Elon Musk’s Boldest Attempt Yet to Tilt the Election in Trump’s Favor

Not only is Elon Musk inviting Donald Trump to return to X (formerly known as Twitter) for an exclusive interview with him on Monday, he’s also now pushing Trump’s advertisements on the social media platform.

As advertisers continue to flee X, Musk is happy to elevate campaign ads from the @realDonaldTrump account. Musk is also promoting the hashtag “TrumpIsOnX” ahead of the interview Monday evening.

One of the promoted ads begins with a montage of the former president being pursued for his various crimes, from the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago to his felony charges for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. “The only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it,” his voiceover says.

“I will totally obliterate the deep state,” he declares as videos of him with military personnel flash on-screen. 

Other ads also include a Ronald Reagan deepfake and Andy Warhol–esque black and white film of Trump walking toward the camera complete with an action movie soundtrack. 

If Trump’s return to X after nearly a year wasn’t enough cause for concern, his strange conspiracy-laden videos should be. On Monday night, the Republican presidential nominee is set to speak with X owner Musk on the platform’s “Spaces.”

Last year, Musk tried to livestream on Twitter Spaces with former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, a disastrous event plagued with continuous technical glitches that still couldn’t distract from the Florida governor’s horrible vibes. At the time, Trump made fun of Musk and DeSantis for the failed event. It looks like Musk’s promise of campaign cash changed Trump’s mind.

Donald Trump is suing the Justice Department for alleged damages incurred from the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022.

Trump’s legal team said in a legal filing on Monday that there was “tortious conduct by the United States against President Trump” in the search, calling it “political persecution” and “unconstitutional.” He is asking the Justice Department for $100 million.

The court filing accuses Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed special prosecutor Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, and FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed, of engaging in “malicious prosecution” against him.

“Garland and Wray should have never approved a raid and subsequent indictment of President Trump because the well-established protocol with former U.S. presidents is to use non-enforcement means to obtain records of the United States,” Trump’s attorney Daniel Epstein wrote. The DOJ has six months to respond, and the case will move to federal court in the Southern District of Florida if it isn’t resolved in that time.

Two years ago, the FBI searched Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate as part of its investigation into the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. In June 2023, Trump was federally indicted on 37 criminal counts over his handling of the documents, but the case was dismissed last month by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who presides in the Southern District of Florida.

Trump’s lawsuit is rather brazen, and it’s only possible because Cannon, who seems heavily biased toward Trump, dismissed his classified documents case on the flimsy grounds of the special counsel’s appointment being unconstitutional. Smith has already appealed the dismissal of the classified documents case, so the former president and convicted felon isn’t even out of the woods yet.

Trump seems to be banking on winning in November, which raises the question of whether he’ll simply order the DOJ to pay up if he returns to the White House.

Representative James Comer has launched a probe into Vice President Kamala Harris’s involvement with work on the U.S. southern border, in a blatant attempt to help out Donald Trump.

Comer, the House Oversight Committee chair, requested that the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol turn over all correspondence with the vice president’s office, despite the fact that CBP has little to do with addressing the root causes of immigration and more to do with the day-to-day processing and vetting of migrants who arrive at the southern border.

In his letter, Comer admitted that “Vice President Harris focused on the purported ‘root causes of irregular migration’ from Central America,” rather than border security. But to Comer, that only seemed to add to Harris’s complicity in the “border crisis.”

“Central to Vice President Harris’s root causes initiative is an effort ‘to provide $4 billion to the region over four years.’ Vice President Harris has traveled to Central America—to Mexico and Guatemala in 2021 and to Honduras in 2022—more than she has traveled to our own southern border,” Comer wrote.

In his letter to CBP, Comer wrote that it was “unclear what actions, if any, Vice President Harris has taken to fix the border crisis,” according to The Hill.

Since the announcement of Harris’s candidacy, Donald Trump, along with other Republicans, have continued to falsely claim that Harris was the “border czar” who failed to stop an influx in illegal immigration. Comer’s newest probe takes these claims and attempts to drag them into Congress, where they can be debated in front of everyone, including voters. Only this approach hasn’t worked out so well for Comer in the past.

He previously attempted a similar gambit by spearheading an investigation into the Biden family—which crumbled, having not produced any evidence of the president, or his family’s, supposed wrongdoings.

In an interview with Fox News’s Trey Gowdy Sunday night, Comer said that Harris had “failed miserably at the border,” claiming that she had essentially invited people to illegally enter the United States.

“And one thing that we’re trying to find out on the Oversight Committee is the cost of this,” Comer said.

Comer claimed that an influx in immigration had a “huge impact” on Medicaid. In general, undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive Medicaid benefits, although in some states, such as New York, benefits are available to citizens over 65 years of age, regardless of immigration status.

Comer also implied that it cost the government a significant amount of money to transport immigrants across the country. Republicans have previously criticized the Biden administration for flying immigrants away from the border after they’ve been let into the country, a criticism that often overlooks the fact that many of these immigrants are children who cannot be legally kept in border detention facilities for more than 72 hours—a law that was also in place during the Trump administration, according to The Washington Post.

Comer complained that these planes sometimes arrived in the middle of the night. Officials have previously stated that the late-night flights were often done to avoid exposing the identities of the children.

Comer also asserted that immigration placed an immense financial burden on public school systems, a claim stoked by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate group, as well as the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025.

While Republicans have attempted to push the narrative that public schools have become overrun with foreign-born children, undocumented children make up a small percentage of the roughly 50 million students who attend K-12 public schools.

Still, Comer insisted he wanted to run the numbers. “So we want to know the cost, and we want to know exactly what Kamala Harris did other than basically send an open invitation to the world to illegally cross our border,” he said.

But for someone who cares so much about border security, Comer was suspiciously quiet in May when Senate Republicans killed a bipartisan border security bill—at Trump’s behest.

Vice presidential picks don’t normally take center stage during an election year. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, that’s not the case with J.D. Vance.

Democratic attacks on Vance are actually sticking, making the Ohio senator an increasingly unpopular candidate. A pair of polls conducted weeks apart by centrist Democratic pollster Blueprint indicate that Vance’s favorability has fallen from -7 to -11, Semafor reported Monday, with a significant number of voters viewing the vice presidential pick exactly as Democrats describe him: “conservative,” “anti-woman,” and “weird.”

“It’s not just the favorables; it’s what people think of it. It’s how he’s been introduced to the country,” Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for Blueprint, told Semafor. “Everything has gone exactly as bad as Democrats had hoped and Republicans have feared and everyone suspects.”

Vance, who famously authored the New York Times–bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has seen a significant decrease of positive labels by voters since he was announced to the Republican ticket. Descriptive options such as “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” have all gone down among survey participants, according to Semafor.

Most participants were aware of Vance’s strange and off-putting remarks, including an instance in which Vance claimed that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, deriding Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.” Approximately 50 percent of respondents said they were aware of Vance’s comments, while 55 percent said they were bothered by it.

Potential voters were also disturbed by a 2021 interview in which Vance defended a Texas abortion law’s lack of exceptions for instances of rape and incest by claiming that the resulting pregnancies were simply “inconvenient.” Roughly 62 percent of survey participants said they were “bothered” by that description, while 50 percent noted that it “bothers me a lot.”

Trump has attempted to brush off the issue by arguing that, historically, a presidential nominee’s pick for number two has “virtually no impact” on the outcome of the race. But Vance may prove to be the exception, argues The New Republic’s Alex Shephard:

As the race tightens—and Harris is leading in several polls—it’s becoming clear that Donald Trump has slowed down considerably over the last four years. He is very old. He struggles to hold his thoughts together, even by his own standards. And he has considerably less energy than he did even a few years ago. He can’t campaign vigorously. Which means he will have to rely on his running mate—whom everyone seems to hate.

J.D. Vance evidently did some cross-dressing back in law school.

On Sunday, a photo of the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee allegedly wearing a blonde wig and dressed as a woman was posted on X.

It didn’t take long before the picture was trending with the hashtag #SofaLoren, a play on words referring to the false rumor that Vance performed a sexual act with a couch. When The Daily Beast reached out to Vance to see if the photo was real, the campaign did not deny its authenticity and also refused to comment further.

The source of the photo is from one of Vance’s classmates at Yale Law School, Travis Whitfield, who said the picture was taken by a different classmate in 2012, when they were all students. Whitfield sent the photo to podcast host Matt Bernstein, who then uploaded it to X.

“It’s from a group chat of Vance’s fellow classmates and is from a friend of a friend,” Whitfield said to The Daily Beast. “I believe it was grabbed from Facebook and was taken at a Halloween party.”

Whitfield posted on X about where the photo came from, offering proof in the form of the photo’s presence on his phone. Whitfield doesn’t appear to be a Vance supporter, saying in a different post that “from all the sources I’ve heard, JD was actually a good guy in law school. Not sure what happened after though…”

While a funny photo of a politician in a Halloween costume from college normally wouldn’t be a big deal, Vance has a history of attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, using the “groomer” slur against critics of “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. He introduced the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act” in the Senate, which promotes misinformation about transgender health care. Vance also stated that he would vote against codifying same-sex marriage and has promoted so-called “parents’ rights” talking points.

Just on Sunday, he falsely claimed that his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, promotes taking children away from parents who don’t consent to gender-affirming care. The fact that neither he nor the campaign has denied the truth of this photo is telling. In any case, expect this photo to make the late-night TV circuit, or at least persist on social media along with his fictional couch tryst.

Donald Trump just lost the ability to use yet another song from a musician who wants nothing to do with his divisive, hateful rallies.

The family of Isaac Hayes announced a sprawling lawsuit on Sunday, slamming the Republican presidential nominee for 134 counts of copyright infringement related to repeatedly using Hayes’s song “Hold On I’m Coming” at numerous campaign rallies between 2022 and 2024.

“We demand the cessation of use, removal of all related videos, a public disclaimer, and payment of $3 million in licensing fees by August 16, 2024,” announced Hayes’s son, Isaac Hayes III, on social media. “Failure to comply will result in further legal action.”

Isaac Hayes III explained Saturday on social media that his family had repeatedly asked Trump, his team, and the RNC not to use the song, but their requests went unheeded.

“Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric,” Hayes wrote on X.

The family has issued a cease and desist against further use of the song and has demanded that Trump, his campaign, and the RNC “remove all videos featuring the song and” issue a statement affirming that they never received authorization to play the song. The suit also demands that Trump issue a check for $3 million in licensing fees, according to legal documents shared by the estate.

“The normal fee for these infringements will be 10 times as much if we litigate, starting at $150,000 per use,” the documents read, describing the $3 million price tag as “very discounted.”

Trump has until Friday to respond to the notice before the family says it will “proceed with litigation.”

But that wasn’t the only musical loss for the Trump campaign over the weekend. On Sunday, Celine Dion’s team clarified on Instagram that it did not approve of or endorse Trump’s use of Dion’s song “My Heart Will Go On” at a rally in Montana.

“… And really, THAT song?” they added.

Hayes and Dion join a long list of artists who have yanked their rights away from Trump, including Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, the Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, the Village People, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Donald Trump has taken his size insecurity to the next level, falsely accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to make a crowd appear bigger in photos and videos.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Michigan on Wednesday, where they were reportedly greeted by a crowd of 15,000 people. Only, Trump and his cronies are pushing the conspiracy theory that it never even happened.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday night.

Trump wrote his thoughts above a screenshotted post from conservative commentator Chuck Callesto, a font of misinformation whose faux–breaking news posts are regularly seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

Trump claimed that Harris had been outed by an airport maintenance worker and that the rumor had been “confirmed by the reflection” in the finish of the plane, which did not appear to show the crowd.

“She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING—And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box,” Trump wrote.

Trump argued that Harris should be “disqualified” for election interference, over the use of the image. “Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING,” Trump wrote.

Like many of Trump’s accusations, this conspiracy theory is actually an admission.

Ever since he lied about the crowd size at his inauguration, Trump has continued to establish himself as an unreliable source for numbers of any kind. In May, his campaign pushed the false claim that his rally in the Bronx had attracted a crowd of 25,000 people, while in reality it was more like 1,000.

One thing is for certain: Trump cares a lot about appearances. Apparently, he even has a weird habit of waving at no one as he boards his plane.

The Republican presidential nominee’s sensitivity to Harris’s groundswell of popularity comes just as his running mate, J.D. Vance, trailed Harris and Walz across the country, attracting meager crowds just miles away from Harris’s massive gatherings.

Trump’s ravings were easily answered by actual journalists and photographers who had covered the event, whose reporting revealed a sizable crowd inside a packed airplane hangar, with many rallygoers spilling out onto the tarmac.

Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley specializing in digital forensics, said he analyzed the image for evidence of A.I. generation. “While the lack of evidence of manipulation is not evidence the image is real. We find no evidence that this image is AI-generated or digitally altered,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Harris’s campaign hit back at Trump on Sunday night, claiming that the image was genuine. “1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” the Harris campaign wrote in a post on X. “2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week.… Low energy?”

Renowned white supremacist and Charlottesville protester Nick Fuentes personally attacked J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha, last month for her Indian heritage, claiming that the Republican vice presidential pick “clearly doesn’t value his racial identity” and is unlikely to be a “defender of white identity” due to his wife’s ethnicity.

But even that isn’t enough for Vance to take a stand against the racist rhetoric.

In a sitdown interview with ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, Vance continued to defend a dinner between Donald Trump, Fuentes, and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, falsely insisting that Trump had “issued plenty of condemnations” on Fuentes while agreeing that the Hitler-loving livestreamer’s comments about his wife amounted to “racist garbage.”

After ABC’s Jonathan Karl pushed back, Vance claimed that Trump “doesn’t know anything about” Fuentes and “frankly, doesn’t care.” (Trump had shared clips from Fuentes’s internet show before the dinner took place.)

Instead, what matters to Vance is how Trump personally treats his wife—not the fact that the Republican presidential nominee entertains political rhetoric that makes the country significantly less safe for people of color.

“The one thing I like about Donald Trump is he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views,” Vance said. “Donald Trump has spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful, and jokes around with her a little bit.

“I’m not at all worried about Donald Trump,” Vance continued. “I’m worried sometimes about these ridiculous attacks. This is what you sign up for when you come into politics. I wish people would keep it focused on me. They’re gonna say what they’re gonna say. My wife’s tough enough to handle it, and that’s a good thing.”

The interview came just two days after Fuentes shockingly revoked his support for Trump, announcing on social media that he and his allies were declaring a “groyper war” against the Trump campaign over the belief that the candidate was headed toward a “catastrophic loss.”

Fuentes’s renunciation hits the Trump campaign at the same time as a slip in support from white men, according to recent polls, despite Trump’s attempts to pander to them this election cycle.

After being absent for nearly a year, Donald Trump returned to X (formerly Twitter) early Monday morning, posting a new campaign ad shortly before 3 a.m. E.T.

The post and campaign ad used a question taken from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign for president, when he asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Trump’s post makes this point by also claiming, “Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We’re a nation in decline.”

Trump was banned from Twitter more than three years ago following the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Shortly after acquiring the microblogging service, Elon Musk reinstated Trump to the platform in November 2022. But Trump refrained from posting to the platform, except for posting his Georgia mug shot in 2023 after being indicted on election interference charges. Commentators have speculated that he was either deliberately focusing on his own social network, Truth Social, or he has some legal requirement to post on his own social network.

So why has he posted on X after so long? Perhaps he’s desperate after plummeting in the polls thanks to the surging Kamala Harris campaign. He’s lost a lot of ground in the last month after President Biden withdrew from the race and after Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate has done him few, if any, favors, inviting attacks from Democrats calling Republicans weird.

Trump’s time on Twitter, from the start of his 2016 presidential campaign through his four years as president, was marked by belligerence, schoolyard insults against his opponents, and incitement of violence. From Trump’s standpoint, his four years as president were probably the peak of his political career, so maybe he’s desperately trying to bring the old magic to revive his flagging fortunes and make himself feel better. Maybe Musk asked him to post again in advance of his interview with the egotistical tech mogul Monday night. Or maybe he’s returning to X because his own social network is losing a lot of money.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is trying to draw the support of Arab and Muslim American voters with a Palestinian American running mate.

NBC News reports that Stein has been looking for a vice presidential candidate to take advantage of the frustrations from Muslim and Arab Americans over Democratic Party support for Israel in its brutal war on Gaza. 

Since the start of the war in October, President Biden has given unequivocal support to Israel, costing the Democratic Party support from Muslim and Arab Americans, who not only are a key part of its base but also make up a large number of voters in Michigan, a battleground state. Calls for a cease-fire have not brought one about, and the war has stretched for 10 months and caused a massive humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Stein has spoken with three prominent Arab Americans as potential candidates: Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American comedian and activist; and Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, who, at age 34, is constitutionally ineligible to be vice president. 

Zahr, who lives in Dearborn, said that he was initially open to voting for Vice President Kamala Harris but lost enthusiasm after she “disrespectfully” shut down protesters who interrupted her at a Detroit campaign rally, and after an aide said that she would not support an arms embargo against Israel.

“She could have said, ‘I hear you, we’re going to address this, and if you want it to get better, elect me instead of Donald Trump,’” Zahr told NBC. “But instead she suggested we want to help get Trump elected … as if we owe her something and she doesn’t owe us.”

Zahr is one individual, but there are likely many other Muslim and Arab Americans who were dismayed by Harris’s response to the protesters and who would like to see a change in U.S. policy toward Israel, including an end to weapons shipments. If Stein makes a big overture by putting an Arab or Palestinian American on her ticket, it could draw away enough voters to tip the balance in Michigan.

Plus, it’s not just Muslims and Arab Americans who care about Palestine: Young Americans of all backgrounds have seen the destruction and violence and want things to change. Can Harris convince them that she will end the war and change policy, or will a third-party candidate like Stein get their votes?