Top Trump Aide Makes Terrifying Threat at Madison Square Garden Rally

At Donald Trump’s rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday, one speaker took a bigoted swipe at Muslims—and he holds an important position in the Trump campaign.

Howard Lutnick, the CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and a co-chair of the Trump campaign’s transition team, told the crowd why they should vote for the former president and, raising a fist, invoked Islamophobia.

“So, the first thing: We must elect Donald J. Trump president because we must crush jihad,” Lutnick shouted to cheers.

Lutnick’s use of the word “jihad” in this context is an allusion to bigoted views about Islam. The term is widely mistranslated as “holy war,” when the literal Arabic translation is “to strive” or “to struggle.” In a religious context, the word is used to describe a person’s internal or external struggle to do good deeds.

The comments undermine the Trump campaign’s recent efforts to woo Arab American and Muslim voters, particularly in the battleground state of Michigan. Trump has a narrow lead among Arab American voters over Kamala Harris, and has found an opening due to the Harris campaign’s neglect of the community.

Harris has campaigned in Michigan with former Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, drawing the ire of the state’s Arab American community, which includes 90,000 Iraqi Americans who remember the elder Cheney’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 as well as his daughter’s reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry.

The state also boasts large Lebanese and Palestinian communities who are seeing the Biden administration’s staunch support for Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza and Lebanon as the Biden administration continues to make no progress on a cease-fire or arms embargo. At the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris’s campaign neglected to highlight Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim voices on the stage.

But Harris has some good news in Arizona, where last week more than 100 Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders in the southwestern battleground state signed a letter supporting her campaign. The vice president’s campaign will have to hope that statements like Lutnick’s, as well as Trump’s own bigoted record on Islam and Muslims, will help her win over more of the crucial vote. 

JD Vance was called out for lying … again. 

The Ohio senator was caught trying to create a conspiracy theory about retired Gen. John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, who said last week that Trump fits into the “general definition of fascist.”

During an interview with Jake Tapper Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Vance was faced with his own creative interpretation of Kelly’s decision to sound the alarm against Trump.

“You said the other day, quote, ‘I guarantee John Kelly talked to somebody on Kamala Harris’s campaign beforehand,’ before he did this interview,” Tapper said. “I’ve spoken with people in John Kelly’s circle, and I’ve spoken with people in the Kamala Harris campaign, they say there’s been no communication the entire time, so where did that come from?” 

“Oh, I’m highly skeptical of that, Jake,” Vance replied. “You know the way that these attacks work, you know the way that these people are often vetted by a campaign before something goes out there—”

“So, you made it up?” Tapper interjected. 

“No, I said that the American media and the American Democratic Party apparatus works a certain way,” Vance said. “If it comes out that John Kelly never even spoke with a person in the Kamala Harris orbit—”

“I’m telling you that,” Tapper insisted. 

“You’re telling me that based on secondhand conversations with John Kelly,” Vance said. 

“If it is true that he never spoke with anyone in Kamala Harris’s orbit, I’m happy to apologize to John Kelly for misstating how he delivered this news to The Atlantic magazine,” he added.

To cast attention far away from his lie, Vance then suggested that Kelly had a “particular ideological motive” for going to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he said had “encouraged” the invasion of Iraq with “dishonest” journalism. 

During his interview with CNN, Vance also tried to defend Trump’s remarks calling Democrats “the enemy within” and threatening to send the military after American citizens by pretending Trump had never said that at all, and then claimed Trump’s threats were taken “out of context.” 

Trump has “said publicly that he wants to use the military to go after ‘the enemy within,’ which is the American people,” Tapper explained.

“He did not say that, Jake,” Vance responded. “He said that he was going to send the military after the American people? Show me the quote where he said that.”

For the record, here’s the quote from earlier this month: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the—and it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

But Trump hasn’t just said “enemy from within” once, he’s said it at nearly every speaking event for the past two weeks, adding more and more context to exactly whom he views as the “enemy from within.” 

The Republican presidential candidate has used the term to describe Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, suggesting that “enemy from within” referred to his political rivals. In an interview with Joe Rogan on Friday, Trump used the phrase again, referring to people who disagree with his politics as “people that are really bad, people that I really think want to make this country unsuccessful.”

Vance went on the defensive anyway. “He said that he wanted to use the military to go after far-left lunatics who are rioting, and … he also called them ‘the enemy within,’” Vance insisted Sunday.

“He separately, in a totally different context, in a totally different conversation, said that Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were threats to this country,” Vance continued, conveniently leaving out that Trump had used the exact same language about both—the very definition of taking something out of context.

But it took barely a few hours before Trump repeated the phrase again Sunday night, at a rally in New York City, adding even more context.

“A massive, crooked, vicious radical left machine that runs the Democratic Party,” Trump said. “They’re just vessels.”

“And when I say the ‘enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy. Becomes a soundb—‘Ohh, how can he say?’ No, they’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within,” Trump whined.  

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is suing Elon Musk over the billionaire’s election interference plot.

Krasner on Monday filed a civil lawsuit arguing that Musk and his America PAC have violated Pennsylvania law by operating an illegal, unregulated lottery in the state, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Though several legal experts and the Justice Department have sounded the alarm, Krasner’s lawsuit announced Monday is the first legal challenge that Musk has faced for his $1 million bribe.

“America PAC and Musk must be stopped, immediately, before the upcoming Presidential Election on Nov. 5,” the lawsuit states. “That is because America PAC and Musk hatched their illegal lottery scheme to influence voters in that election.”

The lawsuit avoids the bigger question of whether the whole stunt—encouraging swing-state voters to sign a petition in return for a chance at winning $1 million—violates election law by essentially paying people to register to vote. Instead, Krasner’s legal argument states that Musk is operating an illegal lottery. Under Pennsylvania law, a lottery can only be run by the state and for the benefit of the state’s seniors.

He also argues that Musk’s giveaway isn’t as random as the Trump surrogate states. “Though Musk says that a winner’s selection is ‘random,’ that appears to be false,” Krasner’s lawsuit says. “Multiple winners that have been selected are individuals who have shown up at Trump rallies in Pennsylvania.” More than half of America PAC’s $9 million doled out to voters has gone to Pennsylvanians.

As of Monday morning, Musk has yet to make a statement about Krasner’s suit, but he did retweet a video of himself condemning the partisan “legacy media” and arguing that it should be easier to get rid of a law than make one.

Donald Trump’s campaign is desperately trying to backtrack after a comedian at Trump’s New York rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday made a very racist joke about Puerto Rico.

Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at the rally, immediately drawing backlash from across the political spectrum, even including Republicans like Senator Rick Scott and Representative Maria Elvira Salazar.

On Sunday night, the Trump campaign immediately went into damage control mode, with spokesperson Danielle Alvarez telling CNN, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Then, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt went on Fox and Friends early Monday morning before sunrise, and initially tried to spin the rally as “amazing” and diverse.

“The energy last night was palpable in the room, the spirit. It was happiness and joy. And it was such a diverse group of people in that stadium packed to the house. There wasn’t an empty seat. You had Black Americans, Latino Americans, Jewish Americans, men, women of all ages coming in support of President Trump and unafraid to show it,” Leavitt said.

Steve Doocy then addressed the elephant in the room.

“You know, this morning, the mainstream media has picked up on the comic’s comments, which were offensive, have been denounced by the campaign and everybody else. What went on with that?” Doocy asked Leavitt.

Leavitt tried in vain to distance the campaign from Hinchcliffe’s language.

“Look, it was a comedian who made a joke in poor taste,” she replied. “Obviously, that joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or our campaign. And I think it is sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”

But none of the following speakers at the rally Sunday, including Trump himself, condemned or tried to distance the Trump campaign from Hinchcliffe. The comedian himself doubled down, accusing his critics, including Walz, of “having no sense of humor.” It also was a reminder of Trump’s poor record regarding Puerto Rico, and how he mishandled the aftereffects of Hurricane Maria’s devastation of the island in 2017.

Trump’s rally was full of disturbing parallels to a 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden supporting the Nazi Party, and the racism was just the icing on the cake. Americans who oppose such racism, including the many Puerto Ricans living in battleground states, should keep that in mind when they head to the polls.

Even Fox News has raised its eyebrows at podcasting behemoth Joe Rogan’s decision not to interview Vice President Kamala Harris despite penning in a three-hour slot for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

During a Sunday discussion on the network between Fox News host Howard Kurtz and pundit Caroline Downey, the MediaBuzz anchor claimed that it was Rogan who had stiffed the Harris campaign.

Downey argued that the lopsided interview opportunity proved a “net benefit” to Trump’s campaign, since “every TV hit that Kamala Harris does, she comes off more bitter, more angry, and more jaded, whereas Trump comes off as a normal guy.”

“So, you know, Kamala Harris claims she’s trying to cater to the younger generation, but she’s sticking to legacy media interviews for the most part, and she refused to go on Rogan,” Downey said.

But Kurtz was quick to push back on Downey’s behind-the-scenes speculation.

“Well, no, I don’t think that’s true. I think she wanted to go on Joe Rogan, and I don’t think Rogan wanted her,” Kurtz said. “I think it would have been a good thing if she’d gone.”

“So, even though Rogan, I believe, has refused to have Trump on in the past, he seemed largely sympathetic to the former president, and you heard him dismiss the media as a bunch of left-wing Democrats,” the host added.

In recent weeks, Trump has dodged mainstream news appearances, including going so far as to break election tradition by refusing to sit for a 60 Minutes interview in September, which he reportedly backed out of last-minute over fears that the rigorous show would fact-check him.

Instead, Trump has relegated his TV appearances to friendlier, more sycophantic networks, including Fox News, whose anchor Maria Bartiromo did not interrupt or correct Trump when he claimed that the real Election Day threat is the “enemy from within” while suggesting that the military should forcibly involve itself in handling the election results.

But a chat with Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters for either candidate.

Donald Trump says that he and Speaker Mike Johnson have a dirty “little secret.”

Speaking at a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Trump seemed to tell his fans that he and the Republican House speaker have a plan to make sure that Republicans clinch victory in the House and the presidential election.

“I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact,” Trump said, before claiming he’d only reveal the secret after the election.

Though it’s unclear exactly what the plan may be, the implication is not subtle: Johnson is ready to help Trump win the election. As Politico noted, these “sinister comments … could be a reference to the House settling a contested election.”

Some in Congress agree, even sounding alarms about the comments. “I think the secret yesterday that he [Donald Trump] referenced very likely may relate to his compact with Mike Johnson to—as a back-up plan for when he loses—to overturn this election on January 6,” said Representative Daniel Goldman on Monday morning.

Before he was elected speaker, Johnson played a key role in the efforts to stop the certification of the 2020 election results, taking the lead in filing a briefing in a lawsuit to stop Joe Biden’s victory.

On Sunday, Johnson also told Axios that he has a “very close working relationship with President Trump and consider[s] him now a close friend.”

“I know that’s mutual,” Johnson continued. “[Trump] tells me how much confidence he has in my leadership.”

“He’s going to be around for a long time, I predict,” said Trump at the rally.

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.