Trump Ally Suggests Just Handing Him a Crucial Swing State

The chair of the conservative-led House Freedom Caucus said that North Carolina’s legislature ought to preemptively grant Donald Trump all 16 of the state’s electors before any vote has even been counted.

Maryland Representative Andy Harris’s outrageous comments were in response to a speech that right-wing extremist Ivan Raiklin, who previously assembled a “Deep State target list” of Trump’s political enemies, gave at a Republican Party dinner hosted Thursday. Raiklin argued that due to the widespread damage and displacement caused by Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s Republican-led state legislature should award its electors to Trump ahead of the election results, according to Politico.

Raiklin also suggested that Republican-controlled state legislatures in New Hampshire, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia, and Wisconsin could carry out similar schemes, by coming together for a vote on Election Day.

When Raiklin opened the floor to questions, Maryland Representative Andy Harris said that it “makes a lot of sense” for North Carolina’s legislature to simply say Trump won, and actually suggested that waiting for the results of the popular vote would somehow “disenfranchise” voters.

“You statistically can go and say, ‘Hey, look, you got disenfranchised in 25 counties. You know what that vote probably would have been,’” Harris said. “Which would be—if I were in the Legislature—enough to go, ‘Yeah, we have to convene the Legislature. We can’t disenfranchise the voters.’”

The popular vote typically determines the allocation of electors in all 50 states.

Harris argued that the plan would only work in North Carolina, and would probably look like an illegal plot to steal the White House if Republicans tried it anywhere else.

“But how do you make the argument in other states? I mean, otherwise it looks like it’s just a power play. With North Carolina I mean, it’s legitimate. There are a lot of people who aren’t going to get to vote, and it may make the difference in that state,” he continued.

When asked to explain his statement, Harris told Politico, “As I’ve repeatedly said, every legal vote should be counted. I would hope everyone could agree that legal American voters whose lives were devastated by the recent storms should not be disenfranchised in the upcoming voting process.”

Early voting in North Carolina began last weekend, and already, voter turnout appeared to be lessened by the destruction of Hurricane Helene earlier this month. Across 13 counties in western North Carolina that were identified as the most affected by Helene, voter turnout on the first day of early voting was significantly lower than it was in 2020, according to Citizen Times.

Donald Trump’s ex-allies and former staffers agree that the Republican presidential nominee is a fascist—but the people laser-focused on returning him to the Oval Office are working overtime to undercut the dire warning.

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist ideology, characterized by dictators who lean on military force to quash civil opposition. Trump has repeatedly mirrored the rhetoric of some of the world’s most infamous fascist leaders—namely, Adolf Hitler—on hot-button issues such as immigration. Earlier this week, interviews in The Atlantic and The New York Times revealed that Trump had, in private conversations, showered the violent regimes with praise, reportedly telling White House staffers that he needed the “kind of generals that Hitler had.”

In a joint statement released Friday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed that it was Vice President Kamala Harris, and her decision to formally label Trump a fascist, that has ushered more violence into the presidential race (as opposed to Trump’s dangerous and economically unstable policy goals).

Harris “must abandon the base and irresponsible rhetoric that endangers both American lives and institutions,” the pair wrote.

Memorializing the assassination attempt on Trump in July, the conservative leaders argued that the “Democratic nominee for President of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus.”

“Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over,” Johnson and McConnell wrote. “The Vice President’s words more closely resemble those of President Trump’s second would-be assassin than her own earlier appeal to civility.”

But the joint letter belies the reality that the conservative leaders are backing Trump for wildly different reasons. Johnson, a Christian nationalist with plans to curb LGBTQ+ right and hand states the keys to ban abortion, has vehemently defended Trump for years, going so far as to design the legal strategy to further the former president’s 2020 election interference conspiracy. On the other hand, McConnell—an expedient Republican operative—has privately referred to Trump as “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” and a “despicable human being,” all while publicly endorsing him and promising that he’s on the “same team” as the Republican presidential nominee.

Their letter also conveniently ignores the fact that Trump has repeatedly called Harris a fascist for the past few months, despite the fact that Harris’s rhetoric and policies don’t align with the authoritarian ideology while Trump’s do.

Meanwhile, almost half of all Americans acknowledge that Trump is a fascist, according to a new poll from ABC News/Ipsos. That included 87 percent of Democrats, 46 percent of independents, and 12 percent of Republicans. That same survey found that nearly two-thirds of voters view Trump as a candidate who regularly departs from the truth.

It appears Jeff Bezos is very afraid of Donald Trump. For the first time in 36 years, The Washington Post will not be endorsing a presidential candidate this election.

The Post’s editorial page editor David Shipley announced the news to shocked colleagues in a reportedly tense meeting Friday morning. The paper’s publisher, William Lewis, published a note to readers shortly thereafter confirming the news, writing that the newsroom is “nonpartisan” and wants to let readers “make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions.”

It’s a stunning announcement from the paper that proudly adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” just after Trump became president in 2017.

The news caught staffers completely off guard. In fact, the Post—reporting on the chaos within its own newsroom—noted that a presidential endorsement for Kamala Harris had already been drafted. The paper’s editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned soon after the public announcement, and other staffers are similarly furious over the decision. One opinion writer, speaking anonymously to Semafor’s Max Tani, said, “If you don’t have the balls to own a newspaper, don’t.”

The Post’s union put out a statement pointing a finger directly at Bezos for the decision.

Marty Baron, the newspaper’s former executive editor, also slammed the decision. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he wrote on X. “[Donald Trump] will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner [Jeff Bezos] (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

The Post endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020, calling out Trump’s threat to democracy as well as his “few accomplishments in his first term and no agenda for his second.” The editorial board has also previously condemned Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection, his actions while in office, and his general rhetoric.

Suffice it to say, this is a major departure that can only be explained by cowardice from Bezos, one of the world’s richest people. The Amazon founder is likely worried about how a Harris endorsement would hurt him if Trump returns to office. Bezos has contracts before the federal government that could be at risk, including Amazon’s shipping and cloud computing services and his Blue Origin space company (also a government contractor).

The news indicates a troubling trend of billionaires already bowing to Trump. Earlier this month, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong reportedly ordered the paper to avoid making an endorsement in the presidential election. On Wednesday, the LA Times’ editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, saying the decision made the paper look “craven and hypocritical” given its past reporting and editorials on Trump.

This story has been updated.

Almost half of all Americans view Donald Trump as a fascist, according to a new poll from ABC News/Ipsos.

The poll, released Friday morning, shows 49 percent of registered voters think of Trump as fitting the definition of a “political extremist who acts as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” The survey also found that nearly two-thirds of registered voters say Trump departs from the truth.

The poll’s results seem to break down along political lines, with 87 percent of Democrats, 46 percent of independents, and 12 percent of Republicans calling Trump a fascist. The poll showed that 22 percent of registered voters saw Kamala Harris as a fascist, broken down to 41 percent of Republicans, 20 percent of independents, and 3 percent of Democrats.

The poll was conducted before Trump’s former chief of staff, retired General John Kelly, told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday that the former president fit the definition of a fascist and had praised Hitler multiple times in the past. An article published Tuesday from The Atlantic also detailed Trump’s praise for autocrats and his desire to use the military against his political opponents.

Harris has called out the former president for his authoritarian wishes, saying on Wednesday, “We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question, in 13 days, will be: What do the American people want?”

Well, right now, the American people are almost evenly split in their choice for president, according to the latest polls, with some of them showing Trump ahead and others giving Harris the edge. With only 11 days left to go, Harris still has to convince more Americans that Trump is a fascist, and how dangerous that would be. Unfortunately, it appears many Americans openly embrace Trump’s fascistic ideas, such as putting immigrants in militarized camps. The question is whether those Americans will vote in large numbers.

Senator Lindsey Graham is sounding the alarms that another seismic terrorist attack is on the horizon—if Donald Trump doesn’t win the November election.

During an interview on Fox News’s Hannity Thursday, the South Carolina Republican baselessly argued that Vice President Kamala Harris’s border policies would cause another 9/11.

“That’s Donald Trump, Kari Lake, Sam Brown—let’s secure these Senate seats to help this president shut down the border before another 9/11 comes,” Graham said as the show’s outro music began.

“This is the most important election in our lifetime. Turn around those caravans. LindseyGraham.com,” Graham added.

A $118 billion bipartisan border deal was moments from coming to fruition earlier this year, before Republicans willingly tanked it in order to hand Trump fodder for his 2024 campaign. The deal would have tightened rules for asylum and created a standard for shutting down the southern border if undocumented crossings reached daily benchmarks, meeting practically every requirement set by the conservative caucus.

And run on the issue he has. At a rally earlier this month in Aurora, Colorado, the Republican presidential nominee amped up his Nazi rhetoric, weaponizing violent and dehumanizing language against immigrants, referring to them as the “enemy from within,” while advocating for harsher criminal punishments for the vulnerable demographic, including promising the death penalty.

“They took the criminals out of Caracas, and they put them along your border, and they said if you ever come back, we’re going to kill you,” Trump said.

“Think of that!” he continued. “We have to live with these animals. But we won’t live with them for long!”

Trump has made his own violent threats about his potential loss in recent months, including claiming that the nation would lose World War III if he failed to resume the Oval Office.

“We won’t even be in World War III, we’ll be losing World War III with weapons the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said at a Nazi-attended conservative conference in Racine, Wisconsin, in June. “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed. And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me. It’s true.”