Trump’s Last Campaign Rally Guest Was a Total Nightmare

In his final rally before Election Day, Donald Trump brought out a KKK sympathizer to hype up his Grand Rapids, Michigan, crowd.

Just after 1 a.m. EST Tuesday morning, Trump invited Brian Pannebecker, the founder of Auto Workers for Trump, onstage to speak. Pannebecker, a longtime Trump supporter, was outed by Politico in 2015 for praising David Duke’s My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding in a 2001 Amazon review, and for calling President Barack Obama “a race hustler” who was “trying to benefit from racial tension and animosity,” in a 2015 Facebook post.

Pannebecker praised Trump at his last campaign rally and predicted that 65 percent of United Auto Workers members in Michigan would vote for Trump and he would carry suburban Macomb County. The county was key to Trump’s victory in the state in 2016, and Pannebecker said, shouting, “We’re gonna carry Michigan again!”

Trump and Pannebecker’s relationship goes back to that 2016 campaign, with Trump meeting with the Michigan native back then even after the news of his David Duke praise was revealed. Pennebecker has been an active campaigner for Trump during this election, making regular appearances at Trump’s rallies in Michigan and being dubbed Trump’s “go-to Michigan auto worker” by the The Detroit News.

But Pannebecker is exaggerating how much support Trump is getting from autoworkers. The UAW endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris, in July, drawing the ire of Trump. On one of JD Vance’s visits to Michigan earlier this month, several people in the crowd for his speech wore “Auto Workers for Trump” T-shirts but weren’t autoworkers at all. On October 15, Trump even belittled autoworkers, saying their jobs were so easy children could replace them.

As a battleground state, Michigan’s election results are expected to be very close and could be a bellwether for who wins the presidency. The question is whether autoworkers in the state, a key voting constituency, will vote based on the UAW’s endorsement and Democrats’ pro-labor record or go with glib promises from Trump and Pannebecker.

Republicans have scored another ballot box victory in a crucial swing state.

The Georgia Supreme Court sided with the Republican National Committee and the state’s Republican Party in a decision that overturned efforts to extend the absentee ballot deadline in Cobb County.

Last week, Cobb Elections announced that more than 3,000 absentee ballots had been mailed out after the state required deadline. Three residents filed suit to get their ballot acceptance deadline extended, as there was no other choice.

Cobb Superior Court Senior Judge Robert Flournoy found this to be sensible, extending the deadline for votes to be counted until Friday, November 8, so long as ballots were postmarked by Election Day. But the Georgia Supreme Court overruled him on Thursday, ruling that county election officials can only count ballots received by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

The decision puts nearly 3,000 ballots at risk of going uncounted. Ballots received late will be separated and kept, “until further order of the Court.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center and American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the voters impacted, are urging Cobb residents to vote in person if they can. “Only as a last resort, should voters simply mail their ballots. Unfortunately, there are voters who will not be able to access the remaining options and will not have their voices heard in this election as a result of this ruling,” the SPLC wrote.

Billionaire Elon Musk made his final pitch to voters: Donald Trump’s campaign is going full QAnon. 

The world’s richest man posted a dizzying nostalgic “Trump hype video” Monday night that begins with a threat: “If you do something bad to us, we are going to do things that have never been done before.” The audio, originally ripped from an October 2020 Rush Limbaugh interview about Iran, is probably the most normal part of the supercut. 

As “Jump” by Van Halen plays, vaporwave and ’80s and ’50s revival aesthetics pour over the screen, and Trump declares that “2024 is our final battle.” Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who waved their guns in front of their St. Louis mansion to threaten Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, also make an appearance in the video. 

Then, as Trump declares that “the future does not belong to globalists, the future belongs to patriots,” the O in the word “patriot” transforms into a Q. The rest of the letters quickly fall away, leaving only the Q, for QAnon as the audio trumpets “activation word: Ronald McDonald.” 

Earlier in the day, Musk shared another QAnon favorite: rumors about Pizzagate. He wrote, “The hammer of justice is coming” and shared  a misleading story about the conspiracy theory from last year. 

The Trump hype video appears to have been made by an account called “National Revival” which describes itself as “✞ Immortal Knight of Aryamehr ♛ Imperial State of Iranshahr Minister of Propaganda.” The account posts similar video edits of Iranian politicians, and the pinned video is a tribute to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last monarch of Iran. 

Musk tweeted out the video at the same time that he failed for an hour to host an “X town hall,” eventually giving up and asking people to just watch his episode with Joe Rogan.

Just before Election Day, Donald Trump decided to take a shot at one of his least favorite people: Nancy Pelosi.

At a rally just after midnight EST Tuesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Donald Trump, his face plastered orange with bronzer, called the representative and former speaker of the House a “crooked person.”

“She’s a bad person. Evil! She’s an evil, sick crazy b— oh no,” Trump said, raising his finger and miming a b sound with his mouth. “It starts with a b, but I won’t say it. I wanna say it!”

Perhaps it’s not the most conventional closing message for a presidential candidate, but for Trump, it’s what one would expect. After all, he has been calling his political opponents the “enemy within” for the home stretch of his campaign, mentioning Pelosi in particular as among the people he would like to use the military against.

Trump has resorted to profanity before, so it’s funny to see him exercise restraint. Perhaps he didn’t want his last sound bite before the election to be an expletive. In the past, Trump hasn’t hesitated to drop some four-letter words, even to a room full of priests at the Al Smith dinner for Catholic charities last month. It’s quite different from another closing message the Trump campaign sent Monday: memorializing a pet squirrel euthanized by New York state wildlife officials over the weekend.

The campaign felt compelled to jump on the conservative cause of the day, the beloved pet Peanut, after Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins tied the squirrel’s death to their baseless conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ pets. It just goes to show where the campaign’s priorities are on Election Day: taking shots at Trump ’s favorite enemies, and finding some kind of wild conspiracy to stir up the MAGA base.

The king of the manosphere has spoken. Celebrity podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump in a lengthy post Monday evening on X. Receipts immediately followed.

“The great and powerful @elonmusk,” Rogan wrote over a video of him interviewing the billionaire Trump fanboy. “If it wasn’t for him we’d be fucked.  He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump. Enjoy the podcast.”

Fans were quick to point to the many times Rogan has criticized Trump. In regard to January 6, Rogan called the former president “so fucking dangerous … a guy can incite a bunch of morons to do something really fucking stupid.” In another clip from 2022, Rogan outright called Trump a “man baby.”

A more than two-minute long montage of Rogan making very solidly liberal and leftist points also began to circulate. He heaps praise on the Obamas, calling Barack the best president of his lifetime. He says he wants universal health care, says he’s voting for Bernie Sanders, says he wants to spend more on low-income communities, says he’s very “pro-choice, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights.” Rogan even says that “not all Trump supporters are racist, but all racists are Trump supporters.”

The podcaster has a laundry list of opinions that Trump and his campaign are diametrically opposed to, and yet he threw in his endorsement the night before Election Day.