MAGA Scrambles to Excuse Trump Chickening Out of Second Debate

Donald Trump flubbed the last debate. His allies know it, his fundraisers know it—but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to admit it.

On Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee announced that he had decided not to debate Vice President Kamala Harris for a second time, writing in a lengthy rant on Truth Social that “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” (Apparently he’s counting his debate against Joe Biden.)

But less than 24 hours after the major reversal, Trump’s team was already working to explain away why the country would be getting less of their candidate.

“I admire President Trump for not debating her again,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem told Fox News. “He is recognizing the fact that it is a waste of time, that she is not going to say what she truly believes, she’s not going to be truthful with the American people, and he’s going to take his argument directly to families and to people that live in this country that are impacted by her policies.”

In an interview with CNN, former J.D. Vance Senate staffer Ryan Girdusky argued that Trump was vindicated in his decision on the basis that the vice president is “the least vetted candidate” in U.S. history.

Former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard touted a stale campaign line, telling Fox News that the debate was fundamentally flawed because of the presence of two ABC moderators.

“President Trump went into a debate where it was three versus one. It was completely biased,” Gabbard said. “Why would he walk into that again?”

(In reality, ABC actually allowed Trump to speak for six minutes longer than his Democratic opponent over the duration of the debate.)

But Republican donors saw through the act. Behind the scenes of the political theater, conservative fundraisers saw Trump’s reversal as a candidate left with no other options following a “disaster” debate performance.

“I think a lot of the donors, or at least the ones that I was texting with the night of the debate, were not exactly thrilled about how that debate went down,” GOP fundraiser Noelle Nikpour told Fox News Thursday. “What I will tell you, I do think it’s smart for Donald Trump not to do the debate. I think that that was a good decision with the campaign, and I’ll tell you why. Because depending on when that debate will be scheduled, and if he has another repeat performance like he did, I don’t know if the campaign can recover that quickly. I don’t think they have enough time to recover from that.”

CNN made a video comparing Donald Trump’s debate answers against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and his answers from Tuesday’s debate with Kamala Harris eight years later, and there’s a considerable difference in how the Republican presidential nominee spoke and conducted himself.

The video comparison, aired on Thursday night, shows how Trump would stay on topic and give coherent answers in 2016. In contrast, Trump earlier this week went off on tangents, rambling and avoiding specific ideas.

In particular, on immigration, 2016 Trump was able to hammer home his points about building a wall and stopping drugs from entering the country. On Tuesday, Trump ranted about the false rumor of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio and a disproven story about a Venezuelan gang taking over an apartment complex in Colorado.

Trump’s performance during this week’s debate was widely seen as poor, as Harris was able to bait him into ranting about personal grievances, going against the game plan made by his advisers. At one point, he tried to combine right-wing talking points on transgender people, migrants, and criminals, and he also gave a word-salad answer about Afghanistan policy,

It’s a stark example of the convicted felon’s cognitive decline, which has become more pronounced during the current presidential campaign. Earlier this month, Trump appeared to forget at a Fox News town hall whether he was running against Harris or President Biden. A few weeks before that, he went on a weird rant about bacon and wind power and accidentally praised Harris’s record. As the 2024 presidential campaign enters its home stretch, it’s becoming more and more apparent to the public that Trump’s mind has lost a step.

The judge in Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case tossed three of the charges, including two against the former president, Thursday. 

In his ruling, Judge Scott McAfee dismissed three counts related to filing false documents, finding that bringing such charges was outside Georgia’s jurisdiction. Instead, he determined they belonged in federal court. 

“Because Counts 14, 15, and 27 lie beyond this State’s jurisdiction and must be quashed, the Defendants’ motions to dismiss the indictment under the Supremacy Clause are granted in part,” McAfee wrote.

The three counts that were dismissed were criminal attempt to commit filing false documents, conspiracy to commit filing false documents, and filing false documents. Trump had been indicted on the latter two of those three counts.

The motion to dismiss the charges was brought by two of Trump’s co-defendants, John Eastman and Shawn Still, who argued that the charges were in violation of the supremacy clause. 

McAfee separately declined a motion to toss the indictment’s racketeering charge. He wrote that the charge remained “facially sound and constitutionally sufficient as alleged.”

Still, the case against Trump, which has been stalled for months, has only continued to narrow. McAfee previously threw out six counts in March, three of which were against Trump. The former president is still facing eight of his original 13 counts.  

Donald Trump’s meager attempt to prove a group of immigrants had begun dining on their neighbors’ pets has predictably fallen apart.

After Trump was brutally fact-checked during Tuesday’s presidential debate when he tried to baselessly claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating local pets, the former president took to Truth Social to provide his own so-called proof.

What he was able to provide were blurry screenshots of one call report from the Clark County Communications Center, which had been obtained by the right-wing opinion blog The Federalist. The report detailed a call from August 26, during which a caller claimed that they had seen a group of people walking down the street carrying geese.

The caller “said he could tell they were Haitian because he was within earshot of them to hear them speaking Haitian Creole,” according to the report. The identifying information on the report had been removed.

The report was meant to justify Trump’s extreme claims on national television, but a closer examination of the facts—and testimony from the caller—shows that the right-wing hysterics are over basically nothing.

Steven Monacelli, a freelance investigative reporter for The Texas Observer, decided to follow up on the report with the Clark County sheriff’s office.

A clerk for the sheriff’s office passed along the original report, as well as a recording of the call. “At this time we have not found any other record concerning Haittians [sic] harvesting geese. At this time we have not found any record of Hattians eating pets,” the clerk wrote in an email, which Monacelli posted to X.

Monacelli also spoke with the caller, whom he identified simply as “Toby” to protect his privacy. Monacelli detailed what he learned in a series of posts on X.

Toby explained he was simply trying to report what was potentially illegal goose hunting, which requires a permit outside of goose-hunting season, which starts in September. Toby also pointed out that a viral photo of a man walking down the street holding a goose, which many on the right have cited when pushing this conspiracy, was from Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield.

“I’m not trying to really be put on the news, famous or anything, I was just a citizen on his way to his orientation, and just happened to see that,” Toby explained. “I just made a report, that’s literally all I did.”

When asked whether he had seen anything similar since making his initial report in August, Toby said, “No I haven’t.”

Monacelli asked what Toby thought about the right-wing claims that there had been widespread pet abductions, to which Toby replied he “hadn’t seen any pictures, or anything like that myself. But then again, I’m not on social media.”

Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba recently escaped some legal trouble of her own.

On August 27, Habba settled a case brought against her by Alice Bianco, a former waitress at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, who had sued the club alleging that she was tricked into a hush-money deal after a supervisor sexually harassed her. Bianco also sued Habba, accusing her of betraying ethics by offering her legal advice while helping the club secure a $15,000 deal in exchange for her silence. Just a few weeks after the deal, Habba joined Trump’s legal team.

Bianco settled with the club in March, but Habba at the time was curiously left out of the deal—leaving her open to being sued.

According to New Jersey state law, an agreement like the one Habba set up “relating to a claim of discrimination, retaliation, or harassment” is “against public policy and unenforceable.” After attending mediation, Bianco and Habba agreed to an out-of-court settlement, but terms were not disclosed. It’s unclear how much Habba had to pay to make the lawsuit go away.

“I feel very proud. I’m very grateful to have my life back. This was a three-year-long fight that caused many sleepless nights,” Bianco told NOTUS. “I pray that she gets what she deserves.”

In the summer of 2021, Bianco sought legal counsel after getting fed up with her supervisor requiring her to “engage in sex as a quid pro quo for continued employment and protection,” according to her lawsuit. She hired an employment lawyer, and discussed her case with co-workers.

Habba then approached her as a concerned friend, offering to give her legal advice. Bianco didn’t know who Habba was, only having seen her as a member of the club who liked to sing at the club’s party nights, according to court documents. Habba convinced Bianco to drop her lawyer and hire her instead, then advised Bianco to accept the hush-money deal and keep the story out of the news.

When Bianco found out that she would owe taxes on the $15,000, she reached out to Habba via text message, who was unsympathetic.

“I can’t technically give u legal advice,” Habba texted back, according to the lawsuit documents. “That’s the problem.”

This would seem to explain why Habba was left out of the golf club’s settlement, with its lawyers saying that the club “cannot be held liable for Ms. Habba’s purported misrepresentations.” Bianco hired a new lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, who helped the waitress put together a timeline showing how Habba kept Bianco quiet to impress Trump.

Habba persuaded Bianco to sign the $15,000 deal on August 21, 2021, and three weeks later, the attorney joined Trump’s legal team in his defamation lawsuit against a former Apprentice contestant, Summer Zervos.

“The timing could not be more definitive. She silenced me in order to be in Trump’s good graces,” Bianco said to NOTUS. “She is evil. She does the devil’s work for free. She acted as a caring guide in my life. She acted like she could help me, only to then completely ghost me and use me for her own success.”

Habba’s representation of Trump has brought her legal expertise into question, with her statements at times sounding like admissions of Trump’s guilt. In defending the former president, she seems to misunderstand legal terminology like “due process,” and during Trump’s E. Jean Carroll defamation trial was reprimanded 12 times in one day by the judge. Her case with Bianco is something entirely different, though: It calls into question her ethics and morals.

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Donald Trump went too far by spending time with Laura Loomer this week.

On Sunday, Loomer said that if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center,” referring to Harris’s Indian heritage. Days later, Trump visited Philadelphia for the first presidential debate with Loomer right by his side—and he then traveled with her to a September 11 memorial event.

Now MAGA infighting is erupting in public view, with Greene leading the charge against Loomer.

“This is appalling and extremely racist. It does not represent who we are as Republicans or MAGA. This does not represent President Trump,” wrote Greene on X, hours after Trump visited the 9/11 Memorial with Loomer. “This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.”

But Loomer didn’t roll over, hitting back at Greene with a slew of insults, calling the Georgia representative “extremely jealous and vindictive,” accusing Greene of saying the n-word and being antisemitic, and throwing some jokes about CrossFit into the mix. “She is not representative of the GOP or what it means to be America first.”

More than anything, Loomer slammed Greene for not being loyal enough to Donald. “Guess you gave up on Trump when he gave up on your boyfriend @SpeakerMcCarthy,” she wrote, asking the representative why she wasn’t at the debate.

Loomer’s racist tweet shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. In the past, she has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism” and even claimed 9/11 was an inside job.

When Greene was asked by CNN if she had contacted Trump about the argument, she confirmed they had spoken but was sparse on the details. “I just felt like it was time to call it out. I think it’s wrong. We’re not a party of identity politics,” Greene said, stating that her party should focus on policy, “not attacking people for their race.”

Fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has also chimed in, echoing Greene’s talking points and condemning Loomer’s comments on 9/11 and Harris. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is right. I don’t say that a lot,” said the South Carolina senator. “I think that the president would serve himself well to make sure this doesn’t become a bigger story.”

Bernie Moreno, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio, has been lying to his constituents not only about his background but about his plans to cash in on his time in office.

Moreno was in the national news this week after he helped to spread racist, right-wing rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating their neighbors’ pets.

Moreno, who was born in Colombia, claimed in a post on X that Haitian immigrants were “sucking up social services” in Springfield. “We need to deport illegals, not invite them to wreak havoc on our communities,” Moreno wrote, even though the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are not undocumented and are under temporary protected status.

Those aren’t the only lies that the MAGA Republican has told on the campaign trail, however. Apparently, Moreno has also been lying about his business dealings, repeatedly claiming that he’s sold all of his companies so he can head to Washington, D.C., with no hidden agenda.

“I’ve sold all my operating businesses,” Moreno said in November, according to the Statehouse News Bureau. “I wanted to go to Washington, D.C., free of any conflicts of interest. No individual stocks, no individual bonds, no corporate holdings. I’ve made that sacrifice to run for the U.S. Senate.”

During a December appearance on the Ola Hawatmeh Show, a conservative YouTube channel, Moreno repeated his claims. “This is what I do full time every single day. I’ve sold all my operating businesses. I believe that people go to D.C., they shouldn’t have conflicts of interest. I don’t own any operating companies, don’t have any individual stocks.” The title of the episode touted Moreno, a former car dealer, as an “Entrepreneur Turned Politician.”

“I’ve sold all my business interests to do this,” Moreno said again during a Ohio Republican Senate debate in March, eliciting some applause from the audience. He added that he was “concerned about the people who made a lot of money while in Washington.”

But in April, just a few weeks after winning the Republican primary, Moreno spent $9.5 million on a plot of land in Sunbury, Ohio, according to NBC News. Around the same time, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services entered into a mortgage agreement with a company called M20 Realty LLC—one of the 20 businesses that Moreno owns, according to a recent financial disclosure statement. Moreno has signed off on $40 million worth of Mercedes-Benz financing to open up a new dealership, according to the Statehouse News Bureau.

Moreno had signed the mortgage as M20 Realty’s manager and also signed a landlord-tenant agreement between M20 Realty and M20 Motors on behalf of both companies, according to the Delaware County, Ohio, recorder. Moreno said the Sunbury project has been in the works for four years, according to NBC News. In 2022, M20 motors registered for the name Mercedes-Benz Sunbury.

Campaign spokeswoman Regan McCarthy hit back at claims that Moreno had presented his financial interests dishonestly. “The Sunbury dealership is not currently an operating company and is going to be run by Bernie’s son,” McCarthy told the Statehouse News Bureau. “This is an investment by Bernie in a business for his son, not a business for himself.”

In addition to his future plans, it seems Moreno has also been lying about his past. When he applied to open an Infiniti car dealership in Coral Gables, Florida, a document submitted claimed that he had received an MBA from the University of Michigan. Moreno had even signed the application. However, the Michigan Office of Public Affairs told the Ohio Capital Journal Monday that Moreno held only a bachelor’s degree in business.

When the campaign tried to dismiss the claim by referring to a different document with the correct information, the Journal found yet another document filed a year later with the wrong credentials. The campaign told the Journal that the third document had been “prepared by a staffer who made a mistake.”

The Journal found that the false credential popped up in several places, in fact. In 2014, it appeared in a bio for Moreno published when he joined the Cleveland Foundation board of directors. Another campaign spokeswoman told the Journal that Moreno “never told the foundation that he held an MBA. I’m not sure why they listed that, you’d have to ask them.”

A 2018 biography of Moreno from when he chaired the Cleveland State University Board of Trustees claimed that he held multiple degrees from Michigan, but he only has one. The claim that he had received an MBA also appeared on the website for a car dealership he owned in North Olmsted, Ohio. Both mentions have since been removed from those websites.

J.D. Vance is attacking immigration as bad for economic prosperity in the United States.

In an interview on CNBC Thursday morning, the Republican vice presidential nominee said that “if the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous city in the world.”

“America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens,” Vance continued, citing greatly exaggerated numbers. He went on to blame inflation and lower take-home pay on a “massive influx of illegal labor.”

Vance’s point neatly sums up Republican thinking about immigration, particularly in the MAGA movement. However, Vance’s conclusions are wrong. For example, in Springfield, business owners like Jamie McGregor, the CEO of the town’s McGregor Metal plant, credit Haitian immigrants with helping to fill a labor shortage.

“I mean, the fact of the matter is, without the Haitian associates that we have, we had trouble filling these positions,” McGregor told NPR in August about a need in his factory that Haitian workers helped to fill.

Also, earlier this week, Vance complained that Haitian immigrants were driving housing prices up in Springfield. This is actually an indication that the economy in the town is improving. As NPR reported, in the years prior to Haitian immigrants’ arrival in Springfield, the town’s population and wealth were dropping as the auto industry, once a major local employer, was declining. An increase in housing prices would indicate a reversal in fortunes.

As far as the stature of the United States, it is the most prosperous country in the world, with the highest gross domestic product, even per capita. Economic experts say that immigration as a whole is a check on inflation and helps job growth as well. And immigrants, even the undocumented, tend to contribute more in taxes than they pay—with undocumented immigrants being ineligible for most, if not all, federal welfare programs.

Vance is parroting Republican orthodoxy on immigrants being at the root of economic difficulty for native-born Americans. And his ideas seem to be influenced by the right’s racist ideas of an immigrant invasion taking over the U.S. If Vance really thinks immigration is bad for the country, he should talk to his wife, Usha, daughter of two Indian immigrants.

Donald Trump’s advisers are frustrated about how the former president veered wildly off script during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, according to reports from The Guardian and Axios.

Kamala Harris easily baited Trump with lines attacking the crowd size at his rallies and the fact that people left them early out of boredom. As a result, Trump lost his focus and went on angry rants, going against the carefully crafted plans from his debate prep team.

For example, if the ABC News debate moderators were to dispute the false rumor that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating people’s pets in Ohio, then Trump was supposed to say it was hearsay and attack Harris on how illegal immigration helps crime. But Trump got stuck arguing over the rumor and Harris’s attack on his rallies.

Trump advisers say that the Republican presidential nominee was also prepped on how to deflect Harris’s attacks back onto her, but he couldn’t help himself, launching into his trademark grievances like the 2020 election. They told him not to respond directly, but he did anyway.

The plan was to press the vice president about why she and President Biden weren’t implementing any of her solutions right now, and pin today’s problems on her and the administration, according to Axios. Trump was supposed to dismiss Harris’s plans for the future, point out failures in the present, and pin the blame on her for things like the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But given the opportunity, Trump whiffed, offering up a word salad.

Trump’s advisers pointed to his closing argument as one of the few times when he appeared to stick to the script, but that wasn’t enough to erase his ranting and raving from earlier in the debate. Republicans have been hoping for years that one day Trump would eventually become presidential, leave behind his petty grievances, and focus on the important things. They thought he would do so after he was first elected president, and then again after the attempt on his life in July, but each time, he quickly dashed their expectations. Tuesday’s debate is only the latest evidence that he refuses to change.

Two days after Donald Trump mentioned Springfield, Ohio, in the presidential debate, falsely accusing Haitian migrants in the town of abducting and eating pets, the city is already rocked by threats of violence.

On Thursday morning, Springfield City Hall was evacuated due to a bomb threat “to multiple facilities throughout Springfield,” according to a city statement. Mayor Rob Rue did not release the exact language of the threat, but said it came from an individual claiming to be from Springfield who expressed frustration related to Haitian immigrants.

Springfield government officials say they were made aware of the threat, which “was sent to multiple agencies and media outlets,” via an email message at 8:24 a.m.

Meanwhile, some Haitian families are reportedly keeping their children home from school over fear they will be attacked. One Haitian woman told The Haitian Times that her cars had been vandalized, and the windows broken in the middle of the night. She fears she will have to leave the town to feel safe again.

Over the past several days, right-wing figures including J.D. Vance, Republican representatives in Congress, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, and Trump adviser Stephen Miller, among many others, have pushed the baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants are eating people’s pets. They shared memes of AI-generated animals begging not to be eaten—and Vance even said he didn’t particularly care if the racist conspiracy turned out to be false.

Police and city officials in the town said they have received no credible reports of pets being stolen and eaten.

But then, during Tuesday’s debate, Trump pushed the unfounded claim before a national audience. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

In response, Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine tried to push back against the rumors, after a half-hearted attempt earlier this week, and said he would send more resources to Springfield to deal with the influx of immigrants.

The Clarks, one family at the center of tension of the community, whose son was killed by a Haitian driver in December, are begging “morally bankrupt politicians – Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump” to stop using their son’s “death for political gain.”

“Please stop the hate,” Nathan Clark, the boy’s father, said.

Springfield City Hall is closed for the remainder of the day. It may be that Trump is more of a threat to the town than any Haitian refugee.

This story has been updated.