Trump and JD Vance Hit With Second Terrible Moo Deng Allegation

Donald Trump and JD Vance are busy making more enemies: this time, fans of famous baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng.

Moo Deng, the adorable viral star who lives at Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand, is a pygmy hippopotamus, a protected species. Hippos like her are still targets of hunters, and this week, it was revealed that a big-game trophy hunting group endorsed Donald Trump.

According to a deep dive by Meidas News, the Safari Club International, or SCI, which has demonstrated ties to Trump and Vance, has a record book that proves that its members have hunted Moo Deng’s species. “[The pygmy hippo] is a very wary, alert animal that has proven extremely difficult to hunt by normal methods,” SCI’s record book reads. The group of hunters has more than 40,000 members and 180 local chapters.

After the Trump endorsement news, Meidas News again reported the GOP’s second controversial Moo Deng story.

In a recent podcast with SCI, Vance defended trophy hunters who target endangered and threatened species, arguing that they care about animals “more than people who never spend any real time in the environment,” and discussed the Republican culture war on gray wolves. But Vance’s ties go even deeper: The group also organized a fishing trip with Vance before the podcast recording.

Trump visited the SCI HQ in June, where he met with the “Hunters’ Embassy to discuss our shared fight to protect and promote the right to hunt,” according to SCI.

The group is encouraging and organizing their group of hunters to vote in November. Perhaps Moo Deng’s fans can do the same.

The White House under sexual abuser Donald Trump secretly worked to suppress an FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh while his Supreme Court nomination was under consideration by the Senate.

In September 2018, when Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, Trump promised that the FBI would have “free rein” to fully investigate the claims, adding that the bureau was “talking to everybody.”

“I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion,” Trump posted on Twitter at the time. However, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Trump’s assertions were all a farce, citing a new report by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Whitehouse’s report states that the FBI was directed to conduct a limited investigation in only a week, and requested “additional guidance” from the White House. But Trump administration officials never provided any authorization for a deeper probe into the allegations against Kavanaugh.

Messages to the FBI’s tip line about Kavanaugh were sent to the White House but weren’t investigated, and the FBI wasn’t provided written instructions for the background investigation ordered by the Trump administration, according to the report. The bureau was told by the White House to interview 10 potential witnesses, yet wasn’t given the ability to pursue any corroborating evidence, which some senators cited in their votes to confirm Kavnaugh to the Supreme Court. The FBI didn’t even speak directly to either Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Senate that Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school over 30 years before.

“The congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: The FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” said Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, lawyers for Ford.

Another woman, Deborah Ramirez, alleged in a New Yorker story at the time that Kavanaugh shoved his penis into her face when the two were Yale University students in the early 1980s.

“It’s really disappointing since our client was so candid about something that was a pretty awful experience,” said John Clune, an attorney representing Ramirez.

Trump today brags about his appointments to the Supreme Court and how they overturned Roe v. Wade, severely restricting abortion rights in many states around the country. And it seems that, even as he publicly claimed to be listening to allegations that Kavanaugh had a history of sexual assault, his staff were ignoring them to make their own rapist boss happy.

There have been at least 50 school shootings across the United States in 2024, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. But the Republican presidential ticket doesn’t seem to have any solutions for preventing future violence.

Instead, JD Vance transparently dodged a direct question Tuesday from a reporter with The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan campus newspaper, on the sensitive topic, choosing instead to ramble extensively about paltry school rivalries.

“Why should students in Michigan cast their vote for the Trump-Vance ticket, and additionally, how will your administration support students specifically concerning gun violence when you have rejected calls for tougher gun laws and bans on bump stocks?” the student reporter asked, to jeering and booing from the MAGA crowd. “Essentially, why should students concerned about their safety on campus vote for you?”

It quickly became clear that Vance had no intention of actually answering the question.

“First, let’s be honest here, I don’t know if an Ohio State graduate is the best messenger to University of Michigan students,” Vance said to cheers. “In fact—maybe, we should just get a clip of me saying something nice about Kamala Harris out to the University of Michigan because maybe then they’d all vote for Donald J. Trump if you just told them I was a Buckeye.

“I’m always a little nervous about injecting myself into the OSU-Michigan rivalry,” he continued, still skirting any mention of taking legitimate action to halt the senseless violence.

“All kidding aside, look, we all care about the country,” Vance said. “And that’s why I  think every person in this room is going to help me make Donald J. Trump the next president of the United States.”

Vance then attempted to lure in listening students with promises of creating more jobs in their hometowns and vaguely addressing the housing crisis—though that baseless future wouldn’t help their situation if they found themselves in the crossfire of another shooting.

Minutes later, Vance actually did have some words to share about the topic at hand.

“What I have said is that upwards of 90 percent of the gun crime that’s committed in this country is committed using an illegally obtained firearm,” Vance said.

In reality, a 2023 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, found that the vast majority of guns used in crimes—roughly 99 percent—were purchased legally from a dealer, pawnbroker, or direct from a gun manufacturer, even if they were stolen and used in crimes later.

Vance has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, which spent nearly half a million dollars in Ohio to help elect him to his Senate seat in 2022. The MAGA Republican has also promised to abolish the ATF, which oversees the $9 billion gun industry.

Ultimately, according to Vance, the “best way to reduce gun crime” has nothing to do with limiting the amount of weapons in the country, no matter how destructive or army-ready they are. Instead, the obvious solution is the retroactive one: to “lock up people who are committing violence against their fellow citizens.”

“That’s the most important thing,” Vance told the jubilant crowd.

For all his talk of being a family man, JD Vance went out of his way Tuesday to put a target on the backs of children during a speech in Detroit, Michigan. But they’re the children of immigrants, so why would he care? 

Vance was speaking about undocumented immigrants when he turned his attention specifically to school-age children. 

“The other thing that is crazy about the border, is that in the state of Michigan—I didn’t know this statistic until today—there are 85,000 students in Michigan public schools who are the children of illegal aliens,” Vance claimed.

“Eighty-five thousand. Now think about that. Think about what it does to a poor school teacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English,” Vance said. “Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Here, Vance seems to have widened his net beyond targeting undocumented immigrant children, a plainly heinous rhetorical step in itself, to children who may very well be U.S. citizens by nature of being born here. It’s also worth noting that Vance has a penchant to falsely describe immigrants with protected legal status as “illegal,” so it’s unclear whom exactly he would include in this statistic. 

While it’s also unclear where Vance got “85,000” children from, the number does appear on the Higher Education Immigration Portal, which states that there are 85,000 second-generation immigrant students attending higher education institutions in Michigan. 

If this is in fact the number Vance is using, it’s worth noting that it has absolutely no relationship with U.S. public schools, school-aged children, or even undocumented immigrants. “Second-generation immigrants” refers to people born in the U.S. While Vance’s claim was specifically about the parents, there is no data that supports the claim that all of these students’ parents are undocumented.

In that same vein, it’s likely that these second-generation students would not struggle with English language proficiency. Way to go, Vance! That’s 0 for 4!

But let’s for a moment imagine that the number Vance gave was somehow correct. Even then, his alleged grievances start to fall apart. 

In 2022, 1,433,914 students were enrolled in Michigan public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means that Vance is claiming that roughly five percent of all students in the state are such a gross drain on resources that it has somehow diminished the quality of education for the other 95 percent. Perhaps Vance is right to be concerned about the waning quality of American education. 

Vance’s blatant scapegoating makes no sense because it is not built on real concerns about the quality of education, or the “poor” teachers who might struggle to meet the needs of the classroom because of a lack of education funding. Rather, his claim is built on making racist distinctions between who “deserves” to have access to education and who should be kicked out as a cheap shot for votes in a battleground state.

“Look, I think we’re a great country, we can be compassionate, and we ought to be compassionate, but our compassion has to start with our fellow citizens, the people that deserve to be in the United States to begin with,” Vance said. 

The Ohio senator touted Donald Trump’s plan for the largest mass deportations in the history of the United States as “the best way to be compassionate.”

Vance has previously invoked compassion as a quasi-religious justification for the blatantly bigoted immigration policies. Neither of Vance’s rhetorical lines are particularly new for the Trump campaign, which has repeatedly stressed the strain influxes of immigration can have on schools. But this goes to show how the Republican ticket has normalized rhetoric that targets the most vulnerable in our society.

Last month, Trump made a similar comment about non-English speaking students in schools in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, which was promptly debunked by the Charleroi school district superintendent. In fact, reimbursement from the Department of Education had actually increased as student enrollment increased—the very same Department of Education Trump hopes to dismantle.

Vance’s reckless targeting of school-age children and teenagers also happens to be in a state with the largest populations of Palestinian and Lebanese immigrants. Michigan has the second largest population of Arab immigrants in the U.S., and the highest with the highest percentage population in the country, according to the Arab American Institute.  

This story has been updated.

During Kamala Harris’s Tuesday appearance on The View, the vice president was asked what her biggest difference with President Joe Biden is—and she gave a surprising answer: She plans to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet.

Harris initially said that “not a thing comes to mind” that she would have done anything differently than Biden. But then she went on to elaborate.

“Listen, I plan on having a Republican in my Cabinet,” Harris elaborated. “You ask me what’s the difference between Joe Biden and me, well that will be one of the differences.”

Then, she appeared to take a jab at Biden, adding, “I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.”

But not everyone thinks appointing a Republican to her Cabinet is a great idea for Harris, nor is that how they’d like to see her differentiate herself as a candidate.

Harris’s decision to appoint a Republican, if she chooses to do so, wouldn’t be entirely out of the ordinary. For example, Republican Ray LaHood served as secretary of transportation from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama.

Harris has continued to court “Republicans for Harris” throughout her campaign, allowing several Republicans time to speak on the Democratic National Convention stage, including Republican Ana Navarro-Cárdenas of The View and Illinois Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger. Republicans Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney have announced they also plan to vote for Harris.

In a new survey from The New York Times/Siena College, Harris’s Republican support has nearly doubled over the past month.

Former first lady Melania Trump’s self-titled memoir may not divulge political insights from Donald Trump’s White House, but it does offer a glimpse of a woman who once stood beside one of the most powerful men on the planet—and who may soon do so again.

Melania, which was released Tuesday, is a 256-page exploration of the former first lady’s life, from growing up in Cold War–era Yugoslavia to nude modeling in the United States and standing by Trump during his presidency. But some of the most pot-stirring details lie not in what Melania did but rather in what she believes, and how much her own platform differs from that of her MAGA husband.

That includes writing against previous reports from her own aide that she refused to denounce the violence at the U.S. Capitol at the hands of her husband’s supporters on January 6.

“The violence we witnessed was unequivocally unacceptable,” Melania writes in the new book. “While I recognized that many individuals felt the election was mishandled and the vice president should halt the confirmation process, we must never resort to violence.”

But Melania does nothing to dispel the baseless conspiracies her husband has spread that the 2020 election was stolen, either. In fact, she feeds into them, writing, “Many Americans still have doubts about the election to this day. I am not the only person who questions the results.”

Melania also says that she fought her husband on his administration’s family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, telling Trump that “this has to stop.”

“The government should not be taking children away from their parents,” Melania recalled telling the former president shortly before he signed an executive order ending the horrifying policy.

And, perhaps most significantly, Melania revealed that she is staunchly pro-abortion.

“A woman’s fundamental right to individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy,” Melania writes in her book.

That stance was, apparently, totally fine with the aggressively anti-abortion Republican presidential nominee. During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump casually confessed that he had encouraged his wife to “write what you believe” with regard to the new book. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign, Project 2025, and the Republican Party have worked overtime to tell every other woman in America exactly what they should do with their bodies—whether that’s fighting for a national abortion ban or celebrating the encroaching stateside restrictions on other, adjacent reproductive procedures, such as in vitro fertilization. Trump himself has repeatedly boasted about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and peeling back abortion rights across the nation.

Notably, Melania has done nothing, either while her husband was in office or in the four years since, to actually advance abortion rights in the U.S.

Throughout the book, Melania was quick to blame the influence of “the media, Big Tech, and the deep state” for a variety of her family’s woes, including supposedly preventing her husband’s second term.

“We are living in a dangerous time when it comes to journalism,” she claims.

Kamala Harris has taken a slim lead over Donald Trump over the past month, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College. And that may be in part thanks to rising support among a critical voter group.

Nine percent of people who describe themselves as Republicans said they plan to vote for Harris in November, compared to just 5 percent who said the same thing in the Times poll last month. Harris also has a narrow lead overall against Trump of 49 to 46 percent, with voters more likely to choose her over the former president as caring about people like them and representing change.

This is the first Times/Siena poll in which Harris has led Trump in the race ever since President Biden withdrew and the vice president succeeded him. Last month’s poll had Trump and Harris deadlocked at 47 percent each after the first presidential debate, which Harris was widely seen as winning.

Harris has also taken her first lead in the question of which candidate represents change in the race, with 46 percent of respondents giving her the edge over 44 percent for Trump. The gap widens among younger voters, with 58 percent choosing her versus 34 percent for Trump. The poll has her in the lead as the more fun candidate, as well—43 percent of likely voters, including 13 percent of Republicans, give her the edge over Trump (with just 35 percent).

Trump still has an 11-point advantage over Harris among male voters, and 42 percent of voters overall said his policies helped them personally, compared to 22 percent for Biden. And he retains trust, with 48 percent of voters saying they trust him to handle the issue they see as most important, as opposed to Harris, with 46 percent.

The poll was conducted from September 29 to October 6 among 3,385 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percent, and shows that the presidential race is incredibly close with the election less than a month away. Harris has made incredible strides to take a narrow lead and is even winning over key voters in battleground states, such as Hispanic voters in Georgia and Arizona.

But there’s still more work to be done to ensure Harris wins key battleground states like Pennsylvania and therefore the presidency. A key group of people to target could be those left out of polls like this: people who didn’t vote in 2020. While 2020 had the highest voter turnout of any election since 1900, one-third of eligible voters didn’t vote, and the Trump campaign is actively courting them. Recent polls show that Harris could gain a major edge with a cease-fire in Gaza and an arms embargo against Israel.

Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna demanded more FEMA funding for Florida, just weeks after she voted against a bill that provided $20 billion for federal emergency funds.

As Hurricane Milton approaches the Florida coastline, Luna has waded into a growing spat between Vice President Kamala Harris and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“We have a category 5 hurricane headed right to Pinellas, and @KamalaHarris is taking this time to attack @GovRonDeSantis?” Luna wrote Monday in a post on X.

“Cut the crap. We need FEMA DOLLARS FREE’D UP. ALL ASSETS. STOP ATTACKING RON AND DO YOUR JOB! @VP” she added.

But just last month, as Hurricane Helene approached the United States, Luna voted to shut down the federal government, vetoing a measure to extend FEMA funding by $20 billion. Luna was among 82 House Republicans who voted against the deal and one of 11 Florida lawmakers who cast dissenting votes.

Now, as Florida prepares to face a massive Category 5 storm that has prompted massive evacuations across the state, Luna is vying to get every cent she can.

When Luna failed to support FEMA funding, she faced strong criticism from Democratic candidate Whitney Fox, who is running to unseat her.

“As the worst storm in our lifetime was hours away, Luna couldn’t set aside her partisan games for even a moment,” Fox said. “She voted to delay critical FEMA aid and emergency support when we would need it most. This isn’t leadership—it’s a catastrophic failure.”

At the time, the White House warned that the stopgap bill, while necessary to pass, did not provide adequate funding to help communities recover from natural disasters.

Donald Trump’s campaign team is lashing out against a journalist following news that the former president secretly kept in touch with Russian President Vladimir Putin after leaving the Oval Office.

A statement put out by Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, is rife with ad hominem attacks against journalist Bob Woodward, calling him a “total sleazebag,” “an angry, little man,” “a truly demented and deranged man,” and also “a boring person with no personality.”

In his new book, War, which Trump’s campaign says “belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore,” Woodward writes that Trump has made at least seven calls to the Russian leader since leaving office. Trump also allegedly secretly gave Putin Covid-19 testing equipment during the early days of the pandemic.

“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin told Trump, according to the author, out of concern for the backlash Trump would undoubtedly face. “I don’t care,” said Trump. “Fine.”

Woodward also says that in one incident at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, Trump told a senior aide to leave so he could have “a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Accusing the investigative journalist of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump’s team has denied his close relationship with Putin, stating that none of what Woodward writes is true, without any real rebuttal.

Following the news, Trump posted an edited clip of Robert Mueller on Truth Social, calling the investigation the “RUSSIA HOAX!”

Republicans have launched a host of lies and disinformation throughout the 2024 hurricane season. So far, conservative leaders in heavily affected regions, including Florida and Georgia, have accused the Biden administration of diverting funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants entering the country (a charge that FEMA has fervently rejected), claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and have conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.

But the depth and depravity of the Donald Trump–swirled fiction stretches even further, even to the point of harming one of the MAGA leader’s strongest voting blocs.

By Tuesday, it became clear to federal officials that the lie that FEMA was out of money had stopped people from actually requesting their aid in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia.

Speaking with CNN, former Republican communications strategist Douglas Heye lamented how Trump’s own supporters were bearing the brunt of the misinformation.

“The area of North Carolina that was hit is overwhelmingly Republican,” Heye, a North Carolinian, told the network. “By spreading this misinformation, you’re hurting your own voters first. And we know Donald Trump takes his people sort of as a special case, he’s damaging them for his own political goods. That’s malicious.”

But the magnitude of disaster caused by the bold-faced lies will only come to light after the full hurricane season has passed. On the immediate horizon swirls another massive superstorm, Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which is scheduled to slam the west side of Florida by Wednesday evening. Central Floridian leaders have repeatedly warned Milton’s arrival at the Sunshine State’s shores will be a catastrophic event that will claim lives and demolish the region, with forecasted 10-to-15-foot storm surges that Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has described as “not survivable.”

“I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die,” Castor told CNN on Monday, a warning she said she has never issued before.

Speaking with MSNBC on Monday night, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he had “not seen” weather emergency–related inaccuracies “ever before at this level.”

“You and I both remember a time when an extreme weather event, a natural disaster, actually brought people together,” Mayorkas told host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. “Now, unfortunately, tragically, quite frankly, it is politicized. And what happens is, the people who are victimized by the natural disaster are the ones who will suffer.”

“It sows distrust in their government, and therefore they don’t seek the help that they truly need,” Mayorkas continued. “We have funds to put in their pockets to be able to help them address immediate needs. These individuals are not seeking that relief because of the disinformation, the intentionally false information, they are receiving.”