DeSantis Aide Says He Resigned Rather Than Follow His Menacing Orders

Governor Ron DeSantis’s top deputies directly ordered a Florida Health Department lawyer to prosecute television stations for airing political ads about protecting abortion rights in the state.

According to a sworn affidavit from John Wilson, general counsel for the Florida Department of Health, on Monday, DeSantis’s office directed him to send prewritten cease and desist letters to TV stations that aired political ads supporting Amendment 4, a ballot initiative to increase abortion access.

“I received drafts of the letters directly from Sam Elliot, Assistant General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, earlier that day,” wrote Wilson in his affidavit. “Ryan Newman, General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, and Jed Doty, Deputy General Counsel for the Executive Office of the Governor, directed me to send them under my name and on the behalf of the Florida Department of Health.”

Wilson alleges that he was given the threatening prewritten letters to send to the stations on October 3, with no conversation about the letters beforehand. He then made the decision one week later to quit his job instead of sending more letters. “A man is nothing without his conscience,” wrote Wilson in his resignation letter.

DeSantis is part of a federal lawsuit by Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group leading the Yes on 4 campaign to expand abortion rights in the state. The lawsuit will now drop Wilson as a named defendant.

“This affidavit exposes state interference at the highest level,” said Lauren Brenzel, campaign director of Yes on 4. “It’s clear the State is hellbent on keeping Florida’s unpopular, cruel abortion ban in place.”

It’s not looking good for DeSantis and his cronies, as a federal judge last week had tough words for the villains looking to take the pro-choice ads off of the air: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mark Walker.

Donald Trump thinks the answer to the Bronx’s ailing schools is “no transgender, no operations.”

The former president visited a Bronx barbershop with Fox and Friends’ Lawrence Jones in a segment that aired on Monday, and was asked by a local what he would do to improve the school system. Trump replied, “Well, we’re moving them back from Washington, where you have people who don’t care about New York, frankly.”

Trump launched into a brief rant about how he’d cut the Department of Education, claiming “half the buildings” in D.C. belonged to the federal department and that he’d cut it to “one person and a secretary to just make sure they’re teaching English,” which he has said on the campaign trail before. But then, he went off on a disturbing tangent.

“No transgender, no operations, you know they take your kid. There are some places. Your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl, OK. Without parental consent. What is that all about? And they talk about a threat to democracy, they’re a threat,” Trump said as Jones looked on.

“Without parental consent. And first when I was told that was actually happening, I said, ‘You know it’s an exaggeration.’ No: it happens, there are areas where it happens. We’re not going to let it happen,” the former president and convicted felon added.

Trump’s rant fits right into conservative plans, as outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto, to eliminate the federal Department of Education and curtail LGBTQ+ rights. For the record, there are no schools giving free, secret sex-change operations to children.

Eliminating the Department of Education is also a right-wing fantasy, which would deprive school districts around the country of vital federal funds. A president who unilaterally tried to shut it down would run into stiff resistance from Congress as well as state governments. Trump either doesn’t know this, or he’s just repeating what the people around him, many of whom have connections to Project 2025, keep whispering into his ear.

If the intention behind overturning Roe v. Wade was to save infant lives, it failed.

A new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that infant mortality in the U.S. worsened after the Supreme Court reversed its landmark ruling in June 2022, allowing states to implement their own abortion restrictions.

The death rate for infants with severe anatomical problems was significantly higher during six months by the end of 2023 than it had been prior to the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, researchers found. During that period, researchers also found three months when the country’s overall infant mortality rate had increased.

Medical experts saw the throughline: The Dobbs decision had prevented some women from receiving critical care for pregnancies that otherwise would have resulted in abortions.

“There’s a really straightforward mechanism here,” Alison Gemmill, a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times.

“Prior to these abortion bans, people had the option to terminate if the fetus was found to have a severe congenital anomaly—we’re talking about organs being outside of the body and other things that are very severe and not compatible with life,” Gemmill said.

But, with patients situationally forced to continue the pregnancy, “those babies would die shortly after birth,” Gemmill told the Times.

Stronger abortion restrictions may be on the horizon. Donald Trump, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to encroach on abortion access, from fighting for a national abortion ban to celebrating the advancing stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as in vitro fertilization.

Meanwhile, the lack of national protections for the critical procedure has spelled disaster for women in states that have already implemented draconian laws. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that even emergency abortions violate Texas’s extreme abortion ban, despite the law’s supposed emergency abortions clause, effectively ruling that women in the Lone Star State will never be able to receive abortion care—even if their lives depend on it.

Nearly one in five Republicans say that if Trump loses the election he should declare the results invalid, and do whatever it takes to assume office, according to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute published earlier this month. An even larger number support their party using violence to advance their political aims.

If Trump loses, there are quite a few ways he could try to fight his way into the White House. Politico speculated that the Republican nominee could potentially undermine the vote certification process, convince Republican-led state legislatures to appoint alternate electors, and lobby for a GOP-led House to accept his alternate electors, essentially allowing the House to choose the president.

Meanwhile, only 12 percent of Democrats surveyed said that if Kamala Harris loses, she should call the results invalid, and seize the office.

49 percent of Americans believe that Trump would use the office of president to become dictator, while only 28 percent hold a similar concern about Harris. While disturbing, it’s not particularly surprising, considering Trump’s explicitly authoritarian plan to enact massive deportations and undermine rights and public education. There’s also that pesky promise to become a dictator on “day one.”

The survey also found that Republicans were more likely to support political violence than Democrats, with 29 percent of Republicans believing that true American patriots may resort to violence to save the country, compared with only 8 percent of Democrats agreeing with that statement.

Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, told Axios that the results were particularly disturbing. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and these answers … are keeping me up at night,” Jones said.

Vice President Kamala Harris may have better odds in the presidential election than previously predicted.

A poll published Monday by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago suggests that Harris has more than a marginal lead in favorability over the Republican presidential nominee, but is actually surging by double digits.

The nationwide poll, conducted last week, found Harris’s favorability to be significantly higher than Trump’s, with 51 percent of registered voters viewing Harris as a favorable candidate compared to just 40 percent who felt the same about Trump. Independent voters, notably, were equally split on their opinions of Harris, while the majority of independent voters—58 percent—felt negatively about Trump.

Surveyed voters also leaned toward the Democratic presidential nominee on a wide range of issues. Harris led with voters by 20 percent on election integrity, by 12 percent on middle-class taxes, by 11 percent on natural disaster relief, by five percent on the national housing crisis, and by two percent on jobs and unemployment. Trump, meanwhile, led with voters on immigration and crime, which he led Harris by eight percent and five percent, respectively.

But perhaps no Democratic stance resonated more with voters than abortion, which saw Harris lead Trump by 23 percent.

Abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans that November, resulting in major midterm losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Post-election, at least some members of the conservative party had a stunning reversal, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”

But much of the Republican party, especially the MAGA movement, has refused to give it up. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, for one, has previously likened abortion to murder, and has supported efforts to strip abortion access away from women. In 2023, the Ohio politico called for a “minimum national standard” on abortion restrictions, and his run for U.S. Senate in 2022 included language on his website that described him as “100 percent pro-life.”

Trump, meanwhile, has made 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.

Since then, he has used scare tactics to spread disinformation about the procedure, erroneously claiming that Democrats support abortions “after birth”—otherwise known as murder. And Trump’s track record includes the most egregious offense against national access—the appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Elon Musk has promised to give away $1 million to one lucky registered swing state voter every day until Election Day. Now, critics and politicians are sounding the alarms over the legality of Musk’s scheme.

At a campaign event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Musk announced his America PAC’s $1 million bribe.

“We want to try to get over a million, maybe 2 million voters in the battleground states to sign the petition in support of the First and Second Amendment.… We are going to be awarding $1 million randomly to people who have signed the petition, every day, from now until the election,” said Musk.

This is just one more escalation in Musk’s ridiculous money-sink into Donald Trump’s election campaign. Musk has nearly entirely funded the Trump-focused America PAC, pouring $75 million of his own dollars into the Republican candidate’s voter outreach efforts.

It’s a federal crime to pay people to vote or to register to vote. According to a Justice Department manual, that includes both direct payments and lottery-style giveaways. If Musk was on thin ice with his promise to pay people to refer swing voters to sign the America PAC’s petition, now he might really be in trouble as he skirts the gray zone in election law.

“Elon Musk thinks your vote can be bought,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a Democratic event on Sunday, joining the chorus of people questioning the $1 million prize.

On Sunday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called Musk’s move “deeply concerning” and suggested that law enforcement should examine the ploy. “I think it’s something that law enforcement should take a look at. I’m not the attorney general any more of Pennsylvania, I’m the governor, but it does raise serious questions.”

According to Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor, though Musk’s previous actions through the PAC “were of murky legality,” he believes this prize “clearly illegal” because the only people eligible for the lottery are registered voters in battleground states.

To be eligible for the $1 million, one must have signed the America PAC petition in “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.” They also must be a registered voter and live in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

On Monday, Musk bragged that new Republican voter registration is crushing that of Democrats.

It would be such a shame if Democrats also signed Musk’s petitions and made themselves eligible for the giveaway …

A new analysis on the future of Social Security suggests that Donald Trump’s proposed policies for strengthening the program wouldn’t just be ineffective—they would actually destroy it.

A report published Monday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, found that Trump’s pitches would add to the program’s cash deficit by roughly $2.3 trillion, quicken the downfall of the retirement benefit by as much as three years, and could force higher taxes in the long run in an effort to salvage the late-age payouts.

Trump’s campaign promises add up to disaster for the nearly century-old program They include calling for an end to the taxation of overtime pay, tips, and Social Security benefits, which the organization noted would reduce revenue streams, and promising to impose massive tariffs on imports (as high as 2000 percent on foreign cars), which the committee forecast would drastically increase inflation or reduce payroll. But even policies that, on their face, seem as though they wouldn’t impact Social Security—such as Trump’s massive deportation program—would also capsize the retirement benefit by reducing the number of immigrant workers paying into the program’s trust funds.

All in all, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government found that ending income taxation of Social Security benefits would cost $950 billion, cutting taxes on tips and overtime pay would cost $900 billion, and changes to tariffs and immigration would cost $400 billion.

Under current law, Social Security is predicted to reach insolvency by 2034. Once that happens, Social Security will have to reduce spending, cutting as much as 23 percent—approximately $16,500 in annual benefits for a dual-income couple. But Trump’s proposals would expedite that, pushing insolvency to 2031, and could cost the average couple somewhere between 29 and 36 percent “depending on the scenario,” according to the report.

Saving the program, especially from the brink of Trump’s promises, would decimate payouts for current as well as future retirees, forcing the program to either cut benefits by one-third or increase “all current law taxes by roughly one-half.”

Trump’s solutions for salvaging Social Security won’t inspire the kind of cash flow he promises. The Republican presidential nominee has promised to delay the benefit’s shortfall by bolstering the oil and gas industry and growing the economy. But, as the committee noted, increased energy exploration is unlikely to have a meaningful effect, “even if the gains were deposited into the trust fund,” and saving the program through the economy would require “unrealistically fast economic growth.”

During a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Trump cited a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal which noted that during his interview with the publication’s editorial board, Trump displayed “no sign of such slippage,” and had only become more “confident” and “knowledgeable,” despite the sustained incoherence the public may witness on the campaign trail. The Journal also rebranded Trump’s rambling as “discursive.”

“One thing they said that was great, ‘We watched this guy for 20 years, the one thing we know is he’s got no cognitive problem,’” Trump said. “I’ve got no cognitive!”

“She may have a cognitive problem!” he said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, as his supporters cheered. 

Trump said he had called for a cognitive test for all people running for president, “not based on age.” 

“You know, some of the greatest leaders in the world—and I’m not 80, and I’m not that close to 80—but in the Biden case, he’s 81 or 82,” Trump said, getting sidetracked yet again. He went on to laud Rupert Murdoch, who is 93 years old, as a “very successful” person who is also old.  

Of course Trump is 78, only two years away from being 80. If elected, he would be the oldest person elected to office. 

While the Republican nominee has called for cognitive tests, in reality, he has failed to disclose any new information about his physical and mental well-being, something which is not mandated but traditional of presidential candidates, especially ones where their age is a concern. 

Donald Trump was sued by the Central Park Five Monday for defamation over comments he made during the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia. The lawsuit argues Trump’s debate comments were “extreme and outrageous, and … intended to cause severe emotional distress” to the Central Park Five.

The group of five men were charged and convicted of the rape and assault of a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989, in a case that garnered national attention. The five Black and Hispanic men were just teenagers when they were convicted. More than a decade later, DNA evidence exonerated them after a serial rapist confessed to the crime, and the teens settled a $41 million lawsuit against the city in 2014.

At the time, Trump took out full-page ads for $85,000 attacking Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, calling for the return of the death penalty in the city’s four newspapers: The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post, and New York Newsday. Years later, when he ran for president in 2016, Trump continued to claim that the five were guilty, saying, “the fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”

During the debate last month, Trump repeated the false claim that the five pleaded guilty, that they killed someone, and that Mayor Bloomberg agreed with him, according to the legal filing.

“Defendant Trump falsely stated that Plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false,” the civil suit read. “Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.”

The lawsuit requests an unspecified amount in compensatory and punitive damages.

At the Democratic National Convention in August, members of the group spoke out against Trump, with newly elected New York City Council Member Salaam saying about the former president, “Forty-five wanted us un-alive, he wanted us dead.”

“That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will,” Salaam told the Chicago audience.

“Our youth was stolen from us. Every day, as we walked into [the] courtroom people screamed at us, threatened us, because of Donald Trump,” said Korey Wise.

This story has been updated.

After manning the fry station at a McDonald’s restaurant on Sunday, Donald Trump didn’t answer a point-blank question about whether he would raise the minimum wage.

Trump took off his suit jacket, put on an apron, and watched an employee show him how to put the fries in oil, salt them, and then scoop them into boxes. Later, he took questions from reporters from the drive-through window. CBS’s Olivia Rinaldi asked the former president if “the minimum wage should be raised.”

“Well, I think this: I think these people work hard, they’re great, and I just saw something, a process that’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see, these are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs, and it’s great, and great people working here too,” Trump replied, avoiding the topic altogether.

Trump has obsessed over the fact that Kamala Harris worked at a McDonald’s while she was a student at Howard University, repeatedly claiming that it’s not true despite providing no evidence for his claim. Harris has often spoken of her time working at the restaurant, even telling the story in a campaign ad.

Harris’s proposed policies call for raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 due to opposition from Republicans and moderate Democrats. While Trump was president, he didn’t raise or even propose increasing the minimum wage, and was skeptical of how it would help Americans during his 2020 campaign. Trump’s McDonald’s stunt is part of a pattern of appearing to sympathize with working people while enacting policies that benefit the wealthy at workers’ expense.