Trump Resorts to Playground-Level Strategy With New Obama Attack

Because irony is dead, a 78-year-old Donald Trump tried attacking 63-year-old Barack Obama by calling him divisive, exhausted, and old.

During a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Tuesday, Trump turned his attention to Obama, who has been campaigning on behalf of Kamala Harris. Over the weekend, Obama urged rallygoers in Nevada to take Trump’s fascist threats at his word.

The Republican presidential candidate seemed less than pleased, calling Obama a “jerk.”

“Over the last couple of days, I watched him campaign. What a, uh, divider he is, right? What a divider he is,” Trump said Tuesday.

“He’d divide this country, he couldn’t care less,” Trump said.

Trump, who has canceled several appearances in the last two weeks, claimed that Obama was campaigning for Harris because “she’s incapable of campaigning.” He criticized Harris for bringing out Obama because he supported Hilary Clinton during her failed presidential campaign in 2016. Obama also helped with Joe Biden’s successful presidential campaign in 2020, which went unsurprisingly unmentioned.

“The reason they’re bringing him out—cause he doesn’t even want to do it, I think he’s exhausted. I watched him talk, and I think the guy’s exhausted,” said Trump.

Last week, a Trump adviser told producers of The Shade Room that Trump wouldn’t be following through on talks to appear on the podcast because he was “exhausted.” Harris seized on the word last week, noting, “Well, if you are exhausted on the campaign trail, it raises real questions about whether you are fit for the toughest job in the world.”

On Tuesday, Trump’s third beat of attacks against Obama was perhaps the most preposterous. “And I never say a guy’s looking old … but he’s looking a little bit older, isn’t he? You know, there’s nothing wrong with that, but he’s exhausted,” said Trump

Trump’s tendency to refashion criticisms against him as attacks on his enemies is hardly new, but this recent round of “I Know You Are, but What Am I?” feels particularly dull.

Trump previously claimed Obama looked “exhausted” during a rally in Detroit on Friday.

Obama appeared for a high-energy rally in Detroit on Tuesday, in the very same venue that Trump had some trouble filling, according to CNN. “I heard there was another rally here on Friday night, but it was a little smaller than this one,” Obama quipped.

Less than two weeks from the election, Donald Trump is speaking to one of the lawyers who helped him contest the 2020 election results.

The New York Times reports that Trump has been in touch with Kurt Olsen, who spoke to Trump several times over the phone on January 6, 2021, while a violent mob attacked the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the election results for Trump. Olsen later faced court sanctions in 2022 for making baseless claims about voting machines in Arizona.

Olsen has reportedly told Trump this time around that the former president should take legal action to make sure voting machine data from Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia is preserved, according to the Times. Trump reportedly encouraged this line of action.

Trump and Olsen first met in late 2020, as the then-president was talking to anyone offering to help him stay in power. Olsen later joined the Texas attorney general’s doomed appeal to the Supreme Court to stop Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. When that failed, he drafted a civil complaint based on the lawsuit and tried to bring it in person to the acting U.S. attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen. Justice Department officials found the complaint flawed and said it didn’t seem viable. In 2022, Olsen represented Kari Lake in her failed attempt to overturn her loss in the Arizona race for governor.

In July, Olsen was hit with an ethics complaint from the States United Democracy Center and Lawyers Defending American Democracy, who asked the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission and the District of Columbia’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel to investigate Olsen’s election denial activities.

“Kurt Olsen has abused his law license to spread lies about our elections in the courtroom time and time again, and his pattern of unethical conduct shows he’s not going to stop,” said Gillian Feiner, senior counsel at the States United Democracy Center, at the time.

The fact that Trump is seeking out someone the Times describes as a “fringe figure” suggests that he is worried enough about the coming election to attempt the same dangerous schemes as he did in 2020. None of Olsen’s schemes worked then, but Trump still has the ability to whip up confusion and incite an angry mob. Plus, he now has his supporters in important election posts across the country. The former president still hasn’t faced any consequences for his actions four years ago. What is he willing to try this time?

Donald Trump’s latest election interference fearmongering has turned out to be another nothingburger.

A statewide audit of Georgia’s 8.2 million registered voters uncovered 20 noncitizens, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shared on Wednesday.

Nine out of the 20 noncitizen registrations had participated in elections years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Election officials canceled the registrations and subsequently reported the individuals to law enforcement.

“We are committed to ensuring that only U.S. citizens can vote in our elections through rigorous citizenship verification at the front end, and in maintaining the cleanest voter rolls in the nation through continuous list maintenance,” Raffensperger said in a statement obtained by the Journal-Constitution.

As part of his election conspiracy, Trump has campaigned on the notion that noncitizen voters are upending the presidential election results and, by extension, American democracy in favor of the Democratic Party. But his focus on the issue belies the fact that it is, of course, already illegal and impossible for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections, including in Georgia, where the individuals who fell through the cracks in the system account for just 0.00024390243902439 percent of the state’s voting population.

An additional 156 people could not have their citizenship status determined. They will be further investigated by the secretary of state’s office, Raffensperger announced.

A prior audit conducted two years ago in Georgia found no evidence of noncitizen voting. The latest audit was more comprehensive, relying on voters’ affidavits from when they were called to jury duty.

“Although Georgia is well into the early voting period, we hope that his findings and transparency will help bolster voter confidence,” Kelly Loeffler, a former Republican U.S. senator, told the Journal-Constitution.

Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade may have pulled a muscle while bending over backward to justify Donald Trump’s request for loyal, Nazi-like generals.

As his presidency came to a close, Trump said that he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders,” two people present during the private conversation in the White House told The Atlantic.

Trump also asked his former chief of staff John Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Kelly had to explain to Trump that Hitler’s generals unsuccessfully tried to kill the Nazi leader three times, but Trump, unconvinced, falsely insisted, “They were totally loyal to him.”

On Fox & Friends Wednesday morning, Kilmeade tried desperately to make it OK. He argued Trump was simply trying to express a desire to be obeyed.

“Play this out: If your general, who’s your chief of staff and your secretary of defense, is not doing what you say on an everyday basis, I could see him going, ‘I’d love generals that listened, that would be great,’” Kilmeade said, according to The Daily Beast.

Kilmeade claimed that Kelly and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, both retired generals, “didn’t like the president” and worked to ensure that many of Trump’s requests “never got done.” Kilmeade also tried to argue that Trump was predisposed toward fascism because of his experience getting his way in the business world.

“He’s also from a world where his company is huge, but it’s a family company. When he asked Eric [Trump] or somebody to do something, they’d do it,” Kilmeade said.

“It’s not even publicly traded, he doesn’t have board members, and all of a sudden now he’s like, ‘Do this. What do you mean, you can’t do it?’

“He obviously had frustration,” Kilmeade continued. “And I can absolutely see him go, ‘It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever.”

Kilmeade argued that Trump was not aware that German generals unquestioningly carrying out orders to commit mass slaughter for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler were, in fact, Nazis. Instead, Kilmeade suggested it was all hyperbolic, that Trump “was frustrated with the slowdown—”

“It wasn’t just a slowdown, it was insubordination,” interjected host Lawrence B. Jones, taking his turn to defend Trump’s authoritarian statements.

Donald Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita can’t come up with a good explanation for all his posts after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, blaming Trump for the violence of that day.

In the immediate aftermath of the riots, several Republicans criticized Trump for fueling the protesters violently attempting to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election. Chris LaCivita was among them, sharing comments on X (Twitter at the time) calling January 6 an insurrection fueled by Trump’s lies about the election, CNN reports. 

LaCivita shared several reposts condemning Trump for January 6, including former President George W. Bush’s statement expressing “disbelief and dismay” and calling the unrest at the Capitol “a sickening and heartbreaking sight.” LaCivita later deleted this post, along with several others, but CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski was able to find them on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

CNN also saw a video of a screen recording showing that LaCivita liked a post from former Republican Representative Barbara Comstock, who called for Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and remove him from office.

“Twitter locked @realDonaldTrump for 12 hours. Now the Cabinet needs to lock him down for the next 14 days. #25thAmendmentNow,” Comstock’s post on the evening of January 6 read.

LaCivita also shared a post from a Republican Senate aide, John McCormack, who at the time was a reporter for the conservative magazine National Review.

“Text message from a GOP Senate aide: ‘This is a disgusting tragedy. Someone literally lost their life because of a lie that Trump told, Cruz/Hawley capitalized on, and fringe media echoed. This is in no way shape or form sustainable,’” McCormack’s post read, referring to Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who were supporting Trump’s claim that he hadn’t lost the election.

LaCivita also reposted, and later deleted, a comment from a Republican political staffer calling the people who stormed the Capitol “thugs,” quoting a tweet from CNN about the breach of the Capitol.

Trump’s campaign manager didn’t deny making the posts and reposts in a statement to CNN but said, “Retweets and likes are not endorsements.

“I’m focused on winning the election two weeks from now, and not distractions from CNN,” his statement read.

All of his posts show that LaCivita, like many other Republicans, saw the Capitol riots as very damaging for the country and the GOP. But today, these criticisms have been memory-holed, as the Republican Party and Trump’s fervent supporters have sought to downplay, whitewash, and even defend the events of January 6.

Along with 2020 election denial, ignoring the riots has even become a litmus test of supporting Trump in his campaign for president. With the 2024 election only days away, how will LaCivita and the rest of Trump’s campaign react if there’s another violent attempt to overturn the election?