Ron DeSantis’s Sick Plan for the Next Hurricane

Another massive hurricane is barrelling toward Florida’s coastline, but that doesn’t mean the state is shifting its standards to help its denizens prepare for Election Day.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will reportedly not be extending the Sunshine State’s deadline for registering to vote, according to the Orlando Sentinel’s Jeffrey Schweers, despite the fact that much of the state is preparing for or fleeing the imminent Category 5 storm due to hit its west coast this week.

“There is nothing inhibiting people from registering today,” DeSantis told the publication.

Last week, DeSantis issued an executive order allowing local election officials to change early voting sites and set up consolidated voting centers in areas ravaged by the last major weather event to rip through Florida, Hurricane Helene, which displaced thousands of voters and poll workers late last month. The executive order also loosened restrictions on mail-in ballot requests and allowed state employees to take paid leave to work as poll workers on Election Day, according to CBS News.

But DeSantis’s rigidity on the threat posed by the oncoming hurricane doesn’t come from a place of ignorance. So far, the Republican governor has issued a state of emergency for 51 of Florida’s 67 counties. “A major hurricane is the most likely outcome,” DeSantis said on Sunday while expanding the ordinance. “This is not a good track for the state of Florida.”

The brunt of Hurricane Milton is scheduled to slam the west side of the state by Wednesday evening, but the rain has already begun. Rainfall could reach totals of five to 10 inches, with localized totals adding up to 15 inches across regions of the Florida peninsula and the Florida Keys, threatening minor to moderate river flooding, hurricane center specialist Eric Blake told USA Today.

“Regardless of the details, there is increasing confidence that a powerful hurricane with life-threatening hazards will be affecting portions of the Florida west coast around the middle of this week,” the hurricane center said Sunday.

Extreme weather is already wreaking havoc on voting ahead of the election. Hurricane Helene has upended postal service in North Carolina, potentially delaying early and mail-in voting in the crucial swing state.

The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal from Elon Musk’s X Corp. on the company’s claim that special counsel Jack Smith took an unlawful deep dive into Donald Trump’s social media account without notifying the former president.

X Corp. begged the Supreme Court in July to determine under what circumstances a tech company can be compelled to turn over information on its users, while being prevented from alerting those users that they’re being investigated.

The court did not publish a comment Monday, and there were no dissents.

Last year, Smith’s team was able to use a “nondisclosure order” to prevent X Corp. from notifying Trump that prosecutors were using a search warrant to obtain private communications from Trump’s X (formerly Twitter) account, including direct messages, location data, and his drafts from the weeks leading up to the January 6 insurrection.

When X Corp. challenged the order, it was found in contempt and fined $350,000. Prosecutors argued that notifying Trump of the search would endanger the evidence.

Last week, an unsealed filing from Smith’s team showed precisely how the prosecution in Trump’s January 6 trial intended to use tweets from the Republican nominee’s personal X account to demonstrate his alleged election interference.

Trump’s tweets cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election results, spread false claims of voter fraud, attacked those trying to share accurate information about the election, cheered on those traveling to Washington for the rally that would become the riot, and helped the former president conduct a pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence.

At 2:24 p.m. on January 6, 2021, as rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

This tweet was then read out to the crowd at the Capitol, who later chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” Moments after Trump tweeted, Pence had to be ushered to a secure location, according to the filing. When Trump heard that Pence had been taken to safety, he reportedly responded, “So what?”

JD Vance’s supporters are seeking revenge against the consulting firm Deloitte after an employee shared personal messages from the Ohio senator in which he criticized Donald Trump’s record.

Donald Trump Jr. and other Republicans are accusing Deloitte consultant Kevin Gallagher of interfering with the election and are asking Speaker Mike Johnson to punish the company for its employee’s action.

“An executive at @Deloitte named Kevin Gallagher decided to interfere in the election & leak private convos with JD Vance to help Kamala Harris,” wrote Trump Jr. “Deloitte also gets $2B in govt contracts. Maybe it’s time for the GOP to end Deloitte’s taxpayer funded gravy train?”

In September, The Washington Post published messages shared by Gallagher where Vance admitted in 2020 that Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver” on his economic plans and that he would most likely lose to Joe Biden. The consultant and Vance communicated for 11 months after Vance contacted Gallagher via Twitter about an essay regarding Catholicism and politics.

Trump Jr. continues to argue that Deloitte’s $3 billion in annual government contracts should be canceled due to Gallagher sharing his own personal communications, accusing the consulting firm of “conspiring with the Washington Post to help Kamala Harris.”

“This individual shared private personal messages on his own volition without the knowledge of Deloitte, which is a non-partisan firm,” said Deloitte in a statement. But that distinction doesn’t matter to MAGA.

“Kevin Gallagher FAFO!” wrote senior Trump adviser Jason Miller. “This is outrageous and @Deloitte should immediately and publicly respond to this scandal,” said Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt.

Vance’s communications director, William Martin, told the Post that Vance “has no opinion on the issue,” but Martin himself retweeted Trump Jr.’s attacks on Gallagher.

“The moment Kevin Gallagher chose to leak his private communications to The Washington Post, he went from a private citizen to a willing participant in the political arena,” Martin said. “When he made that decision, he dragged Deloitte Consulting into the political arena with him.”

Donald Trump’s disastrous speech on Sunday perfectly demonstrated the cognitive decline that attendees at his rallies have been witnessing for months.

The New York Times published a report Sunday analyzing Trump’s recent rally speeches, finding them longer, more rambling, and more extreme than ever before. That same day, during a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, Trump embarked on a nearly two-hour speech filled to the brim with misinformation, random grievances, and incoherent gaffes.

Trump slurred his words as he rambled about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, calling it “probably worse than Katrina.”

“If you want someone who steals your wealth and abandons your family when the floods waters rise, those… flood… waters rise. And they were gone,” Trump ranted. “They haven’t seen anybody from the federal government yet.”

Trump has spent the last week spewing misinformation about the federal response to Hurricane Helene. He falsely claimed that Democrats were preventing aid from reaching Republican areas (something he actually once considered after the California wildfires), and lied that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” efforts at all in North Carolina.

During his speech, Trump also gushed over Elon Musk, who, between running a pro-Trump super PAC and spreading election misinformation, has apparently provided “big doses of” Starlink to some affected by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina per Trump’s request. If “doses” seems like the wrong word to describe internet connection, that’s because it is. Even Trump admitted that he doesn’t “know what the hell” Starlink is.

Trump then made a particularly grim remark when asking if there were any people in the audience planning to vote for “Lyin’ Kamala.”

“Please raise your hand. Please raise your… actually I should say don’t raise your hand. It would be very dangerous,” Trump said, laughing. “We don’t want to see anyone get hurt. Please don’t raise your hand.”

At one point, Trump became increasingly distracted by a fly, calling it a “very aggressive sucker.”

“This one, this one in particular is very aggressive… like, I’m going to be aggressive for our country. You can probably say that,” Trump joked to uproarious applause.

Trump also whined about his canceled interview with 60 Minutes. Trump had decided not to go through with the interview, CBS announced last week. The Trump campaign has since claimed that CBS “begged” for an interview but wouldn’t agree not to fact-check the Republican nominee.

On stage, Trump insisted instead that it was because he had not received an apology for his last appearance on the show in 2020, where he had thrown a fit about how inappropriate it was to be asked “tough questions” before cutting the interview short. Trump said he’d ended the interview after he was incorrectly fact-checked about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“Ah, it’s terrible. So we’re waiting for an apology, they want to do it again,” Trump said.

“I’ll do it again, but they gotta apol—don’t you think I should make them apologize?”

In addition to repeatedly garbling his words, saying “Midworsten” and “Evan juggles” (Evangelicals), the Republican nominee made a number of outlandish lies. He attempted to take credit for the recent record highs in the stock market, claiming that “the market goes up every time I get a good poll number,” while also promising a “1929 depression” if Harris were elected (he said the exact same thing about Biden in 2020). He attempted to walk back his own remarks that voters would only need to vote one more time, and promised again to be a dictator “for one day.”

A new Supreme Court decision effectively means that Texas women will never be able to receive abortion care—even if their lives depend on it.

On Monday, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that emergency abortions violate the Lone Star State’s already draconian abortion laws, upholding a ban on the life-saving procedure even in emergency circumstances.

The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court ruling, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in June to punt a challenge to a similarly restrictive medical emergency abortion clause in Idaho. That decision temporarily allowed emergency abortions to continue while a lower appeals court retried the case.

The administration also pointed to federal mandate, reminding the court that hospitals must provide life-saving emergency medical care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The government further noted that legal precedents set by the Texas Supreme Court mean doctors within the state do not have to wait until a woman’s life is in immediate danger to provide the critical care required to save her.

Yet none of that seemed to matter to the ultra-conservative bench, who ruled in favor of heightened restrictions without detailed reasoning, reported the Associated Press.*

Texas had asked the Supreme Court to leave the order in place, arguing that their law left exceptions in place that prioritized the health of pregnant patients. But accessing Texas’s emergency abortion clause loophole isn’t cut and dry. Some women in the state, such as Kate Cox, have been forced to flee for care after failing to legally obtain access to abortions under the state’s emergency clause.

Cox’s case was the first such lawsuit since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Despite her apparent eligibility—and a court decision allowing her to receive the critical care—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in, promising to prosecute doctors with felony charges if they were caught performing the procedure.

Doctors argue that the medical exemptions in the state are unclear, leaving them in legal jeopardy and effectively stalling access to abortions in Texas by proxy.

* This article originally misstated the justices’ vote breakdown.

JD Vance over the weekend admitted that Donald Trump would stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told a reporter on Saturday that “we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions.

“That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around; it will remain a consistent view,” Vance said to RealClearPolitics.

Vance’s remarks fly in the face of how other Republicans, including Trump, have tried to present more moderate views on abortion. Last week, Trump claimed that he would veto a national abortion ban. Republicans have experienced loss after loss as anti-abortion ballot initiatives fail at the state level in red states like Ohio, Kentucky, and Montana.

Planned Parenthood itself provides many vital services outside of abortion, from preventative screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and cancer to birth control. The organization depends on government reimbursements and grants for 34 percent of its revenue, according to its 2023 annual report. These include Medicaid as well as other federal grants and programs.

Republicans have been trying to end public funding for Planned Parenthood for a long time but have only succeeded in a handful of states, most recently Missouri. It’s something they’ve been trying but failing to do at the federal level.

The former president has been all over the place on abortion rights. In the past, he’s also called for regulation of the procedure to be left to the states, said that a “six-week [ban] is too short,” and struggled to make sense when speaking about the abortion pill mifepristone. Trump’s position on abortion, though he attempts to obfuscate it, is opposing reproductive rights. He’s appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he’s courted the religious right, and he depends on the support of conservatives. Over the weekend, Vance finally said in clear terms what Trump intentionally tries to hide.

Not only has Elon Musk been pushing election misinformation, now his mother is getting in on the action by encouraging her followers to commit election fraud.

Maye Musk, mother of the bouncing billionaire, posted on X Saturday in response to her son’s call for people to register to vote in Georgia, to say that voters don’t actually have to register at all.

“The Democrats have given us another option. You don’t have to register to vote. On Election Day, have 10 fake names, go to 10 polling booths and vote 10 times. That’s 100 votes, and it’s not illegal,” Maye Musk wrote. “Maybe we should work the system too.”

Users on X were quick to correct Maye Musk, pointing out not only that it’s obviously illegal but that at best it was a stupid thing to say, and, at worst, she was inciting people to break the law.

“Actually, this comes from Gavin Newsom,” Maye Musk wrote in a response to one of her many, many angry replies. “What you are saying is that he should be jailed for his new law that prevents ID when voting, so illegal immigrants can vote many times. I guess you don’t understand sarcasm.”

Last month, California Governor Newsom passed a law banning local governments in California from enacting voter identification rules because there are already state laws in place that require voter identification. The new law would prevent each locality from having its own set of requirements, which could potentially disenfranchise voters.

A bad sense of humor seems to run in the family. Last month, Elon Musk found himself in hot water after “joking” that there aren’t any assassination attempts made against Kamala Harris, which unsurprisingly got him in trouble with the feds.

While executive branch figureheads float around the American South in the wake of Hurricane Helene promising relief, one Washington politico’s actions could actually make all the difference for thousands of victims—but he doesn’t seem to be doing a thing about it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson will not be calling the House back early to vote on emergency hurricane relief, reported Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

The speaker said that the damages from the storm have to be “tabulated” before Congress can pass supplemental aid to help the victims, adding that he believes the situation is weeks away from that being achieved.

Johnson will visit western North Carolina on Wednesday, a region that was devastated by Helene and its subsequent floods. More than 100 people died in the storm’s aftermath. Across the six states that the Category Four storm hit, at least 231 people have been reported dead, making Helene one of the deadliest recorded storms in U.S. history. Overall, Helene has been described by weather forecast offices as “one of the most significant weather events” to hit the area “in the modern era.”

More than 300,000 people remained without power in Georgia and the Carolinas by Sunday evening, with nearly half of those customers in North Carolina, reported CNN.

So far, President Joe Biden has deployed 1,500 troops to help with recovery efforts, alongside more than 6,100 National Guardsmen and 7,000 federal personnel. The Biden-Harris administration has also distributed more than $137 million in federal assistance to support the beleaguered region, the White House announced in a press release Sunday.

Meanwhile, Johnson has continued to undermine one of the federal agencies tasked with responding to the storm surge. In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Johnson elevated a false claim launched by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, insisting that the Biden administration had diverted emergency relief funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to aid immigration efforts.

“The streams of funding are different, that is not an untrue statement, of course,” Johnson told the conservative network. “But the problem is with the American people, see, and what they’re frustrated by, is that FEMA should be involved. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, their mission is to help people in times like this of natural disaster. Not to be engaged in using any pool of funding from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border. That’s what the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, and Secretary Mayorkas have been engaged in.”

In response, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told ABC News that the charge was “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” Criswell said on Sunday. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took a break from spreading lies about Hurricane Helene to dip her toe into a new conspiracy theory.

“Raw Milk does a body good,” wrote the Georgia representative on X Sunday afternoon, posting a photo of a large glass of milk. “Make America Healthy Again!”

The far-right has long touted their devotion to only drinking unpasteurized milk, which skips the process of killing off harmful bacteria and does not in fact do a body good. Greene’s post was hit was a massive fact-check in the community notes section of X, clarifying that “raw milk consumption is linked to a number of foodborne illnesses (e.g., Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella) that can result in serious complications and death.” X users added a long list of links with evidence of how dangerous drinking raw milk can be.

As Melody Schreiber reported for The New Republic in July, drinking unpasteurized milk can also put the consumer at an unnecessary risk for H5N1, or the bird flu. In states where it is legal to sell raw milk, there were 3.2 times more outbreaks of illness linked to the milk over a span of 20 years.

Dairy was a hot topic this weekend for Republicans, who only seem to be getting weirder, as Trump invited a QAnon conspiracy theorist to speak at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally alongside Elon Musk on Saturday.

“We will protect your raw milk,” said Scott Presler of Gays for Trump, in attempt to court the Amish vote in the swing state.

In recent years, the deregulation of the dairy industry and shift away from pasteurization has turned into a new culture war for the right. How long until Trump tells his followers to drink it, like he told them to drink bleach?

This post has been updated.

House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to dodge a question from George Stephanopoulos about who won the 2020 election, a worrying sign for November’s coming election.

On Sunday morning, Johnson was asked on ABC if he could “unequivocally” say that Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost in 2020. His answer was less than forthcoming.

“See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s a gotcha game,” Johnson said. “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not gonna talk about what happened in 2020, we’re gonna talk about 2024 and how we’re gonna solve the problems for the American people.

“I think this thing, this game that’s played all the time, I’m not gonna engage in it,” Johnson added.

Johnson is echoing every Republican who wants to curry favor with Trump. J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, refused to answer a similar question during last week’s vice presidential debate and was called out by Tim Walz, who called it a “damning nonanswer.” (After being hounded by a comedian later in the week, Vance confessed that he believes Trump won the election.) Trump’s campaign staff refuses to answer the question too, as do many Republicans such as Senator Tom Cotton, who dodged it on Sunday’s Meet the Press. 

These signals from leading Republicans don’t bode well for next month and could signal more serious efforts to undermine unfavorable results, just like in 2020. In a worrying sign, pro-Trump election deniers are working as election officials in key swing states and are already disrupting the voting process in places like Georgia. They could cause further problems if they don’t get the results they like.