Trump’s Favorite John Deere Story Is Totally Made Up

Surprise, surprise: Donald Trump has been lying about how he supposedly saved American jobs by threatening John Deere with tariffs.

In Trump’s telling, the farm equipment manufacturer had planned to outsource some of its production to Mexico but abandoned the plan when Trump threatened to hit the company with tariffs.

“John Deere … announced about a year ago they’re gonna build big plants outside of the United States. Right? They’re going to build them in Mexico,” Trump told the Economic Club of Chicago Tuesday. “I said, ‘If John Deere builds those plants, they’re not selling anything into the United States.’ They just announced yesterday they’re probably not going to build the plants, OK? I kept the jobs here.”

But the company had made no such announcement, CNN reported Wednesday, finding nothing in any media reports or John Deere’s corporate releases. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that they hadn’t made any such announcements or changed their plans to shift some of their production. 

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign to ask for evidence or comment on the Journal’s report but did not receive a response. The former president is known for making false claims on days ending in -y, but according to polls, the economy is a topic where voters trust him more than Kamala Harris.

Trump did not help his economic credentials in Chicago Tuesday, with the event’s moderator, Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait pointing out that his promises, including tariffs, would wreck the economy. He also lashed out at Micklethwait for fact-checking his outrageous claims during their interview and wasn’t able to stay on topic for many of the questions he was asked. Trump’s many made-up claims and anecdotes during the Tuesday interview seem to indicate that his ongoing cognitive decline is worsening as the election nears.

During a Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, Donald Trump revealed that transgender people will be one of his first set of victims—appearing to suggest a sweeping executive order.

At the town hall dedicated to “women’s issues,” Trump was asked about what he would do as president to tackle the “transgender issue” in women’s sports. Trump responded by first saying something true: “It’s such an easy question” for him to answer.

“We’re not going to let it happen,” he said.

Trump then went on to discuss one California transgender NCAA volleyball player who has been the target of the right for the past month. “I never saw a ball hit so hard,” said Trump, referring to a viral video of the athlete. Under his watch, transgender athletes competing in sports that match their gender will “absolutely stop,” he added.

When Fox’s Harris Faulkner asked a slightly more difficult question, how Trump would actually logistically stop the issue, Trump replied, “You just ban it. The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.”

The question of transgender people competing in athletics is an easy culture-war question for the right. It doesn’t address any real hardship for women or issues that impact everyday Americans’ lives. Despite half of states placing some kind of ban on transgender athletes, experts estimate there are probably fewer than 100 transgender women competing in NCAA sports. This type of question that allows Trump to pontificate about gender is exactly the kind of easy question he adores.

Meanwhile on the other side of the aisle, Kamala Harris’s team also felt comfortable using transgender people as a political pawn. In a post on X Wednesday, KamalaHQ faced blowback after trying to drag Trump for offering gender-affirming care to migrants and incarcerated people during his presidency.

Elon Musk is playing Jewish and Arab American voters against each other.

The tech billionaire is funding a super PAC, Future Coalition PAC, that is running digital ads that tout Kamala Harris’s support for Israel in Michigan, in areas heavily populated with Muslim and Arab voters. At the same time, the super PAC is running ads aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania attacking Harris as promoting anti-Israel policies, HuffPost reports.

One of the ads in Michigan touts Harris and the Jewish identity of her husband, Doug Emhoff, calling them “America’s pro-Israel power couple,” and mentions Israel’s “noble fight against the terrorists in Gaza.” A mailer paid for by the group also states that Harris leans on her “Jewish husband” to craft her policies on Israel. The ads’s focus on Emhoff to bolster a pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian message has been called antisemitic by Jewish Democrats.

Meanwhile, the super PAC’s ads in Pennsylvania send the opposite message, asking, for example, “Why did Kamala Harris support denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands? And why did Harris show sympathy for college protesters who are rabidly antisemitic?”

The aim of the two ads is to try to use the crisis in Gaza  to undermine Harris’s support from two major communities in key battleground states.

The New York Times confirmed Tuesday, shortly before FEC filings became public, that Building America’s Future is the dark money group behind the PAC. And The Wall Street Journal had already reported that Musk is one of the group’s major contributors. The tech CEO has pushed antisemitic conspiracy theories on his social media platform, X, and curried favor with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect criticism.

The super PAC’s ads may prove to be effective with many Muslim and Arab American voters frustrated with President Biden and Harris’s stance over Israel’s brutal war in the Middle East, which has killed 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza and has expanded to include Lebanon. The Democratic National Convention snubbed opponents of Israel’s actions and refused to feature any Palestinian speakers. The Harris campaign has also refused to signal any change in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine. 

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.