Trump Doubles Down After Elon’s Shocking “Tank the Economy” Confession

Just hours after Elon Musk admitted Donald Trump’s policies will tank the entire economy, the former president confirmed his plans to let Musk be a part of the destruction, claiming that “nobody is going to feel it.”

In an interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, Trump lauded Musk as a “very exceptional guy” and a “great cost-cutter” when asked about a potential role for the billionaire CEO in his Cabinet. But even more unbelievably, the Republican candidate said with confidence that the American people wouldn’t “feel” the economic impacts of cutting trillions from the budget.

“He’ll cut costs without anybody even knowing it—nobody’s going to notice—nobody is going to feel it,” Trump told Hannity, confirming that Musk does indeed plan to slash $2 trillion from the government’s budget.

Musk has proposed heading a “Department of Government Efficiency” under a Trump Cabinet—and the former president has clearly taken him up on it. At Trump’s hate-filled Madison Square Garden rally over the weekend, Musk announced that the target is $2 trillion in cuts.

Trimming the budget to the level would have to include cuts to essential government services like Medicare and Social Security—and could result in an initial huge economic crash. But Musk admitted Tuesday that that’s all a part of the plan, agreeing with a far-right troll on X that crashing the economy would lead to “sounder footing” in two years.

The plan sounds strikingly similar to that of Musk and Trump’s friend Javier Milei of Argentina. When campaigning for president, Milei promised to “take a chainsaw to the state,” cut public spending on education and health care, and eliminate the central bank and tens of thousands of government jobs. Since his election last year, Argentina has suffered a deep recession and the worst economic downturn in the country in decades, with 57 percent of the population now in poverty and inflation up 270 percent.

As journalist Kevin Drum noted, “Elon is claiming we should literally zero out the entire rest of the federal budget. Everything. The FBI, national parks, food stamps, Medicaid, education, NASA, the EPA, farm support, the NIH, all federal R&D grants, embassies worldwide, the FAA, the Department of Justice, the VA, the weather service, the border patrol, etc. etc. Everything.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s other horrible economic plans would simultaneously dramatically hike inflation and slow U.S. production and economic growth. But perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that two bumbling billionaires are planning to manufacture an economic disaster that will disproportionately harm poor Americans.

Donald Trump is once again suing districts in swing states over alleged voter intimidation.

The Trump-Vance campaign announced Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit over alleged voter suppression in Pennsylvania, claiming without evidence that Bucks County was preventing Trump voters from participating in the 2024 election.

Speaking at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the night before, Republican National Committee Co-Chair Michael Whatley claimed that the Keystone State had been “turning away our voters.”

The campaign did not point to any instance in particular that led it to believe that voters had been treated unfairly in Bucks County, but county officials had observed that there were complaints on social media (shared by the Trump campaign) about long lines to obtain mail-in ballots on Tuesday, the last day of their availability. Due to a miscommunication, some voters believed they could not have their mail-in ballot requests accommodated, Bucks County officials wrote on X, noting that that information was incorrect and that all voters who had joined the line before 5 p.m. would be able to receive a mail-in ballot.

But Trump chose to stoke the flames Wednesday morning, posting on Truth Social that “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.”

“Law enforcement must act, NOW!” he added.

Bucks County officials confirmed to NBC Philadelphia that they had been notified of the lawsuit, but did not provide further comment. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, meanwhile, shot back at the Republican presidential nominee, highlighting that Trump and his allies have spent the last four years actively corroding public trust in U.S. elections—and that they are currently warming up their second conspiracy to undermine the 2024 election results.

“Let’s remember, in 2020, Donald Trump attacked our elections over and over,” Shapiro wrote on X. “I was the Attorney General back then and despite his bluster and rhetoric, he went 0-43 in court when he fought to make it harder to vote and then tried to overturn Pennsylvanians’ votes.

“He’s now trying to use the same playbook to stoke chaos, but hear me on this: we will again have a free and fair, safe and secure election—and the will of the people will be respected,” Shapiro said.

A former Republican House candidate has been arrested and charged for stealing ballots in Indiana.

Larry L. Savage Jr. was charged with destroying or misplacing a ballot—a felony—and theft after he was captured on security footage nabbing two ballots in Madison County during testing of local voting machines, reported Fox59. The testing began at 10 a.m. on October 3 and was open to the public, according to court documents.

Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.

After pocketing the ballots, Savage leaned over to a woman streaming the event on Facebook Live, telling her that there was a “fucked-up count.” Upon exiting, Savage approached a man outside the government facility and showed him the ballots in his pocket before the unidentified man patted him on his back.

After Savage left, the woman confronted election officials about whether they were missing any ballots, reported Fox59. Savage then joined the woman’s livestream, commenting via his account “Cardkiller57” that the facility was “3 ballots short.”

“Dontvtake [sic] anything,” Savage wrote in another comment.

Ironically, Savage had framed himself as a champion of election integrity in online forums.

When questioned by police, Savage admitted that he had taken the ballots but claimed that a woman at the facility had given him permission to do so. He insisted that he “wasn’t trying to steal from nobody.”

After being confronted with evidence revealing that he had never asked for permission to take the ballots, Savage admitted that he had lied.

“If you go to Payless, or go wherever, it says sample and you usually can take a sample,” Savage said, according to Fox59. “So that is the way I took it. I thought they were fake fucking ballots.”

Speaking with Fox59, Savage claimed that he was an elected official and that he was “just trying to fight for our country.” (Savage, a businessman, came sixth out of eight candidates in the Republican primary.)

Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings said that Savage’s act was a deliberate attempt to “undermine our election process.”

“This was an act that feeds into that concern that a lot of voters have about the integrity of our process,” Cummings told Fox59. “And it simply wasn’t necessary. This is corruption. This is corruption at its core. To undermine our election process is unacceptable. And our office needed to take action.”

Donald Trump and his allies have corroded and undermined trust in the integrity of U.S. voting since he lost the presidential election in 2020, refusing to admit and rejecting mountains of evidence that the election was not “stolen” from him. Last week, Trump issued his first call to arms for the 2024 race, preemptively claiming on Truth Social that the November election is already rigged, mere days into early voting.

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.

Donald Trump is already constructing his election fraud theory if he loses the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

On Wednesday morning, Trump made a baseless accusation that there is widespread voter fraud going on in the state. “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” wrote the Republican nominee on Truth Social. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”

Trump’s alarmist rhetoric about election integrity in the swing state appears to only be escalating. On Tuesday, speaking in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump said he intended to sue Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia, for allegedly turning away voters who waited in long lines to receive mail-in ballots.

“There’s been lines like this for days across counties in PA,” wrote James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, on X .” Only for elections officials to come out and push people out of line and tell them to come back. Voter suppression!”

But the reality is different from the Trump team’s hallucination. “Contrary to what is being depicted on social media, if you are in line by 5 p.m. for an on-demand mail-in ballot application, you will have the opportunity to submit your application for a mail-in ballot,” wrote Bucks County on the Bucks County Government Facebook page.

Earlier this month, a viral video appeared to show election workers in Bucks County ripping up mail-in ballots that had been marked for Trump. However, on Friday, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, issued a joint statement explaining that the video was part of a Russian election disinformation plot.

This follows Trump’s similar claims earlier in the week, in which he singled out York and Lancaster counties. In a post late Monday night, Trump spread lies about thousands of fraudulent ballots and voter registrations, even making the widely inaccurate claim that one person had filled out 2,600 forms, which he again reiterated at the Allentown rally.

The reality is that those counties are going through their normal proceedings of verifying last-minute voter registrations and mail-in ballot applications. Any concerns were in fact already raised to law enforcement, according to county officials.

But in a state whose Republicans are nearly all election deniers, Trump’s flagrant lies don’t bode well for a close race come Election Day.

Suppressing votes just got a lot easier for a key Trump ally in Virginia.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday voted 6-3 to allow the Virginia election commission to resume a controversial voter purge program that has already wiped the names of 1,600 people from its voter rolls. The state says the program is designed to remove non-citizens, but two lower courts previously found the program is likely illegal.

All three of the court’s liberal justices—Justices Sonia Sotamayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented. 

Virginia’s Trump-loving governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed the controversial program into law and appealed legal challenges all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court made its decision Wednesday in a one-page order with no reasoning for the decision included.

The state of Virginia argued that the 1,600 people removed from the state’s voter rolls didn’t provide adequate proof of citizenship when registering to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But voting rights advocates argued Youngkin’s program violates the National Voter Registration Act’s ban on clearing voter rolls too close to Election Day.

In the end, the conservatives on the court decided to help out Republicans in the state. And while this decision is troubling, it is perhaps unsurprising for a majority that includes Judges Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito, each of whom have been chipping away at voting rights for some time now. 

This is a notable win for Republicans in an important state. It also shows that the highest court in the land will continue to reinforce Trump’s fear mongering about noncitizen voting. And if 1,600 voters sounds marginal, Virginia’s state legislature was decided by just one vote in 2017. It’s again clear that Republicans will go to absurd lengths to help Trump—and the rest of their party—win.

This story has been updated.