Trump’s Disastrous Debate Night Is Already Hurting His Wallet

Donald Trump’s poor debate performance is now hitting his wallet—his media company’s stock plummeted in Wednesday morning trading.

Shares of Trump Media & Technology stock opened 15 percent lower the morning after Tuesday night’s debate on ABC, very close to an all-time low for the company since its initial public offering in March. It’s not a good time, either: In eight days, Trump and the company’s other large shareholders will be allowed to sell their stock.

Trump owns about 57 percent of Trump Media’s stock, amounting to about $2 billion at market close on Tuesday. Wednesday’s early trading caused the value of Trump’s stock to drop $200 million. It’s a sign that investors don’t think he performed well during Tuesday’s debate, as the stock’s performance often shows how people are feeling about the former president.

It’s been a bad couple of months for Trump Media. While its value spiked during the Republican National Convention in July, the stock has declined in the weeks since, particularly after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential election. When Trump broke a long hiatus to finally post again on X (formerly Twitter) last month, the stock nosedived, as it looked like bad news for Truth Social, Trump Media’s only product.

Trump is in a lot of debt, whether it’s unpaid bills, his legal fees, or the financial judgment against him due to his fraud trial. In fact, the state of New York may very well seize his assets. He’s resorted to half-baked moneymaking schemes like selling NFT trading cards, his own branded Bibles, and assassination-themed sneakers. Will he sell off his stock as soon as he gets the chance? If the other major shareholders in the company do so before he can, the value of his company will plummet even further, and he could be left holding a company that’s worth less than his grandiose promises.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have decided to go all in on the outlandish conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Did you hear that sound? That was the American public discourse hitting rock bottom, and shattering into one million pieces.

During the presidential debate Tuesday night, Trump elevated a blatantly racist and thoroughly unsubstantiated rumor that individuals in a community of 15,000 Haitian immigrants had begun eating house pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in! They’re eating the cats! They’re eating … they’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” Trump claimed while Kamala Harris laughed at him. “And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

When ABC News moderator David Muir fact-checked him with a statement from Springfield’s City Manager Ryan Heck, who’d said they’d received “no credible reports” of any such activity, Trump fired back that it had to be true because he’d “seen it on television!”

Well, there you go.

Apparently, even Trump knew that wasn’t going to fly in terms of proof, so after the debate, he took to Truth Social in the early hours of the morning to post his own so-called evidence.

Trump posted what appeared to be a call report by the Clark County Communications Center, made on August 26, in which a caller alleged that they had seen a group of people walking down the street carrying geese. The caller “said he could tell they were Haitian because he was within earshot of them to hear them speaking Creole,” according to the report.

Trump also reposted audio of the call, which was obtained by The Federalist, a right-wing opinion blog. In the New York Post-ian world into which Trump has dragged us, it seems a police call is presented as tantamount to a conviction—and a wild goose is tantamount to a house pet.

Trump also posted the video that spurred the right-wing hysterics—of a woman from Canton, Ohio, who allegedly ate a cat. Not only is there no indication that the woman is a Haitian immigrant, but she is a U.S. citizen.

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance pushed back at a question from NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor that implied that he had helped spread the insidious right-wing rumor, which could possibly endanger Haitian immigrants. Earlier that day, he’d posted a rant about how it didn’t really matter if the rumors about pet-eating were actually true.

“No one spread false claims,” Vance said, as he reared up to spread more false claims.

“What they’ve said is that a small migrant community” has “caused a lot of problems,” Vance explained.

“It’s led to higher rates of communicable diseases, that’s a verifiable fact.” It is verifiable—but certainly not verified. In fact, on Tuesday, Ohio’s Department of Health director Bruce Vanderhoff said that Springfield has “not seen a measurable, discernible increase in vaccine preventable illness.”

“It’s led to animals disappearing,” Vance continued, citing reports from “many” of his constituents. He claimed that the city manager “isn’t fully in touch with what’s going on on the ground there,” implying that, somehow, he personally was.

Trump and Vance have chosen to double down on these distinctly unproven claims about a group of vulnerable people, because that is precisely what they have been doing for the entirety of their campaign. At his rallies, Trump has repeatedly cited instances of “migrant crime” ripped right from the pages of tabloids in an attempt to motivate voters to support his fascist plan for mass deportations.

Vance said his constituents reported seeing “abductions with their own eyes.” Earlier that day, Vance had said it was entirely possible that the rumors would “turn out to be false.” With his blatant flip-flopping, it’s clear that Vance doesn’t actually care whether the rumors are true.

“What do I think is a bigger problem: insulting 20,000 people or the fact that my constituents can’t live a good life because Kamala Harris opened the border? I think it’s Kamala Harris needs to do her job, and make people happier and healthier in this country,” Vance said Tuesday night before walking off.

After Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris Tuesday night, the worst person you know decided to weigh in.

Elon Musk had disgusting things to say after reading Swift’s Instagram post supporting Harris for president. “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” wrote Musk on X. Talk about weird.

Musk’s response is in reference to Swift’s sign-off in her post, where she self-identified as a “childless cat lady,” a dig at J.D. Vance’s continuous attacks on single women. In her Instagram photo, the pop star is holding one of her three cats, Benjamin Button. Swift also criticized Donald Trump for using A.I.-generated images of her to make it appear that she was supporting him.

Though it’s not clear exactly what bump Swift’s endorsement might give Harris, clearly it was big enough to trigger the billionaire funding Trump’s ground campaign.

Musk is known for threatening to spread his seed as part of the pro-natalist movement and regularly stokes fear about birth rates. But before Musk threatens to impregnate another female musician, maybe he should focus on his own problems, like winning his custody battle with former girlfriend Grimes over three of his 12 known children.

After falling short in his debate with Kamala Harris Tuesday night, Donald Trump is lashing out at his favorite network.

Speaking on Fox News Wednesday morning, Trump told Fox & Friends that he would prefer Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, or Laura Ingraham to moderate any future debate, saying that Watters “was fantastic last night, what he said.”

“Jesse really got it. Jesse said that Trump won that debate. We won that debate by a lot. No, I wouldn’t want Martha involved. But I would take some others, yeah,” Trump said, arguing that Bret Baier and Martha McCallum aren’t qualified to moderate.

The small amount of praise that Trump received Tuesday night came from Hannity and Watters. Hannity said that the biggest loser in the debate was ABC, while Watters, trying to spin the debate in favor of the former president, said that “all of the memorable lines were from Donald Trump.”

Trump may not be willing to admit it, but he probably knows that his debate performance was a disaster. Harris’s strategy Tuesday night was to bait Trump into being himself and shooting his mouth off, and she succeeded, getting him to sound like right-wing mad libs at times. He went on a long-winded, inaccurate rant about Afghanistan, claimed that he had “concepts of a plan” on health care, and gave a disturbing answer about January 6.

Getting friendlier moderators may be the only way Trump could look better in a future debate. But it’s a very long shot that Kamala Harris would agree to a debate with his favorite anchors, as she already rejected a Fox News debate that Trump wanted to have on September 4. Plus, there’s the well-known fact that the conservative network is biased toward Trump and wants him to win. If Trump wants another debate, he’s going to have to go to a network that his supporters don’t run. Is he desperate enough to take the risk of being trounced again?

Donald Trump is trying to make it sound like Kamala Harris is creating transgender people from scratch, like his beloved “late great Hannibal Lecter.”

“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” said Trump during the debate on Tuesday, sounding like your weird estranged grandfather at Christmas dinner.

The line quickly went viral for its truly wild combination of words in successive order.

If we want to give Trump a modicum of the benefit of the doubt, which it’s not really clear he deserves, the Republican nominee may have been referring to a recently uncovered 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire.

In the survey, Harris was asked if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”

Harris replied, “Yes.”

But Harris, in her support for gender-affirming surgery several years ago, certainly isn’t making that a central part of her platform in 2024. 

Fearmongering about trans people and migrants is nothing new for Trump, though. At a Moms for Liberty conference earlier this month, Trump went on a similar rant when he alleged that public schools will provide surgery to a transgender minor without parental consent. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation,” Trump said. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” There is no evidence that any schools do such a thing, even with parental permission. However, that didn’t stop Moms for Liberty from thanking Trump for the lie.

But Trump never let the truth get in his way before.

During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump had a long-winded, barely coherent answer about his administration’s Afghanistan policy, where the U.S. was negotiating with the Taliban.

Trump claimed that the Taliban was killing a lot of U.S. soldiers with snipers, and that he spoke to “Abdul,” who he claimed was and is the head of the Taliban, warning him against continuing those murders. Trump said that “Abdul” asked, “Why do you send me a picture of my house?”

Trump, by his own account, purportedly responded, “You’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul,” and said that for 18 months, no U.S. soldiers were killed.

In reality, almost none of this is true. The head of the Taliban since 2016 has been a cleric named Hibatullah Akhundzada, although one of the Taliban’s negotiators with the United States was Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of Akhundzada’s deputies. A former Wall Street Journal reporter also notes that the Taliban didn’t use snipers often and was more effective at killing people with IEDs.

Nor did Trump oversee an 18-month stretch where no U.S. soldiers were killed. There was one such stretch where no U.S. service members were killed in combat, but it happened from March 2020 to August 2021, half of which was during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Last month, Trump’s former national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, told CNN that Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban resulted in the U.S. forcing the Afghan government to release 5,000 members of the extremist organization, a fact that Kamala Harris was only too happy to point out during the debate in her takedown of his word salad.

Trump tried to claim Tuesday night that if he were president during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, it would have gone a lot differently and favorably, with no U.S. casualties. In reality, it would have likely gone as badly, if not worse, and Trump would have had the benefit of a compliant right-wing media backing him to the hilt.

It’s official: Childless Cat Lady Taylor Swift is voting for Kamala Harris.

The pop superstar managed to completely erase all buzz around the presidential debate Tuesday night by coming out in favor of the Democratic nominee. She shared a post on her Instagram, alongside a photo of herself with one of her cats.

“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most,” Swift wrote.

She slammed Donald Trump for creating a weird A.I. version of the singer and making the fake Swift endorse Trump. The real Swift cited this moment as one of the reasons she decided to be “very transparent” about her voting plans.

“The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” she said.

“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”

Swift urged her fans to register to vote and to vote early, and included information for how to do both in her Instagram story. She then cheekily signed her post,

With love and hope,
Taylor Swift
Childless Cat Lady

Harris (as well as her predecessor on the Democratic ticket, Joe Biden) and Trump have been vying for Swift’s endorsement. In addition to being a musical powerhouse and an elite NFL WAG (wife and girlfriend), Swift has proven herself to be an influential political voice in recent years. In October, Swift posted on Instagram for National Voter Registration Day, resulting in more than 35,000 new voter registrations—a 23 percent increase compared to the same day the year before.

Donald Trump tried to sidestep giving a policy position on health care, and walked straight off a rhetorical cliff.

During the presidential debate Tuesday night, Trump struggled to answer a question about his health care plan, accidentally revealing that he didn’t have one at all.

After his particularly lackluster response criticizing Obamacare but giving no alternatives, ABC moderate Linsey Davis asked Trump outright if he knew what he was talking about. “Yes or no, you still do not have a plan?” she said.

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump replied. “I’m not president right now.”

“But if we come up with something, I would only change it if we come up with something that is better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that. And you will be hearing about it in the not too distant future.”

On X, people immediately jumped on Trump’s pathetic response as being relatable … for being total bullshit.

Trump’s ridiculous nonanswer reminded users of the most pathetic characters television has to offer.

Donald Trump’s take on Kamala Harris’s racial identity somehow managed to get even worse.

During Tuesday night’s debate, the former president was probed about his controversial statements on Harris’s racial identity, including that the biracial Democrat had “turned Black.”

“I want to ask a bigger picture question tonight. Why do you think that it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?” prompted ABC’s David Muir.

“I don’t. And I don’t care,” Trump said. “I don’t care what she is. I don’t care.”

“You make a big deal out of something, I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is OK with me,” he continued. “All I can say is that I read where she was not Black—that she put out, I’ll say that. And then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one is OK with me. That’s up to her.”

Trump’s outrageous claim first sprang up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in early August, when the 78-year-old white candidate tried and failed to curry favor with the crowd by trash-talking Harris’s racial identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said at the convention, seemingly unable to grasp how a biracial person (multiracial people now make up more than 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 census) could have two parents from different cultures but still manage to appreciate both.

Speaking on his foreign policy prowess during Tuesday’s debate, Donald Trump made sure to brag about his endorsement from a dictator.

“I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you’re a disgrace,” said Kamala Harris, telling Trump that his debate performance proves he does not have the “temperament” to lead the country.

In response, Donald Trump flaunted his relationship with authoritarian Hungarian leader Victor Orbán.

“Victor Orbán, one of the most respected men—they call him a ‘strongman’—he’s a tough person, smart,” Trump started off, then stating that Orbán told American leaders, “You need Trump back as president.”

Boasting about the support of a prime minister who has decried “mixed race nations,” called for “a Europe of nation states,” and helped demolish democratic guardrails in Hungary is certainly a choice.

“China was afraid of him, North Korea was afraid of him … Russia was afraid of him,” said Trump, speaking in the third person, trying to show his own strongman tendencies.

“These dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again,” Kamala Harris responded later in the debate. “You adore strongmen instead of caring about democracy.”

Trump smiled and nodded.