Sketchy Pro-Trump Group Emerges at Last Minute to Skirt Campaign Rules

A shady new super PAC named for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg just spent nearly $20 million on efforts to help Donald Trump appear more moderate on abortion, but the group won’t reveal where its money comes from until after the election.

The pro-Trump RBG PAC (a massive insult to the late justice, who hated Trump) is attempting to use the liberal justice’s legacy to try and boost Trump ahead of the election. Its website even features photos of Ginsberg and the former president, captioned “Great Minds Think Alike.”

Two advertisements produced by the RBG PAC emphasized Trump’s statements claiming that he would not support a federal abortion ban.

The PAC revealed Friday that it had spent $19,976,000 on digital media, text messages, and printing or postage, according to a disclosure to the Federal Elections Commission. The majority of that cash, a whopping $17.3 million, was spent on digital media.

It’s unclear who exactly is funding RBG PAC. The group registered on October 16, which was the last day of the final filing period before Election Day, according to The New York Times. Any group active at that time would have had to disclose its donors and vendors, but RBG PAC’s contributors still remain a mystery.

Every cent was paid to a company called Western Creative Group LLC, a Wyoming-based company with no digital footprint. Political reporter Roger Sollenberger noted in a post on X that the company had “never been paid by a federal committee before; principals hidden behind a corporate agent; no online footprint whatsoever.”

Forms for the PAC’s expenditures were signed by May Mailman, one of Trump’s former legal advisers. While in the White House, Mailman worked in the chief of staff’s office and the staff secretary’s office.

After her turn in the Trump administration, Mailman served as the vice president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a Republican-led nonprofit organization that challenges what it views as violations to election law. She’s currently the director of the Independent Women’s Law Center.

During an appearance on CNN earlier this week, Mailman defended Elon Musk’s scheme to randomly give out $1 million to registered voters who sign his “constitutional petition,” a scheme that earned him a warning from the DOJ. Mailman said Musk’s stunt was just to get “attention” and that “creativity is warranted in elections.”

“So, Kamala Harris has raised $1 billion in three months. I mean, this is record-breaking and Trump’s money just isn’t there. And so I do think actually, there is something to super PACs using their money smarter and not just flooding the airwaves,” Mailman said.

Perhaps now, the former Trump adviser is putting her words into action and organizing a flood of attention in the 11th hour of Trump’s presidential race.

Despite his recent overtures to Muslim and Arab American voters, Donald Trump privately encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call earlier this month to “do what you have to do.”

The Washington Post reported Friday the former president told the Israeli prime minister that he supported Israel’s brutal bombing campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, according to six anonymous sources. Trump himself has said that he has spoken to Netanyahu at least twice this month, with one phone conversation occurring as recently as Saturday.

According to Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump was especially impressed by Israel expanding its war to Lebanon, and told Netanyahu as much.

“He didn’t tell him what to do militarily, but he expressed that he was impressed by the pagers,” said Graham, who was on a call with Trump and Netanyahu earlier this month, referring to the Israeli attack on Hezbollah last month that used explosive batteries inside pagers. Those explosions killed dozens and injured more than 3,000.

“He expressed his awe for their military operations and what they have done,” Graham added. “He told them, do what you have to do to defend yourself, but we’re openly talking about a new Mideast. Trump understands that very much there has to be change with the corrupt Palestinian state.”

This would seem to contradict what Trump has said in recent weeks in his overtures to Muslim and Arab American voters. At a rally in North Carolina earlier this week, he spoke about how Dick Cheney brought war to the Middle East and killed “many many Arabs,” and took a shot at Cheney’s daughter Liz, who is campaigning with Kamala Harris in Michigan, home to a large population of Arab Americans.

“Why would Muslims support lyin’ Kamala Harris, when she embraces Muslim-hating—and very dumb person—Liz Cheney?” Trump asked the crowd.

Trump’s efforts have borne fruit with Arab Americans, with a recent poll showing him with a narrow lead over Harris with the community. Liz Cheney’s campaign visits to Michigan have not helped, with many of the state’s Arab and Muslim communities, including its 90,000 strong Iraqi-American population, remembering her father’s support for the Iraq War and her reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry.

But Trump’s calls to Netanyahu and praise for Israel’s brutal war—which has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza since last year, and at least 1,580 people in Lebanon since September 23—contradict any promises or rhetoric he’s offering to Arab and Muslim voters. Just as Harris has not promised any meaningful deviation from the Biden administration’s unconditional support of Israel, if Trump returns to the White House, he too is likely to continue enabling Netanyahu’s wars. It seems Arab and Muslim voters, as well as others who want to see an end to Israel’s brutal actions, are left with little to hope for in this election.

Ohio Senator JD Vance still likes Mark Robinson—even if his boss doesn’t.

While campaigning in North Carolina Friday, the Republican vice presidential nominee gave a quick shout out to the conservative outcast before realizing, midsentence, that he was running off script.

“I want to give a shout-out to—you guys have a great lieutenant governor,” Vance said before putting his finger up in the air.

“Sorry, um, we got—sorry,” Vance continued. “Mark isn’t here.”

He was, of course, referring to North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor and the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who was removed from the billing of Vance’s rallies for political measure.

Robinson morphed into a political pariah after CNN published a sprawling investigation last month about his pre-politics proclivities, which included writing in online pornographic forums that he had, at least at one time, desired to own slaves, enjoyed transgender porn, and peeped on women’s locker rooms. In the weeks that followed, Robinson sued CNN for defamation, seeking $50 million in damages for “reputational harm” over what he described as a “high-tech lynching.” On Tuesday, Robinson tweaked that number, amending the lawsuit to instead seek just over $25,000 in damages.

Vance may not have gotten the memo that Robinson had been booted from the Trump campaign trail as a result of the stunning report. Hours before the story dropped, the Trump campaign reportedly told the Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-flouting antisemite that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Carolina Journal in September. Local Republican strategists had also reportedly called on Robinson to exit the North Carolina gubernatorial race in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state, but Robinson roundly rejected those calls.

Long before the MAGA movement deemed Robinson to be dead weight, the exceedingly controversial politico had near countless headline-grabbing scandals based on his disturbing online history. Those included posts in which he minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers (despite admitting that his wife had an abortion), and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.” Robinson has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”

Robinson has been projected to lose North Carolina since at least July, with some political forecasters expecting a double-digit loss to his Democratic opponent, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein.

Escalating his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump is now calling the United States “a garbage can for the world.”

The Republican nominee used the descriptor twice on Thursday night during a campaign rally in Arizona. “First time I’ve ever said ‘garbage can’ but, you know what, it’s a very accurate description,” he claimed.

On Friday in Texas, Trump again said, “We’re like a garbage can. First time I said it was last night.… I said it—I don’t know, just came out, ‘garbage can.’ We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people they don’t want.”

The unsavory, nativist phrase has elicited public outcry, and on Friday afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris said Trump’s remarks were “just another example of how he really belittles our country.”

“This is someone who is a former president of the United States, who has a bully pulpit. And this is how he uses it? To tell the rest of the world that somehow the United States of America is trash?” Harris said. “I think, again, the president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are.”

Online, many have decried Trump’s remarks as unpatriotic and departing from past U.S. leaders’ statements about America and immigration—such as those of John F. Kennedy, who celebrated America’s status as a “nation of immigrants” and wrote that “everywhere, immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.”

Historian Douglas M. Charles noted that Trump’s rhetoric parallels that of Ku Klux Klan leader William J. Simmons, who in the early 1920s said the United States is not “a melting-pot” but “a garbage can! … When the hordes of aliens walk to the ballot box and their votes outnumber yours, then that alien horde has got you by the throat.”

While the wording may be new—for Trump—his comparison of immigrants to garbage is consistent with his tendency to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, spanning back to his claims that Mexico was “bringing drugs,” “crime,” and “rapists” to the U.S. when announcing his 2016 campaign. More recently, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” repeatedly referred to them as “animals,” and spread debunked rumors about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Several former White House officials who served under Donald Trump have come out in support of retired General John Kelly, who earlier this week called the former president a fascist who often praised Hitler.

Politico reported Friday that more than a dozen officials agreed with Kelly in a letter of their own, stating that “this is who Donald Trump is.”

“The revelations General Kelly brought forward are disturbing and shocking. But because we know Trump and have worked for and alongside him, we were sadly not surprised by what General Kelly had to say,” they wrote in the letter.

The letter goes far in backing Kelly, with the signatories saying that like him, they “did not take the decision to come forward lightly.”

“We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments. Everyone should heed General Kelly’s warning,” the letter states.

The letter’s signatories included Trump administration officials such as former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former press secretary to the vice president Alyssa Farah Griffin, and former assistant secretary of homeland security Elizabeth Neumann, among others.

Grisham spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, telling the Chicago audience that Trump “used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, just say it enough and people will believe you.’” Griffin has also come out against Trump, calling his message to women “creepy.”

The letter is the latest example of many Republicans turning against Trump. Some have even gone on to endorse Harris, such as a group of more than 100 former GOP officials, as well as former staffers to previous Republican presidential candidates. Harris hopes that the GOP defections don’t stop there but continue at the ballot box in 11 days.