J.D. Vance’s 2020 Black Lives Matter Lie Shows the Threat He Really Is

Following the 2020 George Floyd uprising, J.D. Vance peddled an unhinged conspiracy about Black Lives Matter: Amazon funded the protests to burn down its competition.

On Thursday, the Christian Science Monitor reported that in 2021, Vance attended a conference hosted by right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, where he claimed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos funded Black Lives Matter to encourage private property destruction during the protests of summer 2020.

“Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” he declared.

Vance pushed a conspiracy about “woke capital” and called Bezos “one of the largest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

“Woke capital is when companies and businesses are more invested in a movement like BLM than they are in traditional American principles,” said Vance, pushing the far-right’s favorite diversity, equity, and inclusion conspiracy. “If you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefiting financially from it.”

Amazon did donate $10 million to a range of social justice organizations about two months after the murder of Floyd, but categorizing the megacompany as “one of the largest funders” of the racial justice movement is pure disinformation.

In the speech, Vance also categorized companies supporting abortion rights as corporations being “so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children.”

When asked for comment by the Christian Science Monitor, Vance didn’t back away from the conspiracy. “Jeff Bezos’s companies promoted and donated to Black Lives Matter as BLM protestors destroyed countless brick and mortar businesses across the country—the very businesses that Amazon counts as direct competitors,” a Vance spokesman wrote. “Woke billionaires like Bezos have taken over corporations across the country and turned them against the American people. Senator Vance is absolutely right to call them out and will continue to do so.”

Donald Trump’s latest hire is proof that the former president is hoping to get the band that first got him to the White House back together.

The Trump campaign has hired Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s campaign manager ahead of the 2016 presidential election, to advise its senior leadership team. Lewandowski will reportedly serve above Trump’s co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, amid swirling rumors that the two have become the most vulnerable members of Trump’s team.

Lewandowski was viewed as a fierce defender of Trump’s unorthodox approach to campaigning, according to The New York Times. When Trump was urged to soften his message to appeal to moderates, Lewandowski adopted the motto “Let Trump Be Trump.”

This nonstrategy stands in stark contrast to the current state of the race, in which Trump’s allies have begun urging him to stop making personal attacks against his opponent and stay on message. As such, Lewandowski’s hiring could signal Trump pushing back on his team’s attempts to get him to focus on policy rather than his typical grandstanding.

Lewandowski’s reputation precedes him. In March 2016, Lewandowski was arrested for intentionally grabbing and bruising the arm of a female reporter. He was charged with misdemeanor battery.

The charges were ultimately dropped because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. Trump defended him, telling reporters at the time, “I think it’s a very, very sad day in this country when a man could be destroyed over something like that.”

Trump, whose catchphrase is literally “You’re fired,” claimed that he couldn’t just “discard people.” Lewandowski was fired from the campaign three months later.

While the split was “amicable,” Lewandowski had been subject to several unfavorable headlines and reportedly had a contentious relationship with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. Trump later expressed regret about firing his campaign manager.

After the election, Lewandowski went on to lead the pro-Trump Make America Great Again super PAC, but he was ousted from that organization in 2021 after he was accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward a Trump donor. Lewandowski has remained an informal Trump adviser.

Lewandowski also co-wrote a book about working on Trump’s campaign, predictably titled Let Trump Be Trump. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard described the book as “repetitive, sycophantic, and self-serving.” It simultaneously painted Lewandowski as the true architect of the Trump campaign’s success in 2016 while remaining effusively complimentary of the wrathful, tantrum-having candidate at its center.

LaCivita and Wiles also announced that Alex Pfeiffer and Alex Bruesewitz, top officials at the MAGA Inc. super PAC, would be joining the Trump team. Earlier this week, the Trump campaign announced that it had hired that super PAC’s leader, Taylor Budowich, who is also a former Trump aide.

The campaign has also brought aboard Tim Murtaugh, who was the communications director on Trump’s failed 2020 reelection campaign.

Donald Trump’s campaign advisers may be getting worried.

As the campaign has struggled to land any sort of attack against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, criticism has come inside and outside the campaign from dissatisfied conservatives, and advisers are being forced to downplay dissension within the ranks.

“As President Trump said, he thinks Ms Wiles and Mr LaCivita are doing a phenomenal job and any rumors to the contrary are false and not rooted in reality,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement to The Guardian regarding the status of campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who have recently become the subject of a far-right campaign to have Trump fire them.

“This campaign is focused on winning, and anyone not focused on electing President Trump and defeating Kamala Harris is doing nothing but hurting every American. Detractors and lobbyists are waging a destructive battle of rumor and innuendo, and they are well known and will be remembered,” the statement added.

But that’s not likely to quiet detractors, especially with the news Thursday that Corey Lewandowski, a Trump 2016 campaign veteran, will be rejoining the campaign at a level above LaCivita and Wiles. Earlier this month, Trump and his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump met with Kellyanne Conway, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser and later campaign manager, to discuss strategy.

That meeting didn’t go over well inside the current Trump campaign, with advisers seeing Conway as intruding on the campaign and possibly even wishing to take over, according to The Guardian’s sources. While Trump played down the meeting and called out Conway’s Ukraine lobbying and 2023 idea for a 15-week abortion ban, there are still nervous vibes within the campaign.

In 2016, Trump made late changes to his campaign staff and won the election, but in 2020, he did the same and lost. Right now, the former president and convicted felon is having trouble staying on message, worrying Republican lawmakers. He’s also obsessed with recruiting poll watchers and observers, which could hurt the GOP ground game. Will Trump overcome these issues by the time November rolls around?

A key author of Project 2025 was caught in a secret recording bragging about how close he is to Donald Trump and admitting his love of “Christian nation-ism.”

Russell Vought, who is reportedly in line for chief of staff in a second Trump administration, said that his group, the Center for Renewing America, is leading the charge drafting executive orders and policy memos to help Trump immediately take action upon entering the Oval Office. He was caught on camera by two undercover British journalists from the nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting, which published the secret recording on Thursday.

Vought revealed his group plans to create “shadow” agencies to implement its draconian vision to solidify the “Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

“We’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” said Vought.

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” he said. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

The investigative reporters secretly recorded their nearly two-hour conversation with Vought, who served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee and recently helped to rewrite the official GOP platform. Vought, former Office of Management and Budget director under Trump, said he has personally been in talks with the former president over recent months and even received a personal “assignment.”

“He’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it,” Vought continued, saying that Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”

Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, is one of the many right-wing groups that are a part of Project 2025; Vought authored the chapter discussing the executive office of the president in the 900-page master plan. Trump has been trying to deny the influence of Project 2025 on his campaign.

“President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the campaign, told CNN in response to the latest report.

But Vought wasn’t bothered. “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious, distancing himself from a brand,” he said in the secretly recorded interview. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

Donald Trump is looking for one more get-out-of-jail free card, but the last-ditch effort is unlikely to work this time.

The convicted felon asked New York Justice Juan Merchan one more time on Wednesday to delay his New York hush-money criminal sentencing until after the November election. The historic event—which marks the first criminal sentencing of a former U.S. president—is currently scheduled for September 18.

In a pre-motion letter to the judge, Trump’s legal team suggested that delaying the sentencing would mitigate the “appearances of impropriety.” The letter pointed to Merchan’s daughter’s prior work for Democratic candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, and her business partner’s contributions to the Harris-Walz campaign, notably those made by Michael Nellis, the founder of Authentic Campaigns.

“Sentencing is currently scheduled to occur after the commencement of early voting in the Presidential election,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote. “By adjourning the sentencing until after that election—which is of paramount importance to the entire Nation, including tens of millions of people who do not share the views of Authentic, its executives, and its clients—the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings.”

“There is no basis for continuing to rush,” he added.

Merchan seems the least likely of Trump’s trial judges to offer him any favors, especially after enduring Trump’s endless mud-slinging throughout the grueling, seven-week trial. Trump’s attacks were primarily aimed at a gag order on the former president, which prevented him from targeting witnesses, jurors, courtroom staff, and their family in his venomous statements to the press—but did not prevent him from hurling vitriol at Merchan.

Trump repeatedly falsely claimed Merchan was violating his First Amendment right to free speech, but despite the constant heat, Merchan never broke. Appellate lawyers described Merchan’s behavior throughout the trial as “flawless” and have predicted that the attacks wouldn’t play well for Trump’s numerous appeals.

But if their background weren’t enough of an indication of how Wednesday’s request will proceed, another recent filing by Merchan might shed some light. The day before Trump filed his latest plea, Merchan plainly rejected an even bolder petition calling for his recusal from the wrapped New York case.

“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” Merchan wrote in his ruling posted Wednesday, noting that Trump’s arguments were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims.”

Donald Trump seems incapable of staying on message, and it’s seriously beginning to worry Republican lawmakers, according to a report NOTUS published Thursday. 

Trump’s campaign attempted to debut a smaller messaging event on Wednesday, as part of a new strategy to get the president to stay on topic. Trump predictably detoured into his typical racist fearmongering and personal attacks against his opponent, Kamala Harris. 

Despite the Trump team’s efforts to curb its loquacious candidate and its insistence on running a  “disciplined” campaign, it seems that nothing the team does can prevent Trump from, well, being Trump. And Republican lawmakers aren’t impressed. 

“Let’s be real: He lost in ’20. He has a solid base but has done nothing, or worse, alienated anyone from coming back to him,” one Republican lawmaker told NOTUS. “It’s like the sixth or seventh season of a show that was once funny but now panders to his base.

“If he continues down this road and Harris stays her course and the economy starts to show signs of improvement, he will be a two-time loser,” the Republican added.

Another Republican congressperson who spoke anonymously to NOTUS warned that Trump “needs to get back on message and start talking about policy differences.

“If he doesn’t do this I think he will lose and probably cost Republicans the House and Senate,” the GOP lawmaker said. 

A third House GOP member told NOTUS that Trump was “rattled” and needed to “get on message.”

Trump has reportedly been struggling to manage his frustration following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race. What was once a sleepy, one-event-a-week campaign has turned into an actual race, against a younger candidate with considerable energy and enthusiasm behind her. This anger seems to be coming out in different ways, and undermining Trump’s ability to effectively campaign without alienating his supporters and backers. 

Last month, just days after Harris announced her campaign, one of Trump’s aides fired off some extremely angry texts to wealthy GOP backer Miriam Adelson on behalf of the former president, according to The New York Times. Adelson, who is worth roughly $30 billion, is one of the Republican party’s wealthiest backers. 

The texts accused Adelson of having allowed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) to run her Preserve America PAC. Trump and Adelson were scheduled to meet and make up this week, and it’s not clear that the comments will affect Adelson’s giving. 

Last week, Trump repeatedly attacked Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, much to the dismay of his allies and supporters, who believe it will hurt his chances in Georgia. One House Republican told NOTUS it was “extremely foolish” for Trump to go after Kemp. 

“If he displayed self-discipline and impulse control, he’d win,” the lawmaker explained to NOTUS. “The issues favor us. He’s been unable to focus on the issues and is behind. This is his race to lose, and he’s shooting himself in the foot. There’s some Trump fatigue too, and if he’d focus on issues and get off the personality attacks, he’d connect more with voters.”

But Trump hasn’t proven that he’s able to do that. The former president was meant to speak solely about the U.S. economy on Wednesday, but the Republican nominee couldn’t help but play into what his audience was most responding to, and they seemed excited by his jokes and jabs at Harris. But, ultimately, Trump’s audience of supporters isn’t representative of the electorate.

Typically, an election cycle has two or three presidential debates and just one showdown between the vice presidential candidates. But J.D. Vance wants to mix that formula up.

On Thursday, the Ohio senator announced that he would commit himself to more debates against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, believing that the “American people deserve as many debates as possible.”

“Not only do I accept the CBS debate on October 1st, I accept the CNN debate on September 18th as well. I look forward to seeing you at both!” Vance wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday morning.

But there may be more than meets the eye to the unprecedented second debate invitation, as September 18 holds a different kind of significance for the Republican campaign: It also marks Donald Trump’s sentencing date after a New York court found the former real estate mogul guilty of felony business fraud charges.

It’s not yet clear if Walz has agreed to the second debate—but doing so could divert attention from the first criminal sentencing of a former president in U.S. history.

“CNN invited both Senator Vance and Governor Walz to a Vice Presidential debate this fall, and Senator Vance has accepted,” a CNN spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

“We are always in communication with the campaigns around opportunities for the American public to hear from leading candidates for President and Vice President of the United States, and we look forward to this programming in the fall,” the spokesperson said.

Tim Walz and J.D. Vance will be debating on CBS News on October 1.

CBS News invited Walz and Vance for a debate in New York City on Wednesday, offering them a choice of September 17, September 24, October 1, and October 8. Walz quickly confirmed his willingness, posting on X that afternoon, “See you on October 1, JD.”

And on Thursday morning, Vance finally agreed. He even tried to pressure Walz into a second debate hosted by CNN in September, a clear sign that things are not going well for him.

Typically, the vice presidential candidates don’t debate more than once leading up to an election, and many see the proposition as desperation from Vance and the Trump campaign.

When Vance was initially asked by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Wednesday evening if he would show up to the October 1 debate, he waffled.

“I strongly suspect we’re going to be there on October 1, but we’re not going to do one of these fake debates where they don’t actually have an audience there, where they don’t actually set the parameters in a right way where you can have a good exchange of ideas,” Vance told Ingraham.

“In other words, we’re not going to walk into a fake news media garbage debate. We’re going to do a real debate, and if CBS agrees to it, then certainly we’ll do it,” Vance added.

But things clearly changed in the Trump team’s calculus. Vance’s debate follows Donald Trump’s decision last week to debate Kamala Harris, after weeks of hesitating and complaining about Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. He attempted to schedule a new debate on GOP-friendly Fox News, only to face criticism from his own supporters. It seems that now Trump and Vance are getting desperate in the face of Harris and Walz’s surge in the polls.

Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, just got a little bit weirder.

On top of the wannabe authoritarian’s other archaic views of women, the Ohio senator revealed to Fox News Wednesday that he doesn’t believe it’s “normal” for suburban women to care about their reproductive rights.

“What do you say to suburban women out there who are marinating in this propaganda?” prompted Fox News host Laura Ingraham, claiming that some women have fallen into the belief that abortion is banned nationally.

“Well, first of all, I don’t buy that, Laura,” Vance said. “I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about.”

But Vance’s assumption that suburban women don’t care about abortion is plainly wrong—and Trump’s campaign might be doing better in the polls if they paid attention to the data. An April Wall Street Journal poll found that abortion ranked head and shoulders above other issues in seven battleground states, with 39 percent of surveyed suburban women describing it as a “make or break” issue in the 2024 election.

An August report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in seven U.S. women have had an abortion at some point in their lives and that three out of four U.S. women believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Roughly 74 percent of the polled women also opposed leaving it up to the states to decide the legality of the lifesaving procedure.

“JD Vance thinks he gets to tell women how to live our lives,” Harris-Walz 2024 spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Women are sick of Trump, Vance, and their Project 2025 obsession with controlling our most private decisions. We’ll shut the door on them this November.”

Donald Trump’s obsession with convincing his supporters to surveil the upcoming presidential election may ultimately be hurting his campaign.

The Republican nominee has repeatedly claimed that Republican Party officials only need to focus on ensuring election integrity in November, and has centered his campaign’s efforts on recruiting thousands of poll watchers and poll workers. As a result, the campaign is relying on a constellation of outside groups to rustle up the traditional networks of volunteer door-knockers and canvassers.

These groups include Elon Musk’s incredibly shady America PAC as well as Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of white-nationalist Charlie Kirk’s organization. A recent FEC rule change from March now allows for canvassing super PACs to coordinate directly with campaigns on messaging and campaign data. As a result, Trump’s scrappier in-house volunteer program can be boosted by funds from megadonors.

However, outsourcing this aspect of the campaign could prove problematic if strong personnel and structural dynamics don’t fall into place. The America PAC recently underwent a change in leadership, which caused it to clean house with its vendors supplying the workers.

The Trump campaign said it has rounded up more than 150,000 poll watchers and poll workers, reviving concerns about voter intimidation that first cropped up in 2020. The number of employed campaign staff and campaign volunteers is far smaller.

James Blair, the campaign’s political director, posted about the campaign’s operations on X Thursday, following a report from Axios that relied on numbers he’d shared last week.

In his update, Blair wrote that the campaign was bolstered by 14,500 community volunteers called “Trump Force 47 captains.” He said 2,500 of them had been trained in the last week alone, and has previously estimated that another two thousand would join every week until election day.

Last week, Blair had said that outside groups had employed more than 1,000 canvassers in battleground states, which would rise to 2,500 by election day. He said that the campaign employed hundreds of staff across the battleground states.

The Republican National Committee had plans in place for a more expansive canvassing effort, those plans were discarded once Trump’s team took over in March, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

While Trump’s focus on election integrity may not have been a detractor when he was running against President Joe Biden, it certainly looks that way now. Since announcing her candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has worked with 330,000 volunteers and has a staff of 15,000 people.

“What’s happened in the last couple of weeks is we actually have a real race. This is a real presidential campaign. The Biden-Trump version of this was one event a week by each candidate, very rarely on the campaign trail and no real engagement,” Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, told the Post. “Now this is going to be one of those campaigns where strategies matter, resources matter, time matters, and there is not much room for error.”

Several people close to the Trump campaign told the Post that there was an ongoing effort to get the easily distractible candidate to focus more on attacking Harris and other Democrats.

Trump has falsely claimed that Democrats are actually encouraging illegal immigration for the purpose of bolstering their voter base. Meanwhile, he was the one who killed a bipartisan border deal earlier this year that would have helped curb the entry of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump has repeatedly said the priority of the Republican Party is to tighten election restrictions, but his fearmongering is fed by his own baseless claims of election fraud and conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting. Trump’s election martyrdom from 2020 may be the nail in the coffin of his 2024 campaign.

This story has been updated.