Trump: It’s Ukraine’s Fault It Got Invaded by Russia

On a podcast released Thursday morning, Donald Trump said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “should never have let that war start,” referring to Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, which began when Russia invaded the country in February 2022. It was the latest of Trump’s many statements absolving Russia—and its murderous leader, Vladimir Putin—of blame for the invasion.  

Throughout the nearly 90-minute interview with Patrick Bet-David on the PBD Podcast, Trump continued to slam Zelenskiy, facetiously calling him “one of the greatest salesmen I’ve ever seen.” 

“Who else got that kind of money in history? There’s never been. And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help him because I feel very badly for those people. But he should never have let that war start. That war is a loser,” said Trump. 

Trump also focused on the “beautiful golden domes”—referring to the numerous Orthodox churches, many hundreds of years old—destroyed by the Russian army, rather than the one million dead or injured in the conflict. (Trump loves a good dome.) And then, he attempted to paint President Joe Biden as the instigator of the war, rather than Putin. 

“Everyone will say, ‘Oh, this is terrible, he’s blaming Biden,’” said Trump, who then clarified that he is in fact blaming Biden, adding that “he instigated that war.” 

Trump has come under fire this month over rumors that he continued his relationship with Russian autocrat Putin after leaving the Oval Office. As president, Trump sent Putin Covid tests; out of office, the two have reportedly talked on the phone on numerous occasions, though both deny this (not always convincingly). On Tuesday, the former president did very little to deny those allegations, stating in an interview with Bloomberg that it would have been “a smart thing.”

JD Vance would not stop complaining Thursday about having been “censored,” when what he was actually describing was being corrected.

During a campaign stop in Pittsburgh—a publicized event with a large crowd, hardly censorship—Vance transformed a speech meant to be about economic issues into a diatribe about free speech. He repeatedly claimed that Kamala Harris wanted to censor Americans’ speech—without providing any actual instances where she had done so.

“We have leaders who would rather censor their fellow citizens than listen to them and persuade them,” Vance said.

He referred to his previous, and fully debunked, claims alleging that illegal immigrants had taken over the cities of Springfield, Ohio; Aurora, Colorado; and Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

“We are seeing all across this country that criminal gangs, sometimes, are moving into our communities and making it unsafe for American citizens,” Vance said. He immediately tried to walk back his gross generalization. “And even if it’s not criminal gangs, sometimes it’s people moving into our communities who have no legal right to be there.”

However, the groups that Vance has discussed, Haitian immigrants in Springfield and Charleroi, do have a legal right to be there. They are in the United States under temporary protected status, a legitimate legal status that Vance has conveniently decided he doesn’t believe in.

As for Aurora, Vance and Donald Trump have pushed claims that Venezuelan gangs have laid claim to apartment buildings in the area, an allegation that has been challenged by both residents and law enforcement.

Vance blamed the “thousands upon thousands of children” of undocumented immigrants for a decline in the quality of American education, and blamed immigrants for long wait times in emergency rooms.

At no point did he actually detail any supposed “censorship” of his words, but Vance’s statements about these immigrants have been subject to thorough fact-checks because they were all, in reality, untrue. Despite all the supposed government censorship, he did manage to get the words out without being arrested, which must have been a relief.

Later, Vance turned back to the subject, claiming that he and Trump would “always fight for your right to speak your mind.”

“The genius of the First Amendment is that when we debate our ideas, rather than censor one another, we can actually come to the table. We can disagree but still share a meal with one another afterwards,” he said.

“You do not bring our fellow citizens together by trying to silence them. You bring our fellow citizens together by talking to them. And inviting the conversation about how we’re going to make this country better, and fix our problems.”

Of course, when Vance or Trump are invited to the table, they lose their minds at the slightest bit of correction, not censorship. Vance himself flew off the handle after the smallest fact-check during the vice presidential debate.

“We may not always agree with each other, but we will fight for your right to speak your mind because this is America, and we get to say whatever the hell we want to,” Vance concluded his speech Thursday. He has repeatedly proved that painfully clear.

It’s worth noting that Vance and Trump haven’t limited their misinformation campaigns to immigration but have also spent the better part of the last two weeks spreading false claims about federal hurricane relief efforts, all while the work was actually undercut by MAGA lawmakers who opposed emergency funding until they wanted it.

In any case, it seems that Vance should be more worried about self-censorship, as his running mate has started pulling out of interview after interview.

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?”

Fox News is desperately trying to spin Kamala Harris’s interview with Bret Baier Wednesday night and create the impression that the vice president bombed. 

The effort started right after the interview concluded, with Martha MacCallum telling Baier, “Bret, I thought you did a masterful job. This is the kind of interview that we should see a lot of on the campaign trail. 

“I thought you really asked the questions that a lot of Americans want answers to, which is, ‘How did you let all these millions of people come into the country, and do you have any regrets about it?’ and I think her answers were not good on that,” MacCallum said.

Sean Hannity covered for Baier on his evening show, saying, “He didn’t let Kamala off the hook; he pressed her, he pressed her repeatedly. Needless to say, I’d say the joy is gone in the Harris campaign tonight, and her obvious anger? That was on full display, the one she’s notorious for.” 

Baier went on Hannity’s show himself, and accused Harris of gamesmanship by coming out to begin the interview at 5:17 p.m. instead of earlier. He also accused the vice president of having a “mission” to find a viral moment.

“She came to Fox News and she wanted to have a ‘go after Donald Trump’ viral moment that plays on a lot of other channels and on social media, and I think she may have gotten that,” Baier said.  

Jesse Watters also took shots at Harris, saying, “She was roughed up so badly, Pelosi’s asking Joe to get back in,” saying that she had no good answers on immigration, praising Baier, and putting down her interviews with other news networks.

“This is what an actual Kamala Harris interview should look like. Bret gave her the same treatment as he gave Trump in the spring: respectful, firm, and persistent. We didn’t swap her answers to make her look better like CBS. We didn’t invite little Timmy along to hold her hand like CNN. This was a big girl interview. And she flopped,” Watters said.  

Fox News is the most important media organ for Republicans and conservatives, and it’s not surprising that its hosts would push the narrative that Harris messed up. In reality, though, Harris did not back down from the network’s bias, challenging Baier and fighting back against his interruptions, and outside observers, including former Fox employees, agreed. Watters’s contention that Fox treated Harris the same way as Trump is laughable, especially since the network made heavy edits to an interview with the former president in June and had aired a remarkably gentle and sanitized town hall with him earlier that day.

The network was always going to be a formidable opponent for the Democrats this election, and Wednesday’s interview is clear proof that Fox’s on-air personalities want to make Harris look bad and help their preferred candidate, Donald Trump. The question is whether their audience was convinced. 

Appealing to undecided Latino voters with bold-faced racism at a Univision town hall was a brazen strategy for Donald Trump. Surprisingly, it didn’t seem to pay off.

The Republican presidential nominee’s favorability among Latino voters has been in flux, but a New York Times/Siena College poll published earlier this week found that Vice President Kamala Harris led the nationwide demographic by a 12-point margin, while Trump attracted just 40 percent of the coveted vote. But groups of Latinos in key swing states, such as Nevada, have become less shy in recent months about showing their support for the former president, particularly over the economy.

So when it came time to answer a question from Jorge Velazquez, a 64-year-old Mexican immigrant farmer, about his mass deportation plan and the thousands of arduous jobs it would leave empty in the agricultural industry, Trump had an opening to seal the deal. Instead, he dropped the bag.

“The problem we have is, we had people coming in under my administration, and they were coming in legally, they were coming in through a system we had which was great because I’m the best thing that ever happened to farmers, you know that. I was great,” Trump said.

“They’ve released hundreds of thousands of people that are murderers, drug dealers, terrorists—they’re coming in totally, nobody knows who they are, where they come from,” Trump continued as audience members shifted in their seats.

“The other thing I can say is that a lot of the jobs that you have and that other people have are being taken by these people that are coming in,” Trump continued, misunderstanding Velazquez’s question, which directly tasked Trump to answer how much America would pay for the “price of food” if immigrant labor was unavailable.

“The African American population and the Hispanic population in particular are losing jobs now because millions of people are coming in,” Trump said. “So, they’re coming in but they’re also coming in largely and tremendous numbers, coming in, out of mental institutions—they’re emptying out mental institutions—they’re emptying out insane asylums, that’s a step above a mental institution.… They’re emptying out jails.”

In another sprawling and disturbing answer, Trump reinforced the baseless MAGA conspiracy that Haitian immigrants (who have legal temporary protected status) were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, lamenting that the sudden influx was preventing locals from accessing their basic needs.

“If you were a person that lived there, if you lived in Springfield, Ohio, and all of a sudden you couldn’t get into a hospital, you couldn’t get your children into a school, you wouldn’t be able to buy groceries. You could no longer pay the rent because the government’s paying rent, any of that. If any of that happened, it would be a disaster for you and you wouldn’t be happy. We want to make our people safe and secure, and we want to make them happy,” Trump said.

But the Haitian immigrants—who were attracted to the city due to its low cost of living and readily available work opportunities—are hardly why so many schools and government buildings in Springfield have shut down in recent weeks.

Instead, that fault lies with Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who have drawn so much attention to the tiny city with their conspiracy that Springfield has endured at least 33 bomb threats, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities.

Multiple city officials, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and even JD Vance himself have stated in no uncertain terms that the Haitian immigrant conspiracy is false.

No, it’s not 2016: Donald Trump is once again trying to pay to keep Stormy Daniels quiet ahead of the presidential election.

Just 11 days before the 2016 election, Trump had organized for Daniels to be paid $130,000 so that she would not speak publicly about their extramarital affair, illegally concealing the payment by laundering the money through Michael Cohen, his former attorney.

As a result, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in May, and awaits sentencing later in November. Apparently, Trump hasn’t learned from his mistakes at all. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported Wednesday night, Trump tried yet again to pay for Daniels’s silence.

Following Trump’s conviction, Daniels still had to pay some legal fees to his team related to some of their other disputes. While negotiating the fees and interest, Trump’s lawyer demanded $652,000 from Daniels, who was aiming for a number closer to $600,000.

When Daniels’s lawyer Clark Brewster called her to tell her what number they’d agreed on, Daniels was shocked to find that Trump’s team was trying their same, failed gambit as last time.

“They want to cut some kind of deal where they silence you,” Brewester said, in a video of the call Daniels had released to MSNBC.

“Don’t they know that shit won’t work?” Daniels scoffed.

“It’s not gonna happen, it’s not gonna happen,” Brewster replied.

Maddow was incredulous as she explained the situation. “Trump is trying to get another hush-money deal with Stormy Daniels ahead of this election,” she said. “Trump’s lawyer basically offered to take it off the bottom line; they would pretend that Stormy Daniels owed less money to Trump than they actually believed she owed, if she also signed an agreement not to talk about Trump.”

Maddow said that she had also received emails between Brewster and Trump’s lawyer Harry J. Ross, which confirmed Trump’s offer in exchange for Daniels’s silence.

“We disagree that a payment of 620,000.00 would be in full satisfaction of the three judgments,” read the offer from Ross. “However, we can agree to settle these matters for $620,000.00 provided that your client agrees in writing to make no public or private statements related to any alleged past interactions with President Trump, or defamatory or disparaging statements about him, his businesses and/or any affiliates or his suitability as a candidate for President.”

When Brewster refused Ross’s terms, he received another message, which dropped the bid for Daniels’s complicity. “I just spoke to my client and co-counsel,” the email read. “Case can be settled for 635,000.00 ALL IN.”

Daniels ended up paying $627,500 in fees to Trump, and did not agree to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

While Ross did not respond to MSNBC’s questions, the Trump campaign released a statement that … also did not answer any questions. “These purported documents were attained as part of an illegal, foreign hacking against President Trump and his team,” said Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung.

Of course, this is a lie, as Brewster had provided the emails to MSNBC.