answer as to whether he would certify the results of the upcoming election no matter the outcome.

“Regardless of who wins, you’ll certify the results?” asked host Kristen Welker.

“Regardless? Of course, yes, if the election is free and fair and legal, and we pray and hope that it is, there’s a lot of work being done to make sure that’s true,” Johnson said. “I think this one’s going to be so large there’ll be no question. I think Donald J. Trump is your next president, and that can’t happen soon enough.”

When Welker pointed out that saying “if” the election is fair, as well as Trump’s continued lack of a concession over the 2020 vote, was likely to undermine voter confidence in the upcoming election, Johnson was quick to brush off her concerns.

“The point is the process works. We have the peaceful transfer of power. We did in 2020,” he said, conveniently ignoring the fact that an armed and violent mob stormed the Capitol to try to prevent that transfer of power.

Loyalty, after all, has a premium in any future Trump administration.

Pennsylvania Democrats are sounding the alarm that Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign may be mismanaged, Politico reported Wednesday. 

“I feel like we’re going to win here, but we’re going to win it in spite of the Harris state campaign,” said a Democratic elected official in the state, who, like others for this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive matter. “Pennsylvania is such a mess, and it’s incredibly frustrating.”

Specifically, it seems that Pennsylvania Democratic leaders are worried about the efforts of one person in particular: Nikki Lu, Harris’s campaign manager in the state.

Ryan Boyer, the first Black leader of Philadelphia’s powerful building trade council, spoke on the record about his worries over the campaign management. “I have concerns about Nikki Lu,” Boyer told Politico. “I don’t think she understands Philadelphia.”

Others criticized Lu for failing to connect with state Democratic leaders. A second Democratic state official described Lu as “AWOL,” while a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist told Politico that Lu “empowers a culture” in Harris’s presidential camp that has left elected officials feeling left out in the cold. 

Late last month, Latino and Black Democratic leaders met with officials from the Harris campaign to discuss their concerns, according to five people who attended or were briefed on the proceedings. Officials asked for increased presence at local events, improved surrogate operation, and a more sophisticated approach for engaging with diverse voting blocs. 

Harris’s national campaign manager Julie Rodriguez Chavez responded to criticism of Harris’s Pennsylvania campaign, saying that they were running “the largest and most sophisticated operation in Pennsylvania history.” 

“We have 50 coordinated offices and nearly 400 staff on the ground,” she said, touting the large investments the campaign has made in advertising  and outreach targeting Black and Latino voters. Both presidential campaigns have spent more in Pennsylvania than in any other state in the country. 

In recent weeks, Harris’s campaign has been joined by Paulette Aniskoff, who served as a field director for Barack Obama in 2008. Democratic leaders have been enthusiastic about Aniskoff’s presence and what they view as a softening of Lu’s authority in the campaign. Leaders were also encouraged by the work of two advisers, Brendan McPhillips and Kellan White, whom they saw as having a strong understanding of Philadelphia voters. 

While Harris needs to shore up support in Democratic-leaning Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the surrounding suburbs, the vice president’s campaign has devoted significant resources toward attracting disaffected Republican voters throughout the state. 

Aniskoff seems all for it. “I do think these suburban folks—Nikki Haley folks—are very uncomfortable with Trump, uncomfortable with all of his crazy shit, and we have such a great opening,” she said. 

Unsurprisingly, that seems to involve cavorting with Republicans, which could explain why Democratic leaders appear to feel a little iced out. 

On Wednesday, Harris spoke in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she was joined by former Georgia Republican Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan, as well as Olivia Troye, former Homeland Security adviser to Mike Pence. Troye previously spoke at the Democratic National Convention and was Harris’s guest at her presidential debate in September. 

Harris held a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday, where she called Trump “increasingly unstable and unhinged.” Both Erie and Bucks County supported President Joe Biden in 2020. 

The Nebraska Supreme Court has delivered a last-minute ruling that could impact one of the most important Senate races this November and one crucial Electoral College vote.

On Wednesday, a judge ruled that Nebraskans with past felony convictions can vote in the November elections and cannot be barred by county elections officials. Individuals with felony convictions in that state can register online through Friday or in person by October 25.

This comes as the Cornhusker State has garnered national attention over its exciting Senate matchup between independent Dan Osborn and Republican Deb Fischer, who are currently neck and neck in the polls.

Further, Nebraska’s particular split-electoral-vote system, which Republicans tried to challenge earlier this year, means that the blue dot of Omaha could be Kamala Harris’s key to winning in November. 

Nearly 7,000 voters could now be eligible to vote in less than three weeks. Many of Nebraska’s former felons live in or near Omaha. The overlapping 2nd congressional district race between Republican Don Bacon and Democrat Tony Vargas is also too close to call.

For the past 20 years, Nebraskans with past felony convictions were forced to wait two years before registering to vote, until legislation passed this April ending the waiting period. Voters were held in limbo after the Nebraska attorney general challenged the decision. Wednesday’s ruling sets the record straight. And these new voters may just determine the future of the White House, Congress, and the Senate—if they can register to vote in time.

Donald Trump had no idea what in vitro fertilization was until after Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling against the practice in February, needing Senator Katie Britt to explain it to him.

The former president made the startling revelation during a Fox News town hall in Georgia about women’s issues that aired Wednesday, shortly after calling himself the “father of IVF” and saying, “Nobody talks about that.”

“I got a call from Katie Britt, a young, just a fantastically attractive person from Alabama, she’s a senator, and she called me up like ‘Emergency, emergency’ because an Alabama judge had ruled that the IVF clinics were illegal and had to be closed down,” Trump told Fox News’s Harris Faulkner.

“I didn’t know they were even involved in [IVF]; nobody talks about that, they don’t talk about it, but now that they can’t do it, she said I was attacked in a certain way, I was attacked, and I said explain IVF very quickly, and within about two minutes I understood it. I said, ‘No no, we’re totally in favor of IVF,’” Trump continued incoherently.

Trump admitting he had never heard of IVF until February would be damning for most political candidates, let alone one running for president. Trump’s supposed vow to protect IVF is even worse, as he has constantly flip-flopped on the issue, with his running mate, JD Vance, struggling to keep up and explain Trump’s policy.

Trump’s fellow Republicans, including Britt, have refused to protect the practice at the federal level, voting against multiple measures in Congress. But so far, Trump and the GOP have escaped any blowback for failing to protect IVF or their numerous other attacks on reproductive rights. It looks like the only accountability they’ll face will be at the ballot box in November.

Fox News built Donald Trump his own safe space in Georgia on Tuesday, reportedly inviting local chapters of conservative organizations to bolster the crowds.

From the jump, the all-women audience-led town hall at Reid Barn in Cumming, Georgia, was notably more energetic than Trump’s recent media appearances. Attendees roared and cheered for the Republican presidential nominee, even while his responses failed to answer their questions or completely went off the rails.

With less than 30 days on the clock until Election Day, the interview was intended to soften Trump’s image with female voters in swing states. But rather than offer an honest depiction of Trump’s popularity among women—which currently drags behind Kamala Harris’s by a 14-point margin, according to a national NBC News poll—Fox opted to plant some of the former president’s biggest fans to help him out.

Some of the women who attended the town hall were spotted in conservative clothing, including one who wore a hat that read “RNC Delegate.” And one of the individuals chosen to ask Trump a question bore a striking resemblance to Lisa Cauley, the president of Fulton County Republican Women.

Behind the scenes, some women openly admitted that they had received “personal invitations” from the network to appear.

“We got a personal invitation from Fox News,” Emily Harris, the vice president of Republican Women of Forsyth, told The Independent. “We were ecstatic.… We were all very, very excited.”

Trump has long fretted over his reputation with women, but that hasn’t stopped him from pushing policies that actively harm women across the country. Those include making rolling back abortion a key component of all three of his campaigns, repeatedly promising over the last eight years to ban the medical procedure at every available opportunity. While in office, he expressed support for a bill that would have banned abortion nationwide at 20 weeks.

He’s actively spread disinformation about the procedure, attempting to turn voters against permitting access to the medical treatment by claiming there are some states and Democrats who support abortions “after birth,” otherwise known as infanticide or, simply, murder. And Trump’s direct actions include the most egregious offense against national access to the lifesaving procedure: the appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The resulting nationwide constriction has sent several states into crisis mode, air-dropping pregnant patients to hospitals in nearby states for critical care that they themselves are no longer able to legally provide.

The former president has also caught flak for his treatment of porn star Stormy Daniels, whom he covered up an affair with ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, said at the time that Trump believed the story could torpedo his rising political star, sharing that he believed it was a “disaster” and that “women are going to hate me.”

Trump’s casual, gross remarks about women haven’t helped his popularity, either. Perhaps most egregiously, the real estate mogul was caught on a hot mic claiming that he could do whatever he wanted to women since he was famous, like “grab ’em by the pussy.”

But none of those reasons came to mind when Trump’s supporters at Tuesday’s town hall were tasked with rationalizing why women are peeling away from the MAGA leader.

“I don’t know where that comes from,” Cynthia Brown, treasurer for Republican Women of Forsyth County, told The Independent. “Because everyone I talk to just loves and appreciate[s] what he is doing, because he’s protecting our children, protecting women from sex trafficking, human trafficking and all the … things that bringing, having open borders allows.”

Donald Trump may have called tariffs the “most beautiful word in the dictionary” on Tuesday, but reporting shows that his economic plans would destroy the economy in nearly every metric. His isolationist policy would skyrocket inflation rates, harm the stock market, and damage America’s global economic standing.

A sweeping report from The Washington Post Wednesday found that independent market experts agree that Trump’s tariff plans would immediately raise costs to U.S. consumers, rather than make his global adversaries pay as he promises. At his appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, Trump bragged about a potential “2,000 percent tariff,” not entirely out of line of his economic threats he’s levied against Mexico and China recently. In the past, he has threatened tariffs of 10, 20, 100, 200, or even 1000 percent.

His ridiculous, still ill-defined tariff plan would shock the U.S. economy according to the Post’s analysis, causing price increases on items at the grocery store and at the gas pump. Economic think tanks estimate that the tariffs could cost the typical American household somewhere between $2,600 and $7,600 per year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Yale Budget Lab.

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the poorest Americans would be hit the hardest, paying an average of 6 percent more under Trump’s plan to implement 20 percent automatic tariffs on all imports. The American economy at-large would also suffer, with that same plan resulting in a $4.3 trillion tax hike over the next 10 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

As expected, Trump’s team called the economic findings fake news. “These Wall Street elites would be wise to review the record and acknowledge the shortcomings of their past work if they’d like their new forecasts to be seen as credible,” said Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, to the Post.

Despite what Trump may claim, tariffs are certainly not “the greatest thing ever invented,” and isolating the U.S. economy from the rest of the world will only hurt people at home.

At a Fox News town hall on women’s issues in Georgia taped Tuesday evening, Donald Trump spoke further of the “enemy within” that he wants to use the military against, specifically naming Democratic Representative Adam Schiff as well as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her family. *

“It is the enemy from within. And they’re very dangerous. They’re marxists and they’re communists and they’re fascists and they’re sick.” Trump said to Fox’s Harris Faulker. “I use a guy like Adam Schiff. They made up the Russia Russia Russia hoax.”

Trump went on to claim that enemies like Russia and China could be handled, but the Democrats were a different story. “The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil,” Trump said, adding that he was investigated “more times than Al Capone.”

“They’re the threat to democracy,” Trump said about his Democratic opponents to applause from the supportive audience.

In a weekend interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, Tru​​mp made an ominous threat to use the military against his critics and intervene in the election, claiming that they are a bigger threat than migrants, a favorite bugbear of his. His supporters struggled to defend his comments, with many Republicans denying them altogether.

Trump has never been a friend of Pelosi, although he did claim in August that one of her daughters said the two would be “perfect together,” which drew a vehement denial from one of said daughters, Christine Pelosi. Trump was also among many of the Republicans who laughed at the violent attack against Nancy’s husband, Paul, in 2022.

The former House speaker has never minced words about Trump, making it clear on January 6, 2021 how much she thought he was a threat to democracy, and highlighting in her book the warnings she received on Trump’s mental health from doctors and mental health professionals. As House speaker, she played a major role in both of Trump’s impeachments in 2019 and 2021. Trump’s targeting of Nancy Pelosi and her family is another way in which he plans to take revenge against his enemies if he wins in November.

* This piece initially misstated Adam Schiff’s title.

It seems that Donald Trump’s campaign isn’t too happy with the glitchy canvassing efforts of Elon Musk’s America PAC.

Musk’s PAC is responsible for the majority of the Trump campaign’s ground game in several swing states. Musk himself has donated at least $75 million to the PAC, spent on advertisements and canvassers to get out the vote.

However, GOP operatives and conservative activists have seen little activity from Musk’s PAC in battleground states, and Trump’s allies are taking their complaints straight to the man in charge, Rolling Stone reported Wednesday.

“We were upfront about our concerns,” said one GOP operative close to Trump. The operative, who spoke anonymously with Rolling Stone, shared a screenshot of a text conversation that showed their reports from swing states had been relayed to the former president.

Several mega-donors and operatives who spoke to Rolling Stone pointed out that the America PAC is still searching for canvassers, according to a posting on its website. “Why isn’t the army already in place?” one donor asked rhetorically.

This complaint is consistent with descriptions of Musk’s operation. In true technocrat fashion, Musk’s canvassing efforts relies on a door-knocking app called Campaign Sidekick, which means that there is no way to actually verify whether volunteers in swing states are doing their jobs.

Sources told Rolling Stone that members of Trump’s camp have been complaining about his reliance on America PAC for weeks. Some in Trump’s inner circle don’t trust the PAC because of who’s actually in charge of it: two veterans of the Ron DeSantis’s failed presidential run, Phil Cox, who led the Never Back Down Super PAC, and Generra Peck, who served as DeSantis’s campaign manager before he dropped out.

“Why in the world would we trust them with anything?” one Trump adviser asked rhetorically.

It seems that Trump has been less than receptive to the warnings from his allies, though. “I can tell you from personal interactions with him that Donald Trump loves what Elon and his operation are doing in the battleground states, and nobody trying to convince him otherwise lately has had any effect,” one Trump political adviser told Rolling Stone. “As you can see, Trump has been saying at rallies how much he loves Elon and the work he’s putting in… Elon is going all in where it truly matters, especially in Pennsylvania, where his efforts are most visible.”

Rather than devote campaign resources to organizing canvassers, Trump has instead focused on motivating his supporters to act as poll watchers, leaving Musk in charge of rounding up hundreds of thousands of votes. As Trump has outsourced his ground game, his efforts have been dwarfed by Kamala Harris’s field campaign.

Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred had one prevailing message for Texans regarding Senator Ted Cruz: You can’t trust this guy.

Going head-to-head for the first time on Tuesday night, Allred systematically portrayed Cruz as failing to work for the Lone Star State, including torching the Republican for his response to the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol and for fleeing the state during times of hardship.

“After he’d gone around the country lying about the election, after he’d been the architect of the attempted overthrow of that election, when that mob came, Senator Cruz was hiding in a supply closet,” Allred said.

Cruz, in turn, shook his head and laughed weirdly. But the sordid detail first emerged from the 53-year-old’s own book, Justice Corrupted, which detailed Cruz’s escape into a “supply closet with stacked chairs” while Trump supporters descended on the legislature.

“And that’s OK, I don’t want him to get hurt by the mob, I really don’t. This election is his accountability. You cannot just be patriotic when your side wins,” Allred continued. “If for the first time in 250 years, this project of ours—this shared American project—that we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, the folks responsible have to be held accountable.”

Allred also attacked Cruz for his minuscule legislative accomplishments after more than a decade in office, which included joining a conservative effort earlier this year to bomb a bipartisan border deal to help Trump win the election. Cruz also faced the fire for his trip to Cancún in 2021, dipping out on the state—and his dog—during a historic winter storm that paralyzed Texas’s infrastructure. Allred leaned into a Texan saying to sum up Cruz’s efforts during his congressional tenure: “all hat and no cattle.”

“This is a pattern. He talks tough, but he never shows up,” Allred said. “Six more years of this? Come on. He’s had 12 years to do it already.”

Cruz, meanwhile, cast Allred as “radical and extreme,” lamenting that the native Texan would “change” Texas.

“We’re doing an awful lot right in the state of Texas,” Cruz said at the top of the debate. “Colin Allred wants to change that. I want to keep Texas Texas.”

After spending weeks trying to run away from his anti-abortion stance on the campaign trail, Senator Ted Cruz was held accountable by his opponent and the moderators of Tuesday night’s Texas Senate debate.

During the debate against Democratic challenger Representative Colin Allred, Cruz tried to dodge a question on whether he supported the right to an abortion in cases of rape and incest.

In Texas, abortion care is not permitted, except to save the mother’s life. When initially asked if he supported exceptions to the state’s draconian abortion law, Cruz gave a nonanswer, simply saying that states should determine their own laws.

“Well, listen, abortion is an issue that many Texans, many Americans, care deeply about, and it’s an issue that people of good faith can disagree,” Cruz said.

“You did not directly answer the question,” said debate moderator Gromer Jeffers, who again tried to push Cruz to respond to the question. “Why is this an issue you won’t address, about saying whether you support or oppose exceptions for rape and incest?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?” asked an exasperated Cruz.

Cruz is clearly avoiding the question because he knows that abortion bans that don’t permit exceptions for rape and incest aren’t popular with voters, even in the state of Texas and even among Republicans.

He quickly tried to change the subject and accused Allred of allowing minors to get abortions without their parents’ permission. “He has voted in favor of striking down Texas law that gives parents the right to be notified and consent,” said Cruz. “He’s voted in favor of striking down Texas’ law and legalizing abortion up to and including the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy.”

“Senator Cruz just called himself pro-life. You’re not,” responded Allred. “It’s not pro-life to deny women care so long that they can’t have children anymore. It’s not pro-life to force a victim of rape to carry a their rapist baby. It’s not pro-life that our maternal mortality has skyrocketed up by 56 percent.

“When Ted Cruz says he’s pro-life, he doesn’t mean yours.”