How Did This Horrifying Trump-Harris Halloween Float Get Approved?

The western Pennsylvania borough of Mount Pleasant is drawing negative attention over an exceptionally violent Halloween parade float depicting Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris in chains.

On Wednesday night, the borough held its parade, and one float featured a person with a Trump mask riding in a golf cart, with a fake sniper rifle mounted to the top of the vehicle. And trailing the vehicle was a rope or chain tied around the wrists of a woman dressed as Harris, who was also wearing handcuffs.

The depiction set off a backlash online and even within the borough, which is located 45 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The borough’s Democratic mayor, Diane Bailey, criticized the float on Pittsburgh TV news channel WXPI along with at least one local resident. Bailey said she was looking into how the float was even approved in the first place.

The NAACP’s Pittsburgh chapter condemned the float, with its president Daylon Davis issuing a statement saying in part, “This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America.”

The parade’s organizer, the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, released a statement apologizing for the float.

“We, the members of the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, want to take a moment to sincerely apologize for allowing the offensive participants to take part in the Mount Pleasant Annual Halloween Parade last evening,” the statement read. “We do not share in the values represented by those participants, and we understand how it may have hurt or offended members of our community.”

Displays like this in a battleground state only days before the election do a lot of harm to the political atmosphere, particularly in an election where the Republican presidential nominee has threatened violence against his enemies and called them “the enemy within.” The racial component of the display can’t be overlooked, either, with one resident saying the float “is simulating a lynching down Main Street in Mount Pleasant.” Hopefully, this small-town float isn’t a harbinger of what’s to come.

Europe’s Green Party is telling third-party candidate Jill Stein to step aside for the sake of America and the world.

European Green Party representatives from Italy, Ireland, Spain, and 13 other countries across the continent came together to sign onto a letter asking the U.S. Green Party’s Stein to withdraw her candidacy and endorse Democrat Kamala Harris for the sake of democracy.

“Right now, the race for the White House is too close for comfort,” wrote the French and Austrian co-chairs of the coalition in a statement released Friday. “We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House.”

There is no longer any formal relationship between the U.S. Green Party and the European Greens across the pond, in part because of key differences in policy around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so the statement is just a plea rather than a binding resolution. In their letter, the Europeans highlighted the connection between Trump’s “authoritarianism” and his close relationships with right-wing leaders Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Jair Bolsonaro, arguing that electing Trump would embolden anti-democratic actions around the globe.

Further, they also argued that by taking away votes from Harris and allowing a Trump win, Stein will not be able to help “bring about a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East,” an issue in which the U.S. Green Party candidate has staked her 2024 campaign upon.

In previous statements to The Guardian, U.S. Green Party spokespeople said they’ve been disappointed by the European Greens’ “silence and complicity” over Israel and Gaza, stating that the parties have “relied too much on US corporate news media” regarding the ongoing genocide.

Stein is polling at less than 2 percent nationally but may take home a larger share of the vote in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Arab and Muslim voters alongside others on the left have rallied around the call to cast a “conscience vote” against the U.S.-backed Israeli onslaught on Gaza.

Others, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, see Stein’s candidacy as a potential spoiler for the election. “All you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious,” said the congresswoman.

At a rally Thursday night in Nevada, Donald Trump pledged to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of “women’s health” if he’s elected president.

“He’s going to work on health, and women’s health, and all of the different reasons ‘cause we’re not really a wealthy or healthy country,” Trump told a crowd of supporters.

Kamala Harris had a one-word response.

Kennedy, formerly an independent candidate for president, dropped out of the race in August and endorsed Trump, likely in exchange for a prominent role in a potential second Trump term. Some reports suggest that Kennedy could get a Cabinet position, such as secretary of Health and Human Services, or have a hand in choosing appointees. In fact, Kennedy has already recommended a prominent vaccine skeptic for HHS.

Kennedy heading up women’s health would be a disaster. Kennedy has a long history of opposing vaccines, and his anti-vax conspiracies even helped spread a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of them children. Kennedy also supports restrictions on abortion, and blames the rise in mass shootings on antidepressants and video games.

Kennedy has co-opted Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan into his own initiative, “Make America Healthy Again.” But his own health hasn’t been as impeccable as he claims, admitting that a doctor once suspected a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.

His record with women’s issues apart from health isn’t good, either: He has a reputation as a compulsive womanizer, which may have been a contributing factor in the 2012 suicide of his second wife, Mary Richardson. If more recent allegations are to be believed, Kennedy also carried on an affair with journalist Olivia Nuzzi, leading to her losing her job with New York magazine.

Kennedy’s reputation should be toxic enough for the Trump administration in any role, let alone one connected to public health and women. The question is whether this would help Trump attract any voters on the fence, or remind them that the former president’s reputation on public health isn’t so great either.

Donald Trump is once again exaggerating conspiracy theories about Democrats committing voter fraud into existence. 

During a rally in Glendale, Arizona, Thursday night, Trump claimed that there had been “bad votes” discovered in York County and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a key battleground state where early voting has indicated that Trump isn’t doing too well. 

Trump claimed that in Lancaster County, “there were 2,600 votes that happened to be written by the same pen, same hand, same signature, same everything. Uhhhh maybe there’s an explanation for that? Two thousand six hundred votes!”

There is an explanation for that, actually, which is that it’s a lie. Lancaster County didn’t discover thousands of fraudulent votes, but flagged a batch of voter registration forms for review. 

Last week, the county flagged around 2,500 voter registration forms for issues, including fake names, dubious signatures, inaccurate addresses and social security information, and other worrying details including suspicious handwriting, according to the Associated Press. Not only were the forms not ballots, but there was no evidence to suggest that they were all written by the same person.

Of the voter registration forms investigated, around three out of five had problems, according to Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams, who said Thursday her office was still actively investigating the issue. 

This isn’t the first time Trump has attempted to place Lancaster’s investigation at the center of his bogus claims of voter fraud. The former president posted on Truth Social Monday that Lancaster County had been “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person.” 

By Wednesday, he was full-on raging over his fake version of the story. “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” he wrote. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”

York County has also received suspicious voter registration forms and mail-in ballot applications, according to ABC News. The county had received the forms as part of a large delivery of election materials from a third-party organization Field+Media Corps, which was acting on behalf of the Everybody Votes Campaign, according to County Commissioner Julie Wheeler. The documents are now under review, and if officials discover fraud, the forms will be fully investigated by the district attorney, Wheeler said.  

Both Lancaster County and York County supported Trump in the 2020 election. 

As Election Day approaches, and likely for many weeks after, Trump is sure to continue exaggerating to the point of invention as he attempts to undermine the integrity of the election.

Elon Musk is now under fire in multiple swing states over his election interference.

Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has asked Elon Musk to take down an “obviously fake” video which appeared to show a Haitian immigrant who claimed to have voted multiple times in Georgia and encouraged others to do the same.

“This is false and is an example of targeted disinformation we’ve seen in this and other elections. It is likely foreign interference attempting to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the 2024 Presidential election,” Raffensperger wrote in a statement on Thursday night.

His office says that they are working to identify exactly where the video came from, and that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, is also investigating the matter. But Raffensperger and CISA have their suspicions about its origin.

“This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort. Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms,” wrote Raffensperger. “The likeliest suspect is a Russian troll farm,” Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, agreed. “It’s isn’t even that good of a fake … but it is fake. It is a lie. Please let anyone you know that this is a steaming pile of Russian … well you get it.”

Former CISA Director Chris Krebs also called the video “more nonsense from Russian troll farms.”

Georgia was subjected to massive disinformation campaigns during Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and was subject to Russian interference campaigns that sowed conflict in the state in 2016.

But fomenting distrust in the election system is easier when it’s coming from Trump and Musk themselves. In recent days, both billionaires have peddled lies about mass voter fraud in Pennsylvania.