Trump’s RNC Applauds Georgia’s Dark Rewriting of Election Law

The Georgia state elections board is making changes to its voter certification process, and the Republican National Committee is in full support.

On Monday, the Georgia board approved a new rule by a 3–2 vote to allow local officials to investigate vote totals after Election Day, opening the door for new obstacles in certifying election results. Now, any member on a county’s board of elections can “examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results,” which could create chaos after an election.

The Republican National Committee’s co-chair, Michael Whatley, praised the measure in a statement, saying, “These steps by the State Election board are critical to securing the election in Georgia and correcting its long history of chaos.”

Three Republicans on the board have been praised by Donald Trump, who lost the state in 2020 and famously told Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes to overturn the results. Those same three members were hit with an ethics complaint last week by a former chair of the Fulton County Board of Elections, Cathy Woolard, who accused them of breaking the law in their efforts to help Trump disrupt the coming election.

Since 2020, Georgia has had the highest number of certification refusals anywhere in the country—and remains the likely epicenter for Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2024. Trump still faces charges for allegedly trying to overturn his 2020 election results in the state, but the case is currently in limbo over efforts to oust Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis. 

The RNC is totally under Trump’s control, having backed Whatley and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to serve as the committee’s co-chairs. The RNC’s support of Georgia’s new rule means that the former president and convicted felon is also applauding the move.

The RNC is sparing no effort to lock up Georgia in the GOP’s favor, also backing the state’s Republicans in a federal lawsuit over the alleged removal of nearly 1,000 voters from the rolls. With elections less than three months away, Democrats should be keeping a close eye on the GOP’s legally questionable efforts in Georgia.

Donald Trump gave his second sleepy address in as many days Tuesday during a stop in Howell, Michigan, diverting from his winding rant about crime to complain that women don’t seem to like him very much. 

During Trump’s low-energy speech, which was hosted in a shiny white garage at the Livingston County Sheriff’s office in front of parked police SUVs, the convicted felon candidate desperately attempted to frame his opponent, a former prosecutor, as being too lenient on crime. 

Trump alleged that Kamala Harris was “the ringleader for this pro-crime and anti-police crusade. It’s a real anti-police crusade. They just have it out for the police. Nobody knows why.”

He also called Harris “one of the first Marxist prosecutors in America” and “the godmother of sanctuary cities.”

Trump continued to falsely claim that Harris was responsible for passing a law that allows shoplifters in California to steal up to $950 in goods without being prosecuted, which Trump first claimed during his wild press conference last week in Bedminster, New Jersey.

“So, guys are walking into stores with calculators,” Trump said, turning to the officers standing behind him. “Did you know that they have calculators? They’re adding it up, they want to make sure they’re under $950. But it didn’t matter because they didn’t prosecute the ones that went over it.”

The Golden State’s penal code says nothing of the sort. Instead, it states that shoplifters who steal under $950 are charged with a misdemeanor, and those who steal more are charged with a felony. Even if the law said what Trump keeps insisting it does, which it doesn’t, it’s not clear that Harris had anything to do with the law being passed, or with “that horrible shoplifting epidemic” he blamed her for. 

While Trump’s speech was meant to focus on crime and safety, he was miraculously able to deliver the exact same talking points he’d made at every speaking event for the past week. He did make one new, but ultimately unsurprising claim, about his apparent lack of support from female voters.

The Republican nominee promised that if elected to the White House, he would stop the “plunder, rape, slaughter, and destruction of our American suburbs,” before detouring into a rant about women voters.  

“I think that women living in the suburbs—I keep hearing about ‘the suburban woman doesn’t like Trump,’ well, I think it’s a fake poll because why wouldn’t they like me? I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump claimed, arguing that women should be grateful that he kept undocumented immigrants out of their communities. 

“I think that they like me a lot, I think it’s a lot of fake polls,” Trump insisted, claiming he had “won the big one,” despite what polls had predicted. Trump went on to argue that for women voters, safety was the most important issue. 

“Women want to have safety. They want to have a strong military. They want to have a strong police force. They want to be in the house, and they want to be safe. They don’t want to have people pouring into their doors and you can’t do anything about it. Right?” 

As the crowd clapped, Trump mused, “I hope they like my personality.”

He thought about it for a moment. “I have a nice personality. But to me, it wouldn’t be very important, the personality. They want to be safe,” Trump said. 

Rather than actually craft a message that appeals to female voters, who could reasonably be disturbed by any part of Trump and J.D. Vance’s lackluster platform, including their overtly misogynistic rhetoric, Trump has repeatedly tried to woo women with his racist anti-immigrant fear-mongering. 

On Sunday, Trump shared a post on his Truth Social account showing video footage of a line of people of color walking on a dirt road with the caption, “If you’re a woman you can either vote for Trump or wait until one of these monsters goes after you or your daughter.”

Trump’s attempts to convince women to vote for him have been falling flat, and female voters have been moving steadily to the left, or as far away from Trump as they can manage. A New York Times/Siena poll published Saturday found that Kamala Harris had opened up a significant gender gap in some key battleground states, earning a 14-point lead over Trump among likely women voters in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, a group that had been evenly split between Joe Biden and Trump in May.

Trump’s speech had no shortage of the fear-mongering one has come to expect from the former president, even if he delivered it at a lower-energy frequency than normal.  He went on to repeat his oft-issued threat, that the world was on the precipice of World War III. 

He claimed he would never allow the military to become woke, before randomly turning to the officers standing behind him. “Do you promise you’ll never be woke? I don’t see a lot of wokeness, there’s not a lot of wokeness,” Trump said. “I don’t think so.”

Donald Trump thinks it should be “illegal” for the public to criticize the Supreme Court justices who rule in his favor.

In a bizarre speech over the weekend, between a bad Emmanuel Macron impression and claiming that he is better looking than Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump made a frightening declaration: He believes that those who criticize his judges should be punished.

“I really think it’s illegal what they do, with judges and justices. They’re playing the ref,” Trump said at a Saturday rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “Remember the term. Playing the ref with our judges and justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that.”

But even as others get their First Amendment rights taken from them, Trump thinks he should still have a right to criticize the courts. “The New York court system is totally corrupt,” Trump said in the same Saturday speech, referring to the court that convicted him of 34 felonies in his hush-money trial. His rants about the judge, the prosecutors, and the witnesses in that trial were so extreme that he was slapped with a gag order back in March, part of which still remains in place.

Trump’s suggestion comes as the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are under greater scrutiny after multiple reports of corruption and ties to far-right groups. Last month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced articles of impeachment against Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

J.D. Vance argued Tuesday that access to firearms should only be restricted for those convicted of a crime—meaning that those under restraining orders should still be able to purchase weapons.

During a press conference in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Vance was asked what he thought about restricting firearms access for those convicted of stalking. Vance answered the question, and then some.

“Well look, I think that we certainly don’t want violent criminals to have access to weapons, and that includes people, I think, who have been convicted of stalking. But I think it’s important to say convicted,” Vance replied.

“And what a lot of those of us who are pro-Second Amendment, what we don’t want is, you know, we don’t want somebody to have their gun rights taken away when they haven’t actually been to court of law. Whether it’s a First Amendment right, a Second Amendment right, you are entitled to due process in this country,” Vance explained.

“Certainly, people who are convicted of a crime, they should not be able to carry a firearm. But people who have not gone through due process, they still have their rights,” he said.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court upheld a New York law prohibiting domestic abusers under restraining orders from carrying firearms, with one lone dissenter: Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas argued that the government could not “strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order—even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime.”

In the majority opinion, Chief Supreme Court Justice Roberts found that the New York law was in line with constitutional law. “Our tradition of firearm regulation allows the government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others,” Roberts wrote.

J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are attacking Andy Beshear over comments the Kentucky governor made on MSNBC Tuesday morning.

“I mean, think about what some people have had to go through because of these laws,” Beshear told Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe regarding Republican states’ laws against abortion.

“J.D. Vance calls pregnancy resulting from rape ‘inconvenient.’ Inconvenience is traffic. Make him go through this,” Beshear added.

The Trump-Vance campaign seized on the words and took them out of context, claiming that Beshear actually called for Vance’s family members to be raped. Vance’s spokesperson William Martin called for Kamala Harris to “immediately repudiate” Beshear’s comments.

The Republican vice presidential nominee chimed in himself, calling Beshear a “disgusting person.”

It’s pretty clear that the Trump campaign is deliberately misinterpreting Beshear’s words, looking to make an issue when in reality, Beshear was accusing Vance of downplaying pregnancies resulting from rape. Recent polls have shown that while the Harris-Walz campaign is surging, Trump and Vance are going in the opposite direction.

Vance could be attacking Beshear as a way to distract from his own views on abortion. Last week, he said that “normal” women don’t care about their reproductive rights, and, long before that, he said some weirder things about procreation and women who don’t have children. In any case, Vance and Trump have struggled to land any effective attack or criticism against Harris or her running mate, Tim Walz, so expect to see them try to manufacture more controversies as the election draws nearer.

He may not be in office, but Donald Trump has been speaking with the powers that be about Israel’s war on Gaza—but it’s not in an effort to end the genocide.

Instead, Trump has allegedly been talking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avert a cease-fire deal, fearing that doing so could help Vice President Kamala Harris win in November, according to PBS.

“The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the Prime Minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign,” said PBS’s Judy Woodruff Monday night. “So, I don’t know where—who knows whether that will come about or not, but I have to think that the Harris campaign would like for President Biden to do what presidents do, and that’s to work on that one.”

Woodruff clarified on Wednesday that the anecdote was not based on her original reporting, but rather on an an Axios story last week that cited two U.S. sources as claiming that Trump and Netanyahu had spoken on the phone about cease-fire and Gaza hostage talks. Netanyahu’s office and Trump both separately denied the report.

“I did encourage him to get this over with. You want to get it over with fast. Have victory, get your victory, and get it over with. It has to stop, the killing has to stop,” Trump said at a New Jersey press conference on Thursday, referring to their meeting at Mar-a-Lago last month. But he also criticized cease-fire demands.

During Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, the president promised that his administration is working around the clock to bring “humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” “peace and security to the Middle East,” and to deliver a “cease-fire” and an end to the war.

The president also nodded to the more than 3,500 protesters who took to the streets of Chicago on Monday, demanding an immediate cease-fire to the war, claiming that the demonstrators “have a point.”* The war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians since it began 10 months ago.

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who escaped the besieged country in December, reported on Monday that the humanitarian area in south Gaza is little more than 14 square miles.

“Crammed in it are more than 1.8 million people, with no water, no electricity, no food, no clinics or pharmacies, and no shelters,” he wrote, lamenting in a separate post that he cannot “understand how this government continues to fund the genocide but cannot put an end to it” and “force the aggressors to stop dropping bombs.”

* This piece has been updated to clarify the number of protesters at the DNC.

This piece has been updated with Woodruff’s statement on Wednesday.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign is sinking fast. Federal Election Commission filings indicated that the fringe political candidate spent more than he brought into the campaign in July, with more than half of his donations coming out of the pocket of his running mate Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.

But shortly after the dire news broke, Shanahan revealed precisely why the conspiracy theorist has remained on the ballot so long, despite his abysmal polling.

“I’ve got to keep focusing on what matters the most outside of party lines. I need to focus on a vision that goes beyond November,” Shanahan told Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory podcast, adding that there are “benefits” to staying in the race, including official party recognition if their campaign secures more than five percent of the vote. That could translate into a stronger third party in the next election cycle, thanks to public funds that could provide up to $13.5 million dollars to the fledgling political group.

“That means that we could position for a real third-party election in 2028, where we don’t have to go around and spend tens of millions of dollars on ballot access, which means that we can spend all of that time and money campaigning,” Shanahan said.

But there’s an entirely different outlook for the Kennedy campaign should they decide to pull out—and, according to Shanahan, it would all be for the benefit of one candidate.

“There’s two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump,” she said. “Or, we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump.”

That latter option would require explaining to all of Kennedy’s supporters why the alternative political pairing have, after all their efforts, ultimately bent the knee to the two-party system. And while that wouldn’t pave the way for more political representation for everyday Americans, it could translate into administration positions for Kennedy and Shanahan. In fact, Trump already floated the idea in July, pitching that Kennedy—a notorious vaccine skeptic—could lead the Health and Human Services Department should the Republican nominee win in November.

“Not an easy decision,” Shanahan said.

Conservatives are freaking out about Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter after she … did nothing but exist.

As Harris’s husband and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff watched on at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, his children Cole and Ella Emhoff stood by his side. Ella, a 25-year-old fashion designer, rocked the Harris-Walz camo hat, campaign swag that was so popular it sold out in just 30 minutes.

As the family shared a proud moment, Republicans zeroed in on Harris and Emhoff’s daughter and began critiquing her looks, her body language, and her love for her dad.

“Totally not weird,” wrote Charlie Kirk, who was already having a rough time at the DNC.

“Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter looks like she is ready to assassinate a former President tonight,” wrote a conservative Twitch streamer, seemingly referring to the shooter who targeted Trump last month.

“This is how Kamala Harris’s step daughter Ella Emhoff dressed to see her step mother during one of the most important moments of her career at the DNC,” wrote right-wing media personality Oli London. (London perhaps shouldn’t talk about looks when he made a name for himself by engaging in extreme ethnic plastic surgery procedures.)

Others went so far as to try to “trans-vestigate” Ella Emhoff and accuse her of being a man.

“This is Kamala’s family. Beyond parody,” the account End Wokeness posted, sharing a normal video of Emhoff speaking with his two children. Again, it’s unclear what exactly is supposed to be weird here.

According to conservatives, when Trump gets touchy with his daughter, it’s normal. But when a daughter hugs her dad in an important moment in their life, it’s strange beyond belief. Totally makes sense!

An online collective of neo-Nazis is using Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast as a recruitment tool, according to an exclusive report published by The Guardian Tuesday.

The Terrorgram collective is a network of neo-Nazis and fascists that produces and disseminates right-wing propaganda using Telegram, encouraging acts of far-right terror and sanctifying those who commit them. 

The collective runs three main Telegram channels that mix mainstream news coverage with far-right content. The mainstream content gives the channels an air of legitimacy as administrators urge users to join group chats where more violent, extreme ideas are pushed, according to a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

The group has reportedly taken over a channel that is linked to Steve Bannon’s podcast, and markets itself as the “official home of the War Room Posse.” In a corresponding group chat, the channel’s administrator claimed that Bannon himself was involved in running the channel, according to ISD. The administrator has garnered more than 63,000 subscribers, only a few hundred short of the official War Room channel, and the channel’s contents have been shared by white nationalist Charlie Kirk to his nearly 170,000 followers. 

The Terrorgram collective disseminates its extremist propaganda to radicalize users and encourage racially charged violence. Nineteen-year-old Juraj Krajčík, who opened fire on people outside a popular LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, killing two people and injuring a third, had published a lengthy creed thanking the Terrorgram for “building the future of the White revolution, one publication at a time.” The U.K. government declared the collective a terrorist group in April.  

The collective is clearly hoping to tap into Bannon’s audience, pulling the already far-right MAGA movement even further into extremism, and Bannon’s platform represents one ripe for a neo-Nazi takeover. 

Bannon, who remains an influential voice on the alt-right, once admitted that he admired Donald Trump because Trump reminded him of Adolf Hitler. Bannon, who worked as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a strategist in Trump’s White House, was the mastermind behind creating the MAGA movement, which he reportedly hoped would rule the United States for hundreds of years. He was ultimately ousted from Trump’s administration after Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Bannon is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for refusing to testify to Congress for his role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign is in financial trouble.

The campaign is spending more money than it is bringing in, according to Federal Election Commission filings. It has $3.9 million in cash on hand, but is nearly $3.5 million in debt. In July, the campaign spent over $7 million while raising only $5.6 million, almost half of which came from RFK Jr.’s running mate Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.

The campaign’s spending remained high despite a cutback on events, according to Politico. Kennedy has not appeared at any public events since the beginning of July, instead sporadically showing up on podcasts and at conferences. Much of the campaign’s funds have gone towards ballot access, Facebook and Google ads, and a security firm run by a longtime associate.

Even with the help of a partnership with the Libertarian Party, the campaign’s fundraising, despite a slight uptick, hasn’t kept up with spending. The fact that Kennedy seems to be relying on Shanahan’s money more than outside donations suggests that he’s not bringing in a lot of new fans, either.

Kennedy seems to be aware of his diminishing fortunes. Last month, the independent candidate spoke with Donald Trump about getting a White House job in exchange for dropping out of the race and endorsing the convicted felon. Kennedy also reached out to the Kamala Harris campaign with a similar proposition, only to be rebuffed, probably because he might actually help her by staying in the race.

RFK Jr.’s campaign was in trouble even before President Biden stepped aside, with Kennedy failing to qualify for the first presidential debate. There were also a series of damaging revelations, from reports of a worm in his brain to the news that he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park to allegations of sexual assault. With diminished polling, all of this begs the question of what the point of Kennedy’s campaign actually is.