Trump Weighs in on Milwaukee Flub and Somehow Makes It Even Worse

Republicans were quick to spin Donald Trump’s decision to call Milwaukee a “horrible city” after his private meeting with House GOP lawmakers Thursday, offering a confused array of cover-up possibilities. And Trump’s own explanation seemed to make the least sense out of the bunch.

GOP representatives rushed to provide justifications that included whining about the city’s delay in answering the former president’s request to expand the security perimeter around the Republican National Convention to keep protesters further at bay. Several loyal allies even claimed that Trump never made the comments at all. Trump took a different route altogether.

“It was very clear what I meant,” Trump told Fox News’s Aishah Hasnie. “I said, we’re very concerned with crime. I love Milwaukee, I have great friends in Milwaukee, but it’s, as you know, the crime numbers are terrible. We have to be very careful.”

But that wasn’t all. Instead, Trump seems to feel it was obvious that he meant multiple things by the short insult.

“I was referring to, also, the election, the ballots, the way it went down, it was very bad in Milwaukee. Very, very bad,” Trump continued. “And the people understand that and they agree with me. Everybody agrees. No, that was a fake story that came out.”

“Yeah. Milwaukee has a problem with crime, as do most Democrat-run cities,” he said. “Most Democrat-run cities, almost all of them have problems. But they also have a problem with votes. And election integrity. And that’s what we want to make sure we get straight.”

Trump may still be reeling after a trio of his allies were hit with felony charges by Wisconsin prosecutors last week for their involvement in the 2020 fake elector scheme, including Kenneth Chesebro, who allegedly designed the national plot that aimed to frame Trump as the winner of the presidential election.

And, as for Trump’s claim that the city’s crime numbers “are terrible”—in reality, they’re way down, with homicides in the city decreasing by 42 percent when compared to 2022, according to data from the Milwaukee Police Department. Crimes such as rape, aggravated assault, theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson have also dropped off drastically in the Brew City.

Baselessly insulting the city where you’ll be nominated for U.S. president in a handful of weeks is certainly a choice, but here’s hoping that Milwaulkee still knows how to give Trump a warm welcome when he arrives.

Donald Trump’s comment trashing Milwaukee, the site of this year’s Republican National Convention, has understandably not gone over well in the city.

Mayor Cavalier Johnson, asked about Trump calling Milwaukee a “horrible city” in a closed-door meeting with House Republicans on Thursday, clapped back at the former president.

“If Donald Trump wants to talk about things that he thinks are horrible, all of us lived through his presidency, so right back at you, buddy,” Johnson said.

“Look, obviously Donald Trump is wrong about something, yet again,” he continued. “I find it kind of perplexing, I find it kind of strange that he would insult the largest city in Wisconsin because he’s running for president, he obviously wants to win Wisconsin, win the election, and so to insult the state that’s hosting your convention, I think it’s kind of bizarre, actually, kind of unhinged, in a way.”

Johnson wasn’t the only Wisconsin politician to get in a few jabs at Trump. “Milwaukee makes the greatest beer, brats, and motorcycles in the world. It’s home to some of our most vibrant communities, hardest workers, and is a part of what makes Wisconsin the best state in the nation. Donald Trump wouldn’t understand even if a jury told him so,” Senator Tammy Baldwin tweeted, referring to Trump’s recent hush-money conviction.

Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin’s 4th district, which includes Milwaukee, also chimed in. “Once he’s settled in with his parole officer, I am certain he will discover that Milwaukee is a wonderful, vibrant and welcoming city full of diverse neighborhoods and a thriving business community,” she posted.

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked legislation to protect in vitro fertilization, a reproductive rights procedure that has gained popularity in recent years to help people have families.

Senate Democrats sought to codify federal protections for IVF as anti-abortion extremists sharpen their knives to severely restrict the procedure while advocating for a national abortion ban. The vote failed, with 48 votes in favor and 47 opposed. The bill needed 60 votes to pass. Only two Republicans voted with Democrats to protect the procedure: Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Here are all the other Senate Republicans who, after signing a GOP-led statement in support of IVF Thursday morning, actually voted against the Right to IVF Act:

• John Barrasso—Wyoming
• Marsha Blackburn—Tennessee
• John Boozman—Arkansas
• Mike Braun—Indiana
• Katie Britt—Alabama
• Ted Budd—North Carolina
• Shelley Moore Capito—West Virginia
• Bill Cassidy—Louisiana
• John Cornyn—Texas
• Tom Cotton—Arkansas
• Kevin Cramer—North Dakota
• Mike Crapo—Idaho
• Ted Cruz—Texas
• Steve Daines—Montana
• Joni Ernst—Iowa
• Deb Fischer—Nebraska
• Lindsey Graham—South Carolina
• Chuck Grassley—Iowa
• Bill Hagerty—Tennessee
• Josh Hawley—Missouri
• John Hoeven—North Dakota
• Cindy Hyde-Smith—Mississippi
• Ron Johnson—Wisconsin
• John Neely Kennedy—Louisiana
• James Lankford—Oklahoma
• Mike Lee—Utah
• Cynthia Lummis—Wyoming
• Roger Marshall—Kansas
• Mitch McConnell—Kentucky
• Jerry Moran—Kansas
• Markwayne Mullin—Oklahoma
• Rand Paul—Kentucky
• Pete Ricketts—Nebraska
• James E. Risch—Idaho
• Mitt Romney—Utah
• Mike Rounds—South Dakota
• Marco Rubio—Florida
• Rick Scott—Florida
• Tim Scott—South Carolina
• Dan Sullivan—Alaska
• John Thune—South Dakota
• Thom Tillis—North Carolina
• Tommy Tuberville—Alabama
• J.D. Vance—Ohio
• Roger Wicker—Mississippi
• Todd Young—Indiana

This article has been updated.

Two MAGA soldiers appeared to be starstruck by Donald Trump during the former president’s meeting with House Republicans Thursday. Unfortunately for the country, they’re some of the top lawmakers in the country.

In a press conference held shortly after the reunion, House Speaker Mike Johnson couldn’t hold back from cracking a smile while mentioning that Trump had personally thanked him for his dedication to Trump’s cause.

“He said very complimentary things about all of us. We had sustained applause,” Johnson said before bashfully turning his head to the side with a smirk. “He said I’m doing a very good job. We’re grateful for that.”

But Johnson wasn’t the only one giddy at the idea of getting a gold star from Trump. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared equally thrilled that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee even recognized her among the crowd.

“He’s always so sweet, recognizing me, and he said, ‘Are you being nice to Speaker Johnson?’” she told CNN’s Lauren Fox.

“He was joking. And I said, ‘Eh,’” she continued, gesturing with her hands. “He said, ‘OK, be nice to him,’ and I nodded my head.”

Trump’s two golden children in the House were diametrically opposed as recently as last month, when Greene forced a vote to strip Johnson of the gavel. Her motion to vacate fell apart after the House voted 359–43 to keep Johnson in leadership.

But the time-consuming and chaotic effort came at the cost of Greene’s already minimal popularity in the lower chamber, with Republicans insisting that the Georgia Republican be stripped of her committee assignments for leading another attempt to divide an already thin and historically unproductive majority.

Donald Trump has transferred $4.6 million of donations to his campaign into his businesses by charging the campaign for travel and food expenses, according to a new report from Forbes.

Federal Election Commission filings show that Trump’s aviation company, Tag Air, has charged the campaign $4.2 million since his 2024 bid kicked off. Secret Service flight costs—members are required to travel with Trump on the campaign trail—reportedly account for more than $800,000.

The campaign has also spent around $60,000 between the Trump National Doral golf resort in Florida and the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. And that’s to say nothing of the $332,000 the campaign has paid to host events at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence.

It’s not the first time Trump has pulled this kind of enrichment scheme: As president, he reportedly charged Secret Service agents “exorbitant” rates—sometimes five times the General Services Administration–mandated government rate—to stay at Trump-branded hotels in the United States, and untold millions at Trump properties abroad. As a candidate in 2016, Trump promised to divest from his business holdings if he were elected president. In January 2017, not two weeks before his inauguration, he reneged on that pledge.

It’s no secret that Trump has been hurting for cash. After losing the 2020 election, he solicited $250 million in supporter donations for his “election defense fund.” In the last six months of 2023, he spent $27 million of his supporters’ money on legal fees. And in the wake of several legal judgments against him—including a $450 million fine in his civil fraud case and an $83 million fine in the E. Jean Carroll defamation suit—he’s been forced to rely on unsavory, if not outright illegal, fundraising methods. Knight Speciality Insurance, the only surety willing to post Trump’s bond in the civil fraud case, famously lacked the assets to back the bond.

The writer John Ganz recently wrote about the mafioso weltanschauung animating Trump’s approach to politics. If it wasn’t already clear from his 45 years of grifting, it’s obvious now that he does business like a gangster.

Donald Trump’s trip to Capitol Hill on Tuesday was supposed to be about his agenda if he wins the election in November. Instead, his meeting with House Republicans was about as coherent as one of his rally speeches.

“Like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion,” one source at the meeting said, while another said that the convicted felon and presumptive Republican presidential nominee was “rambling.”

Almost every Republican in the House attended the meeting, which was full of praise for Trump, including singing “Happy Birthday” to him and presenting him with the baseball from Wednesday’s Congressional Baseball Game. But after that, Trump’s remarks went in various directions, from praising Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Steve Scalise to bashing the site of this year’s Republican national convention, Milwaukee.

Trump also told the audience that he met with Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and claimed he’s leading polls in the state by two points, despite the fact that a Republican hasn’t won there since 2004. Bizarrely, he also brought up Taylor Swift, asking why the pop singer would “endorse this dope,” referring to Biden, and referenced Hannibal Lecter again, calling him a “nice guy.”

“He even had a friend over for dinner,” Trump said.

His comments on abortion to the group were puzzling, claiming that it only became an issue 10 years before.

Weirdly, he also said that one of Representative Nancy Pelosi’s daughters told him, “If things were different, Nancy and I would be perfect together,” which prompted an immediate denial from Pelosi’s daughter Christine.

Trump’s meandering rants didn’t hold the attention of everyone in the room, though, as Representative Chip Roy, who has often fought with his Republican colleagues, was at one point reportedly watching golf on an iPad while Trump spoke.

In a major blow to dastardly labor rights that cruelly curtail righteous corporate greed, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Starbucks on Thursday. The ruling comes amid an ongoing battle between the heroic $25 billion corporation and the evil National Labor Relations Board’s order to rehire the “Memphis Seven,” a group of working class Starbucks employees who had the audacity to organize a union to support workers’ rights. The seven low wage workers were terminated by the java giant, prompting the NLRB to step in.

The case before the Supreme Court was brought by Starbucks seeking to overturn a lower court ruling that affirmed the NLRB’s order for Starbucks to rehire the Memphis Seven, and which issued an injunction against Starbucks for attempting to fight that rehiring. The Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday establishes a new precedent limiting the extent labor organizers and the NLRB can use the courts to enforce their rulings against companies that violate labor law or who unlawfully terminate workers in an effort to union-bust.

The NLRB successfully ordered Starbucks to rehire the “Memphis Seven” in September 2022. The NLRB alleged unfair labor practices for the firings, while Starbucks claimed the seven had engaged in “significant violations” of company policy: Starbucks claimed workers stayed in the store past closing time and allowed interviews by local media. Starbucks took its appeal to federal court and lost in August 2023 before appealing to the Supreme Court.

In response to the ruling, the Memphis Seven wrote, “It is a shame to see the lengths Starbucks is willing to go to destroy their image.” Starbucks Workers United, which represents unionized Starbucks employees, issued a statement on the ruling, calling it “particularly egregious” in light of how curtailed labor protections have become over the years.

Unionized Starbucks workers and those seeking to unionize have frequently alleged union-busting efforts by the coffee giant, including unlawfully reducing or changing worker-organizers’ schedules or closing locations in retaliation for successful organizing drives. Starbucks has received at least 446 unfair labor practice charges in the past year alone. The Strategic Organizing Center estimates Starbucks has spent $153 million on “anti-union activity,” and is liable for $87 million in denied wages, illegal firings, and store closings.

On Thursday, all nine Supreme Court justices either wholly or partially ruled in favor of Starbucks on the basis of impropriety for courts to intervene on matters that can be—and in this case were—resolved by the National Labor Relations Board. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority decision and pointed to “traditional rules” of courts not stepping in, with liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson partially concurring. “I am loath to bless this aggrandizement of judicial power where Congress has so plainly limited the discretion of the courts, and where it so clearly intends for the expert agency it has created to make the primary determinations about both merits and process,” wrote Jackson. The ruling effectively neutralizes the NLRB’s ability to use the court system to enforce its rulings against combative companies, marking the loss of one of the few tools left to combat intensified corporate union-busting.

This article has been updated.

Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill Thursday to meet with Republicans in Congress and supposedly discuss strategy, but it didn’t take long for him to go off on tangents—and dump on the site of this year’s Republican National Convention, Milwaukee.

Republican members of Congress from Wisconsin scrambled to respond to the comments, offering several different explanations to cover for the former president and convicted felon, including one representative who said the whole thing never happened. Unfortunately, three others said it definitely did.

Why would Trump criticize the city, especially since Wisconsin is a swing state that he narrowly lost in the 2020 election? The answer may very well be racism. Milwaukee is very often criticized by the rural and suburban politicians in the rest of the state, who use racist dog whistles, yell “socialism,” or rely on more overt bigotry. Myths of rampant crime continue to plague the city, even as its crime rate has dropped. Meanwhile, its sizable Black population, which has historically tipped the state blue, has slightly tempered its support for Democrats. In 2020, Trump’s allies responded to his election loss by trying to write off Milwaukee’s votes and overturn the state’s election results.

Recently, Wisconsin has been a source of bad news for the GOP, from a liberal candidate successfully winning a state Supreme Court seat to Democrats successfully throwing out one of the most gerrymandered legislative maps in the country. Perhaps Trump sees the writing on the wall and is (presumptuously) writing off the state for 2024, or he has another frightening plan to interfere in the state’s results if they don’t go his way. Or, maybe he hates Milwaukee for the same reasons he hates Chicago and Harrisburg.

One member of Congress who actually represents Milwaukee, had a healthier response to Trump’s comments.

This article has been updated.

The all-business, very important, couldn’t-be-missed meeting between Donald Trump and House Republicans Thursday quickly devolved into a mess, with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee apparently more focused on obsessing over his appeal to celebrities than discussing concrete policy changes intended to aid the American people.

In his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection, Trump ranted and raved, lasering in on key issues such as how Representative Nancy Pelosi is too old for him to date, slamming Wisconsin—the host of the Republican National Convention in July—as a “horrible city,” and, somehow most surprisingly, obsessing over Taylor Swift’s alleged support for President Joe Biden.

“Why would she endorse this dope?” Trump wondered, according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona. “He doesn’t know how to get off a stage.”

Swift has not endorsed anyone for the 2024 presidential election yet.

Days earlier, reports emerged that Trump had mused about Swift’s looks during a November 2023 conservation with Variety co–editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh.

“I think she’s beautiful—very beautiful!” Trump said at the time. “I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually—unusually beautiful!”

Swift was notoriously close-lipped about her political beliefs, even through the 2016 presidential election, when she was rumored to be a closet Republican—but that changed when she sided with Tennessee Democrats in the 2018 midterms against now-Senator Marsha Blackburn.

“Back in the [2016] presidential election, I was in such a horrendous place that I wasn’t going to pop my head out,” Swift explained in her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana. “These aren’t your dad’s celebrities and these aren’t your dad’s Republicans.… I need to be on the right side of history.”

Even with a stacked year that includes running for U.S. president, several criminal trials, serving a sentence, and owing half a billion dollars in legal penalties, Trump still can’t seem to shake Swift from his mind. In private, Trump has promised a “holy war” against the singer if she chooses to endorse Biden in the upcoming election. He has also privately bragged that he’s “more popular” than the internationally recognized pop superstar.

Republicans, meanwhile, appeared less interested in idle gossip. When they left the highly anticipated reunion with Trump, they described it as more of a “pep talk” than anything else.

In the same week that he rambled about electric boats and shark attacks, Donald Trump’s newest riff is one of his most bizarre yet.

During a closed-door policy meeting Thursday with House Republicans, Trump mused about his and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s romantic compatibility, reported Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman. Trump even alleged that one of Pelosi’s daughters had brought it up in conversation with him.

“Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is a whacko, her daughter told me if things were different Nancy and I would be perfect together, there’s an age difference though,” Trump reportedly said.

Pelosi’s daughter Christine, for her part, vehemently denied that the implausible interaction took place.

“Speaking for all 4 Pelosi daughters—this is a LIE,” Christine Pelosi tweeted. “His deceitful, deranged obsession with our mother is yet another reason Donald Trump is unwell, unhinged and unfit to step foot anywhere near her—or the White House.”

Trump has previously waded into Pelosi family discourse, mocking Pelosi’s husband, Paul, after a right-wing conspiracist broke into their San Francisco home and attacked him with a hammer, fracturing his skull. In 2019, Trump called Pelosi, then speaker of the House, “a disgrace to herself and her family.”