Trump’s Biggest Fans Think He’s Part of the Deep State Now

Right-wing influencers Candace Owens and Andrew Tate think Donald Trump has been compromised by the so-called “deep state.”

Tate appeared on Owens’s YouTube show Candace, and Owens raised the idea that Trump has changed since his first presidential campaign, and it’s because of money.

“It doesn’t feel to me like the same Trump from 2015,” Owens said in the episode released on Thursday. “And obviously he’s the better candidate. I want Trump to win as well, but it does seem that now he’s accepted money that he can’t be as hardcore about certain topics and certain issues as he was back in 2015 when there was no chance he was gonna win.

“Now it feels like, I don’t know, like they’ve kind of—I don’t wanna say buck-broken him, but there’s definitely a lot of consultants around,” Owens continued, using a term referring to physically punishing or sexually assaulting a male slave in front of other slaves to humiliate him.

Tate concurred, saying that he’s “a fan of Trump” too, and posited a theory that Trump tried to reason with his opponents during his time as president.

“I think there was part of his mind that said, ‘You know what, I’m really gonna get back into administration and teach these guys a lesson,’ and then I think something happened,” Tate said.

“Someone came along at some point and I think perhaps that deal was done, they said, ‘You won’t go to jail, Trump Tower will stay standing, your kids will be safe in America, everything’s gonna be OK, but you’re gonna have to bend on these few things,’” Tate added.

Tate further expanded on his conspiracy theory, claiming that while he was praying for a Trump victory, he thinks the former president and convicted felon has cut some kind of deal with the deep state to protect himself and his family.

“I just feel like somewhere along the line, something has been agreed to to prevent postpresidency or post-death for his empire and for his children,” Tate said. “There seems to be some kind of deal somewhere … I don’t know exactly what the deal is. I’m not even gonna say that I blame the guy for taking it. But some kind of agreement’s been made.”

The idea that Trump has been tamed in his campaign cycle this time around beggars belief. Are Tate and Owens referring to his attempts to disavow the Project 2025 manifesto, or his reduced travel schedule following the attempt on his life last month? Because it’s pretty clear Trump isn’t trying to tamp down his rhetoric. And they’re not the only ones: Trump has also lost the support of white nationalists like Nick Fuentes. Maybe they all are finally noticing Trump’s apparent cognitive decline.

Six months ago and under the gun for roughly half a billion dollars in legal expenses, Donald Trump took on a flurry of bizarre get-rich-quick schemes to raise some capital. They included a line of NFTs featuring cartoonish images of himself dressed up as superhero characters; a line of gold, high-top sneakers that retailed for $399 a pop; and, bizarrely, his own Bible series.

Trump pitched his God Bless the USA Bible alongside singer Lee Greenwood, the man who popularized the song it’s named after. The selling point boiled down to a callback to Trump’s campaign: “We must make America pray again.”

“Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” the site advertised.

And while it’s unclear if the Trump-endorsed, $60 religious text actually made more people pray, it certainly did help line the convicted felon’s pockets. According to Trump’s latest financial disclosure, that far-flung idea actually brought in $300,000 in royalties. Those numbers could have been bolstered by an even pricier signed version, which retailed for $1,000.

It wasn’t the only book that Trump made some cash off of. His book Letters to Trump, which featured a letter from former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown—who disputed Trump’s claim that the two had shared a near-death experience in a helicopter together—raked in $4.5 million. One of his more recents books, A MAGA Journey, netted $505,763, while Trump’s bestseller, The Art of the Deal, managed to bring in between $50,000 and $100,000 in royalties.

But Trump’s other weird money streams also helped bring in some quick cash. The disclosure listed $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. And, despite having previously labeled cryptocurrency as a scam, the former president notably kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.

Trump listed his social media platform, Truth Social, at more than $50 million. Trump owns nearly 65 percent of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. The company’s stock value has plummeted in recent days.

Still, the disclosure couldn’t offset Trump’s legal reality: It lists more than $100 million for bonds related to three of his legal trials in New York.

What’s in a name? Well, save it, because Representative Nancy Mace doesn’t actually care. The South Carolina Republican, who has drifted further and further into the MAGA fold, made a disastrous appearance on CNN Thursday night.

“Kamala’s, Ka-mala’s, uh—” Mace stumbled.

“You had it right, you almost got it!” chided a smiling Keith Boykin, former Clinton White House aide.

Mace began again, still mispronouncing Harris’s name wrong. “I will say Kama-la’s name any way that I want to,” Mace snapped, defensively.

Boykin and another panelist, Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson, erupted into protests not to mispronounce Harris’s name. But Mace shamelessly doubled down on her wrongness.

“I just did. I just did, and I’ll do it again,” Mace sneered. Unable to own up to her televised mistake, Mace tried to make clear that she was mispronouncing Harris’s name because she doesn’t care about that kind of thing.

This kind of immature behavior is not particularly surprising coming from Mace, who previously made herself a laughingstock by wearing a red ‘A’ to Congress, desperate to set herself apart from her colleagues.

The panel descended into chaos, with panelists speaking over each other. “If I mispronounced your name, that would not be appropriate,” Boykin remarked.

Later, Dyson attempted to call in Mace about her obstinate response.

“Let me just say this, because this congresswoman is a wonderful human being,” Dyson said gently. “But when you disrespect Kamala Harris by saying ‘you will call her whatever you want,’ I know you don’t intend it to be that way; that’s the history and legacy of white disregard for the humanity of Black people.”

“Oh, so now you’re calling me racist,” Mace replied.

“I didn’t say that, I just said you weren’t a racist,” Dyson said. “No, you don’t have to intend racism to accomplish racism.”

But Mace couldn’t handle even the gentlest constructive criticism. “No, no, no, you are intending that I am a racist,” Mace retorted. She called his comment “offensive” and “disgusting,” as the panel once again descended into crosstalk.

Members of the panel grew increasingly tired of Mace’s nonsense. Even after Dyson begged Mace to “pronounce her name right,” the congresswoman refused to correct herself.

“We don’t call you Nancy Ma-chy,” Dyson said. “You are a white woman disrespecting a Black woman.”

Mace clearly thought she did something with this, taking to X to flaunt what she hoped would earn her points in the culture war.

“The Left would rather talk about pronouns and pronunciation than policy,” Mace wrote in a post on X in the small hours of Friday morning. In total, she posted about the interview six times, perhaps worried no one would see her humiliating display.

“These boys were so easily triggered,” she wrote.

“The Left has to resort to this because they can’t defend Kamala’s policies,” Mace said, but the congresswoman didn’t speak about Harris’s real policies—instead she complained about one that Trump had invented while refusing to stay on script during his press conference Thursday.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has released an economic plan with some bold proposals.

The vice president, who will be speaking in North Carolina on Friday, has several policy proposals, including eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans, banning price gouging of food and groceries, capping the prices of insulin and other prescriptions, and granting a $6,000 tax credit for newborn children in their first year.

Since President Biden withdrew from the 2024 election last month and Harris took on the Democratic nomination, Harris’s campaign has not been heavy on specific policies. This is one of the first, if not the first, detailed plans the campaign has released. Not only does it continue Biden’s policy of economic intervention, it goes much further than many of his proposals.

For example, Harris’s plan also includes assistance of up to $25,000 for first-time homebuyers, and the ban on price gouging would take punitive measures against grocery stores whose price hikes are deemed excessive. Parts of Harris’s plan have already drawn criticism from some Democrats.

“The good-case scenario is price gouging is a message, not a reality, and the bad-case scenario is that this is a real proposal,” said economist Jason Furman, who worked in the Obama administration. “You’ll end up with bigger shortages, less supply, and ultimately risk higher prices and worse outcomes for consumers if you try to enforce this in a real way, which I don’t know if they would or wouldn’t do.”

Harris has already faced pressure from executives and business leaders hoping to change antitrust policies and push out Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. While antitrust policy is not part of the economic policies just proposed by Harris, her willingness to offer transformative measures that could drastically improve the lives of many Americans may indicate that she’s willing to take on corporations to the same extent as Biden, and perhaps even further than that.

After all, her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was renowned in Minnesota for instituting one of the most generous child tax credit plans in the country, free school meals, and paid family leave. Harris’s plan is sure to win over much of the left, at least when it comes to economics. Perhaps the next step is overhauling Biden’s disastrous Israel policy, which continues to cause a humanitarian crisis through supporting the brutal war on Gaza.

Donald Trump’s presser Thursday was a scattered assortment of unrelated topics. Despite his campaign’s attempts to rein Trump in and focus his attention on attacking Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies via a narrowly tailored mini-rally, Trump went on an hour-long, mostly unscripted tirade. It was, ultimately, a who’s who of his favorite talking points, including Harris’s alleged “stupidity,” the war in Afghanistan, Covid-19, and migrant crime, with barely any mention made of inflation—or the groceries symbolically propped up inches away from him—for which the entire event was organized.

The new Trump format also attracted an odd variety of attendees. While press conferences typically only attract press, Trump’s Thursday arrangement saw the presence of several curious attendees, including journalists who only lobbed softball questions at the Republican presidential nominee, and another group of people that Trump referred to as “fans” who were overjoyed by some of the darker moments of Trump’s rambling speech.

Responding to a question from a reporter about why “God saved your life” during the assassination attempt, Trump said that “God had something to do with it.” But the back-end of his answer on what he believed God saved him for got a little weirder.

“And maybe it’s, we want to save the world,” Trump continued. “This world is going down. This world is going down.”

That, for whatever reason, elicited a roar from a crowd nearby.

“But I believe that. I believe that. My sons are very good shooters,” Trump expanded, claiming that his sons Eric and Don Jr. were excellent shots who said that the 130-yard distance between Trump and his would-be shooter was akin to a “one-foot putt,” and told their father that a “bad shooter would hit the target almost 100 percent of the time.”

Cereal, coffee, milk, and breakfast sausages sat displayed on a table in the 87-degree heat of Bedminster, New Jersey, mere feet away from Donald Trump as he held a press conference at his golf club Thursday, his second in as many weeks. 

More than a prop, the food might have served as a signal to the meandering Republican nominee to stay on the topic du jour: inflation. Instead, the groceries served as a cringeworthy visual cue for those watching, and became increasingly absurd as Trump continually refused to acknowledge them. Try as he might, Trump just couldn’t stay on topic, and took off on a winding rant that repelled structure and meaning.

Despite the fact he began by reading from notes, which sat in a binder in front of him, Trump repeatedly, and for long stretches of time, went off-script into an array of insane claims and random stories. 

Trump made the severely inaccurate claim that Harris was responsible for a California law that allowed for people to rob stores of goods with a total value under $950—of course, the state penal code actually says that a shoplifter will be charged with petty theft for stealing goods worth $950 or less, and grand theft if it’s more. 

He detoured into his typical racist fearmongering about undocumented immigrants, telling a strange story about watching ICE agents beating up “packs” of MS13 “killers.” Trump warned Americans that under Harris, they might get a system where “everybody gets health care,” ranted about windmills ruining “gorgeous fields” and killing birds, and bragged that he was buddies with the head of the Taliban because he’d once allegedly called Trump “your excellency.” 

After nearly an hour of non-stop talking (not to mention, taking no questions from the press) Trump finally gave a nod to the assortment of food behind him, scoffing at the price tags. But he predictably changed the subject back to call Harris “Margaret Thatcher, the liberal version.”

Trump’s allies have become increasingly concerned that the Republican candidate can’t stay on message to save his life. His team has adopted a new strategy, of smaller single-issue events, meant to keep the former president on task—but their first such event, held Wednesday and meant to focus on the economy, predictably descended into chaos.  

J.D. Vance’s 2021 appearance on a podcast episode is drawing some negative attention thanks to the extremist views of its host, as well as Vance’s own comments. 

The podcast, Jack Murphy Live, interviewed Vance before his run for the Senate in Ohio. The host Jack Murphy, whose real name is John Goldman, has a history of expressing abhorrent views on rape and immigration.

In one since-deleted blog post, Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.”

In another post from 2017, Murphy wrote about an alleged rape of a 14-year-old Maryland girl by two immigrants from central America and said  “sanctuary cities” were the problem for “defying the federal government” by “welcoming massive numbers of immigrants into their neighborhoods.”

“However, the tragedy of a young girl getting raped in the bathroom at school just might be what turns the attention of limousine liberals from the brainwashing narrative of the Democrats and towards a more sane approach to immigration,” the post read. Later in 2017, the charges were dropped against the immigrants in question.

In 2018, Murphy’s posts got him in trouble with his employer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, where he was the senior manager of finance, analysis, and strategy, and was placed on administrative leave. He has since denied accusations that he is a white nationalist or part of the extremist “alt-right” movement.

Vance’s comments on Murphy’s podcast also decried what he believed were the negative aspects of immigration.

“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance told Murphy. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”

How is Vance going to explain odd, if not xenophobic, comments about white, European immigrants from the early 20th century? Much like his remarks about “childless cat ladies” or his thoughts on “the postmenopausal female,” he’s going to be spending some time trying to put these comments in some kind of context.

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.