On Sunday afternoon, when Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe opened the big show with a string of racist jokes. He referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” made a crude remark about Latinos and sex, and joked about carving watermelons with a Black person for Halloween. Some in the packed arena laughed. It was the start of hours of MAGA extremism that included a speaker who called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and one who described Harris’ advisers as “pimp handlers.” The shindig culminated in one of Trump’s most inflammatory speeches.
Throughout the hours-long program, no one on the line-up—including Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Melania Trump, Dr. Phil, and Tucker Carlson—called out Hinchcliffe.
Nor did Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
When it was his turn on the stage, the former Democrat, who this year ran an unsuccessful independent campaign for president, praised Trump to the hilt, claiming that Trump, if elected, would “restore the moral authority” of the United States, “protect” the Constitution and free speech, and “rebuild the middle class.” He also proclaimed that Trump would “stop dividing this country along racial lines.”
Kennedy’s silence about Hinchcliffe’s foul racism was more significant than that of his fellow Trumpers, for he once had a strong bond with Puerto Rico.
In 2001, he was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in prison for trespassing as a participant in a series of protests that aimed to stop the US Navy bombing exercises on Vieques island. The protesters contended the bombing was damaging the island’s environment and harming its 9,100 residents. The arrested demonstrators included actor Edward James Olmos, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Kennedy ended up serving a short stint in prison. He was so emotionally invested in this protest that he gave the middle name Vieques to one of his children.
So what did Kennedy make of Hinchcliffe’s racist gags?
On Monday morning, I reached Kennedy on his cell phone and asked why he hadn’t said anything at the rally about those comments. Kennedy requested we go off the record. Really? He would have to go off the record to discuss this? I replied that I preferred for this conversation to be on the record. He assented and said, “I was unaware of Tony Hinchcliffe’s, uh, uh, statement when I spoke or I would have addressed it.” He stopped talking, as if that was enough of a response.
“Well, what do you think of it now?” I asked.
“I think it was unfortunate,” he said. He paused and then added, “And that’s all I’ve got to say.”
Merely unfortunate? Nothing stronger?
I tried to press Kennedy for more, but he hung up.
His response was far weaker than the statement the Trump campaign had issued when it realized Hinchcliffe’s disastrous performance had tainted Trump’s campaign finale: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Other Republicans were more outspoken. Florida Sen. Rick Scott tweeted, “This joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!” Recently imprisoned Trump adviser Peter Navarro called Hinchcliffe “the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike.”
Hinchcliffe’s comments quickly drew harsh criticism from the Harris campaign, and, at the same time, prominent Puerto Ricans, including Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin expressed their support for Harris. Within hours of Hinchcliffe’s Madison Square Garden appearance, Harris’ team released a video and social media posts assailing his racist cracks and promoting the veep’s plans for Puerto Rico.
In a 1963 speech as attorney general, Robert Kennedy, declared that one of the “overriding moral drives” of the nation was to combat racism and “to do everything possible to eliminate racial discrimination.” And during his speech at the Trump event, RFK Jr. hailed his father and his uncle, President John Kennedy, for having led a party that was committed to civil rights. Yet by hooking up with Trump, who has a long record of racism, Kennedy has not lived up to that standard his father called for. (He has also promoted racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.) His unwillingness to sharply criticize the brazen racism present at the Trump rally where he was a headliner suggests Kennedy is a politician driven more by opportunism than his family’s legacy.
At a Sunday campaign rally, former President Donald Trump promised, if re-elected, to let anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “go wild on health.” Kennedy has previously signaled his desire to join a second Trump administration, after dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump—who himself has wild ideas about health—in August.
Trump tonight on RFK Jr:
“I'm gonna let him go wild on health. I'm gonna let him go wild on the food. I'm gonna let him go wild on the medicines." pic.twitter.com/tBVXrou1YQ
Trump’s pledge alarmed public health professionals, including Dr. Jerome Adams, his own surgeon general. Unlike many other top officials appointed by Trump, Adams was actually qualified: he was praised by colleagues for successfully limiting an HIV outbreak in Indiana by establishing a needle exchange program, among other public health successes.
On Monday, Adams spoke at a conference of the American Public Health Association—which endorsed his 2017 nomination as Surgeon General—on his concerns about Kennedy, especially his anti-vaccine stances, as New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote on X.
Trump's surgeon general, @JeromeAdamsMD warns RFK would hurt America's health:
"If RFK has a significant influence on the next administration, that could further erode people's willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines, and I am worried about the impact that…
Adams has been a strong supporter of the development and distribution of Covid vaccines, and others, including by testifying at a 2021 House hearing on how to encourage Covid vaccine uptake. Kennedy, on the other hand, has promoted the debunked, dangerous theory that vaccines cause autism. It definitely does not—but polio and measles do cause people to develop disabilities.
As my colleague David Corn wrote for Mother Jones in July, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism could potentially be linked to the deaths of children in Samoa who contracted measles. (Kennedy denied fault.)
During the stretch in which the vaccination coverage was dropping in Samoa, Kennedy visited the nation in June 2019 and gave a boost to anti-vaxxers there who had used the death of those two infants to help cause the drop in vaccination rates…Public health experts complained Kennedy’s visit to Samoa helped amplifly anti-vax voices.
During his speech, Adams also directly appealed to Republicans, asking them to not play a role in “allowing vaccine confidence to continue to be eroded, and for us to go backwards on one of the number-one public health achievements made in the last 50 to 75 years in this country.”
Shirley MacLaine is making a ghastly racket. It sounds like a combination of retching and the “aack” noise that the protagonist of that old “Cathy” comic strip used to make whenever she was nauseated, horrified, infuriated or you name it. We’re discussing an encounter that MacLaine had with Donald Trump in the ’80s, when she […]
Music has played a role in political campaigns throughout history, but only recently did it result in headlines about cease-and-desists and “somnambulant bobbing.” Of course, America is in its third consecutive presidential election cycle in which there are nearly weekly stories about musicians objecting to Donald Trump’s unauthorized use of their songs at rallies. (“It’s […]
Joe Scott, a West Point graduate with an MBA and a background in finance, ran for Broward County elections supervisor in 2020. At the time, he thought his previous stints as an account manager for a technology company and a facilities administrator at a health care firmwould make him a “good fit” for a job that would ostensibly preoccupy him with a mélange of humdrum desk-work.
He was surprised, however, to find how much his military experience in Iraq would come in handy.
With an unhurried demeanor, a lanyard, and a warm smile, Scott comes across more like a beloved social studies teacher moonlighting as a football coach than a soldier. But in the late-2000s, he was an Army captain embedded with the Iraqi military during some of the country’s earliest democratically run elections. In an effort to prepare for hotspots of unrest, the Iraqi leadership of Scott’s battalion pitched going door to door to ask locals how they planned to vote; Scott had to explain to the officer that having uniformed and armed Iraqi military members interrogate locals about their voting plans was “not a good look.”
“It was a different world,” he says of the Middle Eastern country’s shaky, fledgling democracy. “Although,” he adds, “America is kind of moving that way.”
The day after Scott was sworn in as Broward’s elections supervisor, in January 2021, election deniers—incited by Trump’s lies about a stolen election—stormed the US Capitol. He called his wife to ask if she was watching the news. “The Handmaid’s Tale is going down right now,” he recalls telling her. “This is real, right?”
He realized then that in the fleeting moments between the end of his campaign and first week of his new role, the job of “being an election official really changed.”
In the months and years since Trump turbocharged election angst, Scott has had to deal with politically motivated actors spreading misleading information about voting procedures and conspiracy-slinging citizens, some of whom have made physical threats against him and his staff. His experience is not the exception but the norm among the people who have taken up this line of work.
Nearly 40 percent of local election workers have experienced harassment or abuse, according to a recent survey conducted by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Dozens of threats have been so serious as to warrant full FBI investigations, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which noted these threats were concentrated in the states Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. Multiple election officials have even been victims of “swatting,” a dangerous hoax in which a caller reports a fake crime with the intention of triggering a substantial law enforcement response at the home or workplace of their unsuspecting target. These tactics don’t only put election workers at risk, they also intimidate voters. A year after the January 6 attack, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism asked Americans whether they felt safe at voting locations. Fewer than half said yes.
But if elections are becoming increasingly unhinged, election officials are also making significant efforts to improve their institutions and the public’s trust in them. Clerks and supervisors are fortifying their physical structures with bulletproof glass and GPS-tracked ballot bags and dedicated power supplies and motion detectors. They’re collaborating with law enforcement, and with one another, about how to prepare for and respond to threats in the first presidential race since Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters tried to overturn the 2020 election’s results. This time around, officials like Scott are hoping for a more tranquil transition period. But they’ve also prepared for the worst.
Scott recently showed me around his new election headquarters, which serves as a processing center for vote-by-mail ballots, the recount site for elections that are within half a percentage point, and the place where paper ballots are scanned into Broward’s auditing system. With security guards, a gated parking lot, badge-entry doors classified by clearance level, and windows for inquisitive (or incredulous) civilians to watch over ballot processing, the $103 million building was hardened to withstand both Category 5 hurricanes—and the growing ranks of election conspiracists. Scott notes the building’s design was an exercise in balancing the public’s desire for election transparency with everyone’s need for physical safety. He had managed similar dynamics before.
“Part of my tour in Iraq was preparing for and making sure that those elections went off without any major security things happening,” Scott tells Mother Jones about his service, which earned him a Bronze Star Medal and a Combat Action Badge. “We wanted to make sure people felt safe going to the polling places.”
Nearly 20 years later, that’s exactly what he and fellow US election workers are doing domestically.
Last month, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package intercepted by a postal center. Its contents included an unknown powder; its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.” The FBI is investigating its origins.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package with an unknown powder—its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.”
She said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she received since last September. pic.twitter.com/i7C84mQdEd
Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she has received since last September. One extremist made a threat to her life while she was in the hospital having a C-section; other threats have been sexual in nature. But rather than panic about potential election-related violence, Griswold has channeled her efforts into preventing it.
The 40-year-old has worked to reform Colorado’s election landscape, including championing the passage of state election laws, among them one that made it a felony to compromise voting equipment. That was something former Colorado election worker Tina Peters did in 2021 when she allowed an unauthorized person to access data from election machines, images from which were eventually posted on conspiracy-riddled websites. (Peters was recently sentenced to nine years in prison.) Other new regulations Griswold has backed have made it illegal to retaliate against election workers and to have guns near election sites.
Since 2020, Griswold has made available at least $5 million in grant money for more physical security at election sites, which has allowed counties to take measures such as installing bulletproof glass or having Narcan on hand in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon. “We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters,” she tells me. “There is no reason we should have to be planning for these domestic conspiracies and the effect it has on our elections, but we have to.”
Election officials elsewhere have been similarly proactive. In St. Charles County, Missouri, the only thing that separated in-person absentee voters from elections staff in 2020 was a row of desks. Kurt Bahr, the county’s Republican director of elections, recently installed a full wall with a locking door and customer service windows to provide a barrier so his employees “feel more secure in case any voter is overly agitated.”
Sante Fe, New Mexico’s clerk has installed GPS tracking devices on all traveling ballot bags. In case someone alleges fake ballots were introduced into the closed system, clerk Katharine Clark can say, “Au contraire. I have this dashboard, and that shows me exactly where my ballot bags are.”
Clark, a Democrat, has also added an accelerometer that measures vibration inside her county’s ballot tabulator to decipher if anyone improperly touched it overnight. Further, her county is issuing personal alert devices for all presiding judges and has hired additional security that will “have eyes and ears on all the public sites.”
One of the remaining challenges election officials face is deciding when a disturbance reaches a threshold that requires the help of law enforcement. “It’s kind of like the definition of pornography,” says Bahr of Missouri. “You know it when you see it.”
Tina Barton has made it her mission to foster coordination between law enforcement and election officials. She learned the importance of this when she became the target of conspiracy-crazed election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, she walked into her fluorescent-light filled office at Rochester Hills, Michigan City Hall, where she had served as the city’s election clerk for eight years. She saw a blinking light on her desk line. It was a voicemail from an unknown caller.
“Ten million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it, and your little infantile Deep State security agency has no time to protect you…We’ll fucking kill you,” said the voice, which also threatened bringing a knife to Barton’s throat. “You will fucking pay for your fucking lying-ass remarks…We will fucking take you out. Fuck your family, fuck your life.”
The culprit was eventually identified as Carmel, Indiana’s Andrew Nickels, who has since been sentenced to 14 months in prison; but the victim of the call was effectively hand-selected by the Republican National Committee. After Michigan was called for Biden, then–RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed that fraud had abounded in the state, and case in point were the “2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats but were Republican ballots,” said McDaniels at a press conference on November 6. “And this took place in Rochester Hills.”
There was a minor issue in Rochester Hills, but it was discovered and corrected well before Nickels left the voicemail. Around 1 a.m. the day after the election, Barton—who had at that point worked more than 18 hours straight—noticed that the county’s website showed a handful of absentee precincts from her county were not showing up. She informed the county, whose officials said they had not received one of Barton’s files. She ran a report and discovered the file was not missing, but saved under the wrong name.
The county advised Barton that the solution was to purge the old file and rerun the absentee precincts, then save that information under the correct file name. But within 24 hours of that step on Wednesday, it was discovered that both files had somehow been added to the county’s total. Immediately, before noon on Thursday, the incorrect file was removed from the system.
Even if the issue was not corrected—it was—Biden won the state by more than 150,000 votes: roughly double the number of people who live in Rochester Hills. An audit led by Republican state legislators would later confirm, in June 2021, that Michigan’s elections were lawfully run, and that temporary mishaps didn’t affect final outcomes. All the while, Barton was perpetually on edge. At the grocery store, she’d think, “Did that person walk too close to me? Why are they everywhere that I’m going?” she tells me. “You become hyper-vigilant about every single thing, and start to view every single thing in person as a possible threat. And that can be really overwhelming.”
While investigators were still working to identify her aggressor, a group called the Center for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE) was forming in response to threats against election officials like Barton. It was founded in 2022 by a cross-partisan group of current and former national, state, and local election officials, members of law enforcement, as well as nonprofits across the political spectrum. Barton, a Republican who has since left her election clerk role, is now a vice chair.
Over the last two years, she’s convened nearly 150 CSSE training sessions across more than 35 states, bringing together thousands of election workers, members of law enforcement, facilities managers, hazmat teams, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and more to help the various stakeholders preemptively form lines of communication among themselves in preparation for what used to be extraordinary complications: Reports of mysterious substances, menacing phone calls, open-carry demonstrations outside polling sites, accusations of non-citizens voting, bomb threats, and more.
Barton and her co-instructor, former Sheriff for Larimer County, Colorado, Justin Smith, travel to various jurisdictions, pose hypotheticals emergencies such as these, and break the attendees into randomized groups to strategize best practices. “Then we’ll take that opportunity after we’ve heard what they’ve said to see if we have some more things to either challenge them on, or to push their thinking on,” Barton says. CSSE has also made instructional videos and guides for groups and officials who can’t facilitate in-person training.
Election workers, many of whom have already been threatened, are usually eager to accept CSSE’s guidance. But in the beginning, it was sometimes a harder sell to law enforcement personnel, who generally feared engaging in anything political and didn’t realize how rampant election-related intimidation had become. Smith would help convince them by comparing the need for police engagement in election settings with the need for police in school settings.
There were school shootings before Columbine, but the 1999 tragedy was an “awakening period” during which both law enforcement educators realized they needed to work together to prevent future catastrophes. Similarly, Smith says, “2020 was not the first time we were having problems in elections,” but the scale of chaos from that cycle was a turning point requiring groups like CSSE to help bridge the divides between the various relevant parties.
Barton and Smith’s work is just one part of a growing movement in which individuals are collaborating across professions and party lines to prevent chaos-mongers from affecting people’s constitutional right to vote in 2024. Another nonpartisan organization, the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions PLEJ was founded in 2022 to facilitate engagement between election officials who share challenges and, with PLEJ’s help, solutions.
Joe Scott of Broward County is a member of PLEJ, as are 89 more of the largest local election jurisdictions across 33 states. Collectively, the group’s members administer elections for 40 percent of the US electorate. At a September PLEJ panel hosted in Washington, DC, Republican and Democratic election officials from eight states came together to talk about their security plans and structures. Carolina Lopez, the executive director of PLEJ and a member of CSSE, says that the officials often invite each other to their sites to trade tips. “Instead of every little fiefdom building something, we’re putting all of our resources together,” says Lopez.
The fraternization may never have happened so quickly—or at all—if Trump hadn’t repeatedly claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, provoking people like Andrew Nickels to assail local bureaucrats like Tina Barton. CSSE and PLEJ didn’t exist then, and they do now.
Unfortunately, so do new threats. “I’m actually really hopeful as we go into the 2024 general election,” says Barton. “I’m also cautious.”
This year, former President Donald Trump’s central campaign pledge has been to conduct the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
In his first term, Trump couldn’t deliver mass deportation. This waspartially a result of his administration’s haphazard policy implementation, but also because a mass deportation campaign would require an almost unimaginable amount of resources: Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.
Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal without bankrupting the economy and likely harming millions of immigrants and many more US citizens in the process.
On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence.
“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” Homan said. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he claimed, there would be “targeted arrests.” But, as I’ve reported before, that’s quite different from the actual plans Trump’s hardline adviser Stephen Miller has been publicly laying out:
When asked by the hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show how the mass deportations project would be realized, Miller said it would require a “switch to indiscriminate or large-scale enforcement activities.” Miller described going to every place where there are known congregations of “illegals” and taking people to federal detention.
To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”
In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”
“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. We’re going to remove people that the judges order deported.”
As a retired government official, Homan has making the rounds of conservative media to declare an “invasion” at the southern border. And he has made an enterprise out of it by launching the nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc. and traveling across the country spreading fear-mongering about migrants.
When asked on 60 Minutes how many people would be deported under Trump’s proposed mass deportation operation, Homan said “you can’t answer that question” because it would depend on how many enforcement agents they would have. Currently, ICE has about 6,000 deportation officers. Arresting and removing the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom have been in the country for more then a decade, would require hiring hundreds of thousands of government employees.
“If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?” Vega asked.
“We’ve done it before,” Homan said, presumably referencing the less than successful slur-named militaristic “Operation Wetback” from the Eisenhower administration that Trump has repeatedly invoked as a model. But historians agree that campaign not only led to far fewer deportations than the federal government claimed, but also ensnared US citizens.
A mass deportation of the scale Trump and Homan have been touting would likely have the same result. And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”
There was no shortage of inflammatory commentary during Donald Trump’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night — against Puerto Rican people, against Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and others. Variety reached out to representatives of MSG and James L. Dolan, whose family owns the venue, for comment on the statements. An MSG […]
Whoopi Goldberg put Joe Rogan in his place during an episode of “The View” in which the EGOT winner corrected Rogan’s false claims about one of Trump’s appearances on the ABC daytime talk show. Trump recently guested on Rogan’s Spotify podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where the two claimed that “The View” hosts once acted […]
Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates the Truth Social social-media network, has seen its stock soar in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 5 presidential election — and it is currently worth more than Elon Musk’s X, the social-media company formerly known as Twitter. On Monday, shares of TMTG, which trade under the […]
I am Puerto Rican, and my country is no “floating island of garbage.” But the people who think that sure are — even if it’s disguised as humor. When comedian Tony Hinchcliffe took the stage at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday for a MAGA rally in support of Donald Trump’s presidential […]
Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin were among the notable industry figures who boosted Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Sunday after a speaker at Donald Trump’s political rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” The starkly racist comment stirred outrage among prominent Puerto Ricans and […]
In a Sunday morning media blitz, vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) tried to clean up former President Donald Trump’s disturbing comments about his domestic political opponents being “the enemy within.”
Trump has made such comments multiple times. Earlier this month, he told Fox host Maria Bartiromo, “We have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within—and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.” Trump added that he considers California Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff among those enemies. And in a podcast interview with Joe Rogan on Friday, Trump said the “enemy from within” was more dangerous than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Tapper, host of CNN’s State of the Union, pressed Vance on those comments from the very start of their interview, as well as John Kelly’s characterization this week of Trump as a fascist who admires Hitler. Vance said Kelly’s comments about Trump were inaccurate. At one point, Vance said, “I believe Donald Trump is the candidate of peace.” Later in the interview, Vance said Trump was reserving his threats to send the military after “people rioting after the election” rather than all Americans.
At another point, Tapper reminded Vance that Trump shared a social media post saying Liz Cheney—now among the Republicans campaigning for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris—should be put before a war tribunal. “None of that sounds fascistic to you at all?” Tapper asked. “No, of course it doesn’t,” Vance responded, before alleging Tapper was taking Trump’s statements out of context.
.@jaketapper: "Liz Cheney, [Trump] said, should be put before a war tribunal. None of that sounds fascistic to you at all?"@JDVance: "No, of course it doesn't." pic.twitter.com/3YuiEI3MGH
When Welker, of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Vance if he agreed with Trump that Pelosi and Schiff “are more dangerous than Russia and China,” he dodged. “Well, I think what Donald Trump said is that those folks pose a greater threat to United States’ peace and security, because America’s strong enough to stand up to any foreign adversary,” Vance replied.
In his interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, he gave a slightly clearer answer. While she didn’t ask specifically about his response to Trump’s comments about “the enemy from within,” Brennan did ask Vance, “What price should Moscow pay for trying to manipulate American voters?”—referring to a Friday announcement by the FBI that Russia was behind a fake video of mail-in ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania.
“A lot of countries are going to try to manipulate our voters. They’re going to try to manipulate our elections. That’s what they do,” Vance replied. After Brennan pressed him, Vance condemned Russia’s actions, but said he would not commit to how the US should or would respond.
As my colleague Inae Oh and I have tracked, Trump has indeed threatened to prosecute, or called for the prosecution of, a long list of political opponents, including Harris, Cheney, President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama, and a slew of others. So—contrary to Vance’s assertions—Trump has given us ample reason to take his threats seriously.
When I arrived outside the arena just before 11 a.m.—six hours before Trump was to take the stage inside, and an hour before doors opened—the line of MAGA hat-wearing supporters wrapped around the block.
The choice of New York as the location for a massive Trump rally, just over a week from Election Day, is confounding: In 2020, President Joe Biden won87 percent of votes cast in Manhattan. And just a few miles south of the midtown block where the crowd gathered Sunday are the courthouses where, earlier this year, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in his hush-money case and ordered to pay $355 million in a civil fraud case brought by state Attorney General Letitia James. Add to that that New York has not voted to elect a Republican president since 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the incumbent, beat Walter Mondale.
But the ex-president—who was born and raised in Queens—has never been deterred by facts. “We are going to win New York,” he has said on the campaign trail. His supporters who showed up Sunday were similarly defiant. “I’m voting for the felon,” yelled one man standing near the line, “and I can’t wait.”
That man, who gave his name as George D. and said he lives on Long Island and works in Manhattan, was holding a flag with Trump’s mugshot emblazoned over the Stars and Stripes. He was one of several supporters who told me he thinks Trump will win the election, despite his apparent tie with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls. (A new ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday shows Harris restoring a lead, polling at 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent.)
“Neck and neck means Trump’s ahead,” George said. “I wear this MAGA hat every day, and I feel the pulse in the streets,” he added. “I went from getting middle fingers to getting thumbs up.”
Like several supporters I spoke to, George preferred Trumpian talking points to my fact-checks, and characterized his candidate as unfairly persecuted by the left. The “lamestream media,” he claimed, is “building a lie” about Trump’s chances of winning. “The only way to beat him is to lock him up or try to assassinate him,” he said, adding that he thinks the attemptedassassinations of Trump were “an inside job.” (Trump, Vance, and Trump’s sons have also falsely claimed, without evidence, that Democrats were behind the assassination attempts; threat assessment experts have told my colleague Mark Follman that this could fuel more retaliatory violence.)
The shootings were on his fans’ minds. When I asked a woman in line named Dana about Trump’s shot at winning, a man behind her cut in: “Don’t say ‘shot’!” The group laughed. Dana turned back to respond to my question about whether Trump could win: “100 percent,” she said, unblinking.
She knew, though, that she was something of an oddity in an election that has arguably become as much about gender as about policy: The most recent ABC/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 14-point advantage among women voters, while Trump has a 6-point advantage among men. Dana, who is from New Jersey, was wearing a pink “Women for Trump” hat. She pointed to it: “I can’t wear this hat when I drop my kids off at school.”
Dana believes women are flocking to Harris due to reproductive rights (fact check: true), but she doesn’t believe Trump actually decimated those rights—he left them to the states. And she doesn’t think he’ll sign a national abortion ban, despite the fact that Trump twice refused to commit to not doing so during the debate (earlier this month, he said in a social media post he would veto it if Congress passed it). “I vote on policy,” Dana said, adding that she was voting for Trump due to his stances on immigration, the economy, and inflation. Under Biden, someone nearby claimed, bacon now costs $12. “I want to eat more bacon!” Dana exclaimed.
A bit behind Dana and her friends, I met a Dutch woman named Gabriëlle Kok who showed up not because she supports Trump, but because she wanted to see who does. The only thing she seemed to have in common with Dana was believing Trump has a shot at reelection. “I think he’s a very dangerous man—for everybody, but especially for women,” Kok said. The Netherlands recently installed its first far-right government, whose leader, Geert Wilders, is known as the ‘Dutch Donald Trump.’ “I think they look up at Trump and Trumpism,” Kok said of the Netherlands’ new government. “There’s inspiration to be gotten for them.”
But Luis Rodriguez, who I met towards the end of the line, feels differently: He sees Trump as a bulwark against the socialism of Cuba, which he emigrated from in 1961, just after Fidel Castro came to power, he said. “I’m much more aware of how fragile democracy is,” Rodriguez, who lives in Manhattan, told me, adding that he’s a registered independent who voted for Obama in 2008.
He had just voted early, before showing up to the rally, he added. “I always get emotional when I vote,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like going to church.” (Trump and his acolytes, of course, still refuse to admit he lost the 2020 election, and are preemptively sowing doubt about this year’s race.)
Rodriguez thinks 2020 was a “troubled election,” he said, and finds the comparisons of Trump to Hitler and other fascists absurd. “Hitler is the cheapest trope you can throw out at someone to shut them up,” he said, adding that the Democrats’ messaging has “become ‘abortion’ and ‘Trump is Hitler.'” He was exasperated. “I’m a Hispanic, immigrant, and I’m gay. I get told I’m supporting a racist, a xenophobe, and an anti-gay bigot.”
His friend Gary Mirkin, of Long Island, was wearing an “I’m Voting For the Felon” t-shirt. He chimed in: “I’m conservative and Jewish, and people tell me I’m voting for Hitler.” Just then, someone in a MAGA cap walked by with a bullhorn, chanting, “F Joe Biden” and “Let’s Go Brandon!”
But these were the theatrics Rodriguez appeared tired of. “Can we discuss the policy?” he asked. Like Dana, Rodriguez said he was voting for Trump based on issues around immigration and the economy. (The ABC/Ipsos poll shows Trump leading Harris on both of those issues, by 12 points and 8 points, respectively.)
He also added that the Obama administration built cages to detain immigrant children—which is true, though it did not maintain a policy of systemically separating families, as the Trump administration did. That policy has, as of earlier this year, still left more than 1,300 kids separated from their parents, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.
Regardless, Rodriguez trusts Trump: “I think he’s the only one that has the grit and wherewithal” to confront the “corrupt establishment,” he said. So what happens if Harris wins? “Obama will pull her strings,” Mirkin said, adding that he had signed up to be a poll watcher. (The GOP has recruited 200,000 poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should Trump lose.)
But he and Rodriguez weren’t too worried. “Tied,” Mirkin said, “means he’s winning.”
The text came from a fellow journalist. I was driving and glanced at it at a red light. It was a forward of an X post by @realDonadTrump. “You see this!?” my friend had written.
As I glanced at it, I saw the back of a police car and what looked like two legs covered in white. There were black shoes, the toes pointing skyward.
Memory jarred me seconds later. That was a 17-year-old photo of murdered journalist Chauncey Bailey lying dead in the street. From Trump? What the hell? I pulled over and discovered that what I had thought was a photo was the opening image of a video. I hit play.
“This is a journalist named Chauncey Bailey,” a disembodied voice said. “We can’t show you his face. It was blown away by this man’s .12-gauge shotgun,” the narration continued as a photo of a dark-eyed young man came on the screen with the caption “Repeat criminal D. Broussard.” It was followed by a re-creation of Bailey’s 2007 killing, an actor playing a masked gunman firing a shotgun twice.
“Unfortunately, the murderer never should have been there. He should have been in jail,” the narrator continued. “Broussard was previously convicted of brutal assault. San Francisco’s liberal DA Kamala Harris”—the narrator, like Trump, mispronounces Harris’ first name as a photo of her is shown—“put him back on the street instead of in jail. Now, Harris has blood on her hands.”
Then, an all too familiar voice: “I am Donald J. Trump and I approved this message.” A photo of Broussard also appears in a second Trump ad over which a narrator says, “As San Francisco DA liberal Kamala Harris let killers go free.”
The ads were designed by a Trump-controlled Super PAC, Maga Inc. that’s painting Harris as a pro-criminal leftist radical who’s soft on crime. It has spent at least $75 million in swing states, including Georgia and Pennsylvania, according to published reports and Federal Election Commission records. Neither campaign responded to questions about the ads.
As first reported by the non-profit news site The Oaklandside, the ad that shows Bailey’s corpse is as rank with Trump’s utter hypocrisy as it is factually inaccurate in claiming Harris is somehow responsible for his death.
From his mocking of disabled Wall Street Journal reporter Serge Kovaleski in 2015 to his repeated use of the Stalinesque “enemies of the people” in his attacks on the media, to urging crowds at his rallies to undertake physical aggression against reporters, Trump’s seemingly endless contempt for a free press is ubiquitous. Campaigning this year, he’s said if elected he would jail reporters who refused to reveal sources, in his words making them go “bye-bye.” He’s repeatedly called for overturning the landmark unanimous Supreme Court decision on libel in Times vs. Sullivan and probably would also support overturning the court’s ruling on prior restraint in the Pentagon Papers case.
Trump’s contempt for journalists long predates his time in national politics. As a newspaper reporter in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the 1990s, I frequently encountered Trump. He owned three casinos at the time and often attacked my reporting on his long casino-development war with rival Steve Wynn, calling me “a fucking twerp,” “a moron,” “an asshole,” and other names. But Atlantic City was a small stage, and most of those remarks were in phone calls and interviews. And all that was years before Bailey’s murder, which shocked and scared journalists in California and nationally.
Within days I was assigned to cover the killing full time, working with others on what became known as the “Chancey Bailey Project.” It was an assignment that lasted nearly five years involving daily stories, as well as deeply reported investigative stories showing the depths of the Bey’s cult, and police indifference and incompetence. The work culminated in a book I wrote in 2012 with the overarching message that you can’t kill a story by killing a journalist. And there also was an element of self-preservation. As the great investigative reporter Robert W. Greene of Newsday noted, when he led a similar effort following the 1976 car-bombing death of reporter Don Bolles, such work is like “buying life insurance” for journalists. The response must be to create more journalism about the matter that the killer was trying to censor than the target ever could have achieved alone.
Trump’s new, horrid misappropriation of a journalist being gunned down in the street is blatantly public. The facts of Bailey’s death are straightforward. The Trump campaign ad claims are not.
Bailey, 57, was shot dead on August 2, 2007, as he walked to work at the Oakland Post, a weekly paper that serves Oakland’s large Black community. He was a lifelong newspaperman having previously worked for The Hartford Courant, The Detroit News, and had recently left the Oakland Tribune for the Post.
It was publication day. He was hurrying to his office to get the paper out, stopping only to buy an unhoused man a cup of coffee. Among the stories Bailey was wrestling with was one he’d written himself about an Oakland business called Your Black Muslim Bakery, which had become a front for wide-ranging criminal enterprises. It had fallen into the hands of its late founder’s 20-year-old son, Yusuf Bey IV and had recently filed for bankruptcy. Baily had a source telling him of a string of violent and financial crimes being committed by young Bey’s cult-like followers. Bailey wanted to publish ASAP, perhaps as soon as that afternoon.
Just then a tall, skinny man, dressed in all black with a ski mask over his face and carrying a pistol-grip .12-gauge shotgun ran up on him. The gunman fired twice into Bailey’s torso at point-blank range. Bailey fell, dead almost instantly. The killer started to run to a waiting white mini-van, then remembered his orders to shoot three times to ensure Bailey’s death. He turned back, leaned over the prone body, a load of buckshot ripping into Bailey’s face.
The gunman, Devaughndre Broussard, 19, who weeks earlier had also killed another man with an assault rifle, jumped into a tattered white mini-van, where wheelman Antoine Mackey waited. They sped off. As they tore through Oakland streets, Mackey grabbed his cell phone and dialed their shot caller. The day before Bey had told the young men, “We gotta take him out before he writes that story.” Now Mackey told him they had.
Harris comes into the story because Broussard was from San Francisco, where she was District Attorney from 2002 to 2011. Trump’s ad stems from Broussard’s arrest for an assault that happened on Halloween night in 2005. He and two friends beat and robbed an art student on the San Francisco subway, taking $60, and an iPod.
With the victim lying on the car floor bleeding as the train lurched into a station, Broussard looked up, directly into the lens of a security camera. He had a magic marker in his pocket and used it to try to color over the lens. It didn’t help. Police arrested him two weeks later for assault with a deadly weapon, battery, and robbery. Broussard’s two friends were also arrested. Both were 17. Their cases were assigned to juvenile court; the outcomes were sealed.
Given his life story, eventually facing incarceration seemed inevitable for Broussard. He barely knew his father. His mother, Audra Dixon, “had an anguished life,” a lawyer representing her in one of her many criminal cases during her son’s childhood once told a judge. Broussard ended up in a home for emotionally troubled youth, where he developed a bad stutter that plagued him into adulthood.
With Dixon in prison, Broussard lived for a while across San Francisco Bay in the city of Richmond with a man who’d fathered a daughter with Dixon. The man became the boy’s Foster parent. Broussard called him dad. At Richmond High School, Broussard did well enough that a teacher helped get him into a summer camp at UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business, where he designed a mock investment scheme that won him a $100 Savings Bond. Then Dixon got out of prison and wanted Broussard back.
She and her mother were running a drug house in San Francisco, both selling and providing users with a place to fix. But the older woman had AIDS and needed money for care. Dixon told Broussard to quit school and get a job. But he disappeared for days, eventually getting arrested as a juvenile in a city south of San Francisco. Dixon’s drug house was soon raided by police. Days later, on October 11, 2005, Broussard turned 18. His next interaction with the law would be as an adult.
He had no hope of making bail for the assault and robbery on the train. As the wheels of justice inched along, at least he had food and a roof over his head.
Eventually, his court-appointed lawyer began talks with the district attorney’s office about the inevitable plea deal. “This certainly wasn’t the kind of case that would have gotten the attention of the elected district attorney,” said Stanford University Law School Professor Robert Weisberg, a leading authority on criminal procedure. Weisberg said he didn’t like the phrase “run of the mill,” but said that’s what the case was.
Under California law, the Probation Department in a county where the crime in question occurred makes a sentencing recommendation to the judge. Such documents are considered confidential and sealed by the court, but in 2007, the Chauncey Bailey Project, a consortium of journalists, including me, who worked together to report on and investigate Bailey’s killing, won a motion to have Broussard’s report unsealed.
Broussard’s “participation in the present offense is deserving of a stiff consequence. The senseless act of violence is totally unacceptable and concerns the undersigned officer greatly,” Probation Officer Germaine McCoy wrote in the report.
McCoy added that a prison sentence was contemplated, but “due to the defendant’s young age, probation will be recommended in hopes that the defendant will use the opportunity to turn his life around.”
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charlene Mitchell, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, sentenced Broussard on February 24, 2006, after he pleaded guilty to assault, court records show.
Mitchell followed McCoy’s exact recommendations. She gave Broussard three years in state prison, but immediately suspended that sentence in favor of three years of supervised probation. She ordered Broussard to serve the first year of probation in county jail, giving him credit for 103 days he’d been locked up since his arrest. Assistant DA Gregory Mendez, didn’t object to the sentence, records show. Mendez, now in private practice, declined to discuss the case. There is no indication in court papers that Harris had any role in it. Court records do not indicate the victim gave a statement at sentencing or was present in court.
The case fell “within a fairly regular pattern by which cases get processed in the American judicial system, especially for a first-time offender,” Weisberg said. “These things are not the result of long, deliberated, adjudication because the system does not have the resources to allow for that.”
Later, when Broussard was charged with killing Bailey, the assault victim’s father, an attorney, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Blame Kamala Harris.” Broussard “should have gone to state prison,” he said. “My kid suffered blurred vision and a fractured nose.”
In her office’s only public statement on the case after Bailey’s death, Harris’ Chief Assistant DA Russ Giuntini said prosecutors agreed to Broussard’s plea because it was unclear which of the three assailants committed exactly what injuries to the victim.
The father’s claim Broussard should have been in prison and Trump’s echo of it now is “something which the system could never tolerate,” Weisberg said. It would be “long-term preventive detention based on imagining the most extremely severe, unlikely things that anybody could do if he’s not incarcerated for a long, long time,” he said.
The victim’s father did not respond to a request for an interview
A journalism advocacy group ripped the Trump ad. “Chauncey Bailey died for his journalism,” The Northern California Chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists (full disclosure, I am a member) said in a statement.“ His memory deserves better than to be twisted into self- serving political lies.”
When Broussard’s jail sentence ended, he hit the streets with something he had never before borne in his life—thousands of dollars of debt. He’d been ordered to reimburse the victim for his medical bills, plus an additional 10 percent in administrative costs. Then there were court fees and booking fees. He had to pay for the probation department’s report to the judge. He had to pay $50 monthly to the county probation department.
He had no high school diploma and no job skills. His stutter remained a drawback. Police soon saw him in areas of San Francisco known for street-level drug dealing. He told his probation officer he was living on the street.
A friend had made vague references to a bakery in Oakland known for hiring young Black men in circumstances like his. He gave Broussard Yusuf Bey IV’s phone number.
Your Black Muslim Bakery was a strange place. There were long sessions of military-like close-order drills. Lots of guns. Mandatory religious training where Bey would give sermons based on the original dogma of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam: Whites were devils, created 6,000 years ago by a scientist called “Big Headed Yakub” in “grafting” experiments that went awry. That god orbited the earth in a giant “mother plane” planning Armageddon, which would elevate Blacks to control of the world. (Bey was not officially affiliated with The Nation of Islam).
But Broussard had food to eat and a bed to sleep in. He left once, skeptical of Bey, but returned when he found nothing else. When he was later charged with Bailey’s murder, he was described as a handyman. But he told police he was “a soldier.” Last year, he told a state parole board that he went to the bakery with an understanding he would be “a hitter” and “a kind of enforcer,” according to hearing transcripts.
In earlier statements to authorities, he said the incentive was purely financial. Bey promised to school him in the ways of financial fraud using fake and stolen identifications and forged documents to get rich. Broussard could even get a house, Bey told him.
“I grew up with a lack of fear,” Broussard told the parole board. With it, came a willingness “to do whatever you need to do to get some money. If it is selling drugs, you sell drugs. If it is stealing, you steal.” Broussard, who is on a prisoner fire-fighting team in the high Sierra, was denied early release by the board largely because he had been recently been caught with a cell phone.
The day of his arrest, Broussard first admitted to killing Bailey after Bey promised to pay for a lawyer who would get him acquitted. But when no lawyer from the Beys materialized, he recanted.
He eventually flipped, telling a Grand Jury that Bey ordered the shooting to stop the story Bailey was working on about the bakery. “Mr. Broussard is coming clean. He’s been living in hell,” his lawyer said.
He also admitted to the killing of another man who was the uncle of a gunman who killed Bey’s brother Antar at a gas station. Prosecutors, under intense media pressure to get to the bottom of Bailey’s killing, gave Broussard a 25-year determinate sentence in exchange for his testimony. With good-behavior credits, he could be discharged next year.
Bey and Mackey were convicted at the end of a long trial in 2011 in which Broussard was the star witness, and each was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Bey was also convicted of ordering two other men killed, including the man Broussard shot with an assault rifle. Mackey was convicted of the other killing Bey ordered—a man they saw walking alone late at night. Broussard testified they bragged of killing the man because he was white.
Ironically, law-enforcement incompetence did contribute to Bailey’s death, but it wasn’t in San Francisco. It occurred in Oakland, didn’t involve Harris, and it seems extremely unlikely to ever become election fodder.
It turned out that police had been investigating the bakery for several months before Bailey’s death. They had accumulated evidence of multiple serious felonies and had planned to raid the building in the early morning hours of Aug. 1, 2007. It was a massive operation, involving more than 100 officers. Police trained for days. Snipers were to be deployed on neighboring rooftops. Ambulances were staged nearby in case of casualties. A judge signed search warrants. All the lights were green. Then they weren’t.
At the last minute, Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker learned that two SWAT commanders were on vacation. He wouldn’t go without them, ordering a 48-hour stand down. Cops balked, claiming the delay was unneeded. But Tucker, a former administrative officer at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office who street cops sometimes called “granny,” didn’t budge.
So, on August 2, 2007, Broussard and Mackey slipped away around 6:00 a.m. to hunt down their prey. The delay cost Bailey his life. When other journalists and I reported Tucker’s decision a year later, relying on whistleblowers and internal police documents, Tucker at first dug in, but resigned after City Council members scheduled a no-confidence vote on him.
Bailey’s sister, Lorelei Waqia was incredulous that the raid that would have saved her brother’s life was botched. Oakland “police just fumbled everything,” she said. “They caused the death, really. If they had moved on it, my brother would still be alive.” Now, she said, seeing the Trump ad was “devastating.” She lives in Georgia where it has appeared on TV. “[It] took the murder out of context by taking bits and pieces and forming a lie,” she added. “How dare they use my brother’s death to benefit them?”
Billionaire-troll Elon Musk is dumping untold millions of his $240 billion fortune into helping Donald Trump regain the White House. In the final sprint of the campaign, he’s doling out (perhaps illegally) $1 million checks to registered voters in swing states who have signed a petition sponsored by America PAC, which he created and funded with at least $75 million. It’s possible he’s contributed additional millions through untraceable donations to pro-Trump dark money groups (which he has done in the past). And there’s another way Musk is boosting Trump: He’s essentially providing him tens of millions of dollars’ worth of social media posts for free.
Every day, Musk, who tweets and retweets dozens of posts on X, the social media site he bought two years ago for $44 billion. (It’s now estimated to be worth $9.4 billion). In recent weeks, many of his X posts have been about the 2024 election and have avidly promoted pro-Trump messages. With Musk’s 202 million followers (more than twice the number of Trump’s followers on X) and with an algorithm Musk asked to be rigged to boost his own tweets, these posts have racked up a large number of impressions—the number of times a tweet is seen by a user on the platform. Each of his posts can draw tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions impressions. That’s a lot of reach.
I examined Musk’s timeline for several days this month (October 19, 21, and 22) and focused on tweets that explicitly advocated the election of Trump or that advanced pro-Trump themes—and that each drew at least 1 million impressions. These were posts that could have served as Trump campaign ads. This group totaled 54 tweets.
The posts in this subset covered various aspects of the election. Musk reposted a tweet that declared that if the Democrats win in 2024, there will be no “meaningful elections in the future” (17 million impressions). Another featured video of him saying the media was manipulating the government to help the Biden-Harris administration (23 million impressions). In one, Musk called for people to put up Trump yard signs and wear MAGA merchandise (38 million impressions). He retweeted former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard proclaiming a Kamala Harris victory will be “the end of democracy in the United States” (53 million impressions). One post exclaimed, “Kamala hates Christians” and amplified the baseless claim that she had disparaged rally attendees because these disrupters shouted “Jesus is Lord” (43 million impressions). Another featured video of Musk at one of his pro-Trump events in Pennsylvania (28 million impressions). A post spread the false assertion that Michigan had more registered voters than eligible voters (32 million impressions). In another, Musk shared a meme stating that the Republican platform included multiple issues—such as free enterprise, secure borders, honest elections, real journalism, and moral standards—and the Democratic platform had only one: “Hate Trump” (79 million impressions).
One popular Musk post featured an AI image of Donald Trump as a beefed-up Pittsburgh Steeler (83 million impressions). He retweeted a meme showing a Venn diagram for “[Jeffrey] Epstein’s Guest List” and “Diddy Guest List,” with the overlap labelled as “All the celebrities coming out to support Kamala Harris” (97 million impressions). He put up a photo of him, Trump, and a Tesla race car (75 million). He boosted a post with a chart predicting a Trump win (65 million impressions). In one post, Musk urged people to vote early (25 million impressions). He retweeted a post that assailed Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (18 million impressions) and one claiming the Democratic criticisms of Trump are “all basically lies” (24 million impressions).
During these days, Musk also posted regularly about about many contentious issues and subjects—government spending and regulation, abortion, woke-ism, censorship, the media, vaccine skepticism, and transgenderism—in a manner that would bolster the case for Trump. As Bloomberg reported recently, Musk is now X’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories” and “debunked theories of undocumented voters swaying the US election.”
What might be the financial value of all Musk’s tweeting for Trump?
Let’s start with the impressions Musk received for his posts. The 54 election-related tweets that each collected over a million impressions during these three days—and there were many other posts concerning the election that drew fewer impressions—totaled 1.273 billion impressions.
How much would it cost someone to obtain so many impressions? There are two ways for an X user to buy impressions. You can purchase ads or you can pay X to promote a post.
Ad rates may vary, depending on the customer and the nature and size of the advertising campaign. But there is a good point of comparison, and it involves Musk’s own PAC.
From early July through October 1, America PAC purchased 59 ads on X targeting swing states for more than $166,000, according to the social media platform’s political ad disclosure data. These ads yielded 32,058,424 impressions. Based on these figures, one can calculate that it costs about $5,000 to score a million impressions with a political ad. (Impressions will also be affected by how many users repost or engage with them.) This, of course, is a rough estimate. It’s possible that Musk’s super PAC got a family-and-friends discount or, on the other hand, that X charged it top dollar in order to transfer funds into the financially-challenged company.
There’s another way to calculate the cost of a million impressions. X offers users the opportunity to boost the reach of an individual post. You may have seen the “Promote” button that is attached to some tweets. When I recently clicked on it, I was informed that for $5,000 that particular post—which had political content—could be zapped to between 55,000 to 1.3 million people over the course of one day. That’s quite a spread, and the fine print read, “Estimated reach is approximate. Actual reach can’t be guaranteed.” But it seems that if I wanted to come close to placing my tweet in front of a million pairs of eyeballs, I’d have to part with $5,000. (Per the caveat, I might end up with far less.)
With these two calculations, it appears X views the monetary value of 1 million impressions as about five thousand smackers. X, which no longer responds to requests from journalists, did not reply to an email inquiring about this and Musk’s posts.
If that figure is approximately correct, the 1.2 billion impressions Musk’s posts gathered over those three days were worth about $6 million. Assuming these were normal days for Musk the tweeting-maniac, he’s putting up about $2 million worth of posts a day to help elect Trump. (That number would be much higher if you factored in the posts on the election that didn’t exceed a million impressions and the posts related to issues that are a boon for Trump.) Add this up over the entire election—Musk endorsed Trump in July—and the value of Musk’s pro-Trump tweets could top $100 million. It might even reach double that and approach a quarter of a billion dollars.
Media tycoons have always been able to assist their preferred candidates with endorsements and favorable coverage. (See Murdoch, Rupert.) What Musk is doing is of a different nature. He’s posting multiple endorsements a day and promoting disinformation that bolsters Trump on a site that claims to have no editorial or political position. While he once proclaimed Twitter should be politically neutral, his excessive, nonstop rah-rahing for Trump has tilted its playing field. Musk has also permitted prominent extremists, conspiracy theorists, and purveyors of disinformation once bounced from Twitter to return to the site, and this band of posters skews dramatically pro-Trump.
Musk’s posts are not technically ads or campaign donations. Nor are the millions of election-related posts tweeted by X’s users (myself included), which depending on their salience or creativity, might garner many impressions. And neither are the commentaries of cable news hosts or newspaper columnists who may favor or oppose a particular candidate. But Musk’s relentless posting for Trump—amplified by the algorithm of the platform he controls—functions as an ad campaign. In a way, he has turned X into his personal plaything, and he has been using it to influence the presidential race to benefit Trump, who has vowed to put Musk in charge of government cost-cutting and regulatory review if he wins the White House. This is oligarchy in action.
Musk is a fortunate fellow. He has the bucks that have allowed him to become one of the biggest donors of the 2024 campaign. The money he has poured into America PAC is financing what are supposed to be extensive get-out-the-vote operations for Trump in swing states. And there’s no telling whether Musk—a major government contractor who yearns for a federal government that will eviscerate regulations that affect his companies—is also slipping big amounts of dark money to other pro-Trump endeavors. Meanwhile, Musk is acting like Trump’s running-mate, leaping about at rallies and holding his own campaign events, as if he were on the ticket. He has broken new ground in American politics, for he has shown us what it might be like for a political candidate (or the backer of one) to control an entire social media platform. (Trump, with his flailing Truth Social site, doesn’t count.) In doing so, Musk has supplied Trump tens of millions of dollars—maybe much more—in free messaging. It might well be one of the biggest gifts in the history of US politics. Or is it more of a payment for future services?
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Space X and Tesla, and the world’s richest man, is convinced that immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States without legal authorization are destabilizing American democracy. It sounds like another conspiracy theory from a man who spouts a lot of them. But on Saturday, the Washington Post reported on one such figure, hiding in plain sight:
Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by the Washington Post.
As the Post story laid out, Musk was working for his first company, an online business and city directorycalled Zip2, while living in the United States, officially, as a student. But he never actually took classes at Stanford University—a precondition for staying in the US. A former board member, Derek Proudian, supplied the story’s money quote. The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.”
Musk has been cagey about his immigration status during his first years as an entrepreneur, but as the story makes clear, his brother, Kimbal, has often made light of it, describing himself and his very famous siblingin public forums as “illegal immigrants.”
It’s tempting to call this a big bunch of hypocrisy. Musk has, after all, spent more than $100 million to elect a candidate who promises the mass deportation of immigrants who have overstayed their visas. But I think thatoverlooks both what’s driving his demands for immigration restrictions and misreads his vision for the world. Musk does not really have a problem with South African computer programmers skirting the rules. He, like Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has a problem with the specific kinds of migrants coming from specific kinds of places. In a2023 response to an antisemiticX user who claimed that Western Jews deserved no sympathy because they invited “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Musk wrote, “You have said the absolute truth.”
What makes migrants undesirable, to the people demanding these crackdowns, is not their status but who they are and why they’re here. It’s why Vance can say that Haitians with legal status are “illegals” anyway. Asa proponent of scientific racism, Musk believes migrants from the Global South are being imported as part of a massive plot to reshape the country’s demography and elect Democrats forever. This is delusional in so many different ways—not the least of which is its ignorance of the long-term voting patterns of immigrant groups themselves—but it is not hypocritical any more than it is hypocritical to embrace restrictions on speech in support of Palestinians and Turkish dissidents but to reject restrictions on the speech of right-wing Brazilians. The animating principle is not supposed to be consistent and objective. His positionmerely reflects the animus and preference of a red-pilled bigot. What does the oligarch want? He wants what he wants.
With a little more than a week to go before Election Day, the presidential race is expected to come down to just seven states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. But the two biggest campaign events this weekend weren’t scheduled for any of them. On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris rallied with Willie Nelson and Beyonce in Houston, where early voting is already underway. And on Sunday, former president Donald Trump is set to appear at Madison Square Garden with his disbarred attorney and a long list of the weirdest people you know.
Trump is on a bit of a blue-state swing. He appeared at the Nassau Coliseum onLong Island in September promising to win New York. Earlier this month, he went to Coachella, in Southern California, where he introduced supporters to the vital concert-festival experience of “waiting for shuttle buses that never show up.” Last week he went to a barber shop in the Bronx.
None of these visits lack immediate value. Both New York and Texas have big races that matter a lot to the national parties—six races in New York could determine control of the House; Texas’ Senate race could determine control of the Senate, and the state is close enough on paper that it may well be a part of Democrats’ presidential strategy sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Trump’s visit to reliably blue California could affect the down-ballot races that could swing the House. Getting control of Congress is half the battle; the candidates for president want to actually be able to do things as president, after all.
And to both Trump and Harris, these dips into enemy territory serve their larger messages: Texas, on the one hand, and New York and California, on the other, represent the sort of outcomes they’re promising to steer the nation away from. The Houston event was organized around the theme of protecting reproductive rights, using as its backdrop a state that has—thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court justices—now criminalized abortion with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you want to see what Trump’s policies get you, just take a look at a state where, according to a study released in January, 26,000 women who have been impregnated by a rapist since the Dobbs decision have been left without access to care that was once their right. For his part, Trump uses his blue-state hosts to paint a picture of American Carnage 2.0—buildings taken over by Venezuelan gangs; rampant homelessness; crime crime crime.
But in doing so, Trump in particular has made clear something that should be obvious but which a lot of observers on both sides often don’t acknowledge:He has a ton of supporters in these places, albeit almost certainly not enough to win either state. Still, he received more votes in NYC alone than he did in 16 states in 2020—eight of which he won—and his popularity has, according to the polls, ticked upwards over the last few years. A New York Times poll this week showed a 14-point shift in the city since the last presidential election. He got more votes in the five boroughs than he did in the entireswing state of Nevada, while more California voters supported him than in any other state. One of the reasons the national popular vote appears to be so close this year is that Trump is more popular in the places that aren’t nominally competitive.
Of course, we don’t have a national popular vote, as much as Tim Walz might wish otherwise. But Trump’s tactic exposes the absurdity of the Electoral College, and it does so in so flagrant a manner that perhaps even the people who have benefited from that system might start to notice. It was one thing when candidates only focused on the key Electoral College states, where every vote counts. But he is spending the last days of the campaign, speaking to people whose votes mean very little to the Electoral College, in the hopes that it might redound to his benefit somewhere else. Once you accept that the people in these states matter—or at least some of the people in these states—and that you’re going to be campaigning there anyway, it’s harder to argue that their votes shouldn’t.
After Joe Biden’s debate debacle and Donald Trump’s near-assassination, the 2024 election looked like it could be a GOP blowout. Then Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris stepped up, the Democrats raised $1 billion-plus, the Republicans went full fascist … And here we are, a week before what feels like (another) Most Momentous Election of Our Lifetimes, and—if you believe the polls—no one has a clue who will win.
Much depends on the outcome of the vote in seven states—the same ones that mattered in 2016 and 2020. This week on Reveal, my Mother Jones colleagues turn their attention to two of the swingest states of this election cycle, while I dig through my reporting archives to unearth a never-before-broadcast interview from 2013 that provides an intriguing glimpse into what makes Harris tick.
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First, national correspondent Tim Murphy goes to Arizona, where flag-waving, gun-toting protesters swarmed outside the Maricopa County election center in 2020, insisting the election had been stolen from Trump. Since then, dozens of court cases across the US have found those claims to be a big fat lie. Yet threats and harassment against Arizona election workers continue to be so common, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, told Tim, that top election officials in the state “have been turning over at the rate of a lunch shift at Taco Bell.”
Richer, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2020, has spent much of the past four years trying to dispel the election lies Trump helped create. To see how it’s going, Murphy visits the recently fortified Maricopa County election center, where Richer’s staff are on a mission to demonstrate to voters that the election process is free and fair and deserving of their trust.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Trump and his minions have been indicted for their attempts to find enough votes (11,780, to be exact) to undo Biden’s victory in 2020, new MAGA-friendly members of the State Election Board have been trying to rewrite the rules to favor the former president this time around. Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman explains the fight to control election results in this crucial 2024 battleground and how it mirrors similar efforts in other swing states.
For the show’s final segment, I travel back almost 12 years, to when Harris was California’s attorney general—the first woman and first African American ever elected to that job—and I was an editor and reporter covering San Francisco. By then, Harris was a rising star in national Democratic politics, and editors at New York-based DuJour magazine wanted their readers to understand why. I jumped at the assignment.
I’d written about Harris a couple of times before; I’d even interviewed her mother. So when we reconnected in 2013, Harris was comfortable in my presence—far more so than with some of the journalists who’ve interviewed her in recent years. We spent about an hour together—an unimaginably generous amount of time in the current political climate—talking about many of the same substantive issues (the housing crisis, gun control, prosecuting sex crimes, and tech privacy and regulation) at the center of her campaign today. After my profile was published, I stored the audio on my laptop’s hard drive and forgot about it—until Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and reporters started complaining about how few interviews she was granting.
Listening back to our conversation, I’m struck by the similarities between Harris then and now—and not just when it comes to policy priorities. When she ran for AG in 2010, very few people—even in her own circle—thought she could win. Her Republican opponent Steve Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, was extremely popular with the tough-on-crime types who had long dominated California criminal justice circles, not to mention he was older and white. “A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen,” Harris told me then. “What motivated me was I really wanted the job. I felt that I could do it well.” She campaigned hard in communities that were not her obvious constituencies. “I never foreclosed any group or constituency as being off limits,” she explained. “Everything and everybody is on the table, and I’m not going to accept that that door is not open to me.” On Election Night, Cooley declared victory—and many Harris supporters assumed she would concede. But she didn’t.
Three weeks later, in one of the closest elections in California history, Cooley was the one to finally concede, and Harris became the new attorney general.
The big unknown, of course, is whether she can do it again—this time against a Republican opponent who refuses to believe that he will lose and a disinformation machine intent on making sure he doesn’t. Here’s what Harris told me then: “I’m an eternal optimist. I really am. I’m a realist and an optimist. I think that those two can coexist, and they do in me.”
Elon Musk, far and away the richest man on the planet, is pouring tens of millions of dollars into efforts to get Donald Trump elected. In addition to his massively valuable promotion of Trump’s messaging on X—an in-kind donation if ever there was one—he reportedly gave $50 million to a group linked to immigrant-hater Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s morally abominable family separation policy. And then there’s the legally problematic $100 payments and $1 million lottery-style giveaways he’s been offering registered swing-state voters who sign a petition stating the following:
The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.
Weird, right? But Musk’s return on investment could be huge if Trump prevails and gives him even more power over the very government at whose teat Musk’s companies were nurtured to profitability—and on which they continue to depend. Also, let’s remember, tens of millions for this dude is the equivalent of pocket change for the rest of us. Here’s how much of Musk’s net worth $50 million represents:
0.000183486238532
But what of his philanthropy, you ask? Didn’t Musk sign Bill Gates’ “Giving Pledge,” vowing to give at least half of his wealth to charity?
Yes, he signed up in 2012, for what it’s worth. But he’s running way behind on his giving. Consider that, in all of 2022, according to his foundation’s latest tax filing, he gave $160.5 million to charitable causes. Musk made more than that just yesterday—a great deal more.
That’s right, Musk’s net worth increased by $2.7 billion on Friday, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires, a database that serves as a reminder of just how far our supposedly egalitarian American experiment has devolved into plutocracy—or oligarchy, if you prefer—a situation that founder John Adams had hoped we would avoid (though he wasn’t terribly confident that we would).
Put another way, the amount Musk gave to charity in one year is this much of what he gained in a day:
0.05962962962963
Six percent!Musk, by the way, is now roughly 100 times as rich as he was when he signed the pledge—a scenario Andrew Carnegie would consider grotesque. He’d best start acting more like MacKenzie Scott. Because, as a trusted advisor to industrialist John D. Rockefeller once warned his boss:
You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you, and your children, and your children’s children!
Now, Musk did contribute almost $2.3 billion in Tesla stock to his foundation in 2022, earning a fat tax break and locking in a huge, tax-free capital gain at the expense of America’s taxpayers. But our rules governing philanthropy are so toothless that he need only disburse a small fraction of these “charitable” assets. His foundation’s nest egg—roughly $7.2 billion at the end of 2022—generated $309 million in investment income that year, and the value of its unsold assets gained at least $373 million. Yet the amount it gave to charity was about the same as the previous year.
Federal law requires private foundations to spend down 5 percent of their assets annually (which includesoverhead). Musk’s 2022 obligation was about $358 million—he didn’t give even half that. The government lets foundations average their disbursements over five years, but he’ll have to pick up his pace considerably.
Lest you were hoping the Musk Foundation’s tax documents would reveal sinister causes to which he may have donated, sorry to disappoint. His public giving is unobjectionable. What you have to watch out for, though, is the transfers to donor-advised funds. His foundation has, since 2018, moved more than $75 million over to a fund at Fidelity Charitable. For some unfathomable reason, the government lets such transfers count toward a foundation’s mandatory charitable payout.
Donor-advised funds are even more problematic than private foundations—although both cost taxpayers a fortune and are, as I explained in our must-read American Oligarchy issue, profoundly undemocratic. Not only are the creators not obligated to dole out a minimum of their assets each year, they are not obliged to reveal whom they are giving to. It’s dark money, in other words— convenient for anyone who wants to give secretly to odiousnonprofits, including groupswilling to subvert the democratic process if it will help put a certain candidate back in the White House.