What the Hell Was Teamsters’ President Thinking With That RNC Speech?

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien praised Donald Trump as an ally for the working class and “one tough SOB,” in a strange speech at the Republican National Convention Monday.

The president of America’s largest and most diverse union  became the first Teamster in its 121-year history to address the RNC—and used that opportunity to elevate the former president.

“I think we all can agree, whether people like him or they don’t like him, in light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough SOB,” said the Teamster president, speaking about the assassination attempt on Trump.

O’Brien’s choice to speak at the convention and praise Trump sets him apart from other labor leaders. Nearly all major labor unions have endorsed Joe Biden for the 2024 election, with the AFL-CIO endorsing Biden 17 months before the general election. O’Brien acknowledged the controversy he is stirring in the union movement saying, “I don’t care about getting criticized.”

“I refuse to keep doing the same things my predecessors did,” O’Brien said in a speech that criticized both parties. “Today the Teamsters are here to say we are not beholden to anyone or any party. We will create an agenda and work with a bipartisan coalition ready to accomplish something real for the American worker.”

Trump, of course, has worked against workers’ interests at every turn—molding the National Labor Relations Board in his image, vetoing the Protect Right to Organizing Act, and restricting overtime pay, wage increases, and health and safety protections. Compare that to Biden, who in 2022 signed the Butch Lewis Act, saving the pensions of nearly 350,000 of O’Brien’s Teamsters membership.

Teamsters’ vice president at large, John Palmer, told Mother Jones last week that members are split when it comes to the 2024 election, with straw polls showing 46 percent supporting Biden and around 37 percent supporting Trump. Palmer has also openly criticized O’Brien’s budding relationship with Trump, writing that speaking at the RNC “only normalizes and makes the most anti-union party and President I’ve seen in my lifetime seem palatable.”

A segment of a phone call between independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump was leaked on social media early Tuesday, revealing just how much the two men support each other, despite Kennedy’s repeated insistence that he wants to offer voters a different option.

In one section, Trump can be heard tying vaccines to autism.

“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a … you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby,” Trump said on the call. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”

Trump appeared to suggest to Kennedy that the two should combine their efforts in some way, telling Kennedy that doing so would be “so good” and “so big” for the independent candidate. At one point, Trump said, “We’re gonna win.”

“Yeah,” Kennedy agreed.

Trump can also be heard describing the moment he was struck by a bullet on Friday at his Pennsylvania rally.

“I just turned my head to show the chart,” Trump said on the call. “And something rapped me. It felt like a giant … like the world’s largest mosquito. And it was. It was a bullet going around. You know, what do they call that, an AR-15 or something? That was a big gun. That was a pretty tough gun, right?”

In a since-deleted post, the apparent originator of the leak—Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III—wrote that “these sorts of conversations should be had in public.”

“Here’s Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids—this was the day after the assassination attempt,” the younger Kennedy wrote. “This is not a cheapfake or somebody doing a Trump voice. This is the real deal.”

Kennedy’s campaign has since come out and apologized for the leak, claiming that he had erred by failing to stop a “videographer” from filming him after Trump rang.

“I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately,” Kennedy wrote on X (formerly Twitter.) “I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

Watch the full clip of the call below:

A Fox News analyst said people would question why exactly Donald Trump had picked J.D. Vance as his running mate, considering his lack of experience and former status as a Never Trump Republican. 

Vance has talked his fair share of smack about the former president, saying Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” accused him of committing serial sexual assault, and calling him “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs.” But as Trump has amassed more power in the run-up to November, it seems that Vance has finally changed his tune. To many, though, it’s unclear why Trump would want to work with Vance at all. 

Brit Hume, a chief political analyst for Fox, said Monday night that many voters would be asking that question, and offered up a possible theory for Trump’s choice. 

“Some people may look at this and remember what J.D. Vance used to say about Donald Trump,” said Hume. “He was a hard-core Never Trumper not very many years ago, and he reversed himself completely not that long ago.

“And one of the things you worry about is, when somebody’s making a pick for a potential president—potential president if something happens to him—then you think, well, is this person; how did he get the job?

“Did he get it because he was really the best qualified to be president? Or did he get it because he sucked up effectively to the nominee?” said Hume. “People will have questions about that.”

Although Vance reportedly divided Trump’s donors, he was the “little pet” of one of Trump’s campaign managers, Susie Wiles, according to one anonymous GOP strategist. He  also had a number of powerful backers in Trump’s inner circle, including Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, as well as Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. 

A top Republican is blaming his divisive, hate-fueled speech at the Republican National Convention on a teleprompter loading error.

Senator Ron Johnson told PBS NewsHour Monday night that he had intended to hop on the “unity convention” bandwagon in the aftermath of the attempted assassination on Donald Trump’s life. But instead, he read a version of the script that was practically the opposite, allegedly because of a teleprompter mishap.

“That speech was written last week. They literally loaded the wrong speech,” Johnson told the news outlet.

“I had taken that out. Instead I’d loaded about that we needed a somber moment in history. We should heed President Trump’s call to unite,” he said. “We must heal and unify this nation. I didn’t know how to take that out without screwing up the teleprompter.”

But those statements being there in error apparently didn’t stop Johnson from saying them anyway. In a four-minute speech on Monday, Johnson told the crowd of conservatives that Democratic policies pose “a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values, and our people.”

He further derided Democrats as the party of “open borders, reckless spending, weaponized government, and weakness on the world stage,” and promised that Republicans would repair “the damage done by Democrats” once again.

“Vice President Harris and President Biden,” Johnson said, “have made our lives less safe and more expensive.”

The solution to all this, according to Johnson, was another four years of Trump. In closing out his speech, Johnson referred back to Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Johnson’s aides reportedly washed their hands of the incident, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that if anyone was going to take the fall for the teleprompter loading error, it would be “not us.”

An apparent teleprompter malfunction, which sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scurrying off-stage at the Republican National Convention Monday afternoon, launched the high-stakes political event into a welcome new phase: cover band concert.

“It is now my honor to introduce the attorney general,” Johnson began haltingly. “And there goes the teleprompter.”

Johnson awkwardly made his exit. Meanwhile, Sixwire, a country-rock band based out of Nashville, Tennessee, performed a rendition of Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In the Years.” A livestream of the main room showed clumps of blonde women dressed in bright red and waving their Trump signs, and white guys nodding their heads to the beat.

After the song ended, the band just kept going, and going, and going, riffing on the song’s iconic guitar melody.… Some say they’re still vamping to this day.

What could’ve transformed into a rocking evening was tragically cut short, as Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird appeared onstage to welcome vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance. He walked around the floor to Merle Haggard’s “America First.” Not nearly as fun of a song, but it was also repeated over and over again as Vance glad-handed delegates.

Days after getting shot at a political rally, Donald Trump claimed he wanted a “unity” convention. But his pick for vice president—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—immediately used the moment to deride liberals and President Joe Biden.

Despite having privately described the former president as “America’s Hitler,” Vance has become a “genuine convert” to the MAGA cause, according to Trump. And on Monday, Trump positioned the Ohio lawmaker as an heir apparent for his brand of far-right politics.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pennsylvania shooting that clipped Trump’s ear and killed two people, Vance took to X (formerly Twitter) to accuse Democrats—as opposed to Republicans—of stoking the violent rhetoric that led a registered Republican to attack the GOP leader.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote on Friday. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Vance has also been more than sympathetic toward convicted January 6 rioters: In 2022, he spread misinformation by falsely claiming that dozens of jailed Capitol protesters hadn’t yet been charged with crimes. He’s jumped onto the Trumpian bandwagon of calling for the Department of Justice to criminally investigate critics of the MAGA regime, and, perhaps most importantly for Trump, Vance has sworn complete loyalty, even if doing so flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution.

During an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos in February, Vance promised that had he been vice president in place of Mike Pence in 2020, he would have continued to carry out the fake elector scheme to overturn the election results.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said at the time. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”

Biden’s campaign, meanwhile, is reportedly poised to label the Trump-Vance ticket as “extreme” and a doubling down on Trump’s aggressive far-right positioning, according to NBC News.

“Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement obtained by the news outlet.

The leader of the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025 reportedly couldn’t be happier that Donald Trump picked Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate Monday.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which penned the lengthy blueprint for a potential far-right Trump takeover and draconian dismantling of the administrative state, was speaking to reporters when the announcement was made.

New York Times reporter Nick Corasaniti described Roberts’s live reaction to hearing that Vance had been tapped. “He reacted to the news ‘with a broad smile on my face’ and said that ‘privately, we were really rooting for him,’” Corasaniti wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

In his own post on X, Roberts congratulated Vance and called him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future.”

“When Americans get to know him, they will appreciate his values and vision as I do,” he wrote.

Roberts recently received widespread backlash for issuing a chilling warning to liberals. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” said Roberts, during an appearance on Real America’s Voice earlier this month.

Trump has since attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, even though at least 140 people he worked with were involved in making the plan, according to CNN. Vance, on the other hand, appears to have embraced the policy plan, saying last week there are “some good ideas in there.”

When Senator Mitch McConnell walked out on stage Monday at the Republican National Convention to nominate Donald Trump for president, he instantly got showered with a host of boos.

The jeers inside the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee were clearly audible as McConnell read out Kentucky’s delegate vote in favor of Donald Trump with a very small smile.

Did McConnell expect a more favorable response? He has always been disliked by MAGA Republicans for being part of the old Republican orthodoxy, even as he pushed through Republican priorities and helped Trump appoint a record number of judges to the federal courts On a personal level, Trump and McConnell don’t have the best relationship, of which the MAGA faithful are well aware.

While Trump appointed McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as secretary of transportation, he would later regularly make racist attacks against her, accusing the Senate minority leader of being compromised by China. Trump has also called McConnell a “dumb son of a b----.” McConnell only endorsed Trump for president earlier this year after all other Republican candidates dropped out of the primaries.

While McConnell lately criticized Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, reiterating his support for NATO and Ukraine, it’s doubtful the RNC crowd booed him for that reason. But McConnell probably doesn’t even care. Not only will he be stepping down from his Senate leadership position after November, but he also doesn’t need public support to accomplish what he wants: keeping the GOP in power.

Representative Matt Gaetz has exposed what may be Judge Aileen Cannon’s real motive in every pro-Trump ruling she makes.

After the Trump-appointed judge on Monday dismissed the former president’s classified document’s case, Gaetz posted a headshot of her on his personal account, captioning the photo “Future Supreme Court Justice Cannon.”

On his professional X account, Gaetz wrote, “I applaud Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision dismissing the Trump documents case in federal court in the free State of Florida.”

It’s not the wildest notion. The former president nominated Cannon to the bench at the tail end of his term. Since then, the inexperienced judge has handed him win after win in his classified documents case—some of which were such flimsy rulings that she was repeatedly shut down by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

If Trump does retake the White House, it’s incredibly possible he could have the chance to appoint a fourth Supreme Court justice—and perhaps he’d like to reward the judge who helped save him from what was the strongest case against him.

Other Republicans, including failed V.P. picks, made celebratory posts after Cannon’s ruling as well. “Dismissed!” Senator Marco Rubio chimed in, and Senator Rick Scott called it a “big win.” Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene celebrated the “major blow” to the Justice Department while warning about future attacks from the Democrats, writing “they are going to keep going after every single one of us who opposes their agenda.”

Donald Trump has named Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate, bucking the wishes of Republican donors and the party establishment.

Trump posted on Truth Social Monday afternoon that he was choosing Vance, saying that Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond …”

It’s an interesting pick, given the senator’s previous, quite vocal criticisms of Trump. Vance was only elected to the Senate in 2022, partially due to the fame of his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, published in June 2016, which was later adapted into a movie. The book, based on Vance’s life growing up in rural Ohio, drew criticism for trafficking in myths and stereotypes about the white working class. 

In the book’s heyday, it was seen as an insight into the voter attitudes that gave rise to Trump, even though the then presidential candidate was not mentioned in the book. Vance even criticized Trump while promoting the book, saying, “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

“I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016. “I never liked him.” In February of that year, he reportedly privately wondered whether “Trump was America’s Hitler.”

A few months later, when the infamous Trump Access Hollywood tape came out, Vance warned, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us. When we apologize for this man, lord help us.” Throughout 2016 and 2017, Vance liked tweets critical of Trump, including that he committed “serial sexual assault” and was “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs.” In a set of since deleted tweets, Vance also criticized Trump’s response to the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, writing, “There is no moral equivalence between the anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville and the killer (and his ilk).”

But of course, like many other Republicans, the self-described “Never Trump” Republican soon changed his tune on Trump, fully backing Trumpism by the time he began his run for the Senate in 2022 and fomenting right-wing attacks on “wokeness” and “critical race theory.” His time in the Senate has continued along those lines, as he has sponsored culture-war bills like one that would completely gut diversity, equity, and inclusion principles in the federal government and claimed he would have tried to overturn the 2020 election results if he was vice president.

The possibility of Vance becoming Trump’s running mate drew objections from several top Republican donors who were concerned about his lack of experience, both in business and in politics. Other top candidates like North Dakota’s Doug Burgum and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida were seen as safer picks, particularly with Rubio’s foreign policy orthodoxy.

But Vance won out in the end thanks to his antiestablishment credentials. He had the support of Silicon Valley tech moguls like Peter Thiel and David Sacks, and Rubio was opposed by several in the Trump camp, including Donald Trump Jr, whom Vance seems to have successfully buttered up.

One Republican strategist criticized Vance’s lack of experience when he was still only on Trump’s V.P. shortlist, saying, “J.D. Vance is a guy who wrote a book and helped with a Netflix show.” Well, now J.D. Vance is the Republican vice presidential nominee, and if Trump wins in November, he’ll be a heartbeat away from the presidency.