Is Elon Musk Helping or Hurting Trump’s Campaign?

Both candidates in the presidential race are after the young male vote—but getting the demographic to side with Donald Trump is apparently a lot trickier than capturing key endorsements from characters such as Elon Musk.

A new poll by Democratic pollster Blueprint 2024 that surveyed young men between the ages of 18 and 29 across the nation found that Musk’s endorsement had actually done more harm than good for the Republican presidential nominee.

Roughly 70 percent of male voters were aware that Musk had endorsed the former president shortly after Trump survived an assassination attempt near Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. And while 24 percent of the men surveyed said that Musk’s endorsement skewed their perspective toward Trump in a positive way, slightly more—28 percent—said it actually made them less likely to support Trump, according to the poll. Approximately 45 percent of respondents said Musk’s stance on Trump had no impact on their opinion.

That’s despite the fact that Musk has gone deliberately out of his way to court young men for the MAGA leader’s cause. Through his Trump-focused America PAC, Musk has effectively promised a political bribe, offering to raffle away $1 million to one registered swing state voter per day, every day until Election Day.

“We want to try to get over a million, maybe two 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,” Musk said last week.

Democrats have roundly criticized the initiative, with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro describing Musk’s initiative as “deeply concerning” and “something that law enforcement should take a look at.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chimed in on the issue at a Democratic event on Sunday, arguing that “Elon Musk thinks your vote can be bought.”

McDonald’s share price just hit its lowest point since Covid. It might not be completely Donald Trump’s fault—but we can’t say that he helped at all.

After Trump’s desperate stunt at the fast-food franchise on Sunday afternoon, McDonald’s suffered a double blow to the golden arches brand. On Tuesday, news broke that an E. coli outbreak related to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders is spreading in multiple states (notably not yet in Pennsylvania, where Trump held his staged photo op).

One person has died from the outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and hospitalizations have been reported across 10 states.

In response to the double whammy, McDonald’s stock, which began dropping the day after Trump’s visit, is down 19 percent on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Trump Media stock continues to fluctuate and even surge, despite the company appearing to fall apart at the seams after hitting a new low last month. Experts say that the share price is less of a measure of the health of the business, which again is not good, and more “a barometer for both Trump and Trump’s followers,” Kristi Marvin, a former investment banker, told The New York Times. “This stock has never traded on fundamentals.”

Trump’s media company continues to lose tens of millions each quarter, and senior management are dropping like flies, despite the stock fluctuations. For a comparison to demonstrate just how much of a failure Trump’s company is, let’s put it into perspective: Trump Media’s quarterly revenue is less than that of a single McDonald’s franchise.

While McDonald’s stock will probably rebound, if investors can begin to see clearly, Trump’s businesses may not be so lucky.

Donald Trump may be teeing up to reward Judge Aileen Cannon for tossing out his classified documents case with a new gig as attorney general.

Cannon dismissed the 42 felony charges against the former president in July, ruling that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment to the case was unconstitutional. Her unprecedented finding has been criticized by legal scholars, and Smith has appealed Cannon’s decision.

Now it appears that she’s being considered for a top spot in a potential second Trump administration. Her name appeared on a list obtained by ABC News, titled, “Transition Planning: Legal Principals.”

The document was drafted by some of the Trump campaign’s senior advisers, including Boris Epshteyn, the Trump team’s top lawyer. Epshteyn was accused of assisting Rudy Giuliani’s fake electors scheme in Arizona and obstructing the certification of the 2020 election result. He pleaded not guilty, but the case is still ongoing.

The transition document included nearly a dozen potential candidates for attorney general, and Cannon’s name appeared second after Trump-appointed Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton, according to ABC. Clayton was Trump’s pick to become the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in 2020.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has previously said that the attorney general would be the second-most important person in the Trump administration.

“We really want the American people to believe we have a fair and equitable administration of justice, if not the entire sort of system falls apart,” Vance said earlier this month. While Vance dismissed Trump’s statements promising to prosecute his political enemies, that seems to be part of the plan.

Far-right pro-Trump activists like Tim Pool and Laura Loomer have been hoping Trump will install a staunch MAGA loyalist as attorney general, so that the Trump administration can carry out the former president’s revenge fantasy to see his supposedly treasonous political opponents tried by the U.S. government and imprisoned. Loomer even wants them put to death.

If Cannon’s actions to defend Trump and delay his classified documents trial are anything to go by, she could be exactly the loyalist Trump is searching for.

Trump’s former chief of staff is sounding the alarm about Donald Trump threatening to use the military against his opponents, saying that the former president is a “fascist” who would govern like a dictator.

Retired General John Kelly spoke to The New York Times for an article published Tuesday about his fears that Trump would disregard the Constitution and the rule of law if elected president, confirming that Trump has praised Adolf Hitler on different occasions and put down disabled veterans.

During the interview, when asked if Trump was a fascist, Kelly read a definition of fascism from the internet, and said that Trump definitely prefers that philosophy.

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Kelly said. “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Kelly said that after he left the White House in 2019, he decided that he would only speak out publicly if Trump spoke inaccurately about him, or said something egregious. The former chief of staff said that Trump’s comments about using the military against “the enemy within” fit those criteria.

“And I think this issue of using the military on—to go after—American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing—even to say it for political purposes to get elected—I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” said Kelly.

Trump thinks that personal loyalty is more important than loyalty to the Constitution, Kelly told the Times, and he couldn’t understand why aides and military leaders weren’t loyal to him above everything else.

“That was a big surprise to him that the generals were not loyal to the boss, in this case him, “ Kelly said.

The fact that a senior White House official is coming out vehemently against Trump in late October, only weeks away from the election, is a stark warning for the country. Kelly clearly fears what would happen if the former president and convicted felon would return to the White House and take revenge for slights real and imagined. The question is whether these fears will make a difference to voters.

From the waning days of Donald Trump’s administration and beyond, the former president has been obsessed with the executive advantages of dictatorship.

A new report by The Atlantic found that, in private, Trump had openly praised the authoritarian setup of some of history’s greatest villains, including Adolf Hitler.

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two sources that spoke anonymously with The Atlantic. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

While in a frustrated discussion with then–Chief of Staff John Kelly, a former Marine general, Trump reportedly asked, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” forgetting that Hitler’s top generals had themselves defied him and made several attempts toward the end of World War II to kill him. Kelly, trying to correct the president, informed him that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”

But Trump wouldn’t hear of it. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s 2022 book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.

When asked by The Atlantic about the exchange for the story published Tuesday, Kelly recalled that when Trump had raised the matter of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?”

“I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’” Kelly told The Atlantic. “And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.”

But Trump did not know who Rommel was, either.

During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Trump complained several times that the U.S. military wasn’t as draconian as the Chinese. “The Chinese Generals would know what to do,” he said in private conversations, referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre, sources told The Atlantic.

Meanwhile, Trump has spent months expressing outward disdain for Americans who actually served in the military. In August, the former president drew the ire of the Army after he was caught red-handed filming video in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where recent military casualties are buried. Trump’s campaign staffers reportedly launched into a verbal and physical fight with cemetery officials, who had asked the campaign to stop videotaping. Federal law prohibits politically related activities in the cemetery, including taking photos and videos in support of a political campaign.

Earlier that month, the reputed Vietnam-era draft dodger came under additional fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment rubbed veterans the wrong way, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

And Trump’s attempts to cover his flailing image have been thoroughly undercut by his own actions. After offering in front of TV cameras to help personally pay for the funeral of Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private who was beaten to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, Trump reportedly complained to his then–Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the cost of the burial.

“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican,” Trump reportedly said, ordering Meadows not to pay it. Natalie Khawam, the Guillén family’s attorney, confirmed to The Atlantic that she had sent the funeral receipt to the White House following Trump’s offer but that the family had never received funds from him.

After Senator John McCain died in 2018, Trump reportedly told aides that they were “not going to support that loser’s funeral” and was irate that the White House had lowered its flags to half-mast in honor of the war hero. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he said, according to The Atlantic.