Oklahoma Official Hit With Lawsuit for Trump Bible Scam

Oklahomans are turning to the legal system to fight back against Superintendent Ryan Walters’s Bible education mandate for public schools.

Dozens of parents, teachers, and religious leaders in the Sooner State collectively filed suit Thursday against Walters and the state’s Department of Education, calling on the Oklahoma Supreme Court to intervene in the mandate’s implementation. Walters announced in September that he intended to spend as much as $3 million on the purchase and intracurricular use of Bibles in Oklahoma public schools.

The plaintiffs in Thursday’s suit included 14 public school parents, four public school teachers, and three faith leaders, all of whom torched the effort for seeking to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on what they described as an unethical, unconstitutional, and an illegal reallocation of resources. According to the suit, Walters’s plan would “unlawfully support an invalid rule” since “no statutory or other legislative authority exists” for him to spend state funds on specific curricular materials. Instead, the Department of Education is restricted to providing state funds to individual school districts, which are then mandated to “spend on texts of their own choice.”

“Respondents intend to spend on the Bibles funds that were designated for other purposes and have not been lawfully reallocated,” the plaintiffs wrote.

Curiously, once Oklahoma’s Department of Education opened bids to fill a 55,000 unit order of Bibles for classrooms across the state, Walters’s parameters for the eligible Bibles became eyebrow-raisingly specific.

Bid documents indicated that the Bible suddenly needed to meet strict expectations, including that the text itself be the King James version, that the copies include core, historical elements of the U.S. educational system, including the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and that the text be bound in leather or a leather-like material. That narrowed the pool of applicants down to just one apparent choice: Donald Trump’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Bible.

That detail didn’t pass muster with the suing Oklahomans, either, who wrote in their suit that it seemed “highly unlikely that anyone could fulfill the requirements” of the bid other than Trump’s version. Further still, the group criticized the state for proposing to spend as much as $54.55 a pop on the Trumpian Bibles—just a couple dollars cheaper than the text’s resale price—when other Bibles can be purchased for as little as $3 a piece.

“As parents, my husband and I have sole responsibility to decide how and when our children learn about the Bible and religious teachings,” Erika Wright, the founder and leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “We are devout Christians, but different Christian denominations have different theological beliefs and practices. It is not the role of any politician or public school official to intervene in these personal matters.

“Oklahoma’s education system is already struggling, ranking nearly last in national standings,” Wright continued. “Mandating a Bible curriculum will not address our educational shortcomings.”

JD Vance’s poll numbers are back to abysmally low levels, two weeks after they spiked following his debate against Tim Walz.

A new poll from The Economist and YouGov from October 12 to 15 shows that after an initial jump in support for Vance following the debate on October 1, his favorability numbers have dropped to where they were before the debate, a historic low for a vice presidential candidate.

According to the poll, 9 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Vance on September 28, and that number improved to 2 percent on October 5. But as of October 12, 10 percent of respondents had negative opinions of the Republican vice presidential candidate.

Donald Trump’s decision to choose Vance as his running mate does not seem to have given his campaign a boost. Trump’s choice was made before President Biden withdrew from the 2024 election and was meant to shore up support from the MAGA base instead of pulling in swing voters. When Kamala Harris succeeded Biden in July, Trump’s folly was quickly exposed, leading many Republicans to second-guess the decision.

Those Republicans had their fears validated in the following week, with sexist comments about “childless cat ladies” resurfacing from Vance’s past. The awkward Ohio senator did himself few favors while trying to ingratiate himself with the electorate, including making a bad joke about Diet Mountain Dew being considered “racist.”

Vance’s liabilities have subsequently piled up. He had previously suggested that Trump had committed serial sexual assault, was found to have promoted a right-wing conspiracy theorist’s book that called progressives “unhumans,” and The New Republic revealed that he wrote a favorable foreword for a book linked to Project 2025.

The debate gave Vance respite from the bad press, giving the public a brief impression that he was a normal person. But as the poll results show, that quickly faded, reminding the public all about his weird ideas. The fact that Vance spoke coherently and clearly in the debate and seemed relatively pleasant—as opposed to his normally awkward, off-putting demeanor—couldn’t make up for the fact that they share the same destructive ideas.

Perhaps nobody in Washington has flipped their opinion on January 6 quite like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Despite his public fawning, behind the scenes of the political theater, McConnell’s true feelings about Donald Trump were well known, according to The Price of Power, an upcoming book on the Republican senator by journalist Michael Tackett.

McConnell reportedly referred to Trump as “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” as well as a “despicable human being” weeks before Trump’s supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol with intent to harm Vice President Mike Pence, then–House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and other key politicians.

Before the Georgia runoff election in November, McConnell reportedly described Trump as “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie,” according to Tackett.

In the midst of the insurrection, as rioters banged on his barricaded office doors, McConnell addressed his staff in tears.

“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.

In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, McConnell laid the responsibility of the day’s events at Trump’s feet, proclaiming that there was “no question” the former president was “morally responsible” for the violent attack, and reprimanding Trump for his inaction while his supporters ransacked the legislature as a “disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

Still, when it came time for the Senate to vote on the House’s impeachment of the outgoing president for his involvement in the riot, McConnell chose to acquit. Then, after a year of relative silence on the issue, McConnell chose to wrist-slap the Republican National Convention for censuring House GOP lawmakers who investigated the events of the day.

“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said at the time.

Since then, McConnell has once again endorsed Trump for the Oval Office, rationalizing his support for the former president’s continued executive leadership on the basis that Trump had “earned” the nomination.

In a statement to the Associated Press on Thursday, McConnell insisted that he was now on the “same team” as the Republican presidential nominee.

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said.

Donald Trump has pulled out of two major interviews Thursday, after the Republican presidential nominee made several appearances this week that went disastrously awry.

Trump had been scheduled to do an interview with NBC News’s senior business correspondent Christine Romans that would air Monday, but the plans for a face-to-face were apparently shelved. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported Thursday that one source suggested the interview had only been “postponed.”

The former president also canceled his speech to an NRA convention on Tuesday in Savannah, Georgia. Convention organizers said Trump had a “scheduling conflict.”

These two changes come just days after Trump canceled plans to appear on CNBC’s Squawk Box, which the economic show’s co-anchor Joe Kernan reported Tuesday. While Trump’s campaign claimed he would be unable to attend the Friday interview due to scheduling conflicts that would bring him to Michigan, he is actually scheduled to appear live on Fox & Friends, which is only a few blocks away form the CNBC studio, according to The Daily Beast.

The cancellations come amid a rough week for Trump, who has visibly struggled during several events. The former president flailed while responding to tough questions at a Univision town hall Wednesday night, leaving attendees looking particularly unimpressed as he weirdly called the deadly January 6 riot a “day of love.”

He babbled incoherently during an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago Tuesday and threw a tantrum when fact-checked on his outlandish economic plans. On Sunday, he appeared to come untethered from reality as he stopped a town hall in its tracks so he could awkwardly stand onstage and listen to music for 40 minutes. And earlier this month, Trump broke nearly 60 years of tradition by backing out of an invitation for a sit-down interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes.

It seems that Trump is trying desperately to avoid a mainstream interview with journalists who aren’t in his pocket, opting instead for friendlier, Fox-ier faces.

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris doesn’t appear quite as apprehensive to speak with those who might not agree with her. Harris appeared in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier Wednesday, and seems to have gotten exactly what she wanted out of it.

Billionaire Elon Musk will host his first of several town halls Thursday at 4 p.m. in Folsom, Pennsylvania. The only people allowed to this event, put on by Musk’s America PAC, are registered voters in the state who have signed the PAC’s petition, “support the First and Second Amendments,” and have already voted in the election.

Musk says while he has three more “talks” scheduled on the calendar in Pennsylvania, he “will probably do half a dozen throughout the state” by Election Day. There’s just one problem: The events likely violate federal election law. As Popular Information reported on Thursday, “federal law prohibits making or offering to make ‘an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate.’” Musk’s requirement that attendees to his town halls be registered voters likely violates that provision.

This follows as Musk continues to increase his involvement in the Trump campaign, with his super PAC essentially running the Republican candidate’s flawed ground campaign with a poorly functioning app.

His America PAC is essentially entirely self-funded; according to new campaign finance data, Musk has poured $75 million into the fund since July. Prior to that report, the PAC only showed a measly $8 million from friends like Joe Lonsdale of Palantir and the Winklevoss twins.

Trump has hinted that this spending could earn Musk a spot in his Cabinet, mentioning the promise again to Latino voters at his Univision town hall on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Musk showcased his main-character syndrome, posting an embarrassing supercut of himself on the campaign trail at 1 a.m. on Thursday.

But Republicans worry that the billionaire might be blowing up Trump’s campaign as he has his randomly exploding Teslas. “We were upfront about our concerns,” an anonymous GOP operative close to Trump told Rolling Stone this week, speaking about the America PAC’s canvassing and voter turnout operation. At the moment, Musk’s PAC is also still hiring door knockers in swing states through X, begging the question from a Trump donor, “Why isn’t the army already in place?”