“You Have No Choice”: Trump’s New, Ominous Election Threat to Voters

Speaking at a Fox News town hall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Wednesday night, Donald Trump got weirdly threatening with his voter base.

“You have no choice,” Trump said. “You’ve got to vote for me, even if you don’t like me.”

As Trump continues to get bad news in the polls, it appears he is getting increasingly desperate to escape a prison sentence and reclaim power. The new election threat comes on the heels of him repeatedly telling voters this summer that after this election, they’ll never have to vote again.

During Wednesday’s town hall, hosted by Sean Hannity, Trump couldn’t even take the time to enjoy a friendly crowd without getting worked up about Kamala Harris.

Trump launched into the ominous order to voters after saying Harris will ban fracking nationwide, which is a lie. “If she won, you’re not gonna have any fracking in Pennsylvania,” Trump exclaimed. Though Harris floated limiting fracking during her 2020 campaign for president, she has since aligned with President Joe Biden’s policy position on the issue. She told CNN last week that she now believes that her administration could create a “thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

The two candidates appear to be tied in the polls in Pennsylvania, hence Trump’s drumming up fear about the industry in the state and begging for votes.

Just a handful of months ago, Donald Trump glided through New Hampshire’s Republican primary. After his first match-off with President Joe Biden in June, Trump’s campaign was so confident it would carry on with the Granite State’s support in November that it had legitimately spooked Democrats. 

Things could not be more different now.

After a weekend kerfuffle in which a top Trump volunteer released an email indicating that the campaign should back out of its efforts in New Hampshire, Team Trump officials seem all too ready to ignore that they ever thought they had a fighting chance to win the battleground state.

“This election is going to be won in those seven swing states” and not in New Hampshire, the Trump campaign’s New Hampshire co-chair Lou Gargiulo told Politico, referring to Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. “That’s where the effort’s got to be put.”

Despite making recent promises that his attention was still trained on its voters, Trump has reportedly not visited the Granite State since he won its primary. His campaign has failed to match the energy of Democrats in the state, with no surrogates carrying the torch in his absence.

“The Trump campaign does not appear to be matching or contesting” New Hampshire, according to Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist from the state and former Trump administration appointee who spoke with Politico.

The Trump campaign was caught off guard on Sunday when a top volunteer, Tom Mountain, issued an internal message notifying fellow volunteers that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state.” Mountain also wrote that internal polling indicated  Trump could lose New Hampshire by a wider margin than he did to Joe Biden in 2020. 

Mountain is reportedly no longer with the campaign, but his message was, apparently, not a one-off. Instead, other New Hampshire Republicans have also signaled that the race in their state is a done deal, according to CNN correspondent Steve Contorno.

Speaking with Erin Burnett on CNN’s OutFront Tuesday night, Contorno argued that the tides have turned for the Trump campaign among New Hampshire voters.

“When I talked to other Republican operatives in the state, they said that this volunteer is painting a pretty clear picture that’s really illustrative of what’s happening there,” Contorno said.

One such Republican was GOP strategist Mike Dennehy, who said that Trump could lose New Hampshire by six to eight percentage points.

J.D. Vance thinks the high cost of daycare can be solved with one easy trick: Just ask your family for help!

At a Turning Point Action event in Mesa, Arizona, Wednesday, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk asked the Republican vice presidential nominee how to lower the cost of childcare. Vance’s answer seemed more than a little tone-deaf.

“One of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for daycare is, maybe grandma and grandpa wants to help out a little bit more. Or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more,” Vance said. “If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all of the resources that we’re spending on daycare.”

For parents who do not have access to help from relatives, Vance said that more people have to get training in childcare and that certain certifications have “nothing to do with taking care of kids.” He falsely implied that childcare specialists were forced to have a “six-year college degree” and thus had to charge more for daycare.

Vance’s solutions, if one could call them that, seem out of touch at best. Family help is not a policy solution, nor is it even practical for many parents who do have family willing to help. Childcare certifications also typically don’t require advanced college degrees, or even college degrees at all. While Washington, D.C., has a degree requirement, it’s only for a two-year associate’s degree.

Yet again, Vance seems to have some weird, archaic views on families. In 2020, the Ohio senator agreed with a podcast host who said having grandmothers help raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” He has policy proposals that would make life harder for people without children and has faced heavy criticism for insulting “childless cat ladies.” Perhaps he should just stop talking about children and families, especially since he doesn’t speak well about his own children.

Someone on Donald Trump’s campaign has leaked an internal warning to staff to please stop leaking.

In an email to staffers on Wednesday, Trump co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles warned employees that talking to the press could cost them their jobs. “You should not be independently speaking or communicating with any members of the press—on or off the record,” the threatening message reads.

“We have done a great job at preventing leaks,” LaCivita wrote (one hour before their warning was leaked). “And that has been because everyone knows what the policy is and what we expect from everyone. Information is power—and the press doesn’t give a damn if you lose your job because you spoke out of school.”

The instruction not to speak to the press and keep information tight for the next two months feels a bit ominous. “There must be a hot story in the works …” wrote Tara Palmeri of Puck News who posted the email on X.

Kamala Harris’s team caught wind of the news and went on to make a jab at the former president’s team. “We’re at the leaks about leaks part of the Trump campaign! We’ve all seen this movie before,” wrote Harris’s rapid response director Ammar Moussa.

Last month, the Trump campaign was rocked after at least three news outlets received leaked confidential material. Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, placed the blame on outside forces in Iran and stated that “any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies.”

Meanwhile, other leaked news has revealed that the Trump campaign “no longer thinks New Hampshire is winnable” and is “pulling back” from that important swing state. It looks like there’s nothing to worry about over here …

Donald Trump’s town hall was mostly an uninterrupted rant about the Republican presidential nominee’s various grievances, including an attempt to set the stage to call the upcoming presidential debate rigged against him, regardless of its outcome.

But between the lines of Trump’s ramblings lay a darker truth: that he simply doesn’t remember who he is running against. During a section of his tirade Wednesday night, the former president seemed to romanticize running against President Joe Biden, to the point that he linguistically forgot which candidate he’s actually up against.

“And by the way, New Hampshire was so badly treated by the Democrat Party and by Joe Biden and her, I can’t imagine New Hampshire voting for him,” Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Anybody in New Hampshire—because they’re watching right now—anybody in New Hampshire that votes for Biden and Kamala, I really think, I call her Comrade Kamala because that’s what her ideology is, but you know that she did something after decades and decades and decades; it was Iowa, the first two—Iowa, New Hampshire—that’s what way people thought it was gonna be,” Trump continued. “He didn’t want to go to New Hampshire. He didn’t want to play the New Hampshire game.”

A pro-Trump account on X attempted to reframe the incident after the Harris campaign’s social media account posted a clip of the verbal flub, claiming that KamalaHQ was “purposely lying to their followers” by saying that Trump had forgotten who he was running against. But the full context revealed even more instances of Trump doubling down on his Biden beliefs than was originally posted by Harris’s team.

“He dumped New Hampshire. And I said to people today, who the hell from New Hampshire would vote for this guy?” Trump said.

Looking ahead to next week’s debate, the bloviating politician insisted that he would allow Harris time to speak.

“I let him talk—I’m going to let her talk,” Trump told Hannity. “There are those that say that Biden is smarter than she is. If that’s the case, we have a problem.”

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance still follows a self-proclaimed historian who this week claimed that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of World War 2”—not Adolf Hitler.

Vance follows Darryl Cooper from both of his accounts on X (formerly Twitter).

Cooper drew increased attention Tuesday after X CEO and fascism enthusiast Elon Musk promoted Tucker Carlson’s interview with the controversial figure on his podcast, calling it “Very interesting. Worth watching.” After the interview was criticized by figures on the right and left, Musk deleted his tweet, but not before both he and Carlson were attacked for giving pro-Nazi propaganda a platform, especially since Carlson said Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

As more scrutiny was focused on Cooper’s views, particularly his white nationalist sympathies, X user @styledape discovered two prominent followers of Cooper’s @martyrmade X account: @JDVance and @SenVancePress.

The fact that Vance follows such a personality suggests that he may hold similar views to Cooper but begs the question of why the Ohio senator would continue to follow him on two major social media accounts. Then again, Vance’s addition to Donald Trump’s presidential ticket has been followed by some damaging revelations from the past few years.

For example, Vance’s comments attacking people without children and derisively referring to “childless cat ladies” have given his campaign quite a bit of negative attention, even drawing the ire of some of his fellow conservatives. He’s praised a book by conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate promoter Jack Probesic and was caught bashing immigrants with another right-wing podcast host in 2021. Maybe Vance needs to go through the skeletons in his closet before another scandal hurts his vice presidential prospects.

Russian agents have allegedly been spreading disinformation through a right-wing U.S. media company that houses a few popular MAGA commentators. 

The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment Wednesday against two Russia Today employees, Elena Afanasyeva and Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, alleging that the two had illegally acted as foreign agents and funneled roughly $10 million into a U.S. media company to produce propaganda that aligned with the Russian government’s interests. 

“While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine,” the indictment said.  

The Tennessee-based media company has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone, according to the indictment. The U.S. company failed to disclose to its viewers that it was being funded and directed by R.T., which has been banned in the U.K., EU, and Canada. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in November 2022, R.T. suspended its activities in the United States, as well.

The indictment doesn’t say the name of the U.S. media company that is responsible for producing Russian propaganda—but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. The indictment says the company is registered in Tennessee and describes itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.”

As Aric Toler and Alan Feuer of The New York Times pointed out on X, there is only one company that fits this description: Tenet Media, a hub of six pro-Trump far-right commentators, including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson. 

Earlier this summer, Pool attacked Kamala Harris by calling her a “Communazi Despot come to put conservatives in concentration camps.” The attack was so over the top that it even drew a reply from white nationalist Richard Spencer, who wondered, “A bit much?”

In addition to MAGA acolytes, it looks like the group members were also—likely unwittingly—Russian propagandists. Maybe they’ll add that to their résumés as they search for new jobs? 

The indictment alleges that Afanasyeva and Kalashnikov worked together to “deceive” two of the company’s commentators “who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers.” The commentators mentioned are likely to be Rubin and Pool, respectively, based on their follower counts. 

The indictment also lists two “founders” who were made to act as foreign agents, though their names are not listed in the indictment. To hide where the money was coming from, the founders allegedly invented a private investor named Eduard Grigoriann who was sponsoring their work.*

Tenet Media is owned by conservative host Lauren Chen, a contributor to Turning Point USA, which is helping Donald Trump out with his presidential campaign, and her husband Liam Donovan. 

According to the indictment, Afanasyeva pushed for content to be covered from an angle that was beneficial to Russia. After a bombing in Moscow in March, for which ISIS admitted responsibility, Afanasyeva directed one of the Tenet founders to have a commentator to “focus on the Ukraine/U.S. angle” and claim that “mainstream media spread fake news that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack yet ISIS itself never made such statements” and saying it was “suspicious” that the attackers had fled toward the Ukrainian border. 

In February, Afanasyeva shared a video of “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia” to be posted to the site. One producer remarked in the Discord chat that “it just feels like overt shilling” but, after urging from one of the founders, did it anyway. 

In June, one of the founders gave Afanasyeva and Kalashnikov permission to post their own content directly onto the company’s channels, according to the indictment. 

Afanasyeva and Kalashnikov have been charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

* This story originally misstated who invented the private investor.

It’s 61 days out until the election, and conservatives seem to be Harris-curious.

On Wednesday, Fox Business host Stuart Varney interrupted RNC Co-Chair Michael Whatley in order to highlight the significance of one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tax policies.

“I just want to press the point, when a political candidate comes up with what I think is a good idea, I have to call it a good idea,” Varney said. “And a $50,000 tax cut—not tax cut but tax credit—for small businesses, coupled with less red tape, I gotta say that is a good idea. Regardless of her other tax ideas.”

That seemed to get Whatley’s attention.

“While that may be a good idea, it’s hard to see how she’s going to move forward with it, and she’s certainly not going to reduce red tape,” Whatley speculated.

Harris is expected to roll out her new tax plan at a New Hampshire campaign event on Wednesday. The $50,000 allotment would be 10 times the current allowable deduction. Under the new guidelines, small businesses could spread the deduction over several years or postpone it until they turn a profit, an unidentified Harris staffer told NBC News. The initiative would also aim to erase some of the bureaucracy surrounding small businesses, including by reducing barriers for occupational licenses and creating a standard tax deduction, according to Politico.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has spent much of his campaign focusing on corporate tax cuts and advertising an expansion to his 2017 tax plan, which is set to expire in 2025. An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that the proposed $5 trillion in tax cuts under Trump’s plan would benefit the upper class rather than middle or lower-class households, with the vast majority of cuts going to households earning more than $450,000 a year. It would also add significantly to the national deficit and shift the benefit of funding the government to lower-income Americans.

After four people were shot and killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, on Wednesday, Governor Brian Kemp said he was “praying for the safety of those in our classrooms.”

But what has the Republican governor done to actually keep Georgia students safe from gun violence? Not a lot. And his critics were quick to point that out.

In 2022, Kemp signed a bill into law that expanded gun rights, allowing Georgians to carry handguns in public without a license or background check. A “lawful weapons carrier,” or any person who is eligible to purchase a firearm, can now concealed-carry a handgun. Long guns could already be carried in many places without a permit.

The governor has previously flagrantly defended his anti–gun control agenda to skeptics. After Georgia’s public media station in 2021 reported that the Giffords Law Center gave Georgia a failing grade on gun control, even before Kemp’s expansion of gun access, Kemp proudly delcared, “I’ll wear this ‘F’ as a badge of honor.”

When he campaigned for governor of Georgia, Kemp ran on expanding access to firearms. This included a nearly unbelievable ad where the then secretary of state sat with a shotgun in his lap, surrounded by even more guns, while speaking to a young boy about dating one of his daughters.

When he isn’t shilling for the gun lobby, Kemp has been keeping busy downplaying Donald Trump’s attempts to overthrow Georgia’s election in 2020. Last week, he co-headlined a fundraiser for the former president and convicted felon.

Today’s shooting was the 218th shooting at a K-12 school this year.

Right-wing media have tried to create controversy over a series of Facebook posts from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s brother, but Jeff Walz threw cold water on that effort Tuesday.

In his Facebook posts last week, which were reported on by the New York Post, the older Walz declared he’s “100% opposed to all his ideology,” referring to his brother, the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Jeff Walz also replied to another Facebook commentator who urged him to publicly endorse Trump.

“I’ve thought long and hard about doing something like that! I’m torn between that and just keeping my family out of it,” Walz, a 67-year-old Florida resident, said. “The stories I could tell. Not the type of character you want making decisions about your future.”

Jeff Walz donated to Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, and reportedly hasn’t spoken to his brother Tim in eight years, aside from one conversation through their mother last month. But despite his differences with his brother Tim, Walz decided not to dive further into politics, telling NewsNation that the stories were mostly of the embarrassing family nature. He mentioned that Tim was carsick as a child and was prone to throwing up in the car on family trips, with no one wanting to sit beside him. “There’s really nothing else hidden behind there,”  he added.

“I was getting a lot of feedback from my friends, old acquaintances, thinking that I was feeling the same way that my brother did on the issues, and I was trying to clarify that just to friends,” Jeff Walz said to NewsNation. “I used Facebook, which wasn’t the right platform to do that. But I will say, I don’t agree with his policies.”

“There is going to be no further statements to anybody, and we’re not campaigning or anything for him or against him or anything like that,” Walz added. 

The whole effort seems to be yet another flat GOP effort to smear the Harris-Walz ticket, much like their attacks on Tim Walz’s military service or the bizarre conspiracy theory that he faked his dog Scout’s identity. Perhaps Republicans should be more worried about their own vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, who was easily mocked by the Minnesota governor ordering donuts like a normal person.