Trump’s New Campaign Hire Is a Clear Sign of Panic

Donald Trump’s campaign has hired Taylor Budowich, a former Trump aide who has been running the super PAC MAGA Inc.

Budowich was a spokesperson for the Trump 2020 campaign, and has found himself embroiled in Trump’s classified documents case and implicated by Congress’s January 6 investigation.

In June of last year, he testified before a federal grand jury in Trump’s classified documents case. “America has become a sick and broken nation—a decline led by Joe Biden and power hungry Democrats,” he said at the time, per CBS. “I will not be intimidated by this weaponization of government. For me, the need to unite our nation and make America great again has never been more clear than it is today.”

Budowich was subpoenaed in 2021 by the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6, which claimed it had reason to believe he had directed roughly $200,000 from undisclosed sources to fund an ad campaign encouraging people to attend the rally that would transform into the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.

When JPMorganChase Bank complied with Congress’s request, turning over Budowich’s financial records, he filed a complaint and restraining order against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House Select Committee and its members, and his bank. His complaint was dismissed by a district court judge, and when he filed to appeal that decision, the case was dismissed again by an appeals court in March 2023—three months after the January 6 committee shuttered its 18-month investigation.

MAGA Inc. is a pro-Trump super PAC that plans to launch a series of ads in swing states that paint Vice President Kamala Harris as a “lunatic,” according to a memo from the group. MAGA Inc. has previously been used to financially buoy the former president’s campaign as Trump hemorrhaged funds across his legal battles, reportedly sending more than $50 million to Save America, Trump’s leadership PAC, in just the first quarter of 2024.

Budowich’s rehiring is the latest in a series of plays by the Trump campaign that signal panic in the former president’s team, which has spent the last month scrambling to mount a solid opposition to Vice President Kamala Harris’s new campaign.

One after another, each of the Trump team’s attempts to regain its footing has proved more disastrous than the last, from Trump’s appearance at the NABJ conference, which devolved into racist accusations; to his rally in Atlanta, where he criticized a Republican governor who’d said he’d vote for him; to his slate of shockingly unfocused political ads and his trainwreck conversation with Elon Musk Monday.

Donald Trump is already receiving pushback after threatening striking workers in his trainwreck interview with Elon Musk on Monday night.

“I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk. “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”

In response, the United Auto Workers on Tuesday morning filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk, calling the two “disgraced billionaires.”

The UAW accused the men of “illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers who stand up for themselves by engaging in protected concerted activity, such as strikes.”

“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW President Shawn Fain.

Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike. Threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

It’s unclear which incident Trump was referring to when he praised Musk for threatening organizing workers on Monday. At Tesla, the billionaire Musk has been accused of violating labor law by tweeting that employees would lose stock options if they unionized. A National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Tesla violated labor laws when it prevented Florida employees from discussing pay and working conditions. In California, Tesla violated labor laws by failing to provide meal and rest breaks and skirting overtime pay. Tesla has also faced multiple lawsuits brought forward by Black workers alleging a culture of racism on the shop floor.

In 2023, the NLRB charged Musk with violating federal labor law after he fired SpaceX workers for circulating a letter describing Musk as “a distraction and embarrassment.” At Twitter, Musk fired workers en masse after his takeover in 2022, including unionized janitors who walked off the job for “pay, benefits, and job protections.”

“Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected,” said Fain. “Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”

Meanwhile, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz will speak to AFSCME union members in Los Angeles in his first solo campaign stop on Tuesday.

Roger Stone’s email account was broken into by suspected hackers to try to gain access to the accounts of senior Trump campaign officials.

Microsoft reported Friday that a “former senior adviser” of a presidential campaign had been successfully spear-phished. The next day, the Trump campaign announced that it had fallen victim to a hack in June. The campaign did not initially alert the FBI because the team distrusts the agency, people close to the campaign said.

Multiple sources confirmed to CNN Tuesday that the adviser who’d been hacked was none other than Stone, a longtime GOP operative and self-proclaimed “agent provocateur.”

A group of hackers were able to break into Stone’s email account in June, with the hopes of accessing his vast network, and using phishing emails as a means of entry into the Trump campaign’s inner workings—and it seems they were successful.

The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Politico have all reported receiving stolen files from the Trump campaign, but as of yet have not reported on the contents of their bounty.

“Mr. Stone was contacted about this matter by Microsoft and the FBI and continues to cooperate with both,” said Grant Smith, Stone’s lawyer, per CNN. “Mr. Stone will have no further comment at this time.”

In a brief statement, Stone told the Post that he’d been informed by authorities that “a couple” of his personal email accounts had been accessed by the hackers. “I really don’t know more about it. And I’m cooperating. It’s all very strange.”

Donald Trump, for his part, has blamed the hack on Iran, citing Microsoft’s report as its evidence. Microsoft declined to comment to NBC, citing its policy of not sharing client details without permission.

While Iran has denied allegations that it was connected to the incident, the techniques associated with the hack are consistent with those used by Iranian hackers, according to CNN.

Ultimately, it seems like Stone should’ve known better, given his prior brush with massive, campaign-damaging email hacks.

It has been theorized that Stone allegedly knew about the 2016 hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, before they were ever published by WikiLeaks, thanks to his “backchannel communications” with Julian Assange.

This story has been updated.

The day after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s choice for vice president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd of lawmakers in Louisville, Kentucky, that a Harris administration would spell certain doom for the Republican Party.

“Let’s assume our worst nightmare—the Democrats went to the White House, the House, the Senate,” McConnell said during his keynote speech at the National Conference of State Legislators Legislative Summit last week, according to Spectrum News. “The first thing they’ll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster. Second, you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity.”

Puerto Rico will vote on a nonbinding ballot measure in November to determine the territory’s future political status, with voters being given three options, all of which would change its official status: statehood, independence, or independence with free association. It will be the seventh time that the island’s 3.2 million people vote to define their political relationship with the United States. Harris has not yet taken an official stance on the vote.

McConnell insisted that next on the historically moderate Democrat’s agenda would be to place as many liberal justices on the Supreme Court as possible, noting that doing so would be “unconstitutional”—while apparently ignoring the fact that that’s exactly what Donald Trump did to achieve SCOTUS’s current conservative supermajority.

“If they get those two new states and pack the Supreme Court, they’ll get what they want,” McConnell said.

Ultimately, McConnell believes that the Harris-Walz ticket “represents the far left of the Democratic Party.

“And by the way, that’s most Democrats today,” he added.

Following the address, Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers broke down the Republican perspective on why Harris turned to Walz as her right hand.

“They’re trying to appeal to a rural voter that they have not appealed to in years,” Stivers said, reported Spectrum. “Now, whether they can or they can’t, that becomes a good question, and I think that will be based on the policies that they put forward. And hopefully, that’s what we get into.”

Donald Trump told Elon Musk during their livestreamed conversation on X Monday night that if the election goes poorly, “we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela because it will be a far safer place to meet than our country.”

Trump made the statement after mentioning that “crime rates all over the world are going way down,” an odd statement to make before bringing up Venezuela, where postelection protests have left 23 dead and more than 2,000 people arrested, according to the United Nations.

It seems that Trump is claiming that crime rates would be so high if he isn’t elected president that authoritarian Venezuela would seem safer by comparison. As president, Trump did not have positive ties with the country or its leader, Nicolás Maduro, casting doubt that Trump is actually serious about planning to flee to Venezuela. Either the convicted felon and former president perhaps was being facetious, or it’s another sign of his cognitive decline.

Unlike North Korea, where Trump and its leader Kim Jong Un infamously exchanged gushing letters, Trump and Venezuela were on bad terms from the start of his presidency. He refused to rule out a military intervention to confront Maduro in 2017, and two years later, Trump recognized Juan Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the interim president of Venezuela, causing Maduro to cut ties with the United States.

Musk doesn’t have any favorable ties with Venezuela either, with Maduro banning X last week and accusing Musk of promoting hatred in the country after its recent election. Musk, in turn, accused the self-proclaimed socialist of “major election fraud.”

In short, Trump probably isn’t going to flee to Venezuela if he loses in November, especially since he’s now a convicted felon and barred from leaving the country at least until he’s sentenced for his hush-money crimes. Venezuela probably wouldn’t take him unless there was some kind of revolution or coup in the country. But stranger things have happened, especially since Musk has remarked in the past that “we will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” regarding a 2020 coup d’état in nearby Bolivia. But surely Trump isn’t dumb enough to bank on something like that, right?

Donald Trump compared a photo-illustration of Vice President Kamala Harris to his wife, Melania, Monday night, seeming to call his opponent a “beautiful woman.”

During Trump’s two-hour, trainwreck conversation with Elon Musk, which took place on the technocrat’s glitchy X Spaces, the former president made several strange comments—but by far the weirdest was the creepy compliment he gave his opponent.

“She’s terrible, but she’s getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her on Time magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. I—it was a drawing,” Trump said. He was referring to Neil Jamieson’s photo-illustration of Harris, which accompanied the magazine’s latest cover story.

From there, his strange flattery only got weirder.

“Actually, she looked like our great first lady, Melania,” Trump said.

“She looked, she didn’t look, she didn’t look like Camilla [sic], that’s right. But of course, she’s a beautiful woman so, we’ll leave it at that,” Trump continued, mispronouncing Harris’s name into an entirely different name. Throughout the interview Trump struggled with a soft lisp, which his team inexplicably denied in the most hostile way possible.

While it’s unclear whether he is calling Harris or his wife “beautiful” at the end, this comment, in addition to his past comments about women’s appearances, makes clear his gross obsession with women’s looks.

Last week, Donald Trump launched a strange attack on Vice President Kamala Harris through an even weirder lie: that he had survived a helicopter crash in 2018 with Harris’s old beau, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who Trump claimed was no longer a “fan of hers” by that point.

Moments after the presser ended, the truth came to light: Trump had fabricated the entire story, with Brown denying having ever ridden in a helicopter with Trump. The copter’s actual passengers at the time—former California Governor Jerry Brown and current California Governor Gavin Newsom (both of whom are white)—called the whole thing “complete B.S.”

But Trump did survive a near-death helicopter experience sometime in 1990 alongside another Black California politician: the former California state senator from Los Angeles Nate Holden.

“If he were confused, which I’m not sure he was, then he could be giving misleading information intentionally,” Holden told CNN Monday night. 

“But if he were confused, Willie Brown is the—I shared with him four years in the legislature, he was in the assembly, I was in the state Senate. There was never any misidentification of us during that time period.

“Willie Brown was a short, intelligent, sharp guy [from the] San Francisco area, and I’m the taller guy from Los Angeles,” Holden continued. “Maybe to Donald, we all look alike.” 

Trump’s former executive vice president of construction and development Barbara Res was also on the terrifying flight, and recalled the white-knuckle encounter in her 2013 book, All Alone on the 68th Floor. She confirmed that Trump, his brother Robert, and Holden were all on board the aircraft as it lost control of some of its instruments and was forced to make an emergency landing in a New Jersey airport.  

“We may not have gotten much business done, but it sure as hell was memorable,” Res wrote.

But regardless of whomever Trump had misremembered on the flight, Holden affirmed to Politico on Sunday that no one had criticized Harris like Trump claimed.

“He either mixed it up,” Holden told Politico. “Or, he made it up. This was just too big to overlook. This is a big one.”

After Donald Trump’s bizarre livestreamed interview with Elon Musk Monday night, Kamala Harris’s campaign released a biting statement that touched a nerve with the Trump camp.

The statement called out the glitches with the livestream, as well as Trump’s extremism and association with the heavily criticized Project 2025. In response, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung called the Harris campaign “f****ing cowards.”

The statement is a sign the Trump team is likely fuming behind closed doors after a trainwreck interview on X. When the interview wasn’t facing technical glitches and Trump wasn’t slurring his words, the former president made one crazy statement after another. Trump said he’d welcome climate change because he thinks he’ll “have more oceanfront property,” praised Musk for firing striking workers, and told Musk that “if something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela because it will be a far safer place to meet than our country.”

Trump came back to X Monday, likely to help promote the livestream, after only posting once in the three years since January 2021, when he was banned from the platform for inciting violence during the Capitol insurrection. Musk helped promote Trump’s return, pushing new advertisements from Trump on the platform and elevating the hashtag #TrumpIsOnX ahead of the interview.

Trump’s posts on X came at the expense of his social media venture, Trump Media & Technology, which saw its share price plummet after the former president and convicted felon returned to the platform that banned him more than three years ago. But Trump is desperate after seeing his polling advantage disappear with Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election and Harris’s ascent.

The Harris campaign’s popularity has skyrocketed in the last month, and it experienced another boost after she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Those close to Trump are worried about the campaign’s 2024 strategy, and the stable genius himself is going nuts over how well the Harris campaign is succeeding. Cheung’s response shows that even Trump’s inner circle is getting agitated.

The U.S. Air Force is claiming that it cannot depollute drinking water that it contaminated with dangerous forever chemicals because the U.S. Supreme Court has stripped federal regulators of the authority to make it clean it up.

In June, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference, a 40-year-old doctrine that required judges to defer to a federal agency when determining the meaning of any ambiguous laws that agency should try to enforce. The Air Force has claimed that without the Chevron deference, the Environmental Protection Agency cannot order it to address its own pollution, The Guardian reported Monday.

In Tucson, Arizona, several Air Force bases have been polluting the drinking water, contaminating it with trichloroethylene, a volatile organic compound produced in industrial work, and PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which do not naturally break down. These chemicals can accumulate inside the human body and have been linked to a myriad of severe health problems.

In May, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the Air Force and National Guard to develop a plan to address the pollution, which would cost them an estimated $25 million—just 0.1 percent of the Air Force’s budget. The Air Force refused, stating that “the EPA’s order can not withstand review” and therefore it wouldn’t be beholden to it, according to The Guardian.

The Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference in the ruling for Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, leading many to fear that agencies such as the EPA would be stripped of their regulatory power. The court’s decision allows the federal judiciary to take on the role of scientists and policymakers, instead of administrative agencies that are staffed by experts on the issue at hand.

Former EPA officials and legal experts told The Guardian that the ruling would likely not apply in this case, because the new precedent only affects rule-making, not enforcement. To challenge the EPA’s regulatory order, the Air Force would need to sue the EPA, which it legally can’t do because one branch of government cannot sue another. A business, however, could challenge the order.

Deborah Ann Sivas, director of the Stanford University Environmental Law Clinic, told The Guardian that the Air Force seemed to be testing just how far it could push the new precedent, which has severely kneecapped regulators.

“It feels almost like an intimidation tactic, but it will be interesting to see if others take this approach and it bleeds over,” Sivas said.

Last year, a report from the Department of Defense found that at least 245 U.S. military bases had contaminated or threatened to contaminate nearby drinking water with PFAS. The Department of Defense is one of the biggest contributors to PFAS pollution in the country.

If Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, Betsy DeVos would like a job again, but only if it involves phasing out the entire Department of Education.

DeVos told The Detroit News Saturday that she didn’t think Trump would ask her to return to her post as secretary of education, but if asked, she would like to serve with the “goal of phasing out the Department of Education as we tried to do through the budgetary process in the first administration.”

DeVos also said that she would like to pass “a major education freedom bill in the form of a tax credit mechanism,” alluding to school choice vouchers at the federal tax level, part of conservatives’ grand plans to eventually get rid of public education in America. The former Trump Cabinet member made the comments at a campaign event for Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan.

DeVos was one of the least popular Cabinet secretaries under the Trump administration. Not only did she have no experience working in or with public schools, but she also fought for increased school privatization, argued in favor of guns in schools, rolled back protections for LGBTQ students, and made it easier for schools to ignore sexual misconduct.  

DeVos resigned on January 7, 2021, citing the violence of the Capitol insurrection the day before. She also discussed with other Cabinet members the possibility of invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and removing Trump from office.

While DeVos hasn’t publicly endorsed Trump for president in 2024, last week she said she’s “definitely supporting the Republican ticket,” according to The Detroit News.  Will she be Trump’s pick for secretary of education if he returns to the White House? His Cabinet the second time around would likely be a lot worse, but it’s hard to exceed DeVos’s unpopularity, unless Trump has someone like Christopher Rufo in mind.