The Despicable Way Republicans Are Scamming Old People

Some of the country’s largest grassroots political donors are handing their money over to Republicans—but they don’t seem to be aware of it.

Hundreds of elderly dementia patients are fueling America’s campaign finance system, collectively shelling out millions of dollars to political candidates while they themselves struggle for cash, according to a CNN investigation published Tuesday.

Some patients, lured by the deceptively direct and aggressive automated messaging strategies utilized by political campaigns, felt that they were taking part in a network of political operatives and had a direct line to either Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.

“President Trump NEVER does this! He personally tapped YOU to become a MAGA Living Legend!” read one message from the Trump campaign.

“The blunt truth: Kamala is BEHIND, and she’s COUNTING on us!” read a note from Harris’s team.

That presumed and false connection drove the dementia patients to tap into retirement savings in order to contribute six-figure sums to the candidate of their choice, CNN reported. Some even threw themselves into debt over the course of thousands of transactions to politicians they believed they were communicating with directly.

One Baltimore-area victim, an 83-year-old woman whom CNN described as wearing “pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones,” didn’t know she had given Republicans more than $350,000 since 2020.

An 80-year-old communications engineer from Texas was another dementia patient who fell prey to the deception. In September 2022, the unnamed man donated $250 to Ron Johnson’s campaign for Senate over the platform WinRed. But as he was barraged with messages over the next year and a half, the Lone Star senior—who for years had thrifted his clothes and driven an old car in order to save for his retirement—unknowingly made more than 15,000 transactions, amounting to more than $440,000 in donations.

CNN noted that the man’s son had spent weeks trying to “help him get the money back” from WinRed but was only able to secure refunds for a third of his father’s political contributions.

Data from the Federal Trade Commission revealed that WinRed had nearly seven times as many FTC complaints as its Democratic competitor, ActBlue. Trump was the single largest beneficiary of the donations.

The majority of victims identified by CNN were in their eighties and nineties and included veterans, house cleaners, nursing home residents, and widows living alone. Some of the donors had coughed up more cash to politicians than they had paid for their homes.

Donald Trump is either trying to make Pennsylvania sports fans hate him or send cryptic QAnon cues—or perhaps he just needs to hire a proofreader.

In an email to his supporters on Monday night, Trump included a fun typo that caught the attention of many of his critics.

“Working at McDonalds, a town hall, a Stealers [sic] game—no one is working harder than President Trump to Make America Great Again!” the campaign newsletter read.

Trump is trying, and thanks to the typo seriously failing, to paint himself as a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, named for the city’s steel industry (an industry that Trump ultimately harmed through his tariffs in his previous term). He even went as far as to make a strange AI-generated photo of himself sporting the number 47 jersey. Though the number probably is supposed to refer to him being the forty-seventh president, for real fans it brought to mind ex-Steelers player Mel Blount, who endorsed Kamala Harris.

Similarly, Elon Musk caught flack online after trying to root for both the Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Trump’s “Stealers” flub was seized upon by Representative Adam Schiff, who Trump recently threatened, calling him “the enemy within.” The Democratic representative snarkily called the mistake an “authoritarian slip.”

If the typo was in fact an accident, and not a call to “stop the steal,” perhaps Trump should reconsider his call to destroy the Department of Education, which helps make sure the nation’s children learn how to spell.

Reports of glitchy door-knocking canvassing by Elon Musk’s super PAC just got way more real, spelling serious trouble for Donald Trump, who has almost entirely outsourced his door-to-door efforts in battleground states to the billionaire technocrat.

It was previously reported that the app used by Trump and Musk’s canvassers was plagued by design problems and glitches, making it difficult to determine whether employees in swing states were actually doing their jobs. Now it seems that some employees are exploiting the app’s faulty location functions.

A video made by one Nevada-based canvasser with a vendor working with Musk’s America PAC demonstrated for users just how easy it is to fake door-knocks.

The video shows users how a GPS-spoofing app can make it appear as if the user went to the homes of Trump voters. In reality, they didn’t need to go anywhere, and could simply falsify survey responses. The video, which was obtained by The Guardian, has been shared with hundreds of canvassers, but it’s unclear how widespread the spoofing practice actually is.

America PAC and several of its vendors, including Blitz, the vendor operating in Nevada and Arizona, released a joint statement.

“Every door that is marked leaves unique fingerprints, and the fingerprints of a door marked with a spoofing app leave these fingerprints in neon colors. We have tech-enabled auditing and fraud prevention tools to identify and dismiss the bad apples, the Pac doesn’t pay a dime, and the door gets knocked by the next canvasser,” the statement said.

Blitz, the vendor operating in Arizona and Nevada uses a “Quickbooks Workforce” app to monitor the location of its canvassers, two people familiar told The Guardian, but even that can be manipulated by simply turning off location services.

This poses a particular problem in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona. Leaked data from America PAC, also obtained by The Guardian, showed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada last week were flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric that indicates faked door-knocks.

Trump’s allies have been begging him to ditch Musk and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders report that they’ve seen little of the efforts Musk has apparently poured $75 million into over the last few months.

A new poll shows Donald Trump with a small lead over Kamala Harris among Arab American voters.

Arab News and YouGov’s poll showed 45 percent of respondents support Donald Trump as opposed to 43 percent for Kamala Harris. Four percent said they would vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, 6 percent said they were undecided, and 2 percent declined to answer. The new poll has a larger gap than another survey from the Arab American Institute earlier this month, which gave Trump a 42 to 41 percent advantage.

Arab Americans make up a substantive population in Michigan, with more than 300,000 of the state’s residents claiming to have Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. In 2020, the community played a substantial role in delivering Michigan to Joe Biden, who won the state by 154,000 votes. In more bad news for Harris, 39 percent of respondents in the poll said they think a Trump administration would be most likely to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, as opposed to 33 percent for Harris and 8 percent for Stein.

About 46 percent of respondents said that racism and hate crimes against Arab Americans were more likely to go up if Trump was elected in November. But the fact that Trump is still leading despite this should be cause for alarm in the Harris campaign. Instead, Harris has been campaigning in Michigan with former Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

This has not gone over well in Michigan, as the state’s large Arab American population also consists of over 90,000 Iraqi Americans who remember not only the elder Cheney’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 but also his daughter’s reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry. Trump quickly seized on Cheney supporting Harris, posting on Truth Social Tuesday that “if Kamala gets four more years, the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames.”

Michigan also boasts large Palestinian and Lebanese communities. Palestine and Lebanon are currently experiencing a brutal Israeli bombing campaign as the Biden administration continues to make no progress on a cease-fire or arms embargo. Harris didn’t do herself any favors when she said that “the first and most tragic story is October 7, and what happened that day, and then what has happened since,” seeming to diminish the massive civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon.

More than one month ago, the Democrats held their national convention and neglected to highlight any Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim voices on the stage. It appears that the Harris campaign is continuing on the same path as Biden, and it could cost her a critical battleground state.

Results from a “shock” poll shared by one of Donald Trump’s surrogates started trending on X Monday, telling 1.4 million people that the Republican presidential nominee was gaining ground on Vice President Kamala Harris in New Mexico. 

But none of it appears to be real.

MAGA ally Richard Grennell, who served as the acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s administration, posted the sourceless numbers to his X account, claiming that Harris only had a three-point lead on the former president in the battleground state. But that alleged narrow lead made light of other recent surveys, including one published in the Albuquerque Journal on Monday, which showed Harris with a  nine-point lead, three times more than Grennell suggested.

“Trump surrogates are literally fabricating polls at this point to make their supporters think a victory is inevitable,” wrote Democratic strategist and pollster Matt McDermott in response to Grennell’s post. “No poll shows this in New Mexico.”

Doubts were similarly cast over Harris’s odds on the betting platform Polymarket, which saw Trump suddenly surge ahead of the Democratic presidential nominee with 63 percent of the projected vote compared to Harris’s 36 percent.

One bettor appeared to be behind the switch-up. “Fredi9999” holds more than $20 million in pro-Trump bets on the site, and users have suggested that the same person could be behind several accounts with some of the site’s largest bets on the Republican presidential nominee, reported CCN.

Donald Trump, who recently led a monthslong smear campaign against the judge overseeing his hush-money trial, the judge’s daughter, and all of his employees, now has a serious problem with people complaining about judges.  

During a speech at the 11th Hour Faith Leaders Meeting in Concord, North Carolina, Monday, the former president took issue with people criticizing judges who appear to like him.

“I actually think it’s illegal what they do,” Trump said, before going on a long tangent about basketball coach Bobby Knight. When Trump finally returned to his point, he explained his plot to limit free speech.

“They play the ref, they start screaming about ‘The judge is no good,’ and ‘This one’s no good,’ and ‘They’re slow’ and ‘They’re lousy judges’ and ‘The judge should be impeached,’ and all of this crap, when you have a brilliant judge that’s doing the right thing,” Trump said.

The Republican presidential nominee is evidently still touchy about Judge Aileen Cannon, whose bias in favor of Trump was apparent throughout the proceedings of his classified documents case. Her unprecedented decision to toss out the felony case by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment unconstitutional has been criticized by legal scholars. 

“And some people will fold a little bit, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ll get them off my back, let me just give a bad ruling here or there,’ and some will do that actually but, uh fortunately, most have courage and they understand,” Trump said, suggesting that some judges bend to pressure. 

“I really believe it’s illegal what they do, and I know there’s some great lawyers in there who are gonna look at it, because what they do is so obvious, what they’ve done to the Supreme Court, even with the protection of their houses, you’re not supposed to be allowed to march in front. They didn’t stop it,” he continued. 

Trump asserted that judges would “give a bad ruling” to silence critics, and specifically mentioned the Supreme Court, which he packed with conservative justices, who tossed him a blanket presidential immunity for official acts and, on Monday, denied a bid from his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump and other officials had him placed in solitary confinement as punishment for his tell-all book.

Trump clearly believes a “bad ruling” is any one that does not favor him. Just months ago, Trump went on several tirades against New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, his family, and his staff, leading a slew of threats against him that resulted in a gag order being placed on the former president. 

Speaking to the room full of Christian voters, Trump promised that he would continue to install conservative judges to protect their interests. 

“I will once again appoint rock solid pro-constitutional judges to faithfully interpret the law and the Constitution; the 300 judges that we appointed changed the whole …” Trump trailed off, shaking his head. “I mean, it was so bad, it was so bad.”

Trump’s slate of 234 conservative judges are some of the most influential in the country, and have already sowed chaos. Take, for instance, Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the only federal judge in Amarillo, Texas. Kacsmaryk was responsible for a ruling that threatened mifepristone access nationwide. Now conservatives are going out of their way to file their suits in his district. 

When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he has a specific ideal year in mind: 1798, when slavery was legal and America carried out mass deportations with little pretext.

Speaking to a crowd in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump on Monday vowed to “rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered,” by jailing and deporting immigrants, utilizing an arcane 200-year-old law.

“I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 18– no, of 1798,” said Trump, first mixing up his dates. “Think of that, 1798. That’s when we had real politicians that said, ‘We are not gonna play games.’ We have to go back to 1798.”

Believe it or not, this is not the first time he has made such a ridiculous claim.

Over the past month, Trump has regularly suggested sending America back more than two centuries in order to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Speaking on October 11 in Aurora, Colorado, he suggested he’d bring back the law to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” He also spread misinformation about “migrant crime” in the area and nationwide, and called his plan to target suspected gang members “Operation Aurora.”

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is one part of four laws put in place by President John Adams as part of the “Alien and Sedition Acts” meant to protect against French invasion. These laws allowed the government to increase citizenship requirements, crack down on disloyalty, and deport noncitizens en masse. The law was meant to protect the United States only during “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government,” or if a foreign nation had threatened war. Notably, it was used by President Franklin Roosevelt to detain thousands of people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps during World War II.

It’s unclear under exactly what pretext Trump would use the law. Would he make the case that MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua gang is a foreign nation? Or would he settle for the GOP’s language of declaring war on Mexico?

As Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Axios, “The rhetorical framing of migration as an invasion is not only something that turns up the temperature in the political landscape, but it’s also something that is meant to conflate legal and rhetorical concepts.”

Even if he has no real plan to use a 200-year-old law in an authoritarian crackdown, as we’ve seen in Springfield, Ohio, this type of language can result in vigilante violence against everyday people.

Donald Trump’s weekend work trip to a closed McDonald’s franchise was intended to help him connect with working-class voters—but regulars and staff members alike at the burger chain weren’t so impressed.

Reviewers on Yelp torched the former president’s performance, even though the Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, location where Trump “worked” had actually closed for the photo-op.

“Customer service was a joke. Senile old man got bronzer on my fries, didn’t wear gloves,” one reviewer, “Karen S,” wrote on the review site. “Repeated himself several times, something about Ronald McDonald in the showers at the golf club? … 0 stars. Do not recommend.”

Another critic, “Christopher F,” complained that a “creepy old man” working the drive-through window “offered to pay me some hush money to keep this story quiet.”

But Trump’s performance drew some legitimate ire from workers at the international restaurant.

A cashier at a McDonald’s location in Astoria, Queens, felt that the campaign stop minimized the work of her and her colleagues, and managers were wholly unimpressed by Trump’s workplace etiquette. One Flatbush, Brooklyn, area manager shook her head at a clip of Trump playfully throwing salt over his left shoulder to ward off bad luck.

“You don’t throw salt like that,” Kishia, who asked that her last name not be used since she was on the clock, told The New York Times. “Somebody could have been behind him, you know?”

But perhaps most egregious was Trump’s french fry form.

While surveying damage from Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on Monday, Trump was awarded one of McDonald’s honors—a “french fry certification” pin—for playing make believe behind the fryer. The gift came from North Carolina Representative Chuck Edwards, who said that he owned several locations of the fast food purveyor.

“The box is, like, backwards,” New York McDonald’s employee David Ye told the Times, referring to the fry carton. “He doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

Donald Trump has sent a legal demand to CBS demanding the full unedited transcript from the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Truth Social Monday night, Trump posted pictures from a letter his attorneys sent to CBS claiming that the network “and its 60 Minutes producers intentionally misled the public,” and that CBS’s “manipulative editing was aimed at causing confusion among the electorate regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’s abilities, intelligence, and appeal.”

If CBS does not release the transcript, Trump is threatening legal action against the network, asking that it keeps all of its communications and documents relating to Harris’s interview in case of future potential litigation. Needless to say, Trump is driving himself nuts over the whole thing, just because he thinks the network edited Harris’s interview to make her look better.

In reality, CBS News has already responded to Trump, noting that any claims of a doctored interview are completely “false.” Still, Trump’s campaign won’t give up its outlandish war. He has bizarrely demanded that Harris drop out of the race, and his campaign has been calling for the release of the interview transcript for nearly two weeks. The former president has even called for CBS’s broadcast license to be revoked, drawing a rebuke from the Federal Communications Commission.

Trump had his own opportunity to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes, but he backed out at the last minute, making tons of excuses. First, his campaign complained about the interview being fact-checked, and then it demanded an apology for Trump’s 2020 interview, in which he stormed off set. Ultimately, the network aired all of these shifting explanations, which probably contributed to making Trump upset.

If Trump really thinks that CBS’s interview had the effect of making Harris look better, he has the option of sitting down for his own interview with 60 Minutes. But lately, the former president has canceled several interviews for outlets that won’t go out of their way to flatter him, perhaps because he knows that he’ll hurt his image just weeks before the election.

If Donald Trump wanted to distance himself from Project 2025, he sure isn’t doing a great job.

Joining Trump for his bus tour across Pennsylvania this week is Monica Crowley, his former Treasury assistant secretary for public affairs. But perhaps more importantly, Crowley is also a signed contributor to the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, which Trump has been desperately trying to disavow as the election nears.

A footnote in Project 2025 shows that Crowley is not simply a passive signatory. “All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Monica Crowley [and others] deserve special mention,” the document reads.

Crowley will join Trump as he stumps at nearly dozens stops across the state. This comes after Crowley took on a role helping JD Vance prepare for his vice presidential debate last month, serving as a mock moderator for the senator during practice sessions.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has denied his many connections to the Project 2025 manifesto and its signatories. Earlier in October, Trump ranted about “Lyin’ Kamal [sic] Harris” and her mission to “make a thing called Project 2025 the central theme of her campaign, advertising and all.”

Trump claims he has “nothing to do with it, NEVER READ IT, NEVER SAW IT,” but evidence says otherwise.