Lindsey Graham Totally Humiliated Over His Desperate Trump Defense

Senator Lindsay Graham’s attack on “dangerous” rhetoric calling Donald Trump a fascist got promptly shut down by video evidence of the former president calling Kamala Harris a fascist. 

Last week, retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said the former president fell under “the general definition of fascist.” Mark Esper, the former defense secretary, said that he agreed with Kelly’s assessment. Earlier this month, it was reported that retired General Mark Milley called Trump “fascist to the core.”

These statements predictably sent Trump into a rage, and Graham attempted to smear the Republican presidential candidate’s critics Sunday for trying to sound the alarm about their former boss.  

“He’s not a fascist. He’s not Hitler, and that just shows you how desperate this campaign is,” Graham said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week with host Jonathan Karl. 

These generals are “trying to turn joy into fear,” Graham cried, as if he were not defending the candidate who, just this weekend, falsely claimed American cities had been “invaded and conquered” by immigrants. 

Graham became hysterical as he claimed Trump’s critics had “turned America upside-down” by “using rhetoric that is dangerous and off-base” to “try to scare Americans.” The South Carolina Republican also claimed the former White House advisers had “called [Trump] Hitler,” which they didn’t.

“Now you have been very critical of the generals, two of them using the word ‘fascist.’ Mitch McConnell and Speaker Mike Johnson have been very critical, saying ‘This is inciting violence,’ ‘How dare you call Donald Trump a fascist?’ Let me just play you a little bit about what Donald Trump has had to say about Kamala Harris,” Karl said. 

Cut to an edit of Trump calling Harris a fascist over and over again. 

“The true divide in American politics today is between these far-left fascists led by Harris and her group,” Trump said at a rally on August 23.

“We have a fascist person running, who’s incompetent,” Trump said again, just three days later. 

“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist—she’s not actually a socialist,” Trump said. 

During a rambling speech in Los Angeles in September, Trump called Harris a “radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist,” though such a person could not, ideologically, exist. 

Graham was quick to make his own attitudes clear, in light of Trump’s rhetoric. “Why don‘t you ask me, ‘Do I think Kamala Harris is a fascist?’ No. Do I think she’s a communist? No. I think she’s the most liberal person to ever be dominated by a major party. I think she’s ineffective, I think she’s incompetent,” Graham said.

Rather than address how brutally ridiculous he just made himself look, the South Carolina Republican started rattling off a stump speech against Harris.

Karl pushed Graham to acknowledge Trump’s “stronger” language. 

“You’re not having Senator Lindsey Graham say she’s a fascist, she’s just incompetent,” Graham sputtered, as Karl brought their interview to a close. 

Last week, more than a dozen officials agreed with Kelly’s assessment that Trump is a fascist, stating that “this is who Donald Trump is” in a letter published Friday. 

Choosing Madison Square Garden as the New York City venue to showcase Donald Trump’s vengeful and divisive rhetoric had already evoked connections to the pro-Nazi rally held in the same location in 1939. But who Trump chose to platform at the event Sunday, and what they said, suggested that the comparisons weren’t far off.

Speaking before thousands at “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” Trump’s guests leaned into the white nationalist “great replacement theory,” donned Nazi-adjacent iconography, and aggressively defined the idea of who is—and who is not—an American.

“The cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only,” said Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump known for his vicious anti-immigrant policies. “One man, and that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you, he took a bullet for democracy.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk also attended the Manhattan event, wearing a full black getup that he described as “dark, gothic MAGA.” But critics noticed something strange on the front of Musk’s hat. Instead of using the normal font seen on Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps, Musk opted for something decidedly more Germanic: the Fraktur font, popularized during the early years of the Nazi regime.

Another guest at the blue-state campaign stop was podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, who launched the lineup with a crass joke about Latinos, claiming that the ethnic group loves “making babies” before mocking Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

Ex–Fox host Tucker Carlson also made an appearance, choosing in part to make fun of Vice President Kamala Harris’s mixed-race heritage.

“It’s gonna be pretty hard [for Democrats] to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive,’” he mocked. “As the first Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.’”

But not all of the fascist appeals stemmed from Trump’s allies. After allowing Republicans to flounder for weeks while attempting to justify or brush aside his controversial “enemy from within” remarks, Trump himself suddenly decided to double down on authoritarian language.

“They’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them,” he said. “And when I say ‘the enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy. Becomes a sound—‘Oh, how can he say’—no, they’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”

Forget firing, Donald Trump just pitched having special counsel Jack Smith deported.

During a rambling radio interview on 77WABC’s Cats & Cosby Thursday, Trump threw out Smith’s name when asked about his plans for immigration. 

“Domestically, what could America look like if it continues to have this open border policy that we have seen?” asked host Rita Cosby.

“We can’t have it, it’s, it’s not sustainable, it has to be shut immediately and you have to let people in, but they have to come in legally and you have to get the killers, the murderers, and the mentally deranged, you have to get them out. And we should throw Jack Smith out with them,” Trump said. 

“The mentally deranged people, Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump continued. 

Trump seemed to pluck Smith’s name out of thin air, as the special counsel had not yet come up in the interview. 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.  

This isn’t the first time Trump has threatened to deport those in the country legally. The former president has repeatedly made threats to deport immigrants who have entered the country under temporary protected status and humanitarian parole.

Shortly before claiming that he would deport one of his political enemies, who is attempting to hold him accountable for his alleged crimes, Trump tried desperately to defend himself from claims that he was a fascist. 

The former president went on a tirade against his former chief of staff, retired U.S. general John Kelly, who said that Trump fell into the “general definition of fascist.” Trump claimed Kelly was simply angry he’d been fired.

Trump went on a wild rant calling Kelly a “stupid person,” “a bully who made up stories,” and “a man of rather low intelligence, who was a tough guy who became a marshmallow.” He swerved into complaints about former Secretaries of Defense Mark Esper and James Mattis, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. 

This is Trump’s second threat against Smith in as many days. Trump vowed Thursday to “fire” Smith on his first day in office, in hopes of washing his hands of the two federal cases against him.

Donald Trump and his allies have suggested for months that the 2024 election will be “stolen,” much like they did in the 2020 cycle, prepping unfounded claims ahead of time that the election will be undermined by “noncitizen” voters, overseas ballot programs, and mail-in voting.

But on Friday, Trump officially called it, writing a “cease and desist” on Truth Social that effectively announced the Republican presidential nominee already believes that the November election is rigged—mere days into early voting.

“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump posted. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation!”

Trump fleetingly acknowledged in September that he did, factually, lose the 2020 election. But his insistence on Friday that he would definitely win the 2024 race came with a threat: that anyone working for the other side of the aisle—from attorneys to election officials and donors—will face consequences when he does.

“Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote. “We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Trump’s allies have concretely worked to skew election results in battleground states. In Georgia, a pro-Trump state election board issued prohibitive regulations that would have made it significantly more difficult for the state to find people willing to volunteer for the increasingly arduous job.

Trump praised the MAGA members of Georgia’s board days before the August move, describing Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”

Those regulations included mandating that poll workers hand-count ballots after they were electronically filed, and granting local election officials the authority to refuse to certify the results. Both of those rules were thrown out by a judge earlier this month.

Meanwhile, some of the most powerful conservatives in the federal legislature, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, have refused to state on the record that they will unequivocally accept the 2024 presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press earlier this month, Johnson wavered on whether he would do his job to certify the results regardless of who won, insisting that he would only do so “if the election is free and fair and legal.

“I think Donald J. Trump is your next president, and that can’t happen soon enough,” Johnson said at the time.

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 42,00 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.

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.