Cognitive Decline? Trump Goes on Weird Tangent Explaining Water

Former President Donald Trump should leave the meteorology to the professionals.

After taking jabs at Kamala Harris and his second debate moderators at a North Carolina rally Wednesday afternoon, Trump suddenly turned to Hurricane Helene, the category storm that devastated large swaths of the state earlier this month, leaving 130 people dead and damaging key infrastructure beyond repair.

“I must’ve been the first one, I followed that storm right in,” the former president said. “I saw the devastation, it was a travesty, it was viscous, it was water. The water was the worst we’d ever seen. It was a water hurricane, that’s what it was.”

This may have been a part of Trump’s usual meandering rally ramblings, or he may just be truly unaware of what a Category 4 hurricane entails. Either way, he spent an ample amount of time explaining how a hurricane works to a crowd that just experienced one of the deadliest hurricanes in two decades.

After more ranting, Trump then re-upped the false claim that the federal disaster response was a complete failure due to Democrats taking money out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “give” to immigrants.  

“They don’t have any money for North Carolina, or a lot of other states, you find out they don’t have any money. FEMA spent money on bringing illegal aliens into our country.”

This conspiracy has been thoroughly debunked. FEMA has approved $100 million of aid to North Carolina. It did not spend any of its disaster funds on the southern border, and even Republicans have pushed back on this claim. But as with his meteorology report, Trump seems to be making it all up as he goes along. 

Mysterious statues of Donald Trump are popping up across the country leaving some amused, some perplexed, and Republicans, of course, offended.

In Philadelphia and in Portland, Oregon, golden statues of the former president have popped up behind statues of naked women in their respective downtowns, bearing the title, “In honor of a lifetime of sexual assault.”

Each statue had a plaque quoting Trump in the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

While in Philadelphia, the statue was quickly removed by city workers, in Portland, the golden Trump was beheaded.

And Washington, D.C., residents spotted a new statue at the Capitol this week, a bronze tiki torch sculpture titled, “The Donald J. Trump Enduring Flame.”

“This monument pays tribute to President Donald Trump and the ‘very fine people’ he boldly stood to defend when they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia,” the plaque accompanying the statue reads, referencing the infamous neo-Nazi march in 2017. The over eight-foot-tall sculpture is under 24-hour surveillance at the Freedom Plaza, where it will remain until 5 p.m. Thursday.

This followed the Nancy Pelosi poop desk that appeared at the National Mall to honor “the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election.”

The Washington Post scored an interview with one of the anonymous artists who created the tiki torch and poop displays. “We are hoping they spark conversation about what we view are certain political issues that are relevant to voters and how they make their decision voting,” he said.

Shortly after their call, the tiki torch had been snapped in half. “We’ll fix it,” the artist texted the Post.

Meanwhile, a giant 43-foot-tall naked Trump marionette has been touring around the United States, stopping in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Madison, and Detroit. The 6,000-pound statue is being trotted around by the anonymous collective as part of the Crooked and Obscene Tour, which the group says is meant to spark dialogue about “transparency—or lack thereof—in politics.” Predictably, Republicans across the country are mad. The Republican Party in Nevada, where the statue first debuted, said it “strongly condemns” the marionette, calling it “offensive.”

Whether any of these sculptures actually reach the category of art or satire, or sway any voters, is yet to be seen.

A New York Supreme Court judge stripped Rudy Giuliani of his ability to talk during his sexual harassment trial Wednesday, insisting that the former New York City mayor was only hurting himself by continuing to speak.

“Mr. Giuliani, you’re going to cause yourself harm by doing this, OK? So I’m going to protect you from yourself at this time,” Judge Nicholas Moyne said, according to the New York Daily News.

“These are not legal arguments that you’re making right now.… These are personal attacks, and this is not the time for that, OK?” Moyne continued. “I’m not going to allow it, I’m sorry. I tried to treat you with respect and with deference, but you have to follow my rules.”

The mute order came after Giuliani openly disparaged one of his former employees, Noelle Dunphy, who is suing the ex–Donald Trump attorney for $10 million for constantly sexually harassing her after he hired her as a consultant in 2019 to help develop his businesses. Her suit alleges the 80-year-old forced her to engage in “violent sex,” reported the Daily News, as well as required her to work in revealing clothing he had purchased and attend video calls in the nude.

Giuliani is also accused of regularly making sexual comments about her body and failing to pay Dunphy approximately $2 million in wages. Dunphy submitted a transcript of some of Giuliani’s comments to the court, which she caught on tape.

Just an hour into Wednesday’s hearing, which was intended to deal with several motions related to the case, Giuliani went on a rant, deriding Dunphy as a “professional extortionist” who was barred from hotels.

Moyne reportedly yelled at Giuliani several times before the judge forced him into silence.

The unpaid Trump ally has been practically buried in a legal hellscape of his own making in recent months. Last week, Giuliani was court-ordered to surrender his assets—including his Manhattan penthouse—to mother-daughter duo Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a pair of 2020 Georgia poll workers whom he had repeatedly defamed.

Giuliani was ordered in December to pay nearly $150 million in damages to Freeman and Moss. Since then, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, begged Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees (Trump refused), had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies, and miserably started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash, before ultimately losing his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the deciding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”

Giuliani is also under the gun for a lawsuit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses. Giuliani, meanwhile, claimed he was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.

Amazingly, Giuliani’s legal troubles don’t end there, either: The MAGA henchman is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election-interference case and was named in April in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. Earlier this month, an Arizona judge torched a legal filing raised by Giuliani in the case, ruling that the ex-Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.

Just hours after Elon Musk admitted Donald Trump’s policies will tank the entire economy, the former president confirmed his plans to let Musk be a part of the destruction, claiming that “nobody is going to feel it.”

In an interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, Trump lauded Musk as a “very exceptional guy” and a “great cost-cutter” when asked about a potential role for the billionaire CEO in his Cabinet. But even more unbelievably, the Republican candidate said with confidence that the American people wouldn’t “feel” the economic impacts of cutting trillions from the budget.

“He’ll cut costs without anybody even knowing it—nobody’s going to notice—nobody is going to feel it,” Trump told Hannity, confirming that Musk does indeed plan to slash $2 trillion from the government’s budget.

Musk has proposed heading a “Department of Government Efficiency” under a Trump Cabinet—and the former president has clearly taken him up on it. At Trump’s hate-filled Madison Square Garden rally over the weekend, Musk announced that the target is $2 trillion in cuts.

Trimming the budget to the level would have to include cuts to essential government services like Medicare and Social Security—and could result in an initial huge economic crash. But Musk admitted Tuesday that that’s all a part of the plan, agreeing with a far-right troll on X that crashing the economy would lead to “sounder footing” in two years.

The plan sounds strikingly similar to that of Musk and Trump’s friend Javier Milei of Argentina. When campaigning for president, Milei promised to “take a chainsaw to the state,” cut public spending on education and health care, and eliminate the central bank and tens of thousands of government jobs. Since his election last year, Argentina has suffered a deep recession and the worst economic downturn in the country in decades, with 57 percent of the population now in poverty and inflation up 270 percent.

As journalist Kevin Drum noted, “Elon is claiming we should literally zero out the entire rest of the federal budget. Everything. The FBI, national parks, food stamps, Medicaid, education, NASA, the EPA, farm support, the NIH, all federal R&D grants, embassies worldwide, the FAA, the Department of Justice, the VA, the weather service, the border patrol, etc. etc. Everything.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s other horrible economic plans would simultaneously dramatically hike inflation and slow U.S. production and economic growth. But perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that two bumbling billionaires are planning to manufacture an economic disaster that will disproportionately harm poor Americans.

Donald Trump is once again suing districts in swing states over alleged voter intimidation.

The Trump-Vance campaign announced Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit over alleged voter suppression in Pennsylvania, claiming without evidence that Bucks County was preventing Trump voters from participating in the 2024 election.

Speaking at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the night before, Republican National Committee Co-Chair Michael Whatley claimed that the Keystone State had been “turning away our voters.”

The campaign did not point to any instance in particular that led it to believe that voters had been treated unfairly in Bucks County, but county officials had observed that there were complaints on social media (shared by the Trump campaign) about long lines to obtain mail-in ballots on Tuesday, the last day of their availability. Due to a miscommunication, some voters believed they could not have their mail-in ballot requests accommodated, Bucks County officials wrote on X, noting that that information was incorrect and that all voters who had joined the line before 5 p.m. would be able to receive a mail-in ballot.

But Trump chose to stoke the flames Wednesday morning, posting on Truth Social that “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.”

“Law enforcement must act, NOW!” he added.

Bucks County officials confirmed to NBC Philadelphia that they had been notified of the lawsuit, but did not provide further comment. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, meanwhile, shot back at the Republican presidential nominee, highlighting that Trump and his allies have spent the last four years actively corroding public trust in U.S. elections—and that they are currently warming up their second conspiracy to undermine the 2024 election results.

“Let’s remember, in 2020, Donald Trump attacked our elections over and over,” Shapiro wrote on X. “I was the Attorney General back then and despite his bluster and rhetoric, he went 0-43 in court when he fought to make it harder to vote and then tried to overturn Pennsylvanians’ votes.

“He’s now trying to use the same playbook to stoke chaos, but hear me on this: we will again have a free and fair, safe and secure election—and the will of the people will be respected,” Shapiro said.

A former Republican House candidate has been arrested and charged for stealing ballots in Indiana.

Larry L. Savage Jr. was charged with destroying or misplacing a ballot—a felony—and theft after he was captured on security footage nabbing two ballots in Madison County during testing of local voting machines, reported Fox59. The testing began at 10 a.m. on October 3 and was open to the public, according to court documents.

Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.

After pocketing the ballots, Savage leaned over to a woman streaming the event on Facebook Live, telling her that there was a “fucked-up count.” Upon exiting, Savage approached a man outside the government facility and showed him the ballots in his pocket before the unidentified man patted him on his back.

After Savage left, the woman confronted election officials about whether they were missing any ballots, reported Fox59. Savage then joined the woman’s livestream, commenting via his account “Cardkiller57” that the facility was “3 ballots short.”

“Dontvtake [sic] anything,” Savage wrote in another comment.

Ironically, Savage had framed himself as a champion of election integrity in online forums.

When questioned by police, Savage admitted that he had taken the ballots but claimed that a woman at the facility had given him permission to do so. He insisted that he “wasn’t trying to steal from nobody.”

After being confronted with evidence revealing that he had never asked for permission to take the ballots, Savage admitted that he had lied.

“If you go to Payless, or go wherever, it says sample and you usually can take a sample,” Savage said, according to Fox59. “So that is the way I took it. I thought they were fake fucking ballots.”

Speaking with Fox59, Savage claimed that he was an elected official and that he was “just trying to fight for our country.” (Savage, a businessman, came sixth out of eight candidates in the Republican primary.)

Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings said that Savage’s act was a deliberate attempt to “undermine our election process.”

“This was an act that feeds into that concern that a lot of voters have about the integrity of our process,” Cummings told Fox59. “And it simply wasn’t necessary. This is corruption. This is corruption at its core. To undermine our election process is unacceptable. And our office needed to take action.”

Donald Trump and his allies have corroded and undermined trust in the integrity of U.S. voting since he lost the presidential election in 2020, refusing to admit and rejecting mountains of evidence that the election was not “stolen” from him. Last week, Trump issued his first call to arms for the 2024 race, preemptively claiming on Truth Social that the November election is already rigged, mere days into early voting.

Trump fleetingly acknowledged in September that he did, factually, lose the 2020 election. But his insistence on Friday that he would definitely win the 2024 race came with a threat: that anyone working for the other side of the aisle—from attorneys to election officials and donors—will face consequences when he does.

Donald Trump is already constructing his election fraud theory if he loses the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

On Wednesday morning, Trump made a baseless accusation that there is widespread voter fraud going on in the state. “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” wrote the Republican nominee on Truth Social. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”

Trump’s alarmist rhetoric about election integrity in the swing state appears to only be escalating. On Tuesday, speaking in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump said he intended to sue Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia, for allegedly turning away voters who waited in long lines to receive mail-in ballots.

“There’s been lines like this for days across counties in PA,” wrote James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, on X .” Only for elections officials to come out and push people out of line and tell them to come back. Voter suppression!”

But the reality is different from the Trump team’s hallucination. “Contrary to what is being depicted on social media, if you are in line by 5 p.m. for an on-demand mail-in ballot application, you will have the opportunity to submit your application for a mail-in ballot,” wrote Bucks County on the Bucks County Government Facebook page.

Earlier this month, a viral video appeared to show election workers in Bucks County ripping up mail-in ballots that had been marked for Trump. However, on Friday, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, issued a joint statement explaining that the video was part of a Russian election disinformation plot.

This follows Trump’s similar claims earlier in the week, in which he singled out York and Lancaster counties. In a post late Monday night, Trump spread lies about thousands of fraudulent ballots and voter registrations, even making the widely inaccurate claim that one person had filled out 2,600 forms, which he again reiterated at the Allentown rally.

The reality is that those counties are going through their normal proceedings of verifying last-minute voter registrations and mail-in ballot applications. Any concerns were in fact already raised to law enforcement, according to county officials.

But in a state whose Republicans are nearly all election deniers, Trump’s flagrant lies don’t bode well for a close race come Election Day.

Suppressing votes just got a lot easier for a key Trump ally in Virginia.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday voted 6-3 to allow the Virginia election commission to resume a controversial voter purge program that has already wiped the names of 1,600 people from its voter rolls. The state says the program is designed to remove non-citizens, but two lower courts previously found the program is likely illegal.

All three of the court’s liberal justices—Justices Sonia Sotamayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented. 

Virginia’s Trump-loving governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed the controversial program into law and appealed legal challenges all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court made its decision Wednesday in a one-page order with no reasoning for the decision included.

The state of Virginia argued that the 1,600 people removed from the state’s voter rolls didn’t provide adequate proof of citizenship when registering to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But voting rights advocates argued Youngkin’s program violates the National Voter Registration Act’s ban on clearing voter rolls too close to Election Day.

In the end, the conservatives on the court decided to help out Republicans in the state. And while this decision is troubling, it is perhaps unsurprising for a majority that includes Judges Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito, each of whom have been chipping away at voting rights for some time now. 

This is a notable win for Republicans in an important state. It also shows that the highest court in the land will continue to reinforce Trump’s fear mongering about noncitizen voting. And if 1,600 voters sounds marginal, Virginia’s state legislature was decided by just one vote in 2017. It’s again clear that Republicans will go to absurd lengths to help Trump—and the rest of their party—win.

This story has been updated.

Trust in Democratic institutions is at an all-time low, and at least one man is celebrating the downfall.

According to a Gallup poll published earlier this month, public trust in the executive office and the legislative branches of government is practically abysmal, with just 40 and 34 percent of Americans, respectively, believing that the institutions are trustworthy.

But somehow, the news media got even more demerits, with confidence in the information apparatus hitting its lowest point on record this year. Just 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the industry’s ability to report news “fully, accurately and fairly.”

On Tuesday, Donald Trump celebrated his role in creating that sentiment, bragging to a crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that it was, largely, thanks to him.

“That is a lot of fake news. When they lose their final ounce of credibility, they’ll probably turn good again, because they’re losing so much credibility,” Trump said.

“You know when I first started running, their approval rating—the very, very beginning, before, maybe, I even started—it was like 92 percent favorable rating. You know what it is now? Twelve percent,” he continued. “I drove it down!”

“I drove it down, numbers. I’m very proud of it. I’ve exposed them as being fake,” he added.

And while his exact numbers may be wrong, Trump’s sentiment is, actually, correct. America’s trust in the media disintegrated in 2016 during his first run for the White House, when Trump routinely platformed the notion that then–Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was receiving more positive media coverage than he was. He also leveraged attacks on the media to undermine the industry’s coverage of his myriad scandals, including his criminal trials.

That year, confidence in news dropped by eight percentage points—the most in a single year since the metric was first recorded—and for the first time in U.S. history sank below 40 percent. It was dragged down, predominantly, by Republican respondents, whose faith in the media plummeted from 32 percent in 2015 to just 14 percent in 2016, while surveyed Democrats and registered independents reported relatively minor dents in their confidence.

Gallup began asking the question in 1972 and has seen the nation’s trust in the news media slowly drift down since it reached an all-time high of 72 percent in 1976, when investigative pieces on Watergate and the Vietnam War rocked the nation.

This year has shown the disheartening effects of that loss of trust: Newspapers and stations alike have laid off thousands of journalists, with dozens of major outlets downsizing or outright folding as the business side of the industry struggles to keep up with the market, the changing technological landscape (i.e., artificial intelligence), and rapidly changing leadership.

The same Republicans who were just yesterday telling America to grow thicker skin are clutching their pearls over a comment from President Joe Biden on Donald Trump’s supporters.

The collective meltdown comes after Biden spoke on a Get Out the Vote Zoom call hosted by Voto Latino on Tuesday evening, where he denounced the comedian at Trump’s rally who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

“Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community.… Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage,” Biden said on the call. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s—his hatred, his demonization of Latinos, it’s unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

Trump and his biggest fans quickly jumped on the remark, claiming that Biden meant “supporters” plural, while the former president said that he was specifically referring to Hinchcliffe.

“While I am running a campaign of positive solutions to save America, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of hate,” former President Donald Trump posted on X early Wednesday morning. “Now, on top of everything, Joe Biden calls our supporters ‘garbage.’ You can’t lead America if you don’t love the American People.”

“This is disgusting,” J.D. Vance wrote on X. “Kamala Harris and her boss Joe Biden are attacking half of the country. There’s no excuse for this. I hope Americans reject it.”

Senator John Cornyn—who remained suspiciously quiet as Trump and Vance spread made-up rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets—called the comments “despicable.” Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde even used it in a campaign ad equating it to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016.

Even if Biden had meant “supporters” plural, this kind of moral grandstanding is just disingenuous. This is a campaign that has referred to the vice president as a “devil,” said she had “pimp handlers,” made up pet-eating rumors that led to bomb threats shutting down Springfield, Ohio, and then still has the nerve to tell everyone to “stop getting so offended” when people get appropriately offended. They don’t have much room to talk.