One of the 2020 Election’s Biggest Villains is Back

The presidential election is less than two months away, and just like in 2020, the postal system may play a pivotal role in determining the outcome.

An NBC News investigation published Thursday found that the slowest mail in the country is in battleground states, many of which have strict deadlines on when ballots can be counted. “It’s a disgrace,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told NBC, referencing recent mail delivery issues with the United States Postal Service. “They need to understand the importance [of election mail], and they need to make no more excuses.”

Georgia, a state that Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, has the worst mail delivery rate in the United States, with only 66 percent of local first-class letters since July being delivered within two days. Less than 40 percent of election mail was delivered on time last spring, according to NBC, with more than 3 percent of all mailed-in votes in the primary elections last year being rejected for arriving late. In 2020, only 0.23 percent of ballots were rejected for being late.

State and local officials from more than 20 states on Wednesday warned that mail delays could result in many votes failing to reach election offices in time to be counted, and urged swift action. In a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, the officials said that mail sent to voters is being marked as undeliverable at above-normal rates. 

“State and local election officials need a committed partner in USPS,” the letter states. “We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service. Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.”

In April, DeJoy promised senators to “fix” Georgia’s problems “within 60 days,” but Georgia’s mail performance is still poor five months later. On Monday, DeJoy claimed that the Postal Service was prepared for the coming election, but that didn’t stop Donald Trump Monday night from threatening to sue the USPS in an attempt to discredit mail-in voting. 

DeJoy has faced criticism and calls to step down since 2020, after he instituted so-called reforms that he claimed were meant to modernize the postal system but ended up slowing down mail delivery. Critics believe DeJoy is deliberately undermining the Postal Service to push a privatization agenda and have been urging Biden to fire him for years. (This would be difficult to do, but it is not, as some claim, impossible.) In any case, DeJoy’s  lack of action has led to mail remaining slower than ever and even getting worse.  

In August, Biden nominated former Representative Val Demings and business executive William Zollars to fill two vacant slots on the USPS Board of Governors, which would give the board a Democratic majority and the ability to fire DeJoy. But those appointments, along with the appointment of former Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh in March, have yet to be confirmed by the Senate.  

The New Republic’s Alex Pareene argued in 2021 that Biden could break with norms and bypass the Board of Governors to fire DeJoy, but the president has not done so. Now the president’s lack of action could cause chaos in the coming presidential election.  

A Project 2025 adviser was exposed Thursday in a congressional hearing for defending slavery in Haiti. 

Mark Krikorian, an adviser for the right-wing manifesto, is the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group with a history of promoting eugenics. Representative Greg Casar, a progressive Democrat, pointed out that in 2010, Kirkorian wrote an article for the conservative National Review magazine defending French colonization in the country. 

“I’ll ask you, Mr. Krikorian, and I know you’re a Project 2025 board member, your recent quote from a few years ago, where you said, quote, ‘Haiti is so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.’ Is that correct, did you say that?” Casar said to Krikorian.  

“I’m happy to talk about that all you want,” Krikorian replied. Casar responded by noting Haiti’s history as a French slave plantation until the slaves revolted in 1791, ultimately winning independence in 1804.

“The French colonized Haiti so that slaves would work on plantations. The end of colonization in Haiti was so that the people there would no longer be slaves. So what you’re saying, and I read your quote, and anybody watching this online should go read it—what you’re saying is it would have been good if they’d stayed colonized, which means it would’ve been good if they had stayed enslaved by the French,” Casar said.

Krikorian stumbled in his response, trying to explain that Haiti wasn’t better off for having gained independence earlier.  

“They had every right to throw the French out,” Krikorian said. “My point is, they would have been free 30 years later, they would have been in the same situation as—”

“You’re saying you wanted 30 more years of slavery in Haiti,” Casar said. 

The hearing from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability was ironically titled “A Legacy of Incompetence: Consequences of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Policy Failures.” Krikorian was ostensibly called as a witness by Republicans to show Democratic failures on immigration. Instead, he was called out for his organization’s history of promoting white supremacists and Holocaust deniers.

Republicans have been criticized in the past several weeks for promoting a disproven, racist conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are capturing and eating pets, ducks, and geese. As Casar pointed out Thursday, those conspiracy theories have their roots in the writings of extremist right-wing ideologues, whose old racist beliefs are influencing Republican policy today.  

The Trump-endorsed candidate in North Carolina’s gubernatorial race could soon lose his spot on the ticket due to an in-house ouster.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is a Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-touting antisemite, and has drawn immediate comparisons to Donald Trump for his bombastic orations and loyal GOP following, along with his own laundry list of controversies.

On Thursday, a bombshell CNN report revealed that Robinson had written on a pornography website’s message board about his desire to own slaves, his peeping in women’s locker rooms, and his enjoyment of transgender porn.

The comments were made long before Robinson entered electoral politics. CNN connected the account to Robinson via a “litany” of common biographical details and a shared email address. He also used his full name on his site account.

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote in one comment on the site, Nude Africa. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

Robinson repeatedly denied any connection to the account, instead telling CNN in an interview that the story amounted to “salacious tabloid lies.”

The story was initially leaked to CNN, as well as local Raleigh news outlet WRAL, by Robinson’s opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein, the Carolina Journal reported.

In light of the story, the Trump campaign reportedly told Robinson that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Journal. Robinson had been scheduled to appear at a rally for J.D. Vance on Wednesday but backed out after his office announced Robinson had fallen ill.

But despite growing pressure to back out—which included calls from local Republican strategists for Robinson to exit in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state—Robinson released a video statement ahead of the CNN report announcing his intention to stay in the critical race.

“Let me reassure you the things that you will see in that story are not the words of Mark Robinson,” Robinson said. “You know my words, you know my character, and you know that I have been completely transparent in this race and before.”

That butts Robinson up against the deadline to withdraw from the race: Thursday evening. If he does exit, the North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee would be required to choose a replacement candidate—less than 50 days before the election.

The scandal is an unusual test of mettle for the exceedingly controversial politico. Robinson has shared a host of his disturbing positions online, including posts in which he minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers, and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.” Robinson has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”

Robinson has also suggested that “schools wouldn’t be getting shot up” if Christian teachings were forced into the classroom, and told a congregation at Asbury Baptist Church that public schools had taken a “nosedive” since mandatory prayer had been excised from curriculums.

Elon Musk’s since-deleted “joke” suggesting that there should be more assassination attempts on the president and vice president’s lives has suddenly landed him in trouble with the feds.

Following a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life Sunday, Musk posted an alarming tweet questioning why the MAGA conservative had been targeted several times while there had been no such attempt to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote.

Musk deleted the tweet after it received widespread backlash, with X users torching him for “inciting violence,” but not before the Secret Service caught wind of the dangerously phrased message.

Secret Service documents related to Musk’s comments could not be accessed by Bloomberg’s FOIA Files newsletter, with the federal agency responding that the records about the post were “compiled for law enforcement purposes” and withheld on the basis that “disclosure could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

Nate Herring, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, told Bloomberg that the agency “is aware of the social media post made by Elon Musk.”

“As a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence. We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees,” Herring added.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the records will translate into a full-throttle investigation, but it does highlight how seriously Musk’s offhand remarks are being taken by federal authorities that have thwarted two assassination plots in recent months.

By Monday, Musk had issued a couple of new tweets to explain away the atrocious comment. According to the tech billionaire, the violent invitation was just a bad retelling of a “hilarious” joke.

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien isn’t happy that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the union for refusing to endorse Kamala Harris for president. On Thursday, in response to her comments, he made the spurious claim that the Teamsters in AOC’s district overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. 

Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, O’Brien said, “[Ocasio-Cortez] should maybe get into her district, where it voted far-right Republican, and maybe find out what the problem is.” 

Bash asked the union president what he meant, to which O’Brien responded, “In our polling, New York, her district, voted overwhelmingly Republican to support former President Trump, so she may want to focus on her job instead of mine.” 

While that sound bite was highlighted by the Trump campaign on X (formerly Twitter), O’Brien’s statement was quickly disproven by the fact that Teamsters Local 202 in New York’s 14th District in the Bronx endorsed Ocasio-Cortez Thursday, which the congresswoman was happy to post on X herself. 

O’Brien’s decision to withhold a presidential endorsement has been met with disapproval from Teamsters local chapters across the country, with several in key battleground states subsequently endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket. After the Teamsters president spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, rank-and-file members spoke from the Democratic National Convention stage to voice their support for Harris. The union’s National Black Caucus also voted unanimously to endorse the vice president.  

O’Brien signaled a possible endorsement for Harris after he criticized Donald Trump last month, calling the convicted felon’s remarks to Elon Musk about firing workers for striking and organizing “economic terrorism.” In the end, the Teamsters president has been left embarrassed not only by organized labor’s traditional allies in the Democratic Party but also by his own members.  

Senator Lindsey Graham hit the road this week, hoping to secure Nebraska’s five electoral votes for Donald Trump.

The South Carolina Republican met with Governor Jim Pillen and more than a dozen Republican lawmakers Wednesday with the hopes of shoring up support for a bill that would make all five of Nebraska’s electoral votes go to whoever wins the state, according to KOLN. 

Nebraska splits its five votes, granting two of them to the winner of the state’s popular vote, while the other three are given to the winner of the three congressional districts. 

Nebraska’s Republican congressional delegation wrote a letter to Pillen Wednesday urging the state to return to a model where all the votes would be granted to the winner of the whole state. Such a bill would transform Nebraska’s presidential election into a winner-take-all system—at the very last minute. 

This change has the potential to hurt Harris in the increasingly tight presidential race. Currently, she has a chance to pick up an electoral vote in Nebraska’s second congressional district, which includes the Democratic-leaning Omaha–Council Bluffs metropolitan area. If the law changes, then the state’s five votes will likely go to Trump. 

Graham’s concerted efforts to pick up extra votes for Trump on the path to 270 shows just how desperate the former president’s campaign has become, as Harris closes the gap in key battleground states. 

The longtime Trump ally seems perfectly aware of how badly things are going for the Republican nominee. He recently criticized Trump’s debate performance, calling it a “disaster,” and practically begged Trump to stop hanging out with right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.  

The Uncommitted National Movement, an organization of Democrats who seek a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza as well as an arms embargo against the country, announced Thursday that they will not be endorsing Kamala Harris.

In a statement, the organization said that “Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her.”

But the organization added that they oppose “a Donald Trump presidency, whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing,” and that they wouldn’t recommend “a third-party vote in the presidential election, especially as third party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given our country’s broken electoral college system.” 

The nonendorsement comes after Harris gave a boilerplate answer to a panel from the National Association of Black Journalists when asked about Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, which has killed over 41,000 Palestinians. The Democratic presidential nominee stuck to the talking points on her campaign website and didn’t offer any specific solutions or changes to existing U.S. policy.  

At the Democratic National Convention last month, the Uncommitted movement, which had 30 delegates at the convention, pushed unsuccessfully for an acknowledgment of the suffering and genocide taking place in Gaza on the main stage and asked the party to allow George state Representative Ruwa Romman to deliver a short speech. In the end, all they received was a panel on Palestinian human rights on the convention’s first day. 

Still, at that point, the organization held out hope that Harris would reach out, giving her until September 15 to meet with Palestinian American families in Michigan who lost family members to “U.S.-supplied bombs in Gaza and to discuss their demands for halting arms to Israel and securing a permanent ceasefire.”

That deadline came and went, prompting Thursday’s statement from the organization. Meanwhile, the Council on American Relations, in polling of Muslim American voters in the battleground states, has Green Party candidate Jill Stein leading Harris in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While the Uncommitted movement didn’t endorse Stein, many of its supporters plan to vote for her, which could be a problem for Harris and the Democrats come November. 

The Teamsters’ International Union will not be endorsing either candidate for president this election cycle—but that doesn’t mean that the local chapters of the million-plus-member union will be taking the same stance.

On Thursday, several chapters of the Teamsters in key battleground states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada, came out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“The Harris-Walz ticket offers a comprehensive vision for America—one that not only prioritizes economic fairness but also stands steadfastly by our nation’s workers,” wrote Michigan Teamsters Joint Council 43 President Kevin Moore in a statement. “Their record and future plans are exactly what our country needs to continue growing and prospering.

“I urge all my Teamster members and fellow citizens to lend their support to this outstanding campaign,” Moore continued. “In conclusion, as a nation we must move forward to protect and grow the middle class. ‘We are not going back’!!!”

Groups in Nevada, California, Hawaii, and Guam also came out in support of Harris, representing a collective 300,000 Teamsters. In a campaign email celebrating the local endorsements, the Harris-Walz ticket acknowledged that Teamsters groups in several other states, including Florida, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, had also backed the Democratic ticket.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, painted the national nonendorsement notice as a win for his campaign, telling reports after the fact that the nothingburger was “a great honor.”

“It’s a great honor,” Trump said during a stop in New York City, reported Fox News. “They’re not going to endorse the Democrats. That’s a big thing.”

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are neck and neck in Pennsylvania, an essential swing state.

A Washington Post poll published Wednesday found that Harris is favored by 48 percent of likely and registered voters, while Trump is favored by 47 percent of likely and registered voters.

When third-party candidates are removed, the race becomes even closer, with Harris and Trump in a 47 percent matchup among likely voters, and Harris at 48 percent and Trump at 47 among registered voters.

Twice as many presidential debate watchers said that Harris won the face-off between the two candidates. Fifty-seven percent said that Harris had won, while only 27 percent said Trump. Seventeen percent thought that neither won.

The slim margin between Trump and Harris shows just how competitive this race has become, in a battleground state that was narrowly won the last two cycles: once by Trump in 2016 and then by Joe Biden in 2020.

Following Harris’s strong debate performance, a few other polls placed Harris ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania. The New York Times published a poll Thursday that found her in the lead by four points, at 50 percent, with Trump at 46 percent. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found Harris was leading Trump 51 percent to 45 percent. A Franklin & Marshall College poll found that Harris was in the lead with 49 percent to Trump’s 46 percent.

For Harris, Pennsylvania is key to making it to the White House. If she loses Pennsylvania, she will have to win Georgia and North Carolina if she has any hope of making it to 270 electoral votes, according to Politico.

Trump’s campaign is focusing its energy on thwarting her advances in these three states. The former president has reportedly spent the most on advertising in Pennsylvania, hoping to secure voters in the pivotal state.

In that same vein, Trump has also picked a new town to harass with racist claims that it’s been overrun by Haitian immigrants, and it’s predictably in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. It seems the former president hopes to stir up some grievance-based votes and sow a little chaos along the way.

Speaking in Long Island on Wednesday, Donald Trump was as bombastic and boastful as ever—but also slurred his words on several occasions.

Trump stumbled over words like “migrants” and “Russia” and had trouble stringing sentences together. In another instance, Trump said he was “greater even than Elvis” because unlike the King, he doesn’t have a guitar—a riff that has increasingly featured in his speeches. 

Trump also promoted his wife Melania Trump’s new memoir—but admitted that he hadn’t read it and that he doesn’t know what she wrote about him, telling the crowd, “If she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and I’ll say, don’t buy it, get rid of it.” 

Trump’s erratic mental state has been on full display as his presidential campaign enters its final months before November. During last week’s debate with Kamala Harris, he went on long-winded rants unrelated to the questions asked. His speech patterns and alertness looked vastly different from 2016, as CNN demonstrated in a video comparing last week’s debate to one from eight years ago. Cognitive experts have also compared his recent speeches to ones from years ago, and see worrying signs.  

Trump even seems to have his own, false recollection of the debate, telling Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld about a nonexistent audience going “crazy” for him. Somehow, though, Trump remains neck and neck with Kamala Harris in the polls despite these stumbles. With the election less than two months away, will the Harris campaign be able to capitalize?