Trump’s Trainwreck Elon Musk Interview May Have Broken the Law

Donald Trump’s lengthy interview with Elon Musk earlier this week may have violated federal campaign regulations, at least according to one Democratic-aligned political action committee that has already filed an FEC complaint over the issue.

The complaint, filed Tuesday by End Citizens United, argued that the unfettered “conversation” on X, Musk’s $12.5 billion company, amounted to a “virtual campaign event” financed by the social media platform. Per the FEC’s website, a contribution is “anything of value given, loaned or advanced to influence a federal election.”

End Citizens United also claimed that the event did not fall under press exemptions set forth by the election commission on the basis that X is not a traditional news outlet; that the company devoted “considerable resources” to host the interview, including dedicating “real time staff” to fix numerous technical glitches; and (perhaps most significantly) that Musk has repeatedly voiced his support for Trump in the 2024 race, and launched the talk with the intention to platform Trump’s personal beliefs.

“Because X spent considerable resources to host an event to expressly advocate for Trump and was not entitled to the press exemption for that event, Respondents have violated the ban on giving and receiving corporation contributions,” the complaint alleged.

The group called for the FEC to “immediately investigate” the violations and to take “appropriate remedial action” against the “brazen corporate contribution.”

Unfortunately for End Citizens United, such high-profile complaints can take months or even years for the ideologically gridlocked six-commissioner panel at the FEC to investigate, making it highly unlikely for the group to reach a consensus before the November election.

“The Donald Trump-Elon Musk campaign rally hosted on X wasn’t just an incoherent diatribe of lies marred by technical difficulties—it was a blatantly illegal corporate contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign,” said End Citizens United president Tiffany Muller in a statement. “This brazen corporate contribution undermines campaign finance laws and would set a dangerous precedent for unfettered, direct corporate engagement in campaigns.”

Donald Trump’s livestream interview with Elon Musk on X Monday night was plagued not only with technical glitches but also Trump’s own slurred speech. Late Tuesday night, Trump finally came up with an excuse.

“My conversation with Elon last night was heard by a RECORD audience, and was really something special, as Elon himself is very special—and I thank him for such a strong Endorsement!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Unfortunately, because of the complexity of modern day equipment, and cellphone technology, my voice was, in certain areas, somewhat different and strange. Therefore, we have put out an actual, and perfect, recording of the conversation. ENJOY!!!”

The post followed another late-night post, made an hour before, where Trump went on the offensive against Kamala Harris.

“Kamala: You ruined San Francisco, one of the greatest cities in the World, you ruined California, one of the greatest places on Earth—And you will turn America into a giant combination of both,” Trump’s post read. “We are not going to let that happen. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Trump’s excuse probably won’t be bought by anyone but the right. The Harris campaign has already seized upon his glitches, as well as Trump’s extremist rhetoric from the interview. The Trump campaign is trying to claim that one billion people watched the livestream, but that’s not going to get much traction either. The likeliest explanation for Trump’s slurring words may be his cognitive decline, which is all the more noticeable now that he’s the oldest candidate in the race.

Elon Musk’s judge-shopping attempt to get back at advertisers has failed.

The CEO of X (formerly Twitter) is trying to sue a coalition of advertisers who he claims conspired against the social networking site by refusing to buy advertisements. Reed O’Connor, a federal judge in the northern district of Texas, recused himself from the lawsuit Tuesday after NPR reported that he owns stock in Tesla, another one of Musk’s companies.

Last week, Musk sued the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a group of advertisers, media agencies, and platforms that focus on safety in media and technology. The lawsuit also targets the parent organization of GARM, the World Federation of Advertisers, and four of its member companies: Orsted, Unilever, CVS Health, and Mars.

Musk appears to have chosen the northern district because it is a favorite of conservatives, as almost all of its judges have been appointed by Republicans, even though the case has little, if anything, to do with Texas. O’Connor has a reputation for giving the right the rulings they are looking for. For example, he has repeatedly tried to gut or eliminate the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, even going after HIV drugs and cancer screenings. 

NPR’s report found that O’Connor owns between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of Tesla stock, which gives the appearance of a conflict of interest and ultimately seems to have led to O’Connor’s recusal. But while that will delay the advertiser lawsuit, O’Connor is still presiding over a different Musk lawsuit against Media Matters, filed in November, accusing the liberal media watchdog of defaming X by pointing out the rise in hate speech on the site.

The Media Matters lawsuit is still ongoing and still has the right-wing judge presiding over it. Even with O’Connor’s recusal from the advertiser lawsuit, Musk had a small measure of success as GARM announced last week that it would be disbanding, claiming that it didn’t have the financial resources to fight billionaire Musk. The question is how much more money Musk is willing to spend to punish perceived slights.

Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has been altering the headlines on real articles in Google search results to make them appear more pro-Harris, Axios reported Tuesday.  

The articles—which, unbeknownst to the outlets publishing them, are transformed into advertisements by the Harris campaign—include a banner that says “Paid for by Harris for President” floating above URLs linking articles on sites such as the Associated Press, Reuters, The Independent, and more. 

The headlines and deks, or subheads, of these articles have been changed in the search results to emphasize support for Harris’s accomplishments. 

For example, an article about Harris’s economic plan published by NPR was accompanied by the headline “Harris Will Lower Health Costs” and a dek that states “Kamala Harris will lower the cost of high-quality affordable health care.”

While the banner is meant to make clear that the results are advertisements, not articles, the ads may create the impression that Harris is backed by certain news organizations when she is actually not. 

Spokespeople for CNN, USA Today, and NPR told Axios that they weren’t aware their brands were being used by the Harris campaign. 

A spokesperson for The Guardian, which had also been featured in the ads, made a statement to Axios. “While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission,” the spokesperson said. “We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice.”

This style of ads is common in commercial marketing, and Google has said that those ads don’t violate its rules. However, this approach may ultimately prove to be a gambit that lacks an actual advantage as it potentially undermines trust in the news. 

It is also unclear why Harris’s campaign felt the need to do this, as there has been plenty of positive coverage of Harris since President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed her to replace him.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump isn’t running these kinds of ads, according to Google’s transparency center, although he has edited articles he posted on Truth Social. But honestly, why would he want to align himself with mainstream media, which he actively rails against? Trump has previously vowed retribution against the press, which he claims has treated him unfairly, referring to journalists as the “enemy of the people.”

The momentum behind Kamala Harris has been so major that it may turn Florida blue again in November.

The Democratic presidential nominee is closing the gap on the Sunshine State’s solidly red status, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV survey of 500 registered voters released Tuesday. The poll results suggest Harris is just five percentage points behind Donald Trump—a far cry from the 19-point advantage that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had over Democrat Charlie Crist in 2022.

The USA Today poll showed Trump receiving the support of 47 percent of surveyed potential voters in Florida, while Harris gained the support of 42 percent. That five-point difference is within the poll’s margin of error.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. trailed behind with 5 percent, while another 5 percent were undecided or refused to disclose their preference.

Another poll conducted by Civiqs indicated that the number of Democrats feeling positive about the upcoming election had shot up since President Joe Biden exited the race, with approximately 34 percent of the party reportedly feeling hopeful. The number of surveyed participants feeling negative—including “scared,” “depressed,” and “angry”—had all gone down.

That could be why former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke believes that the Lone Star State could also be coming into play for Harris—or, at the very least, that her candidacy would motivate enough Texas Democrats to vote downballot in other contentious races.

“The thing is you now see Democrats smiling,” O’Rourke told MSNBC Monday. “There is joy in our party. There is electricity moving through our system. And yes, places that I think were written off are now in contention.”

“I think Harris-Walz rise or increase the chances that we’re going to be able to win these races,” O’Rourke continued, referring to the House race between Democrat Michelle Vallejo and Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz, as well as Democratic Representative Colin Allred, who’s gunning for Senator Ted Cruz’s seat.

“Who knows, but Joe Biden lost Texas by only 5.5 points in 2020. It’s been moving faster into the blue column than any other battleground state. Anything, I think, is possible in this year, and with the energy that those two are bringing to the ticket, I think that Texas could possibly be in play,” O’Rourke said.

Representative Ilhan Omar’s Democratic primary opponent Don Samuels has had quite the week leading up to polls opening in Minnesota on Tuesday—including openly courting Republican voters and getting caught possibly breaking campaign finance laws.

In a WhatsApp group chat titled “Zionists for Don Samuels,” Alexander Minn—who has been a director of strategic engagement for Samuels’s campaign since 2022—openly discussed campaign strategy with its many members, The Intercept reported on Sunday. Minn is no longer with the campaign, according to Samuels’s campaign manager, Joe Radinovich.

This chat of wealthy pro-Israel donors included businessman Michael Sinensky, who said he’d worked with a super PAC called Make a Difference MN, which he proudly claimed had taken on the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the race.

“I’ve heard dozens of questions of where is AIPAC,” Sinensky wrote in the chat. “We are fucking AIPAC now.”

AIPAC has funded the victorious primary challengers of two other progressive lawmakers in the Squad, Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both of whom were critical of Israel and its U.S.-backed military campaign in Gaza, which has killed nearly 40,000 people. Both lawmakers were knocked out in their primary races, against the tidal wave of pro-Israel funding and opponents who supported Israel.

Omar seems to be the next target from the list of lawmakers who have called for a cease-fire and criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Last month, she called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal who is actively committing genocide against the Palestinian people while putting the lives of the hostages and the stability of the region in jeopardy.”

Sinensky, who argued that Zionists ought to be supportive of “alt right Christian Neo Nazis on the PRESIDENTIAL LEVEL” in the group chat, later alleged that Omar was antisemitic in a statement to The Intercept. Minn also claimed that she was a “purveyor of hate against Jewish people.”

In the chat with Minn, Sinensky claimed that he’d worked with Make a Difference MN to raise $120,000 since the end of July to support Samuels’s bid. Campaign finance laws strictly prohibit political campaigns from coordinating with super PACS.

While Minn tried to make clear the legal boundaries preventing his coordination, he still discussed raising six-figure sums for Make a Difference MN. Minn also said that his campaign was “in regular communication with AIPAC.”

“Several members of my campaign staff, myself included, have intimate relationships with active and Former executive member of AIPAC,” Minn wrote in a message on July 24.

In the “Zionists for Don Samuels” chat, Minn also discussed strategies to attract Republican voters, to bolster support for Samuels. While Radinovich claimed that he “doesn’t think winning a primary with Republican voters in an 80 percent Democratic district is a strategy that would be successful,” it seems that Samuels has moved forward with outreach to conservative voters anyway.

Samuels appeared on Fox News Monday night, speaking about a fundraising surge he’d experienced since Bush was knocked out of her primary only a week ago. He called Omar “divisive and combative.”

“She picks a side including simply trying to divide her constituency and ignores the other side,” he said, claiming she had taken “contrarian actions” apart from her Democratic colleagues.

Samuels said he’d gone from 100 volunteers to 13,000 volunteers. When asked why he had decided to challenge Omar, he did not mention Israel.

More than 1,400 people have been charged with federal crimes as a result of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, with over 540 of them receiving jail time. But one lucky defendant who was indicted in May is getting a nice overseas vacation.

The Miami New Times reports that Barbara Balmaseda, a Florida woman and GOP strategist, received permission on July 19 from U.S. District Judge John Bates to go on her honeymoon to Spain and Italy for two weeks beginning on August 29 and ending on September 13.

Balmaseda was arrested in December and indicted by a federal grand jury on May 22 on five charges related to the riots, including corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, knowingly entering and remaining in a restricted building, and engaging in disorderly conduct in a Capitol building with the intent to impede a session of Congress.

One of those charges was a felony, which Bates mentioned in his decision.

“Particularly relevant to the Court’s conclusion are (1) the uncertain status of defendant’s sole felony charge … (2) defendant’s ties to the United States and apparent lack of ties outside the United States; and (3) defendant’s compliance with her conditions of release to date,” wrote Bates.

Prosecutors disagreed, noting that Balmaseda did not have to post bail and is under neither home detention nor a GPS monitor, and that other January 6 defendants have had overseas travel requests denied.

“The Government acknowledges that Ms. Balmaseda’s honeymoon abroad would be a nice trip to celebrate her marriage, but that does not mitigate the severity of Ms. Balmaseda’s actions before, on, and after January 6, 2021 and the interest in having recourse if Ms. Balmaseda violates her conditions,” prosecutors Matthew Graves and Taylor Fontan wrote in a motion to deny Balmaseda’s request.

According to the FBI, Balmaseda created a Telegram chat that included Florida state Senator Illena Garcia and some Miami-area Proud Boys in the months before January 6, and on the day of the riots, climbed on equipment set up for President Joe Biden’s inauguration while wearing a pink gaiter.

So why was Balmaseda’s request granted? Is it because Balmaseda is well connected? What Bates didn’t mention is that, despite having ties to the Proud Boys, Balmaseda also interned for Senator Marco Rubio from 2018 to 2019, helped to organize Ron DeSantis’s 2018 run for governor of Florida, and was a campaign manager for Garcia’s successful Florida state Senate run in 2020.

Other January 6 defendants can’t say they similarly got to go on their honeymoon abroad. Maybe Balmaseda will also try to use her connections to escape serious punishment or, if Donald Trump wins in November, will try to score a pardon.

Rupert Murdoch is sending Donald Trump a hidden message through his editorial boards: Trump, you are looking like a loser.

Through his media companies the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, the billionaire business magnate seems to be trying to communicate to Trump that his 2024 campaign isn’t looking so hot. Though Murdoch himself isn’t penning any op-eds, his newspapers’ headlines highlight anxieties from inside the backrooms, The Daily Beast reported.

“Trump Meets Half the Moment in His RNC Speech,” read a WSJ editorial published just hours after his speech at the Republican National Convention. “Trump or Harris? It’s a Tossup for Many CEOs,” read an article at the top of the politics section on Tuesday. “Does Donald Trump Still Have It?” yet another WSJ opinion piece published Sunday asks.

“Trump Is Looking Like a Loser Again,” editor-at-large Gerard Baker wrote in a column on Monday. “The Trump of the past few weeks has looked and sounded more or less exactly like the Trump of nine years ago. This is the problem. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the presidency in 2020. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the House in 2018 and the Senate in the Georgia runoff election in January 2021.”

The relationship between Murdoch and Trump has been rocky for several years, especially after Murdoch personally greenlit the Fox News call that Trump lost Arizona in the 2020 race. When Murdoch said Trump went too far on his election conspiracies, as did some Fox hosts, Trump called the businessman a “MAGA hating globalist” who was “abetting THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA.”

Even though Fox was later forced to pay up big time with a $787 million defamation for parroting Trump’s false election claims, Trump continues to bash Fox News whenever he gets the chance.

Trump and Murdoch had allegedly not been in touch since the 2020 election until a few months ago, when Murdoch reached out to suggest Trump select North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum for his vice president. Perhaps the businessman saw what is now becoming clear about J.D. Vance: He’s bad for the brand.

As Murdoch showed face at the Republican National Convention last month, Donald Trump Jr. took the opportunity to slam him, telling Axios, “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

Donald Trump is still obsessed with his crowd size—and his buddies are only too happy to back him up.

On Monday night, Trump claimed that 60 million people were listening to his one-on-one conversation with Elon Musk, despite the livestream’s own data tracker indicating that just a fraction of that—roughly a million people—had tuned in. Moments later, Musk amended Trump’s verbiage to project that 100 million people would listen to the glitched-out interview “over the next few days [and] weeks.”

But outside of the X Space, Trump’s allies took the crowd space lie to the moon.

“The president going on X with Elon Musk last night—which got almost, I think, 1 billion views now, is a perfect example of how you combat the disinformation being pumped out by the Democrat media cabal and the Kamala Harris campaign,” conservative strategist Roger Stone told Newsmax Tuesday.

It’s possible Stone was referring to a stretched data point elevated by Musk late Monday night, claiming that the discussion’s audience had reached one billion people—if you lumped in the livestream audience with the aggregate views of every single post made in relation to or mentioning Trump’s talk.

But whether it comes from his allies or the GOP presidential nominee himself, the X crowd nonsense is just another indicator that Trump can’t stop obsessing over his dwindling crowd sizes—and Harris’s growing popularity. Last week, Trump spent some of his spontaneous Mar-a-Lago presser boasting about his attendance numbers, including claiming that his January 6 crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (photographic evidence proves it wasn’t even close).

On Truth Social, Trump lamented that the “fake news … refuse to mention crowd size” when he believes he has more attendees. He also pushed a baseless conspiracy that Harris’s campaign had turned to A.I. to distort her crowd numbers. And on Sunday, the bloviating populist seemed to completely lose it over the issue, claiming online that Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “cheated” at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and that the 15,000 supporters who showed up to see them arrive “DIDN’T EXIST.”

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and even exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. Late last week, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that the short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which reportedly only permitted the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, was evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign. Trump’s return to X on Monday—the first time the Republican had posted in earnest to his account since he was banned following the January 6 riot—was seen as further evidence that the campaign had reached a “break glass” moment amid GOP panic over Harris’s surging lead.

J.D. Vance helped to fund a startup that was supposed to make things better for working people in eastern Kentucky. But not only did it fail, it provided terrible working conditions, causing employees to flee in droves—only to be soon replaced by migrant workers.

CNN reports that in 2017, in the wake of his successful book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was hired by AOL co-founder Steve Case to invest in underserved markets. One week later, Vance took a meeting with Jonathan Webb, the founder of a startup called AppHarvest.

AppHarvest’s plan was to create an indoor farming operation growing fruits and vegetables in eastern Kentucky, an economically distressed region close to much of the U.S. population with plenty of land and water nearby. Webb had already drained his savings and maxed out his credit cards to run the startup, and he needed more cash. So he reached out to investors, including Vance.

Vance would invest $150,000 in AppHarvest, with other investors chipping in $50,000 each. While Senate disclosures say Vance was named to the company’s board of directors in March 2017, AppHarvest’s security filings say that he joined in 2020. Vance’s own venture capital firm, Narya, had AppHarvest as one of its earliest publicly disclosed investments.

Over the next few years, Vance helped the startup get millions of dollars in capital, and helped Webb as a pitchman. All the while, AppHarvest was hiring eastern Kentucky locals to help with its crops, having pledged to bring thousands of jobs to “high unemployment areas,” according to a presentation it gave to investors in 2020.

At first, things were going well, said one new hire, Anthony Morgan. He said his hours as a crop care specialist were manageable and that the benefits were better than anything else in the area. But a few months later, production fell behind and workers were put under pressure. The company cut employee health care benefits along with other costs, and hours were increased with breaks cut.

For workers like Morgan, that meant longer days in a very hot greenhouse, which put them in danger.

“I think about the hottest that I experienced was around 128 degrees,” Morgan told CNN. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up and you seen people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”

As conditions got worse, more and more workers left the company. Morgan organized a sit-in to demand better conditions and was later fired after he took time off to get treatment for an injury that he suffered on the job, he said.

Morgan’s issues were shared by other workers at the company. One other crop care specialist, Shelby Hester, said that the company didn’t provide masks for employees to deal with mold and other contaminants in the greenhouses. Hester corroborated Morgan’s account of workers experiencing heat stroke symptoms, and added that managers disregarded doctor’s notes as a reason to miss work.

With native Kentuckians leaving their jobs, their positions were soon filled by migrant workers coming from countries like Mexico and Guatemala. Politicians and other leaders, like Senator Mitch McConnell, would visit the company’s facilities, only for the migrant workers to be sent away so they wouldn’t be seen.

Kentucky state inspectors visited AppHarvest facilities but didn’t issue any citations, and instead lauded supposed company precautions like mandatory heat breaks and drinks for employees. Nothing would ever happen, and the poor working conditions were documented in a report last year by Grist and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.

The company went bankrupt in 2023 with $341 million in debt, dealing with millions of dollars in lawsuits. Vance left the company’s board in April 2021 before his run for the Senate in Ohio but still had $100,000 invested in the company. With Vance touting his business record as the Republican vice presidential nominee, AppHarvest is another big strike against him and the campaign.