Trump’s Latest Financial Backers Come With a Seriously Sketchy Catch

A new Trumpian super PAC has hit the market—just in time for its donor details to remain secret until after the November election.

The America First Action Fund was organized on October 18, just late enough in the game to skirt donor disclosures until after Election Day, independent journalist Roger Sollenberger reported Wednesday. The move will prevent any transparency around exactly which individuals are fueling Trump’s campaign this late in election season.

The freshly minted super PAC is tied to two separate dark money groups by way of its treasurer, Ashley Hayek, a 2020 Trump campaign staffer who also serves as the executive director of America First Works and the chief engagement officer of the America First Policy Institute.

That latter group, like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is one of several in the running to offer staff picks and transition roadmaps for a potential second term under Donald Trump.

But as a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, America First Policy Institute can’t formally support a candidate for office. Instead, it’s been quietly focused on driving some of Trump’s chief policy goals, including deregulating the federal government. America First Policy Institute received Trump’s blessing even before it was founded in 2021, reported Politico.

“For three and a half years, AFPI has focused on personnel and policy. It was formed by and is teeming with senior staffers from the first Trump Administration whose goal is to be ready on day one,” Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump adviser who chairs AFPI’s Center for the American Child, told Politico in August. “Linda McMahon, Brooke Rollins and the team have planned with precision and executed with put-your-head-down type humility.”

Hit dogs holler. Marjorie Taylor Greene is spinning out about Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledging comments from John Kelly that Donald Trump is a Hitler-loving fascist.

Harris responded Wednesday to two damning reports from The New York Times and The Atlantic, in which Trump’s former chief of staff recalled Trump’s  praise of Hitler and his desire to have generals like the Nazi leader did. After Harris dared bring up Kelly’s remarks, Greene accused Harris of trying to get Trump killed.

“Vice President Kamala Harris is desperate, dangerous, and lying about President Trump,” the Georgia representative wrote on X.

You would think that Harris had just told Democrats to “stand back and stand by,” based on Greene’s description of the vice president’s spontaneous address. But Harris’s comments were simple and without dramatization.

“It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans,” said Harris in her address, responding to Kelly’s allegations. “Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions.”

In the Times interview Tuesday, Kelly called Trump a “fascist” who would regularly praise Hitler and other dictators. Also on Tuesday, The Atlantic reported that two sources confirmed the Republican candidate declared, near the end of his term, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Greene will speak with Trump at a rally in Duluth, Georgia, Wednesday night alongside Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and more in the nightmare lineup.

At the campaign event, expect more whining about the attacks on her favorite president.

Republicans are struggling to defend the report of Donald Trump’s wild comment pining for “the kind of generals that Hitler had”—and in some cases, they’re not defending it at all. 

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu said Wednesday that a casual appreciation for Hitler’s Nazi regime was “par for the course” for the Republican presidential nominee.

During an interview with CNN, Sununu was asked whether Trump’s alleged statement was a deal-breaker for the Republican governor. 

“No,” Sununu said, explaining that in the end, “it’s all about results.” Independent voters, he said, don’t care for “ultraliberal extremism” and just “need a cultural change coming out of Washington.”

“Look, we’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump from Donald Trump. It’s kind of par for the course. It’s really, unfortunately, uh with a guy like that, it’s kind of baked into the vote at this point,” Sununu said. 

Sununu showed just how quick he, and likely other Republicans too, have been to accept Trump’s extremist tendencies. But, as Sununu explained moments later, he was only doing it because it’s what everyone else was doing.

CNN’s Kate Bolduan then asked Sununu whether he was OK with supporting a candidate who former chief John Kelly said fit “into the general definition of fascist” and “certainly prefers the dictator approach” to governing. “That is something you are supporting, is that something you are OK with?” Bolduan asked. 

“No, look I don’t think anyone should be OK with statements like that, of course,” Sununu said. “And if there’s ever anyone you don’t want any sort of comparison to, it’s Hitler and all of that sort of thing. 

“As we’ve discussed before, it’s not just what Chris Sununu is going for. I think most of America is gonna go this way,” he continued.  

So, while Sununu can acknowledge that Hitler is bad, it’s only from an optics standpoint. If everyone else is OK with it, it’s better to just get on board! 

JD Vance has taken Donald Trump’s mass deportation threats to a terrifying new level, implying legal immigrants will also be rounded up.

At campaign events in Arizona on Tuesday, Vance suggested he’d deport immigrants under legal programs like temporary protected status, or TPS, and refused to rule out deporting immigrants with deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA, status.

“The problem is that Kamala Harris has granted mass asylum and mass parole,” he said, invoking a made-up right-wing buzzword.

When a reporter at The Tucson Sentinel asked Vance whether he and Trump would plan on deporting DACA recipients, the vice presidential candidate dodged the question. “When you’ve got 25 million illegal aliens in this country, you’ve got to deport a lot of people or you don’t have a border anymore,” said Vance, who tried to turn attention to “violent criminal illegal aliens.”

“We also have to deport people, not just the bad people who came into our country, but people who violated the law coming into this country. We’ve got to be willing to deport them.”

Dreamers, or children who arrived through the DACA program, are a group of fewer than 600,000 people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The program offers no pathway to citizenship, and to maintain their status, DACA recipients cannot have a felony conviction and must renew their work permit every two years. Painting DACA recipients as criminal masterminds is not only disingenuous but also dangerous.

This is a dramatic escalation of Trump’s deportation plans. Trump and Vance have previously targeted the TPS program, which helps migrants from countries experiencing armed conflict and natural disasters remain in the United States. Currently, immigrants from 16 countries, including Venezuela and Haiti, have increased TPS protections, and fewer than 1 million immigrants have legal residency through the TPS program.

But facts don’t matter to Trump or Vance when it comes to immigration, and now with the latest DACA threat, it frighteningly appears that nothing is off the table.

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?

Former White House national security adviser John Bolton doesn’t agree that Donald Trump is a “fascist”—but only because he’s not as “capable” as some of history’s greatest villains.

During an interview with CNN’s The Source on Tuesday, Bolton pushed back on recent comments made by Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, who said that Trump fit the definition of a fascist.

“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, a retired military general, said. “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Bolton, in turn, described Trump’s behavior as “troubling” but not thoughtful enough to constitute a legitimate philosophy.

“I think it’s a mistake to get into a controversy over whether Trump meets the definition of fascist or not,” Bolton told CNN.

“I think his behavior alone is troubling enough,” he continued. “To be a fascist, you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that.”

Bolton, who also served in Ronald Reagan’s administration, then went on to drag Trump’s mental fortitude, claiming that the MAGA leader could never flesh out his movement like Hitler due to his alleged inability to finish a book.

“You know, Adolf Hitler wrote a profoundly troubling book called Mein Kampf, ‘My Struggle.’ Donald Trump couldn’t even read his way all the way through that book, let alone write something like it,” Bolton argued.

“I’m not trying to understate the dangers of a Trump presidency. I think it’s important to focus on the dangers themselves.”

The Republican presidential nominee and his former foreign policy hawk have publicly butted heads several times since Bolton was ousted from Trump’s administration in 2019. Over the last year, the ex-ally has relentlessly grilled Trump for wanting to pull out of NATO. In February, Bolton claimed that Trump had completely fabricated a story in which he allegedly told a European leader that he’d allow Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies if they didn’t “pay” their “bills.”