Elon Musk Test Limits of Election Law With Shady New Pro-Trump Ploy

Elon Musk has promised to give away $1 million to one lucky registered swing state voter every day until Election Day. Now, critics and politicians are sounding the alarms over the legality of Musk’s scheme.

At a campaign event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Musk announced his America PAC’s $1 million bribe.

“We want to try to get over a million, maybe 2 million voters in the battleground states to sign the petition in support of the First and Second Amendment.… We are going to be awarding $1 million randomly to people who have signed the petition, every day, from now until the election,” said Musk.

This is just one more escalation in Musk’s ridiculous money-sink into Donald Trump’s election campaign. Musk has nearly entirely funded the Trump-focused America PAC, pouring $75 million of his own dollars into the Republican candidate’s voter outreach efforts.

It’s a federal crime to pay people to vote or to register to vote. According to a Justice Department manual, that includes both direct payments and lottery-style giveaways. If Musk was on thin ice with his promise to pay people to refer swing voters to sign the America PAC’s petition, now he might really be in trouble as he skirts the gray zone in election law.

“Elon Musk thinks your vote can be bought,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a Democratic event on Sunday, joining the chorus of people questioning the $1 million prize.

On Sunday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called Musk’s move “deeply concerning” and suggested that law enforcement should examine the ploy. “I think it’s something that law enforcement should take a look at. I’m not the attorney general any more of Pennsylvania, I’m the governor, but it does raise serious questions.”

According to Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor, though Musk’s previous actions through the PAC “were of murky legality,” he believes this prize “clearly illegal” because the only people eligible for the lottery are registered voters in battleground states.

To be eligible for the $1 million, one must have signed the America PAC petition in “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.” They also must be a registered voter and live in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

On Monday, Musk bragged that new Republican voter registration is crushing that of Democrats.

It would be such a shame if Democrats also signed Musk’s petitions and made themselves eligible for the giveaway …

A new analysis on the future of Social Security suggests that Donald Trump’s proposed policies for strengthening the program wouldn’t just be ineffective—they would actually destroy it.

A report published Monday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, found that Trump’s pitches would add to the program’s cash deficit by roughly $2.3 trillion, quicken the downfall of the retirement benefit by as much as three years, and could force higher taxes in the long run in an effort to salvage the late-age payouts.

Trump’s campaign promises add up to disaster for the nearly century-old program They include calling for an end to the taxation of overtime pay, tips, and Social Security benefits, which the organization noted would reduce revenue streams, and promising to impose massive tariffs on imports (as high as 2000 percent on foreign cars), which the committee forecast would drastically increase inflation or reduce payroll. But even policies that, on their face, seem as though they wouldn’t impact Social Security—such as Trump’s massive deportation program—would also capsize the retirement benefit by reducing the number of immigrant workers paying into the program’s trust funds.

All in all, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government found that ending income taxation of Social Security benefits would cost $950 billion, cutting taxes on tips and overtime pay would cost $900 billion, and changes to tariffs and immigration would cost $400 billion.

Under current law, Social Security is predicted to reach insolvency by 2034. Once that happens, Social Security will have to reduce spending, cutting as much as 23 percent—approximately $16,500 in annual benefits for a dual-income couple. But Trump’s proposals would expedite that, pushing insolvency to 2031, and could cost the average couple somewhere between 29 and 36 percent “depending on the scenario,” according to the report.

Saving the program, especially from the brink of Trump’s promises, would decimate payouts for current as well as future retirees, forcing the program to either cut benefits by one-third or increase “all current law taxes by roughly one-half.”

Trump’s solutions for salvaging Social Security won’t inspire the kind of cash flow he promises. The Republican presidential nominee has promised to delay the benefit’s shortfall by bolstering the oil and gas industry and growing the economy. But, as the committee noted, increased energy exploration is unlikely to have a meaningful effect, “even if the gains were deposited into the trust fund,” and saving the program through the economy would require “unrealistically fast economic growth.”

During a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Trump cited a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal which noted that during his interview with the publication’s editorial board, Trump displayed “no sign of such slippage,” and had only become more “confident” and “knowledgeable,” despite the sustained incoherence the public may witness on the campaign trail. The Journal also rebranded Trump’s rambling as “discursive.”

“One thing they said that was great, ‘We watched this guy for 20 years, the one thing we know is he’s got no cognitive problem,’” Trump said. “I’ve got no cognitive!”

“She may have a cognitive problem!” he said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, as his supporters cheered. 

Trump said he had called for a cognitive test for all people running for president, “not based on age.” 

“You know, some of the greatest leaders in the world—and I’m not 80, and I’m not that close to 80—but in the Biden case, he’s 81 or 82,” Trump said, getting sidetracked yet again. He went on to laud Rupert Murdoch, who is 93 years old, as a “very successful” person who is also old.  

Of course Trump is 78, only two years away from being 80. If elected, he would be the oldest person elected to office. 

While the Republican nominee has called for cognitive tests, in reality, he has failed to disclose any new information about his physical and mental well-being, something which is not mandated but traditional of presidential candidates, especially ones where their age is a concern. 

Donald Trump was sued by the Central Park Five Monday for defamation over comments he made during the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia. The lawsuit argues Trump’s debate comments were “extreme and outrageous, and … intended to cause severe emotional distress” to the Central Park Five.

The group of five men were charged and convicted of the rape and assault of a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989, in a case that garnered national attention. The five Black and Hispanic men were just teenagers when they were convicted. More than a decade later, DNA evidence exonerated them after a serial rapist confessed to the crime, and the teens settled a $41 million lawsuit against the city in 2014.

At the time, Trump took out full-page ads for $85,000 attacking Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, calling for the return of the death penalty in the city’s four newspapers: The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post, and New York Newsday. Years later, when he ran for president in 2016, Trump continued to claim that the five were guilty, saying, “the fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”

During the debate last month, Trump repeated the false claim that the five pleaded guilty, that they killed someone, and that Mayor Bloomberg agreed with him, according to the legal filing.

“Defendant Trump falsely stated that Plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false,” the civil suit read. “Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.”

The lawsuit requests an unspecified amount in compensatory and punitive damages.

At the Democratic National Convention in August, members of the group spoke out against Trump, with newly elected New York City Council Member Salaam saying about the former president, “Forty-five wanted us un-alive, he wanted us dead.”

“That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will,” Salaam told the Chicago audience.

“Our youth was stolen from us. Every day, as we walked into [the] courtroom people screamed at us, threatened us, because of Donald Trump,” said Korey Wise.

This story has been updated.

After manning the fry station at a McDonald’s restaurant on Sunday, Donald Trump didn’t answer a point-blank question about whether he would raise the minimum wage.

Trump took off his suit jacket, put on an apron, and watched an employee show him how to put the fries in oil, salt them, and then scoop them into boxes. Later, he took questions from reporters from the drive-through window. CBS’s Olivia Rinaldi asked the former president if “the minimum wage should be raised.”

“Well, I think this: I think these people work hard, they’re great, and I just saw something, a process that’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see, these are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs, and it’s great, and great people working here too,” Trump replied, avoiding the topic altogether.

Trump has obsessed over the fact that Kamala Harris worked at a McDonald’s while she was a student at Howard University, repeatedly claiming that it’s not true despite providing no evidence for his claim. Harris has often spoken of her time working at the restaurant, even telling the story in a campaign ad.

Harris’s proposed policies call for raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 due to opposition from Republicans and moderate Democrats. While Trump was president, he didn’t raise or even propose increasing the minimum wage, and was skeptical of how it would help Americans during his 2020 campaign. Trump’s McDonald’s stunt is part of a pattern of appearing to sympathize with working people while enacting policies that benefit the wealthy at workers’ expense.

Donald Trump thinks that President Biden is trying to restrict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The former president said as much during an interview on an airport tarmac after landing in Detroit Friday ahead of a campaign roundtable in the suburb of Auburn Hills, telling reporters that he was about to speak to Netanyahu following Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar Thursday.

“He’s doing a good job,” Trump said about the Israeli leader. “Biden is trying to hold him back, just so you understand, Biden is more superior to the V.P. He’s trying to hold him back, and he probably should be doing the opposite, actually. I’m glad that [Netanyahu] decided to do what he had to do, but it’s moving along pretty good.”

Trump characterizing Biden as trying to “hold Netanyahu back” is absurd when the White House privately gave Israel the green light to expand its bombing campaign from Gaza to Lebanon while publicly urging a cease-fire. The idea that Netanyahu is doing a good job when the civilian death toll continues to rise in both Gaza and Lebanon raises the question of how Trump defines a “good job” too—and what he would support if he returns to the White House.

On Thursday, Kamala Harris said that Sinwar’s death represents “an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza,” adding that a cease-fire was only possible when “Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

While this essentially repeats what the White House has been saying throughout Israel’s war, it’s quite different from Trump’s bombastic rhetoric: He has repeatedly said that Israel has to “finish the job.” The former president’s Friday comments appear to be an attempt to paint Biden, and by extension, Harris, as being less supportive of Israel than him, which flies in the face of America’s backing of Israel over the past year. The question is whether the conflict will cost either candidate critical votes in a few weeks.

Donald Trump was eager to throw his ghostwriters under the bus during an interview with Fox & Friends on Friday.

After Steve Doocy asked the Republican presidential candidate who helped him craft his mean-spirited jokes for Thursday night’s Al Smith charity dinner, Trump took to complaining about his joke writers. “I had a lot of people, a couple people from Fox actually, I shouldn’t say that. But they wrote some jokes. For the most part I didn’t like any of them,” said Trump to the Fox team.

But a network spokesperson was quick to fact-check Trump and clarified “FOX News confirmed that no employee or freelancer wrote the jokes” for the former president’s tight 10.

It appears that some of Trump’s jokes may have come from comedian Nick Di Paolo, who is not an employee or contract freelancer for the Fox News network but is a contributor to Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show. Di Paolo was fired from a previous gig for joking about school shooters.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump wanted to get a dig in at Fox while appearing on the network, considering his on-again-off-again relationship with Fox’s billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch. During his Friday appearance, he criticized Fox News for airing any negative political ads against him.

“I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch,” said Trump. “I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it … and I’m going to tell him something very simple.… Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days, and don’t put on … they’re horrible people that come on and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”

Additionally, Trump may be acting out against Fox News due to jealousy: The ratings for Kamala Harris’s Fox News interview boasted more than double the viewers of his appearance on the network.

Kamala Harris called out Donald Trump Friday for canceling interviews and public appearances, saying that Trump may not have the stamina for another term as president. 

Speaking at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Harris referenced recent reports from Trump’s campaign that the former president is exhausted, reminding the crowd that Trump also pulled out of a second debate with her. 

“He is ducking debates and canceling interviews. Come on,” Harris said, smiling as the audience booed. 

“And check this out: His own campaign team recently said it is because of exhaustion. Well, if you are exhausted on the campaign trail, it raises real questions about whether you are fit for the toughest job in the world,” Harris added as the partisan crowd cheered.

When he was president, Trump often faced criticism for skipping important functions, such as a 2018 visit to a World War I cemetery in France with other allies. But he was still campaigning vigorously then—something that isn’t the case now. 

Later on Friday, Trump fired back at Harris, accusing her of ducking events. 

“She should have been last night with the Catholics,” Trump said, referencing the Al Smith dinner, a bipartisan charity event in New York Thursday night that Harris didn’t attend. 

“So all they do is put out sound bites. Tell me when you’ve seen me take even a little bit of a rest. I’m not even tired, I’m really exhilarated. You know why? We’re killing her in the polls, because the American people don’t want her,” Trump added. “She didn’t pass her bar exam. She’s not a smart person. She’s not a person that should represent our country.”

Many of the interviews that Trump has pulled out of are those where he would face tougher, unbiased interviewers, such as CBS’s 60 Minutes, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and NBC News. In contrast, the Al Smith dinner is a lighthearted event where the speakers usually make jokes, and Trump used his speech to make a bitter, profanity-laden rant against his political opponents in a room full of Catholic priests. 

With the election only weeks away, every action from Trump and Harris is being closely scrutinized by voters and media outlets. Pulling back on public appearances, media interviews, and another presidential debate would bring any candidate negative attention, let alone the oldest candidate in history, who refuses to release his medical records.  

A cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation are suing the federal government to limit access to mifepristone, one of the pills used to induce an abortion—but an underlying reason behind the suit is perhaps one of the most insidious anti-abortion initiatives yet.

Mifepristone, combined with misoprostol, composes the two-step prescription referred to as “the abortion pill.” The procedure accounts for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits.

The suit was filed by the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho, who argued that the medication should be illegal for minors entirely (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments). The suit also accuses the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general describe as “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.

But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the suit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.

“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit reads on page 190.

And that could lead to cataclysmic losses for the Republican states, whose legal counselors quietly noted that a diminished population could cost them as much as a seat in Congress.

“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds,’ such as potentially ‘losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are’ reduced or their increase diminished,” the suit continued.

The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the FDA and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 13 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 34 percent said it should be legal under any circumstances, and an additional 13 percent said it should be legal in most circumstances.

Donald Trump expressed surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s legal trouble in an interview on The Dan Bongino Show Friday morning.

“I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlonged. He got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of the king of the woke, right? And yet he got it. And I figured that maybe he wouldn’t get hit so hard,” Trump told Bongino. 

Trump seemed to be insinuating some sort of left-wing or liberal conspiracy behind who faces criminal charges in referring to Weinstein, a convicted serial sex offender and longtime Democratic donor. 

“So when they do get hit, they get hit. But that’s the only one I can think of. Normally they protect everybody. What they did with [Eric Adams] is very suspect,” Trump added, referring to the recently indicted New York City mayor, a Democrat.    

There’s a lot to unpack from Trump’s comments, as his claim that liberals tend to protect their own from prosecution also isn’t true, considering the cases of Democrats Senator Bob Menendez and Representative Henry Cuellar this year as well as others in recent decades. 

Trump also brought up Weinstein unprompted, and said “I don’t know him well.” This raises the question of whether the former president is lying and did know Weinstein, which then raises further questions about whether Trump knew about Weinstein’s reputation as a serial abuser. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise, considering Trump’s own record with sexual abuse.

It’s a reminder of Trump’s relationship with another infamous sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The former president has praised Epstein as a “good salesman” and was named in the documents released following a lawsuit against the billionaire from one of his victims.