The Crucial Role Trump’s Fake Electors Play in His Campaign

The fake electors who worked to overturn the 2020 presidential election results still have their hands in American politics.

The fake electors have since donated en masse to Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, along with scores of other Republicans, according to campaign finance records obtained by The Guardian.

Meshawn Maddock, one of the 16 fake electors criminally charged in Michigan and former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, has donated more than $1,800 to Trump this campaign cycle. Tyler Bowyer, a charged fake elector in Arizona, has donated $645 to the Republican nominee. A fake elector in Georgia who has not been criminally charged, David Hanna, has given at least $25,000 to Trump this year alone.

“It is incredibly rare for politicians to accept campaign contributions from people under indictment,” Michael Beckel, the research director at election watchdog group Issue One, told The Guardian. “It’s generally not good optics for politicians to accept money from people accused of serious wrongdoing. Political candidates generally don’t want to be tied to convicted or accused felons. Yet in certain circles, association with the people who served as fake electors for Donald Trump in 2020 may be a badge of honor.”

Republicans running in U.S. House races have also benefited from their affiliation to Trump and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, raking in campaign contributions from the fake electors on their home turf. In 2023, Arizona Representative Eli Crane received $2,900 from Jim Lamon, one of the 18 criminally charged co-defendants in that state, and Representative Yvette Herrell has received more than $3,000 and $2,900 from a pair of fake electors in New Mexico.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has just turned into a thunderdome, as his newest hire seems to spell trouble for his current staff, according to a report from Puck News published Thursday.

Corey Lewandowski, who served as one of Trump’s campaign managers in 2016, was brought aboard the Trump team earlier this week, carrying with him a history of alleged misconduct and his “Let Trump Be Trump” attitude. Lewandowski will serve as a senior adviser, reportedly above campaign co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.

The decision to formally bring Lewandowski back into the fold, after he served as an informal adviser, came straight from Trump, according to Puck’s senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri. The move has launched speculation that Trump intends for Lewandowski’s return to result in the removal of LaCivita and Wiles.

“Susie is a survivor; she’s not going anywhere. But then you have LaCivita and Corey Lewandowski, two alpha men,” a source close to Lewandowski told Palameri. “It’s like Trump just wants them to kill each other and for one to win so he doesn’t have to actually fire anyone.”

As Trump’s team has struggled to maintain an effective line of attack against its new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, the campaign has been forced to defend LaCivita and Wiles for their floundering efforts.

There is also one big reason to believe LaCivita is more vulnerable than his counterpart: his exorbitant fee. Advanced Strategies, LaCivita’s firm, has been collecting $50,000 from the Republican National Committee each month, contributing to the whopping $1.7 million he’s already invoiced in just 2024—quickly surpassing the $1.65 million he billed the year before, according to Puck.

Trump is clearly trying to recreate the behind-the-scenes magic that got him elected in the first place. But unfortunately for his staff, that involved major late-campaign turnover. The former president fired Lewandowski from his campaign in June 2016 and promoted Paul Manafort.

For his part, Lewandowski seemed to deny rumors he would take LaCivita to task over his mounting bills. “I have never told anyone I will be conducting a forensic audit of the campaign, nor have I alluded to, or have any understanding of, how much money Chris LaCivita may or may not have billed this campaign,” Lewandowski told Palameri, adding that rumors he was there to push anyone out were “fake news.”

Lewandowski’s arrival comes with a slate of other aides from old Trump campaigns, and more are sure to follow. “There are things and people that swirl around Lewandowski, and if you bring him back on, they’re coming with him,” the source close to Lewandowski told Palameri. “He’s a mini tornado. He stirs things up and brings things into the orbit.”

Lewandowski’s hiring signals Trump’s desire to be surrounded by those who agree with him and won’t try to change him—while many of the former president’s own allies have begun urging him to do the exact opposite of his favored strategy of personal attacks.

Project 2025, the conservative manifesto put together by the Heritage Foundation, is starting to worry Republicans, including Donald Trump, who see it as a political liability.

These Republicans are trying desperately to figure out how to handle the negative attention from the project, which Democrats have seized on in effective attacks against Trump and the GOP.

“There came a point at which people realized, ‘Oh, you might have actually done something that jeopardizes Heritage’s influence in the next administration,” one source close to the conservative organization told NOTUS.

When Democrats started to attack Project 2025, Heritage staff saw it as “fun” initially, but that was short-lived after Trump, fed up with the negative association with his presidential campaign, disavowed the project.

“People are legitimately worried,” the source said.

The foundation tried to downplay the plan, only to find that it didn’t help in the face of Democratic attacks, which have continued unabated. One Democratic group has even started to specifically target certain House Republicans by tying them to the manifesto.

The fallout of Trump’s frustration with being tied to the project led to the resignation of Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, who some conservatives see as taking the fall for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. Roberts marketed the plan much more heavily than the foundation normally would for its projects.

As more and more revelations come out about the project, Democrats have more avenues to attack it, especially as Roberts continues to defend it and even brag about his associations with Trump. A photo revealed that the two even took a private flight together in 2022. And Trump’s vehement denial of having anything to do with the manifesto has drawn the ire of some of his biggest supporters. No matter what they do, conservatives are stuck.

Donald Trump has angered veterans by claiming that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor.

The Republican presidential nominee, who famously avoided the Vietnam War draft with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs, denigrated the value of the Medal of Honor at a campaign event in New Jersey Thursday night by claiming that the award’s civilian variant is “much better.” According to Trump, that’s because the military medal’s recipients, who receive the honor for valor in combat, are usually “in very bad shape” since they’ve been “hit so many times” by bullets.

“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version,” Trump said, mistakenly referring to the honor bestowed for valor in combat. “But civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

Trump mentioned the award after he was introduced by one of his top patrons, Miriam Adelson, a heavy-handed Republican donor who became the richest Israeli in the world after her husband, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, died in 2021. The couple earned Trump’s favor after they funneled $25 million to Trump’s super PACs in 2016 and donated $5 million to his inauguration. That earned them a spot on the dais, just a few rows behind Jared Kushner, as Trump was sworn in. In 2018, their contributions effectively bought Mrs. Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2019 influenced Trump to recognize Israel’s sovereignty in Golan Heights, an Israeli-occupied portion of southwest Syria that the religious state captured in 1967.

Four years later, the Adelsons eclipsed their previous spending on the pro-Israel politico with a $90 million donation, and gave $300 million to Republican-focused Senate and congressional Leadership Funds, outspending the next three donors combined, according to Intelligencer.

“She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for—and that’s through committees and everything else,” Trump said, referring to Adelson. “I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

The comments rubbed veterans the wrong way, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a bipartisan super PAC, highlighted the clip from Thursday’s event, writing on X that Trump believes the Medal of Honor is “secondary to the medal he gives his billionaire funders.”

“He doesn’t care about our military or their sacrifices,” they added.

Retired Navy intelligence officer and veterans’ advocate Travis Akers felt similarly, posting on Friday that Trump’s comments were “like a fever dream.” In a separate post, Akers said Trump’s remarks were “disgusting” and “offensive on so many levels.”

“I am still trying to wrap my head around how grossly and despicably Donald Trump insulted Medal of Honor recipients last night,” Akers said.

House Oversight Chair James Comer has launched an investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, his second probe into Donald Trump’s opposition in less than a week.

Comer alleged that Walz has a “longstanding cozy relationship with China” and has connections to the Chinese Communist Party, according to a press release published by the committee on Friday.

“Mr. Walz has visited China dozens of times, served as a fellow at a Chinese institution that maintains a devotion to the CCP, and spoke alongside the President of a Chinese organization the State Department exposed as a CCP effort to influence and co-opt local leaders,” Comer said. “FBI briefers recently informed the Committee that the Bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force investigates CCP activity that is similar to China’s engagement with Governor Walz. The American people deserve to fully understand how deep Governor Walz’s relationship with China goes.”

In a letter to FBI head Christopher Wray, Comer wrote that he was investigating Walz as part of a government-wide probe into the CCP’s “political warfare operations against America.” Comer claimed that Walz has “problematic engagement with concerning entities and individuals.”

But Comer only listed one: Consul General Zhao Jian, a Chinese diplomat, lower-ranking than an ambassador, who works across nine Midwestern states—including Minnesota. Comer said Zhao and Walz only met once.

Comer requested that the FBI turn over all of its documents on “any Chinese entity or individual with whom Mr. Walz may have engaged or partnered,” as well as any guidance the FBI may have given Walz about engaging with China.

Walz is said to have traveled to China an estimated 30 times, and set up a program to take high school students on educational trips there in the 1990s and 2000s.

As a member of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, Walz was able to use his firsthand knowledge of China to wield well-informed criticisms of China’s government and its reported human rights abuses, according to The New York Times.

Walz was also credited with being one of the only Democrats to support the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which required the U.S. to sanction officials who committed human rights abuses in Hong Kong, keeping it alive until it was eventually passed.

This isn’t even the first time this week that Comer has gone after one of Trump’s opponents. Comer launched a probe into Vice President Kamala Harris’s involvement with work on the U.S. southern border on Monday. He previously attempted a similar gambit by spearheading an investigation into the Biden family—which crumbled, having not produced any evidence of the president, or his family’s, supposed wrongdoings.

Right-wingers are spreading another conspiracy about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: he’s lying about liking “white guy tacos.”

Kamala Harris and her running mate on Thursday posted a promotional video of them discussing food, during which Walz brought up his Midwestern palette.

“I have white guy tacos,” said Walz.

 “What does that mean? Like, mayonnaise and tuna? What are you doing?” Harris responded jokingly.

“Pretty much ground beef and cheese,” Walz said. “They said to be careful and let her know this. That black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota.”

The innocent exchange led to a total Republican meltdown.

“Why is Kamala the expert on tacos?” asked Fox & Friends co-host Will Cain. “Did she say white guy tacos are tuna in mayonnaise?”

Conservative provocateur Mike Cernovich took it further, accusing Walz of lying about skipping seasoning. “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”

Cernovich pointed to a 2016 award-winning recipe by the Minnesota governor for “Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish,” which included the spices paprika, chili powder, onion powder, and garlic powder.  “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”

Even Senator Ted Cruz got in on the drama, writing, “hispanics are not tacos.” Unclear what he meant there. 

It seems like Republicans will find anything to get mad about if it comes from Harris and Walz—maybe they’ll eventually launch an investigation on what actually goes into “white guy tacos.”

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.