Team Trump Panics as “Hell” Breaks Loose in Elon Musk’s Voting Plan

Elon Musk’s America PAC has Republican operatives more than a little concerned about Donald Trump’s ground game.

Nine Republican operatives and canvassers seemed alarmed about issues with the super PAC, which has reportedly collected a plethora of faked canvassing data, NBC News reported Friday.

As the PAC’s phony canvassing numbers were revealed, an operative close to the effort told NBC that “all hell has broken loose” inside the America PAC.

The PAC has reportedly received a large quantity of suspicious data from its canvassers, following reports that some had learned how to spoof their location to create the impression that they’d visited voters’ homes.

Earlier this month, data leaks revealed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada in a single week had been flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric used to indicate fake door-knocks. America PAC has spent more than $54 million on its vendor in those states, Blitz Canvassing, which is also organizing efforts in Michigan and North Carolina. Blitz Canvassing is one of four vendors employed by the PAC.

The PAC has pushed back on reports that fake canvassing was impeding Trump’s get-out-the-vote effort.

America PAC has also reportedly engaged in dubious treatment of its canvassers. Two canvassers anonymously told NBC News they were made to knock on doors outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, as Hurricane Helene rolled in on September 27. One of them said that their direct manager told them to go door to door, despite leadership instructing them to make calls instead.

“If I go into the troubles that we went through just getting into the field, working, I’m talking about soggy literature, right?” the canvasser told NBC News. “Ponchos on ponchos.”

“It was very bad,” they added.

The second canvasser said that many canvassers quit after that experience.

In Michigan, some canvassers funded by America PAC were reportedly given unrealistically high expectations, under extremely poor working conditions. They claimed that they were threatened financially if they performed poorly. Canvassers said that they’d been misled by the PAC and a video showed that they’d been carted around in the back of a U-Haul, instead of the rental cars they were promised. One canvasser even said they were surprised to learn that they were canvassing on behalf of Trump.

Trump’s allies have practically begged the former president to ditch Musk, and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders in battleground states reported that they’ve seen little return from the America PAC’s efforts.

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.