MAGA Republicans’ Latest Culture War Could Backfire on Trump

A far-flung political gamble by the House Freedom Caucus could end up compromising the election for Donald Trump.

With Congress still in recess, the hard-right minority faction has already come out in support of a continuing resolution to extend government funding past the September 30 shutdown date with the hopes of thwarting a postelection omnibus that could benefit Democrats. But the proposition comes with a catch: passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, which would expand proof-of-citizenship voting requirements for federal elections. SAVE, which passed the Republican-controlled House in June, would also force voter-roll purge requirements on states.

“The House Freedom Caucus believes that House Republicans should return to Washington to continue the work of passing all 12 appropriations bills to cut spending and advance our policy priorities,” the caucus said in a statement.

“Furthermore, the Continuing Resolution should include the SAVE Act—as called for by President Trump—to prevent non-citizens from voting to preserve free and fair elections in light of the millions of illegal aliens imported by the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years,” they added.

Noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is, of course, already illegal. Critics warn that the SAVE Act could be used to disenfranchise American citizens, as Republicans rally to preemptively frame the 2024 election as compromised.

“The SAVE Act is nothing more than a partisan scare tactic meant to erode confidence in our elections,” Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray told NBC News. “It is already illegal for noncitizens to register and vote in federal elections—our elections are free and fair, despite the dangerous, often incoherent, ramblings of Donald Trump.”

Holding the government hostage in order to pass a redundant and dangerous new set of voter requirements could look very bad for Republicans in an already tenuous election cycle—especially if the gamble fails and sends the government headlong into a shutdown as a result.

Congress is in recess until September 9 and will have just 13 voting days before the end of the fiscal year. The Freedom Caucus’s demand could put House Speaker Mike Johnson in a tight spot: He has repeatedly worked to prevent a government shutdown, but he first unveiled the SAVE Act alongside Trump.

Johnson has not yet made a decision on any details for a continuing resolution, including its potential expiration date.

“We’re having some very thoughtful discussion about the pros and cons of the various strategies on it, and that decision is not yet determined, but it will be very soon,” he told The Hill last week in reference to a potential stopgap spending bill, though he noted that it was not “obvious” that one would be necessary.

A pro-Donald Trump super PAC is preparing a $100 million dollar ad campaign hoping to smear Vice President Kamala Harris as a left-wing “lunatic” to voters in swing states.

MAGA Inc., a super PAC that has previously been used to financially buoy the Trump campaign as its candidate hemorrhaged funds across his legal battles, will launch a series of ads targeting Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Monday.

The ads will paint Harris as a “soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House,” according to David Lee and Chris Grant, MAGA Inc.’s top political strategists. Specifically, they will focus on Harris’s immigration policies and her prosecutorial record, one person familiar with the plan told Politico.

“Americans might vote for a liberal, but they won’t vote for a lunatic,” the memo said.

One of Trump’s senior advisers previously said that Trump’s campaign planned to dig up “several Willie Hortons” from Harris’s prosecutorial record, a reference to a series of racist ads from the 1980s, with which to attack the vice president.

The new ad blitz is timed to coincide with the Democratic National Convention, which will take place next week in Chicago. The ads will target voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, all crucial battleground states.

Last week, Trump claimed that while he was lying low at Mar-a-Lago, as his running mate J.D. Vance trailed Harris across the country, he’d kept busy working on “commercials that are at a level that anybody’s ever done before.”

Trump’s forays into political ads on Monday are already proving unfocused at best, detrimental at worst. When Trump posted a new advertisement on X Monday, the move sent shares in Truth Social tumbling to their lowest level in months. Another Trump ad released Monday levied its attacks against President Joe Biden, not his actual opponent, Harris. Another ad inexplicably implied he would have been endorsed by former President Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump’s social media network is losing money just as the former president and convicted felon has resumed posting on X (formerly Twitter).

Trump Media & Technology shares dropped to $24.60, their lowest price level in months, after Trump posted on X early Monday for the first time in more than a year. Shares may drop even further as Trump is supposed to sit down for an interview with X CEO Elon Musk Monday night.

The plummeting stock comes after many investors bought shares in the media company hoping for a boost during the 2024 election, with a possible Trump victory netting an even higher increase. Trump Media reported a loss of $16 million in its first full quarter as a publicly traded company Friday, earning just $836,900 for the period ending June 30.

It’s the latest run of bad news for Truth Social, which is rapidly losing users. It was expected to be an easy money grab for Trump, who owns 60 percent of the company. But even the company’s net loss of $58.2 million in 2023 had to be reaudited after its accounting firm was charged with “massive fraud.” At the very least, Trump Media’s meager numbers last quarter were a huge improvement from the previous one, when it lost an astonishing $327.6 million and only brought in $770,500 in revenue.

Trump is stuck with his company’s stock for just one more month, when he is legally allowed to sell his shares without board approval. He can’t try to increase the share price by bragging, as he did with his real estate properties, because that would be illegal.  Even though the Supreme Court gave him a break with its immunity ruling, he still needs cash to pay his mounting legal bills. It’s only a matter of time before September arrives and Trump dumps his stock. The question is, how low will the share price be?

Donald Trump returned to X (formerly Twitter) ahead of a one-on-one interview with Elon Musk Monday. But rather than elevate that, or attack his current opponent’s policies, one of Trump’s first ads directed at his 88.1 million followers on the platform appeared to narrowly focus on President Joe Biden.

The roughly two-minute video—captioned “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”—attempted to frame Trump as a candidate primed for election since 1987, when he was still a major New York City developer.

“In the ads, he says there’s nothing wrong with American foreign policy that a little backbone won’t cure,” a dated broadcaster can be heard saying at the ad’s opening.

As the music escalates, Trump can be heard claiming that he and his followers will “determine the course of America, and the world, for many, many years to come.” The convicted fraudster—who also announced his intention to sue the Justice Department to the tune of $100 million for the FBI raid on his Florida estate—argues in the video that he’s the antidote for corruption at the highest levels of government.

But by the end of the ad, it’s clear that Trump has not yet found a proper angle of attack against his new Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Instead, the ad directly calls out Biden, reiterating outdated polls that found Trump to be leading the former nominee.

Unfortunately for him, that’s no longer the current state of the race. Since Harris and Tim Walz joined the opposite ticket, Trump has seen a dramatic slip in support, including from white men—the bulk of his base—despite his attempts to pander to them this election cycle.

Trump has also upset white supremacists, with one popular pro-Hitler livestreamer publicly revoking his support for Trump on Friday, 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.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s number two pick—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—has also proven remarkably unpopular with voters, with 62 percent of surveyed voters noting they were “bothered” by Vance’s abortion stance and his description of rape and incest-caused pregnancies as “inconvenient.”

Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Peter Navarro has doubled down on his pleas to the former president, begging him to stop making superficial attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Navarro, who previously served a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena in the January 6 investigation, spoke about Trump’s bad strategy Monday while guest hosting the War Room podcast, which is normally captained by Steve Bannon. But Bannon is currently serving his own four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena in the January 6 investigation.

“The Trump rally 1.0 has always been a fast-moving feast,” Navarro explained, a generous characterization of Trump’s falsehood-filled, meandering public speaking gigs.

“Trump doesn’t need feast now, he needs votes, and the current rally formula is simply not sufficiently focused on the very stark policy differences—policy differences—between him and Kamala Harris that will swing voters in key battleground states,” Navarro said. “Instead, when Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises, particularly among women. It’s just a fact of life, right now.”

Amid Harris’s increase in the polls, and apparently groundswell of support, Trump has appeared to lean into making personal attacks against the vice president. He’s tried out several lame nicknames, accused her of deciding to become Black, and falsely claimed that her campaign used A.I. to create the appearance of a massive crowd.

Navarro’s message for Trump to get serious about opposing Harris was echoed in statements from former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who appeared on Fox News Monday.

“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to what did she do as attorney general on crime. Question what did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as the czar. Question that they brought inflation [down], and she was the tie-breaking vote when it came to inflation, when it came to IRS agents.”

McCarthy called Harris the “perfect person to run against.”

“You thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper? She has the biggest flip-flop, with the most extreme positions, and you’ve got a short time to do it. So, don’t sit back, get out there, and start making the case, and use her own words to do it,” McCarthy said.

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.