Even Lara Trump Can’t Explain Trump’s New Ballot Conspiracy Theory

Donald Trump keeps repeating lies about election fraud, and on Tuesday morning, CNN’s Kasie Hunt called out his daughter-in-law about it.

Hunt brought up a Truth Social post Donald Trump made on Sunday where he said that 20 percent of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent, claimed Democrats are cheating, and called for an investigation. The CNN presenter asked Lara Trump, a co-chair of the Republican National Committee, why the former president was saying this if he wanted more votes.

“He’s specifically referencing information from the 2020 election,” she replied, though that’s not actually clear in the Truth Social Post. “What we’re talking about right now is making sure that every vote matters and every vote counts.”

Hunt followed up, asking for evidence of fraudulent mail-in ballots in the 2020 Pennsylvania election.

“I didn’t see that report, so I’d have to go back and look at it,” Trump replied. “I can’t directly speak to that.”

Trump spent the interview trying to spin her father-in-law’s words by claiming he wants every voter in the U.S. to vote how they are most comfortable, whether that’s by mail-in ballot or in person. But this contradicts a lot of what the Republican presidential nominee has said and continues to say about the electoral process.

The former president’s conspiracies about fraudulent ballots recently convinced Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin to insist on paper ballots in his state and his supporters in Georgia to change state election laws to help him. Meanwhile, he’s pressuring Republicans in the House to attach his “voter fraud” measures into a critical spending bill—thus changing voting laws just weeks before the election.

Trump has a long history of casting doubt on the electoral process, from his repeated claims about a rigged election to his refusal to accept the 2020 results and subsequent attempt to overturn them, and his preemptive efforts to discredit November’s results if they go against him. On Tuesday, Hunt exposed how Trump’s closest advisers enable this behavior even when they can’t explain it themselves.

The rules of the presidential debate are apparently still being hashed out just hours before the first matchup between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

During an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Harris’s communications director Michael Tyler accused Trump of being “muzzled” by his campaign over the controversial decision to mute his microphone during Harris’s responses—a call that some critics have derided as the political equivalent of bowling lane “bumper guards.”

Skirting a question about Harris’s spontaneous burst onto the 2024 campaign trail, Tyler sidestepped to jab Trump and the former president’s inability to control himself on the debate stage.

“Yeah, listen, I think, well, it remains to be seen what Donald Trump says, obviously his team decided to overrule him and has muzzled him somewhat on the debate stage,” Tyler said. “But I think regardless of which version of Donald Trump actually shows up on the debate stage, it is an opportunity for the vice president, right? To communicate her vision for where she wants to take this country.”

Tyler’s media hit clearly got to the former president, who took to Truth Social to vent his frustrations about Harris’s publicist.

“Why does FoxNews keep putting on, for endless periods of time, Michael Tyler, Kamala’s publicist, who spews nothing but lies—like Project 2025, etc,” Trump fumed. “Fox tries to be so politically correct, when the other side plays for keeps. RIDICULOUS!!!”

Donald Trump is once again trying to steer the Republican Party from the backseat.

On Tuesday, the Republican presidential nominee decided to plant himself in the middle of the debate over funding the government, making it that much harder for House Speaker Mike Johnson to rally his caucus behind a six-month continuing resolution to avert a shutdown in three weeks. At the crux of the issue is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility—or SAVE—Act, a piece of legislation that would require proof of citizenship in order to vote.

“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday afternoon. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN—CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”

Trump regularly (and baselessly) insists that Democrats are letting undocumented immigrants vote in an attempt to rig the election. This latest claim comes as he struggles to attract new voters, while his presidential opponent Kamala Harris has seen a steady rise in the polls.

It is, of course, already illegal and impossible for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections. But adding a proof of citizenship requirement to the stopgap funding measure would restrict voter access in less resourced regions of the country, and add another barrier to fulfilling the quintessential American ideal of a free and fair democracy.

Johnson, meanwhile, is already on the verge of losing the funding measure: currently, the conservative leader is facing six “no” votes, while he can only afford to lose the votes of four House Republicans.

But it’s not the first time that Trump has tried to seed division in the American legislative system from the campaign trail. Earlier this year, the former president had a heavy hand in coercing Republicans to tank a bipartisan border deal so that he could overinflate concerns about immigration and run on the issue.

A judge dismissed a lawsuit Tuesday from a member of the Fulton County, Georgia, elections board who refused to certify the results of the state’s primary election.

In May, board official Julie Adams launched a lawsuit against the county, arguing that she could not certify the results of the primary election without having access to all information about the voting procedures. Elections Board director Nadine Williams had barred her from seeing some information.

Adams also sought a court ruling on whether her duty to certify election results is “discretionary, not ministerial, in nature,” according to the suit.

Judge Robert C.I. McBurney dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning that Georgia election officials will continue to have a mandatory duty to certify the election results, scrambling Adams’s attempt to upend years of precedent and Georgia state law.

An amendment to Georgia’s state constitution allows for plaintiffs to seek declaratory relief from the government, which could determine Adams’s obligations in her role as an election superintendent. However, the law required that any complaint seeking relief must be brought against the state or local government only, and no other forms of relief can be included in the complaint.

“Failure to comply with either requirement is fatal: the non-compliant complaint ‘shall be dismissed,’” McBurney wrote in his order.

Adams’s first complaint in May was brought against the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, as well as Williams. According to the judge, “Neither is a proper party for such a suit.” The complaint also requested injunctive relief, which would prohibit Williams from denying Adams access to election materials and processes.

In July, the defendants argued a motion to dismiss using this argument, and Adams amended her original complaint, bringing her case solely against Fulton County. “That was too little, too late; the fatal pleading flaw cannot be undone,” wrote the judge.

Adams, a staunch election denier, was backed by the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.

McBurney made clear that Adams can refile her claim, this time listing the proper party, and that if she “moves with alacrity,” her claim “can be considered alongside” a challenge to the Georgia election board’s new rule requiring a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results. The rule, which was passed in August, would make it significantly easier for county election officials to delay or refuse certification of election results in populous Democratic strongholds such as Fulton or DeKalb counties in November.

At Tuesday’s night’s presidential debate, Kamala Harris is sure to get under Donald Trump’s skin. But just to be extra sure, she’s bringing two of his old administration staffers along.

Former Trump White House director of communications Anthony Scaramucci and former Trump national security official Olivia Troye will be attending the debate in Philadelphia as guests and surrogates of the vice president. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly tried to dismiss the news.

“Nobody is going to listen to someone who was a low-level staffer who didn’t even work for President Trump and someone who barely lasted more time than an expired ham sandwich as White House communications director,” Cheung said in a statement, referring to Scaramucci’s infamously short 10-day tenure.

Scaramucci has not held back on criticizing Trump and his campaign, warning about the repercussions of another Trump presidency and even offering predictions on how long J.D. Vance would last as Trump’s running mate. Troye has called out Trump’s mental fitness, alluding to multiple worrying instances during his time in office, and made a speech at the Democratic National Convention calling for her fellow Republicans to reject Trump and support democracy.

In 2016, Trump brought Bill Clinton sexual harassment accusers Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick to one of his debates with Hillary Clinton in an attempt to abuse and humiliate his opponent. Harris’s aim appears to be different: to show viewers that people who used to work for Trump now see the dangers of him returning to office. Bringing Troye and Scaramucci also offers the side benefit of getting Trump rattled.

The debate promises to be an interesting contest, especially since Trump has tried to get out of it and his campaign has argued over the rules, trying to keep microphones muted when it isn’t Trump or Harris’s turn to speak. The Trump campaign seems to be worried that the former president and convicted felon won’t be able to keep himself from interrupting or resorting to petty insults, and Harris’s campaign wants him to be able to hurt his own cause. Having guests at the debate who Trump can’t stand may allow Harris to get inside his head.

With less than three weeks to avert a government shutdown, House Speaker Mike Johnson is back to begging his caucus to keep the money flowing.

The Louisiana politico has vowed to bring a continuing resolution to the floor “as soon as possible.” In a meeting with House Republicans on Tuesday, Johnson reportedly encouraged his fellow conservatives to back the six-month funding bill, claiming that Americans around the country had been enthusiastic about the measure when he shopped it around in August, reported Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

Johnson can only afford to lose four House Republican votes on the continuing resolution, which has been integrally tied to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility—or SAVE—Act, a piece of legislation that would require proof of citizenship in order to vote. So far, he’s got six “nos,” including Representatives Tim Burchett, Jim Banks, Mike Rogers, Cory Mills, Thomas Massie, and Matt Rosendale.

Five House Democrats voted for the SAVE Act before it was rolled into the continuing resolution, which would extend government funding until March. Republicans have warned that any opposition from those five, who include Representatives Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, would be “pure politics.”

But there are other, fiscal reasons why the continuing resolution has a rocky future in the House, including fears that such a measure would have a negative impact on the Pentagon.

And even if the stopgap bill does manage to scrape by the House, its chances of passing through the Senate are slim to none, setting the stage for an ominously familiar experience to the one that preceded former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s exit.

“As we have said repeatedly, avoiding a government shutdown requires bipartisanship, not a bill drawn up by one party. Speaker Johnson is making the same mistake as former Speaker McCarthy did a year ago, by wasting precious time catering to the hard MAGA right,” Senate Democratic leaders said in a statement issued last week. “This tactic didn’t work last September, and it will not work this year either. The House Republican funding proposal is an ominous case of déjà vu.

“If Speaker Johnson drives House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the odds of a shutdown go way up,” they continued. “Americans will know that the responsibility of a shutdown will be on the House Republicans’ hands.”

Kamala Harris’s campaign is doubling down on mocking Donald Trump for his “weird obsession with crowd sizes.”

A new advertisement released Tuesday by the Harris campaign used video of Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, during which he ribbed Trump over his endless—and often baseless—bragging about how the crowds he draws are so much bigger than Harris’s.

Spliced into Obama’s brutal roast was the sound of crickets on top of footage of Trump’s half-empty arenas, with rallygoers yawning and looking bored. Ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate, the advertisement aired on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.

After Obama’s remarks at the DNC, Trump complained that the former president had “taken loose shots” and that he should be allowed to get personal too, amid his campaign’s desperate attempts to get him to “stick to policy.” Clearly, Obama’s comment had gotten under Trump’s skin, and that’s exactly what the Harris campaign is attempting to do with its new ad spot.

When it comes to Trump’s reliance on lame personal attacks, however, the Republican nominee is certainly compensating for something—whether it be deteriorating public speaking skills or his dearth of workable policy ideas.

Donald Trump’s shady new crypto venture is primed to make him and his family millions should he make it to the White House.

World Liberty Financial, or WLFI, a decentralized finance platform, promises to “put the power of finance back in the hands of the people,” but it’s actually looking a lot more like a get-rich-quick scheme for Trump and his sons, according to Judd Legum’s Public Information Substack.

The Republican nominee is the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate,” while Eric and Don Jr. are both Web 3 Ambassadors. Barron Trump, a freshman at New York University, is a “DeFi Visionary.” The company has gone to great lengths to disassociate from the Trump family in any formal capacity, according to a draft of the white papers obtained by CoinDesk, but it’s apparent that Trump’s family is a major part of WLFI’s inception—and most certainly its promotion.

Late last month, Trump posted the link to World Liberty Financial alongside a blurry edit of himself, with audio from one of his campaign speeches, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.” Wedged between their typical anti-immigrant slime, racist memes, and posts gushing over their father’s bravery, Eric and Don Jr. have repeatedly boosted WLFI’s posts announcing new additions to its team.

WLFI even appears to have adopted some of Trump’s rhetoric. Its mission, according to a recent post on X, is to “make crypto and America great by driving the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance.”

While WLFI purports to be a solution to the “rigged” finance system, it seems the Trump boys are the ones who stand to make a buck.

Seventy percent of WLFI’s governance tokens, which grant holders voting powers, will be reserved for “insiders,” according to the company’s draft white papers, leaving only 30 percent available for public purchase. Typically, governance tokens are used to fund a venture’s growth, but this abnormal distribution suggests that it could be a cash grab by the Trump family, according to CoinDesk.

WLFI’s tokenomics plans have not yet been finalized, one person close to the project told CoinDesk.

WLFI is already trying to get around strict Securities and Exchange Commission scrutiny by making its tokens “locked indefinitely,” or nontransferable. This is where Trump’s political ambitions turn WLFI into a blatant moneymaking scheme. Should Trump win the presidential election, he could install a new SEC chair who is far more friendly to cryptocurrencies than Gary Gensler, whom Trump has already pledged to fire. This would allow Trump and his family to “unlock” their shares without incurring the wrath of regulators.

Already, WLFI has given the Trump family some trouble. Last week, Lara and Tiffany Trump’s X accounts were hacked and used to promote a crypto scam designed to look like World Liberty Financial.

There are some concerns that WLFI itself could be vulnerable to hacks. The owner of World Liberty Finance LLC is Zak Folkman, who previously ran Dough Finance, a lending app that was hacked in July, losing its customers more than $2 million. It appears that some of WLFI’s code was lifted directly from the defunct Dough Finance.

Donald Trump is running his 2024 campaign on vengeance, even if his allies deny it.

In response to Trump’s violent threats against his political enemies over the weekend, CNN published a brief supercut of prominent Republicans trying to deny the former president’s appetite for revenge.

“Donald Trump has been the one that has been very clear,” claimed Senator Marco Rubio in July. “His vengeance is going to be by winning and making America great again, not going after his political opponents.”

“This is the new narrative by all the lemmings in the mainstream media this week: ‘Trump wants revenge and vengeance,’” said former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway in June.

“President Trump has said it himself, the best revenge is success,” said Senator Tim Scott back in May, going on to fight with CNN’s Abby Phillip, who attempted to offer an on-air fact-check to the South Carolina senator’s claims.

Though Trump did say in February that “my revenge will be success,” he has also made plenty of public calls to take revenge in the form of imprisonment, military tribunals, and execution. 

Over the weekend, Trump amped up his language around punishing his enemies. On Truth Social, he threatened to punish “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters and Corrupt Election Officials” to the “fullest extent of the Law which will include long prison sentences” if he believes they meddle in the election. At another speech in Wisconsin, he called for a violent mass deportation of migrants, stating that “getting them out will be a bloody story.”

Will Trump be held to account for his threats on the debate stage?

One of the architects of the conservative Project 2025 manifesto demonstrated on CNN Monday the many ways in which Donald Trump is tied to the project.

Speaking to Kaitlan Collins on The Source, the project’s former director, Paul Dans, admitted that he’s visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate several times and has spoken with Trump’s campaign staff there, including the campaign’s co-chair Susie Wiles.

Trump has tried desperately to distance himself and his campaign from the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, with little success. Collins pressed Dans, pointing out that six of Trump’s Cabinet members contributed to the document, along with some of Trump’s advisers, such as Peter Navarro and Johnny McEntee.

“And so some people say, ‘OK, well, 140 of his staffers worked on it. How can you say that he has nothing to do with it?” Collins asked Dans.

Dans tried to explain it away by saying Trump “personally didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Certainly, a lot of folks, you know, worked on it, came out of the Trump administration, but that’s natural for any Republican administration. You’re going to have the carryover for the next one,” Dans said.

Dans resigned as director of the project in July, thanks in part to Trump’s attempts to disavow the conservative manifesto and in part due to a power struggle for control over staffing in a possible second Trump term. But Dans’s resignation did not tamp down criticism from Democrats over the project’s aims, nor did it successfully give Trump any distance.

The project’s agenda items include everything from the dismantling of government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, to the implementation of national abortion bans and contraception restrictions. Trump has influenced the project, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, also has extensive connections to it, even writing the foreword to a book by one of the plan’s architects, Kevin Roberts. Project 2025 has become an effective attack line by Democrats, who have successfully pointed out that it’s a Republican wish list with disturbing aims.