Elon Musk’s PAC Shifts Into High Gear to Save Trump From Doom

Elon Musk is pouring his heart and soul (and cold hard cash) into electing Donald Trump this November.

New Federal Election Commission filings on Wednesday show that Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC has ramped up its operations, spending an initial $5.8 million. Most of that money, $3.6 million, has gone toward canvassing and field operations.

The political action committee has thus far raised $8.8 million with donations from Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and the crypto tycoons the Winklevoss twins. Meanwhile, America PAC is under investigation in North Carolina and Michigan for collecting personal data under the guise of registering voters.

Musk initially seemed to promise a monthly donation of $45 million to the Super PAC, then in July told Jordan Peterson that the rumor “is simply not true.” He did donate to the PAC last month, but the amount will remain unknown until the political action committee’s next quarterly report with the FEC in October. Put another way, we currently know very little about how much Musk is spending to influence the November election.

What we do know, however, is that Musk is sinking time and energy into getting voters to polls for Trump. According to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this week, Musk has been attending hour-long weekly meetings with his America PAC, with the goal of raising turnout for the former president in battleground states and bringing out 800,000 voters to the polls. According to a new FEC rule, campaigns can consult with Super PACs on get-out-the-vote initiatives.

J.D. Vance is possibly the least popular vice presidential candidate of the twenty-first century.

Directly after Donald Trump first announced Vance as his running mate, the Ohio senator’s net favorability was low, but not by too much. On July 18, three days later, 28.9 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably while 25. 6 percent viewed him favorably, leaving his net favorability at -3.3 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates national polls.

As Vance rose in the public eye, the number of respondents who viewed Vance both negatively and positively has slowly risen. As a result of his botched rollout, which included widespread backlash for his egregiously sexist comments and low-energy speaking events marred by gaffes, Vance’s net favorability dropped even lower.

Vance faced a net favorability of -9.3 percent on Wednesday, with 42.4 percent viewing him unfavorably, and only 33.1 viewing him favorably, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Vance is officially less liked than Sarah Palin, who is widely regarded as one of the least popular vice presidential candidates in recent history, according to ABC News. Palin was initially well liked after her nomination, but as the campaign went on, she saw her unfavorability shoot up by a whopping 20 points. Despite her catastrophic drop in polling, her net favorability was only ever -2 percent, while Tim Kaine’s was -4.

Vance certainly hasn’t seen the kind of flip-flopping Palin experienced, but that’s partially because he was never that well liked in the first place. Palin at least started off with a favorability rating of 47 percent.

Vance’s net favorability was similar to Trump’s on Wednesday, with 53.2 percent viewing the former president unfavorably, and 43 percent viewing him favorably, giving him a net favorability of -9.2 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Meanwhile, Vance’s opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, whose favorability has also dropped, had a net favorability of 4.7 percent on Wednesday.

A dumpster overflowing with books was spotted outside the New College of Florida, one of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s pet projects.

The public liberal arts college was throwing out hundreds of books, including texts on LGBTQ+ issues and religious studies. The dumpster was located outside the Jane Bancroft Cook Library on Tuesday, brimming with books from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center, reported the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Students that spoke with the paper said the books were marked with the college’s seal and carried a “discard” label on their spine. Students were also informed by officials that the books could not be donated due to a Florida statute that prevents the donation of books purchased with state funds.

Amy Reid, the faculty chair and a representative on the board of trustees, told the Herald-Tribune that throwing away books is akin to throwing away democracy.

The book dump is just one of many growing pains since DeSantis decided to give the proudly unconventional school a conservative makeover.

Under DeSantis’s supervision, the school has added six sports teams along with new scholarships and laptops. It’s also overhauled the school’s board of trustees, replacing six seats with DeSantis allies, while ousting the college’s president and replacing her with the administration’s former education commissioner, Richard Corcoran. The school has suffered a faculty exodus, the elimination of the college’s diversity office, and the firing of its academic librarian.

What DeSantis once described as a culture of “woke indoctrination” now experiences censorship instead: Student murals have been painted over, and student orientation leaders were no longer allowed to wear pins expressing support for Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ+ community, reported The New York Times.

The federal Department of Education is also investigating a complaint that the new version of the school discriminated against disabled students, reported CNN. Another federal complaint filed last year claimed that the school’s new leadership discriminated against LGBTQ+ students, effectively driving them out from the campus.

That led to 186 students—or 27 percent of the school—dropping out. Still, the school’s total enrollment was up from the 2022–2023 school year, bringing a record 325 students to the revamped college, according to the New College’s fact book. That may be in part because the school has lowered its standards for admission, reported the Herald-Tribune last year, which cited lower grade-point averages and test scores of incoming students than those of previous classes.

But the problems plaguing the New College are just a sampling of DeSantis’s conservative vision for the future of the state’s education programs. In the last few years, DeSantis has banned classroom discussion of gender and sexuality, gutted DEI programs within the state, and allowed unlimited challenges to which reading texts can be accessed by Florida students.

Many of the books targeted under DeSantis’s signature 2022 legislation dealt with topics such as race, gender, and sexuality, but others were anything but controversial. Some of the challenges have been over cartoon illustrations of naked goblin butts and even the dictionary.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s dig at Tommy Tuberville didn’t go over well with the Alabama senator.

Walz said at a Boston fundraiser Wednesday that “I feel like one of my roles in this now is to be the anti-Tommy Tuberville, to show that football coaches are not the dumbest people.”

While coaching football at Mankato West High School in Minnesota, Walz won the state championship in 1999. Tuberville coached college football for 21 years, including nine years at Auburn University, where he won an SEC championship after going undefeated in 2004.

On X (formerly Twitter), Tuberville called Walz “an embarrassment to the Coaching profession” in response, and didn’t stop there, hurling several accusations at Walz, from questioning his military career to using the epithet “Tampon Tim.”

Tuberville resorting to the lowbrow attacks other conservatives have lobbed at Walz over the past few weeks seems to have proved Walz’s point. Plus, Tuberville’s record hasn’t done him any favors, either. He couldn’t identify the three branches of government in a 2020 interview, and last year he blocked hundreds of military promotions for almost a year to protest reimbursing soldiers traveling out of state for abortions, only to give up and concede defeat.

During that one-man debacle, Tuberville complained about a weaker military, failing to realize that his effort was contributing to the problem, and also lost the respect of his Republican colleagues for his futile effort. He mocked President Biden’s age and walk despite having his own stumble, trip, and fall down some stairs. He has even lied about the details of his own father’s military service in World War II.

In his short political career, Tuberville has already made several blunders, which still haven’t humbled him. Perhaps he should remember the adage, “Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

Following the 2020 George Floyd uprising, J.D. Vance peddled an unhinged conspiracy about Black Lives Matter: Amazon funded the protests to burn down its competition.

On Thursday, the Christian Science Monitor reported that in 2021, Vance attended a conference hosted by right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, where he claimed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos funded Black Lives Matter to encourage private property destruction during the protests of summer 2020.

“Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” he declared.

Vance pushed a conspiracy about “woke capital” and called Bezos “one of the largest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

“Woke capital is when companies and businesses are more invested in a movement like BLM than they are in traditional American principles,” said Vance, pushing the far-right’s favorite diversity, equity, and inclusion conspiracy. “If you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefiting financially from it.”

Amazon did donate $10 million to a range of social justice organizations about two months after the murder of Floyd, but categorizing the megacompany as “one of the largest funders” of the racial justice movement is pure disinformation.

In the speech, Vance also categorized companies supporting abortion rights as corporations being “so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children.”

When asked for comment by the Christian Science Monitor, Vance didn’t back away from the conspiracy. “Jeff Bezos’s companies promoted and donated to Black Lives Matter as BLM protestors destroyed countless brick and mortar businesses across the country—the very businesses that Amazon counts as direct competitors,” a Vance spokesman wrote. “Woke billionaires like Bezos have taken over corporations across the country and turned them against the American people. Senator Vance is absolutely right to call them out and will continue to do so.”

Donald Trump’s latest hire is proof that the former president is hoping to get the band that first got him to the White House back together.

The Trump campaign has hired Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s campaign manager ahead of the 2016 presidential election, to advise its senior leadership team. Lewandowski will reportedly serve above Trump’s co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, amid swirling rumors that the two have become the most vulnerable members of Trump’s team.

Lewandowski was viewed as a fierce defender of Trump’s unorthodox approach to campaigning, according to The New York Times. When Trump was urged to soften his message to appeal to moderates, Lewandowski adopted the motto “Let Trump Be Trump.”

This nonstrategy stands in stark contrast to the current state of the race, in which Trump’s allies have begun urging him to stop making personal attacks against his opponent and stay on message. As such, Lewandowski’s hiring could signal Trump pushing back on his team’s attempts to get him to focus on policy rather than his typical grandstanding.

Lewandowski’s reputation precedes him. In March 2016, Lewandowski was arrested for intentionally grabbing and bruising the arm of a female reporter. He was charged with misdemeanor battery.

The charges were ultimately dropped because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. Trump defended him, telling reporters at the time, “I think it’s a very, very sad day in this country when a man could be destroyed over something like that.”

Trump, whose catchphrase is literally “You’re fired,” claimed that he couldn’t just “discard people.” Lewandowski was fired from the campaign three months later.

While the split was “amicable,” Lewandowski had been subject to several unfavorable headlines and reportedly had a contentious relationship with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. Trump later expressed regret about firing his campaign manager.

After the election, Lewandowski went on to lead the pro-Trump Make America Great Again super PAC, but he was ousted from that organization in 2021 after he was accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward a Trump donor. Lewandowski has remained an informal Trump adviser.

Lewandowski also co-wrote a book about working on Trump’s campaign, predictably titled Let Trump Be Trump. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard described the book as “repetitive, sycophantic, and self-serving.” It simultaneously painted Lewandowski as the true architect of the Trump campaign’s success in 2016 while remaining effusively complimentary of the wrathful, tantrum-having candidate at its center.

LaCivita and Wiles also announced that Alex Pfeiffer and Alex Bruesewitz, top officials at the MAGA Inc. super PAC, would be joining the Trump team. Earlier this week, the Trump campaign announced that it had hired that super PAC’s leader, Taylor Budowich, who is also a former Trump aide.

The campaign has also brought aboard Tim Murtaugh, who was the communications director on Trump’s failed 2020 reelection campaign.

Donald Trump’s campaign advisers may be getting worried.

As the campaign has struggled to land any sort of attack against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, criticism has come inside and outside the campaign from dissatisfied conservatives, and advisers are being forced to downplay dissension within the ranks.

“As President Trump said, he thinks Ms Wiles and Mr LaCivita are doing a phenomenal job and any rumors to the contrary are false and not rooted in reality,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement to The Guardian regarding the status of campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who have recently become the subject of a far-right campaign to have Trump fire them.

“This campaign is focused on winning, and anyone not focused on electing President Trump and defeating Kamala Harris is doing nothing but hurting every American. Detractors and lobbyists are waging a destructive battle of rumor and innuendo, and they are well known and will be remembered,” the statement added.

But that’s not likely to quiet detractors, especially with the news Thursday that Corey Lewandowski, a Trump 2016 campaign veteran, will be rejoining the campaign at a level above LaCivita and Wiles. Earlier this month, Trump and his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump met with Kellyanne Conway, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser and later campaign manager, to discuss strategy.

That meeting didn’t go over well inside the current Trump campaign, with advisers seeing Conway as intruding on the campaign and possibly even wishing to take over, according to The Guardian’s sources. While Trump played down the meeting and called out Conway’s Ukraine lobbying and 2023 idea for a 15-week abortion ban, there are still nervous vibes within the campaign.

In 2016, Trump made late changes to his campaign staff and won the election, but in 2020, he did the same and lost. Right now, the former president and convicted felon is having trouble staying on message, worrying Republican lawmakers. He’s also obsessed with recruiting poll watchers and observers, which could hurt the GOP ground game. Will Trump overcome these issues by the time November rolls around?

A key author of Project 2025 was caught in a secret recording bragging about how close he is to Donald Trump and admitting his love of “Christian nation-ism.”

Russell Vought, who is reportedly in line for chief of staff in a second Trump administration, said that his group, the Center for Renewing America, is leading the charge drafting executive orders and policy memos to help Trump immediately take action upon entering the Oval Office. He was caught on camera by two undercover British journalists from the nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting, which published the secret recording on Thursday.

Vought revealed his group plans to create “shadow” agencies to implement its draconian vision to solidify the “Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

“We’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” said Vought.

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” he said. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

The investigative reporters secretly recorded their nearly two-hour conversation with Vought, who served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee and recently helped to rewrite the official GOP platform. Vought, former Office of Management and Budget director under Trump, said he has personally been in talks with the former president over recent months and even received a personal “assignment.”

“He’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it,” Vought continued, saying that Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”

Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, is one of the many right-wing groups that are a part of Project 2025; Vought authored the chapter discussing the executive office of the president in the 900-page master plan. Trump has been trying to deny the influence of Project 2025 on his campaign.

“President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the campaign, told CNN in response to the latest report.

But Vought wasn’t bothered. “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious, distancing himself from a brand,” he said in the secretly recorded interview. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

Donald Trump is looking for one more get-out-of-jail free card, but the last-ditch effort is unlikely to work this time.

The convicted felon asked New York Justice Juan Merchan one more time on Wednesday to delay his New York hush-money criminal sentencing until after the November election. The historic event—which marks the first criminal sentencing of a former U.S. president—is currently scheduled for September 18.

In a pre-motion letter to the judge, Trump’s legal team suggested that delaying the sentencing would mitigate the “appearances of impropriety.” The letter pointed to Merchan’s daughter’s prior work for Democratic candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, and her business partner’s contributions to the Harris-Walz campaign, notably those made by Michael Nellis, the founder of Authentic Campaigns.

“Sentencing is currently scheduled to occur after the commencement of early voting in the Presidential election,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote. “By adjourning the sentencing until after that election—which is of paramount importance to the entire Nation, including tens of millions of people who do not share the views of Authentic, its executives, and its clients—the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings.”

“There is no basis for continuing to rush,” he added.

Merchan seems the least likely of Trump’s trial judges to offer him any favors, especially after enduring Trump’s endless mud-slinging throughout the grueling, seven-week trial. Trump’s attacks were primarily aimed at a gag order on the former president, which prevented him from targeting witnesses, jurors, courtroom staff, and their family in his venomous statements to the press—but did not prevent him from hurling vitriol at Merchan.

Trump repeatedly falsely claimed Merchan was violating his First Amendment right to free speech, but despite the constant heat, Merchan never broke. Appellate lawyers described Merchan’s behavior throughout the trial as “flawless” and have predicted that the attacks wouldn’t play well for Trump’s numerous appeals.

But if their background weren’t enough of an indication of how Wednesday’s request will proceed, another recent filing by Merchan might shed some light. The day before Trump filed his latest plea, Merchan plainly rejected an even bolder petition calling for his recusal from the wrapped New York case.

“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” Merchan wrote in his ruling posted Wednesday, noting that Trump’s arguments were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims.”

Donald Trump seems incapable of staying on message, and it’s seriously beginning to worry Republican lawmakers, according to a report NOTUS published Thursday. 

Trump’s campaign attempted to debut a smaller messaging event on Wednesday, as part of a new strategy to get the president to stay on topic. Trump predictably detoured into his typical racist fearmongering and personal attacks against his opponent, Kamala Harris. 

Despite the Trump team’s efforts to curb its loquacious candidate and its insistence on running a  “disciplined” campaign, it seems that nothing the team does can prevent Trump from, well, being Trump. And Republican lawmakers aren’t impressed. 

“Let’s be real: He lost in ’20. He has a solid base but has done nothing, or worse, alienated anyone from coming back to him,” one Republican lawmaker told NOTUS. “It’s like the sixth or seventh season of a show that was once funny but now panders to his base.

“If he continues down this road and Harris stays her course and the economy starts to show signs of improvement, he will be a two-time loser,” the Republican added.

Another Republican congressperson who spoke anonymously to NOTUS warned that Trump “needs to get back on message and start talking about policy differences.

“If he doesn’t do this I think he will lose and probably cost Republicans the House and Senate,” the GOP lawmaker said. 

A third House GOP member told NOTUS that Trump was “rattled” and needed to “get on message.”

Trump has reportedly been struggling to manage his frustration following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race. What was once a sleepy, one-event-a-week campaign has turned into an actual race, against a younger candidate with considerable energy and enthusiasm behind her. This anger seems to be coming out in different ways, and undermining Trump’s ability to effectively campaign without alienating his supporters and backers. 

Last month, just days after Harris announced her campaign, one of Trump’s aides fired off some extremely angry texts to wealthy GOP backer Miriam Adelson on behalf of the former president, according to The New York Times. Adelson, who is worth roughly $30 billion, is one of the Republican party’s wealthiest backers. 

The texts accused Adelson of having allowed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) to run her Preserve America PAC. Trump and Adelson were scheduled to meet and make up this week, and it’s not clear that the comments will affect Adelson’s giving. 

Last week, Trump repeatedly attacked Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, much to the dismay of his allies and supporters, who believe it will hurt his chances in Georgia. One House Republican told NOTUS it was “extremely foolish” for Trump to go after Kemp. 

“If he displayed self-discipline and impulse control, he’d win,” the lawmaker explained to NOTUS. “The issues favor us. He’s been unable to focus on the issues and is behind. This is his race to lose, and he’s shooting himself in the foot. There’s some Trump fatigue too, and if he’d focus on issues and get off the personality attacks, he’d connect more with voters.”

But Trump hasn’t proven that he’s able to do that. The former president was meant to speak solely about the U.S. economy on Wednesday, but the Republican nominee couldn’t help but play into what his audience was most responding to, and they seemed excited by his jokes and jabs at Harris. But, ultimately, Trump’s audience of supporters isn’t representative of the electorate.