Trump’s Weird, Rambling Rally Shows How Much He’s Struggling

Donald Trump capped the first week of his campaign’s so-called “reset,” already punctuated with chaotic speeches that veered off topic into personal attacks against Kamala Harris, with yet another chaotic speech that veered off topic into personal attacks.

While Trump initially seemed more interested in staying on script than his previous failed forays, he still couldn’t help but shift his speech on economic issues into immature smears and complaining.

“Joe Biden hates her, okay? Hates her. You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you? Joe Biden hates her,” Trump said. “This was the overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow. They went out, and I spent $100 million fighting Joe Biden.”

Trump proceeded to make several asides, diverting to his same tired lines and some particularly meandering stories. At one point, he caught himself getting off topic.

“They’ll say, ‘He was rambling.’ I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble,” Trump rambled.

“Anytime I hit too hard, they say, ‘He was rambling!’ Rambling?” Trump said, incredulous.

No matter how many times his campaign may try to keep its candidate on message, Trump can’t seem to stop revisiting his worn-out attacks against Harris. He once again started talking about her laugh, claiming it was “the laugh of a lunatic.”

Trump also complained again about the photo-illustration of Harris on the cover of Time magazine, which he’d previously said made her look like the “most beautiful actress to ever live.”

Trump now claimed it was because they couldn’t get a good enough picture, and scoffed at the idea that Harris was “beautiful.”

“I am much better looking than her,” Trump said, murmuring, “Much better. Much better.”

“I am a better looking person than Kamala!” Trump shouted, as the crowd cheered. But the enthusiasm of his audience was hardly consistent.

Trump’s long-winded tales lost the crowd. He told a particularly meandering story about French president Emmanuel Macron to a mostly quiet audience. Later, he reminisced about being endorsed by renowned basketball coach Bobby Knight ahead of the 2016 election.

“He endorsed me and Indiana was mine.” Trump said, to some mild clapping.

While the former president’s lame insults may wind up his crowds, even they can’t pretend to follow his winding stories.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz showed off his football coach pep talk skills speaking to a high school football team in western Pennsylvania on Sunday.

At a campaign stop, the former high school teacher and football coach spoke on the field to Aliquippa High School football players, many of whom were likely too young to even vote, and linked the values of the sport to democracy.

“Politics isn’t that much different than this,” said Walz, who helped rebuild the Mankato West Scarlets and led them to victory in 1999. “It’s about setting a future goal and trying to reach it. It’s about doing it with dignity and hard work.”

Walz described the fourth quarter of a game where players have to trust their teammates.

“Our country’s not that different,” he continued. “Our neighbors want to be with you. Our neighbors want to do what’s right. And the more we figure out that we’re in this thing together, and we have more in common than we have separated. We’re going to do a heck of a lot better.”

He urged the students not to turn away from politics, despite political conversations feeling “pretty ugly” and “pretty negative” these days.

That negativity can be seen in many Republicans claiming that Walz is lying about coaching his winning team. One recent social media post was shared 5,000 times before it was deemed misinformation.

Clearly, the Harris campaign has a different understanding of “locker room talk” than its opponents. 

Donald Trump is looking for anything to boost his fortunes as his polls continue to drop, so he’s resorted to using A.I. to claim Taylor Swift and her fans endorsed him.

The former president and convicted felon shared several A.I.-generated photos on Truth Social Sunday, including one showing the pop star dressed like Uncle Sam, pointing forward with the text “Taylor Wants You To Vote For Donald Trump.” The post also included other A.I. photos of women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts. He captioned the post, “I accept!”

The post contained one photo of a Swift fan with a “Swifties for Trump” T-shirt, which reportedly is legitimate, The Independent reports. However, Swift herself has not made any endorsements in the 2024 election. She has spoken out against Trump in the past and opposed Republican Marsha Blackburn in her run for the U.S. Senate in 2018.

Trump is desperate for Swift’s endorsement, and has made some creepy comments about her appearance, repeatedly calling her “very beautiful.” Privately, some of his supporters earlier this year reportedly called for a “holy war” if she endorsed Joe Biden, and presumably that extends to Kamala Harris.

On social media, Trump’s attempt to gain sympathy from Swifties was quickly dismissed and criticized, with some calling for Swift to take legal action.

Republicans and the right wing have some bizarre views when it comes to Swift, inventing conspiracy theories about her and calling her a “psyop” because they can’t understand her popularity. Her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has fueled many of those conspiracies, with conservatives bewildered over her fans’ new interest in the National Football League.

Recently, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s comments criticizing “childless cat ladies” drew a large backlash from many, particularly Swift fans, as the pop star is famously a cat person. If Trump thinks that some weak deepfake images will be enough to win over Swift fans after that, he fails to realize that they know him all too well.

J.D. Vance desperately tried to downplay new polls showing Kamala Harris in the lead on Sunday—but he couldn’t back up his outlandish claims.

During an interview on Fox News, host Shannon Bream asked Vance about a New York Times/Siena Poll published Saturday that found Harris was leading Donald Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent. The poll also found that Harris had passed Trump in North Carolina, leading him 49 percent to 47 percent, and that she had significantly narrowed the former president’s lead in Georgia and Nevada.

“What is the administration doing—the campaign doing with that data, as it comes in?” Bream asked Vance, who is not doing so well in the polls himself. “I mean, these are critical states that you’ve gotta have to have a path to 270. Are there any pivots, are there any, um, you know, reconfiguring of what you’re doing in this strategy? Because you talk about your message—but is it not landing?”

“First of all, the polls tend to radically overstate Democrats, we certainly saw that during the polling of summer of 2020 and summer of 2016. And of course, a lot of those polls were wrong when it came to Election Day,” Vance replied.

“Kamala Harris got a bit of a sugar high a couple of weeks ago, but what we’ve actually seen from our own internal data, Shannon, is that Kamala Harris has already leveled off,” Vance said. “If you talk to insiders inside the Kamala Harris campaign, they’re very worried about where they are.”

By Vance’s account, there was absolutely no reason for the campaign to change course to address Trump’s weakening polls—or the high-energy campaign that caused the shift. Behind the scenes, however, the Trump team hired several new staffers last week from old Trump campaigns, including Trump’s campaign manager from 2016, Corey Lewandowski.

Bream also asked Vance about a national Washington Post/ABC/IPSOS poll published Sunday, which found Harris to have a slight lead nationally. “Those are new numbers, so if you think the momentum is not swinging, or your internal polls are suggesting differently—every other poll that’s been released has shown great momentum in her direction,” Bream said.

“You know, Shannon, I think there are a lot of polls that actually show her stagnating and leveling off,” Vane said, claiming that Washington Post/ABC had been “a wildly inaccurate pollster in the summer of 2020.”

“And look, if you see the numbers that we’re seeing and you actually talk to the American people, I feel extremely confident that we’re gonna be in the right place come November. We can’t worry about polls, we have to run through the finish line and encourage everybody to get out there and vote,” Vance said, but he wasn’t done, he had time to sprinkle in one last conspiracy theory.

“Consistently what you’ve seen in 2016 and 2020 is that the media uses fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and to create dissension and conflict with Republican voters,” Vance said, insisting that the campaign was in a “very, very good spot.”

There is little evidence to suggest that a poll published in August could convince someone not to vote in November. If anything, a positive poll might convince someone not to vote, because they think their preferred candidate is safe, rather than a negative one convincing someone it’s a lost cause.

Since Harris began her meteoric rise in the polls, the Trump campaign has taken to the practice of disseminating “unskewed” polls, which means adjusting poll results based on the difference between election results and recalled votes of respondents, or how they claim to have voted four years ago. Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio and data consultant Tim Saler have claimed that new polls understate support for Trump in 2020, and that adjusting according to recalled votes creates a more accurate picture of Trump’s chances. Recalled votes are considered by some to be an unreliable metric.

The Trump campaign appears to have decided that if a new poll doesn’t line up with the recall record, it must be inaccurate. Using this method, the campaign has begun to claim that any poll that doesn’t find Trump in the lead is a lie.

The Democratic National Convention started off with a bang Sunday night, literally branding Trump Tower Chicago in lit-up phrases that Donald Trump isn’t likely to be too happy about.

Locals noticed projections on the side of the 96-floor glass scraper that included “Trump-Vance: Out For Themselves,” as well as “Trump-Vance: ‘Weird as Hell,’” “Harris-Walz: Fighting for You,” and “Project 2025 HQ.”

DNC leadership took responsibility for the troll, confirming to Rolling Stone that the group had rented a room across from the massive hotel and set up a high powered projector in order to accomplish the prank.

“He’s a grifter and nothing we said wasn’t the truth,” Abhi Rahman, deputy communications director for the Democratic National Committee, told the Daily Beast.

“Tonight, everyone is seeing a preview of the contrast that will take center stage this week throughout the Democratic National Convention,” Rahman said in a statement that heavily criticized Project 2025. “Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz have proven records of delivering for working families, and now, they’re running to lead our country into a brighter future.”

But Trump didn’t seem to notice the prank by Monday morning, instead continuing to harp on calling Democrats a lot of socialists and communists.

“The Radical Left protesters in Chicago are going after the Democrat Party because the know they are weak and ready to break into a full blown party of Socialism or, if they really do their job, and with a little bit of luck, the Communist Party of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They are already very close and, having a Marxist trained and believing President whose father is a Marxist professor, Comrade Kamala Harris, stranger things have happened! November 5th, 2024, will be the most important day in the history of our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The former chair of the Fulton County Board of Elections filed an ethics complaint Friday against three of the Georgia State Election Board’s members, accusing them of breaking the law in their efforts to help Donald Trump disrupt the presidential election. 

In the complaint addressed to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, former Chair Cathy Woolard alleged that board members Rick Jeffares, Janice Johnston, and Janelle King had violated the ethics code by failing to follow state law and violating the public’s trust. Through their efforts to  make significant changes to the rules governing Georgia’s elections, they had “at minimum created the appearance that their actions are intended to further their own political preferences,” Woodlard wrote.

Woolard described an instance on July 12, when Jeffares, Johnston, and King had hurriedly organized a private meeting, away from the public and the two other board members, to pass two election rules pitched by Georgia Republican Party Chair Jeff Koons.The first rule required county election boards to post daily ballot counts online, and the second increased the number of partisan monitors during the vote-counting process. Woolard argued that their quorum-lacking rendezvous that day had violated the Open Meetings Act, which requires meetings to be open to the public and for all board members to be given due notice. 

Woolard noted that the same day, Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally and staunch election denier, posted on X saying, “There are now 3 great members of the GA State Election Board—support them. They are fighting hard for us!!! The Dems + Kemp + Raffensperger + Carr are fighting our great SEB Members. Fight back!” 

Last week, the Georgia State Election board voted 3-2 in favor of a new rule, which required a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results, making it significantly easier for county election officials to delay or refuse certification of election results in November. 

“This type of regulation is unprecedented nationally, but it is consistent with a broader strategy among Trump allies to lay the groundwork for refusing to certify presidential election results if he loses in November,” wrote Woolard. 

The next day, Johnston moved to reopen a complaint into the administration of the 2020 election in Fulton County, which Woolard said had been closed in May, before Johnston had been appointed to the board. The state attorney general had advised them not to reopen the fully adjudicated case, but Johnston allegedly indicated she had received outside counsel on the legality of reopening the case. 

That day, Trump reposted a video of the board meeting on Truth Social and called for the attorney general to take action on the reopened complaint into Fulton County. Trump wrote, “We can’t let this happen again. WE MUST WIN GEORGIA IN 2024!!!”

Woolard noted that Trump named the three members specifically during his rally in Atlanta, Georgia, earlier this month. While speaking to the audience of thousands, Trump called the trio “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”

“The members have done nothing to dispel that appearance of impropriety, instead receiving a standing ovation at a Trump rally and openly discussing a position in the Trump administration,” Woolard wrote. “Taken together, these actions pose a serious risk of creating confusion about the rules governing the rapidly approaching election and undermining voter confidence in the integrity of Georgia’s elections.”

Woolard also alleged that Jeffares had stated that he was angling for a position in a potential Trump administration. Jeffares told The Guardian that, when speaking to a former Trump campaign adviser, he’d said, “[I]f y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the south-east, I’d like to have it.”

Woolard served as the election board chair from September 2021 to June 2023. When her replacement, Patrise Perkins-Hooker, resigned in April, Woolard stepped in as interim chair to assist with the Georgia primary elections. While some were hopeful she would hold the position until after the general election, Woolard submitted her own resignation on July 3, writing that “it is time for someone who can serve through the fall elections take the reins.”

Government ethics watchdog American Oversight filed a lawsuit against the board in July, similarly accusing the trio of violating Georgia’s Open Meetings Act. Since 2020, Georgia has had the highest number of certification refusals anywhere in the country—and remains the likely epicenter for Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2024. A report from American Doom found that Georgia had at least twenty-two people who’d pushed election denying conspiracy theorists employed as election officials—including two on its board of elections. 

Donald Trump announced Friday his transition team that will assist with staffing decisions and policy setup should he return to the White House—and two of his sons are on it.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. will be honorary chairs along with the vice presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance. The team’s other members are Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive and the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s presidency; and Howard Lutnik, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm.

Both McMahon and Lutnick are major donors to the Trump campaign, with Lutnik recently hosting a New York fundraiser that raised $15 million for the convicted felon.

“The 2024 GOP Platform to Make America Great Again is a forward-looking agenda that will deliver safety, prosperity and freedom for the American people,” Trump said in a statement. “My administration will deliver on these bold promises.”

Trump Jr. has said he wants to be able to “veto” appointment candidates in Trump’s second administration should he be elected, wishing to ensure that his father has true believers.

“I don’t want to pick a single person for a position of power. All I want to do is block the guys that would be a disaster,” he told Axios in July. “I want to block the liars. I want to block the guys that are, you know, pretending they’re with you.”

Trump Jr.’s presence on the team is a sign of his growing influence with his father. While Trump primarily relied on his daughter Ivanka during his White House term, she has not been involved this time around. Trump Jr. was reportedly one of the driving forces behind Trump picking Vance as his running mate.

While naming a transition team before an election is normal for presidential campaigns, it’s taking place months later than in 2016, when Trump’s transition team was named by June. This could be due to reported bad blood between some Trump campaign staffers and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 team over coveted White House staff positions if Trump wins in November. Trump has tried to distance himself from the conservative manifesto, only for more links to emerge each day.

Another reason it has taken so long could be that Trump’s campaign staff was just shaken up with the hiring of 2016 Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. His hiring may have prompted the transition team to finally be selected.

Some Trump staffers are reportedly wondering if Trump wants Lewandowski to push out senior campaign officials such as co-chairs Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. Maybe the former president envisions his staff fighting each other to prove themselves to him and get prized White House jobs.

In preparation for his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump has sought out the help of right-wing convert Tulsi Gabbard, who was able to best Harris during a 2019 presidential debate. 

Trump’s method of preparing for a debate by only talking to people who agree with him has apparently continued, as he has added the former U.S. representative from Hawaii to his roster of friends for so-called “policy talks” in advance of his upcoming debate next month, according to The New York Times. Others he’s enlisted to help with debate prep in the past include MAGA Representative Matt Gaetz and his running mate J.D. Vance. 

Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt confirmed Gabbard’s involvement in an email to the Times. 

Since her failed presidential run in 2020, Gabbard has left the Democratic Party and become something of a conservative celebrity, elevating transphobia, spreading Russian propaganda, and unsuccessfully endorsing Republicans. 

But Trump may have tapped her for a very specific reason: she may know how to beat Harris in a debate. During the July 2019 presidential debate on CNN, Gabbard went out of her way to go after Harris’s prosecutorial record, issuing a devastating blow to the then-senator’s presidential run. 

Harris “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations, and then laughed about it, when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard said at the time. “She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row, until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep cash bail system in place—that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”

Harris responded saying that she was proud of her record, and “proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches, or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor, but actually doing the work.” Harris also said she’d hoped to legalize marijuana. 

Gabbard insisted that Harris had blocked evidence in a death row case. Gabbard was referring to the case of Kevin Cooper, a man who maintained his innocence on death row for 39 years before he was released. In 2016, while Harris was running for Senate, Cooper’s attorneys asked for new DNA testing, which they were confident would exonerate him. Harris’s office refused to allow the testing, and later said that she had not been involved in the decision.  

Onstage, Gabbard said that Harris owed an apology to those who suffered under her “reign” as California’s attorney general. Harris appeared incredulous over Gabbard’s line of attack, and said she had always opposed the death penalty. 

“My entire career, I have been opposed, personally opposed, to the death penalty, and that has never changed,” Harris said. “And I dare anybody who is in a position to make that decision to face the people I have faced and to say, ‘I will not seek the death penalty.’” 

Harris has already gotten some heat from conservatives for her opposition to the death penalty, specifically over her decision in 2019 not to recommend the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer, despite a pressure campaign from several California Democrats and the officer’s widow. As a freshly elected district attorney, Harris kept to her campaign promise that she would not seek the death penalty. 

While Trump’s team has made it clear he’s interested in going after her record as a district attorney and attorney general, it’s unlikely that Trump will reopen the death penalty issue with Harris the same way Gabbard did—especially considering the fact that Trump supports the death penalty, specifically for drug dealers. 

Meanwhile, Project 2025, which outlines the beginning of the Trump presidency, urges the next administration to “do everything possible to obtain finality” for every prisoner on federal death row, which currently includes 40 people—executing them en masse. 

Trump may hope that Gabbard can give him the edge to go face-to-face with Harris, something he has spent the better part of a month trying desperately to avoid. Amid the scheduling chaos and uncertainty, Trump’s team insisted Thursday that the former president had agreed to a whopping three debates, something no one asked for. Meanwhile, Harris’s team has agreed to the first on September 10 hosted by ABC, and if Trump appears, they will go from there. 

J.D. Vance is doubling down on his remarks on immigrants from a podcast in 2021. 

In a press conference on Friday, Vance defended his remarks in response to a question from The New York Times’ Chris Cameron, who asked the Republican vice presidential candidate about his comments on Jack Murphy Live about the problems from European immigration in early American history, and whether he would have recommended mass deportation back then. 

“Has anybody seen the movie Gangs of New York?” Vance asked the room filled with reporters, citing a 2002 film depicting the city in 1863. “That’s what I’m talking about. You know that when you have these massive ethnic enclaves in our country, it can lead to higher crime rates.”

Citing a fictional movie is probably not the best way to defend controversial comments, especially since the major villain of the movie is an anti-immigrant nativist crime boss based on a real person, which people on X were happy to point out.  

Xenophobic undertones aside, Vance’s point loses more credibility in the face of the fact that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, “ethnic enclaves” or not. And while Vance later segued into stating that immigration policy needs to encourage more assimilation, he also skirted around mentioning Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportations. It seems clear that Vance’s words on immigration will probably help the Harris campaign further paint him as weird.

J.D. Vance made some cringe-worthy mistakes and a Freudian slip at his comments in Milwaukee on Friday. 

Speaking to the Milwaukee Police Association, Vance took a question from a reporter who asked about a recent ABC/IPSOS poll showing voters view Minnesota Governor Tim Walz more favorably than Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick. The Ohio senator’s troubles began when he started out by appearing to misgender the reporter. 

“What’s your response to that poll, and what can you do ahead of the October debate to try to win over more Americans?” asked the journalist.  

Instead of answering the question, Vance tried to deflect by associating Walz with the Black Lives Matter Protests of 2020—but fell right on his face. 

“This is a guy who actively encouraged rioters to burn down Minneapolis during the summer of 2020, it’s the biggest city in his country,” said Vance. “His running mate, Kamala Harris, was offering to burn—to bail those rioters out of prison.” 

During the protests, Harris did tweet out a link to Minnesota Freedom Fund, a nonprofit organization that operates a bail fund. But claiming that she was personally involved is dubious. 

Vance also clearly needs a geography lesson, as he then went on to say that Walz “let rioters burn down the largest city in Minneapolis.” 

In the same breath, Vance misspoke yet again. “I think when people know the truth about Harris and Walz, their anti-crime record …” Vance said before pausing, looking frustrated at his mistakes. 

Referring to the Democrats’ record as “anti-crime” is something that Harris and Walz wouldn’t dispute. Considering the vice president’s background as a prosecutor and the Minneapolis Minnesota governor’s experience cracking down on gun-related crime, they probably wouldn’t mind the framing. 

It seems like Vance is trying to give Trump a run for his money for most flubs in one minute.