Trump Has a New Focus in His Campaign Ads—and His Base Hates It

Donald Trump has decided the most important issue of the election. It’s not the economy, immigration, or foreign policy—instead, it’s demonizing transgender people.

Since President Joe Biden stepped aside, Republicans have spent $120 million slamming Democrats in anti-trans attack ads, according to AdImpact data, with much of that spending coming in the past five weeks. However, polling out Thursday from Data For Progress shows that an overwhelming majority of all voters, or 80 percent, believe that candidates should spend less time talking about transgender issues. An astonishingly high 85 percent of Republican voters agree.

Nearly 3 in 4 voters, regardless of party affiliation, including 58 percent of Republicans, agreed that “transgender people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Moreover, most voters say they’d vote for a candidate who supports trans rights over one who does not. When messaging is introduced to explain two hypothetical candidates’ stances on trans issues related, 57 percent of voters chose the candidate “who says that the government should stay out of people’s private lives and that there is too much legislation targeting a small minority of the population.”

A plurality of Republicans (41 percent) and 58 percent of independent voters said they viewed Republican candidates using anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in their campaigns as “sad and shameful,” compared to 38 percent percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents who feel otherwise.

So why is it that Trump and his super PACs have spent $29 million over the past five weeks on TV ads attacking Kamala Harris over “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison?”

That’s six times the amount that the Trump campaign has spent on ads discussing the economy over the same timeframe, making anti-trans ads the number one topic for TV-spending for the Republican candidate. As other October polling from Gallup shows, while there are many topics that voters see as important, transgender culture war issues are not one of them. Trump’s new focus on demonizing trans people—targeting transgender athletes and lying about gender-affirming surgeries—might just blow up in his face.

JD Vance has drawn the ire of labor activists, after crossing the picket line by publishing an opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and defying a strike by the staff.

On Thursday, the newspaper published an article with Vance’s byline, titled “Kamala Harris’ prejudice against Catholics,” where the Republican vice presidential candidate criticized Harris for skipping the Al Smith charity dinner in New York last week, which benefits Catholic charities. Trump attended and made crass, profanity-laden remarks to a room full of Catholic priests.

The newspaper’s workers have been on a long strike since October 2022 with its owner, Block Communications. The National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that the company illegally imposed new working conditions that increased employees’ health care costs and reduced their vacation time. The employees are unionized under the NewsGuild-CWA. (The New Republic’s staff are also represented by the NewsGuild-CWA.)

“JD Vance has crossed a very obvious picket line by striking Americans,” Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, told HuffPost. “And JD Vance is a scab just like anybody else who crosses a picket line.”

Schleuss said that the picket line applies not only to journalists but also to contributors like Vance, even when they’re unpaid.

“You can deliver that message to any other publication,” Schleuss said. “Don’t go into work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, don’t click on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, don’t share articles from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.”

The NewsGuild called out Vance on an X thread, including a graphic that spelled out SCAB in big letters over a picture of the Ohio senator.

One year ago, Vance visited the United Auto Workers picket line in Toledo, Ohio, attempting to demonstrate support for the automobile workers’ strike against General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis. In reality, Vance was making a blatant political move while retaining policies that hurt autoworkers.

Despite making the occasional pro-worker statement, Vance has never done anything beneficial for labor unions or worker organizations. He had fake autoworkers in the audience at a campaign stop in Michigan earlier this month. A few years ago, he helped fund a startup that imposed poor working conditions on its employees, and when they left in droves, the company replaced them with migrant workers. Working people supporting Vance, or on the fence, should take note of the vice presidential candidate’s actions instead of his rhetoric.

Elon Musk’s efforts to help Donald Trump return to the White House have ramped up with less than two weeks left until the election. On Monday, the tech CEO and world’s richest man reportedly had dinner with conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch

The New York Times, citing two anonymous sources, reports that Musk left a hotel room in Pittsburgh, where his political team has a “makeshift war room” to help Trump, to travel to New York City to meet with Murdoch and other billionaires to discuss the presidential race.

Through his company News Corporation, Murdoch owns the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. He also owns the controlling interest in Fox News as well as several other newspapers and media outlets around the world. He has a strong reputation for pushing right-wing and conservative ideology in the media outlets he owns, and they have been unrelenting in their support for Trump, though Murdoch has been known to privately bash the Republican nominee.

During the 2024 campaign, Musk has been spending millions in donations to his America PAC to help the former president, as well as downballot Republican candidates. He’s even attempted a scheme to give away $1 million to one registered swing state voter every day until Election Day, which has already drawn a warning from the Justice Department.

Musk has also been coordinating with Trump to suppress negative stories about the former president and his running mate, JD Vance, on Musk’s social media platform X. He’s also been spreading debunked conspiracy theories as well as misinformation. His political spending has been used on nefarious tactics, exploiting Israel’s brutal war in Gaza to send opposing messages to Arab American and Jewish voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, respectively.

Musk’s efforts and Murdoch’s history raise disturbing questions about what the two could have discussed during their Monday dinner. Were they discussing the best way to spend their money to help Trump? Were they coordinating misinformation or messaging strategies to push on X and in Murdoch’s outlets? The two are among the richest people in the world and wield a lot of influence on the right in American politics. They could very well have made a last-minute plan they hope will tip the scales in less than two weeks.

Fox News made drastic edits to Donald Trump’s recent Bronx barbershop interview, cutting many of the Republican candidate’s lies and rambling rants.

According to a CNN investigation published Thursday, Fox News cleaned up several of Trump’s weaves and most politically extreme comments during his barbershop talk in New York City over the weekend. An unedited video uploaded to Instagram shows a much less polished performance from the former president, filled with meandering tangents and outright lies that never made it to air.

The Fox News broadcast of the event cut Trump’s comments about “gang members and drug lords” in Aurora, Colorado, and his lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. “They just dumped 50,000 people—32,000 migrants from another country—in Springfield, Ohio. They don’t know what to do,” said Trump, greatly exaggerating things. The city estimates somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 immigrants live in the entire county, not all of whom are Haitian. Those who are Haitian are there through temporary protected status, which means they are in the country legally. But Trump doesn’t care about the facts.

Fox additionally drastically edited Trump’s response to an audience member in the barbershop asking about federal taxes. In the unedited video, Trump can be heard rambling for seven minutes about the Keystone pipeline, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, and transgender sports, with the audience member generously trying to keep him on track but eventually saying, “I wasn’t able to finish my question.”

The Fox News video just shows what happens in a brief moment after Trump gets shepherded into answering about eliminating federal taxes, cutting out the rest.

Ironically, the Trump team has spent the past month threatening that they’d sue CBS News over Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview if the network doesn’t release the full unedited transcript. This week, Trump’s team threatened to sue the network if it doesn’t comply, despite having little legal basis to do so.

In his critique of Harris’s CBS appearance, Trump wants to blame it on the edit. However, with this new revelation about Fox, he just looks like a hypocrite.

Donald Trump vowed Thursday to “fire” special counsel Jack Smith on his first day in office, in hopes of washing his hands of the two federal cases against him.

During an interview with conservative radio commentator Hugh Hewitt, Trump said it would be “easy” to remove Smith. “I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said, according to The Washington Post.  

Smith has overseen two investigations into Trump, one regarding his alleged efforts to overturn the election results in 2020, and another into his alleged mishandling of classified documents.  

The special counsel filed a superseding indictment in the election interference case against Trump in September, amending some of the allegations against Trump with respect to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity for “official conduct.”

Trump has been accused of illegally attempting to block votes from being counted, and to subvert election results by engaging in conspiracies to defraud the government, obstruct and impede the counting of votes on January 6, and conspire against the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.

Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, tossed out Smith’s 42 felony charges against Trump in his classified documents case, ruling that Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Smith has since appealed Cannon’s decision.

Earlier this week, Cannon’s name appeared on a list of potential candidates to become Trump’s attorney general. 

If Trump wins the presidential election, he’s promised to fire the person trying to hold him accountable for his alleged crimes, while also making plans to hire the one who helped him get out of trouble.