Trump Crashes and Burns Trying to Defend His Actions on January 6

Donald Trump’s latest play to attract undecided Latino votes did not go as planned.

Speaking at a Univision town hall on Wednesday, Trump was confronted with serious questions by Republicans and former Republicans who had not yet decided if they would support him in a few weeks.

But one question from Ramiro González, a 56-year-old construction worker from Tampa who had de-registered from the Republican Party, really seemed to throw him.

“I want to give you the opportunity to try and win back my vote,” González said. “Your action and maybe inaction, during your presidency and maybe the last few years, sort of, was a little disturbing to me.… What happened during January 6, and the fact that you know, you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capital.”

Trump then launched into his usual diatribe about the events of the day, peeling himself away from the fact that thousands of his supporters had traveled to Washington that day to hear him speak before they were incited to storm the Capitol.

“You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election—they thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came,” Trump said. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said ‘peacefully and patriotically,’ nothing done wrong at all, nothing done wrong.”

But that’s when Trump completely stopped making sense.

“Action was taken, strong action,” Trump said. “Ashley Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed.

“There were no guns down there, we didn’t have guns, the others had guns,” Trump said, apparently complaining that the Capitol Police were armed before quickly attempting to correct that he had simultaneously referred to himself and his rioting supporters as a collective unit.

The entire interaction didn’t go over well with other audience members, who were seen twisting their faces with concern and disgust while the former president drew out his response. And a later comment, in which Trump referred to January 6 as a “day of love,” pushed González to furrow his brow.

The Univision town hall was nothing like the Fox News one Trump participated in the day before, which featured softball questions from a small crowd of women who turned out to be Trump supporters—and whom the network had seemingly invited to offer a safe space for the Republican presidential nominee. Behind the scenes, some women openly admitted that they had received “personal invitations” from the network to appear.

Fox News’s Brett Baier went on the offensive during an interview with Kamala Harris Wednesday night, but even he had to admit she got the best of him.

In a segment reacting to his own contentious interview, Baier conceded that Harris may have gotten exactly what she wanted from that interview.

“I think she had a … a mission, that she wanted to do. And maybe, she wanted to have a viral moment, she wanted to have a pushback,” Baier said. “She came to Fox News and she wanted to have a ‘go after Donald Trump’ viral moment that plays on other channels, and on social media. And I think she may have gotten that.”

During the interview, Baier pushed Harris to respond to several copy-pastes of Trump’s talking points, asking her about gender-affirming care in prisons and if she’d apologize to the family of a child killed by an immigrant. When she responded, Baier interrupted Harris’s answers and, appearing frustrated, formatted his follow-ups like debate rebuttals. Baier later offered a thin defense for his bad form in the interview, saying that he thought Harris would be “tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt,” and complaining that he hadn’t gotten the full time with Harris he’d expected.

At one point Harris even called out Baier for playing a truncated clip of Trump brushing off his “enemy from within” remark, instead of the actual clip itself from earlier this week—perhaps the “viral moment” Baier had referred to.

“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they don’t agree with him. This is a democracy!” Harris said.

While some on air at Fox News, such as Martha MacCallum and Dana Perino, complimented Baier’s performance and criticized Harris’s, it seems that not everyone thought that Baier did a great job—even former Fox News employees.

One former Fox producer sent an anonymous statement to Zeteo’s Justin Baragona, who posted it on X.

“Baier showed, again, he’s not a ‘straight news’ anchor. He’s a hack who’s no different than Hannity or Watters. He bowed to the pressure from his MAGA fans because he doesn’t care as long as they don’t change the channel,” the ex-producer said.

Baragona posted another statement from another former producer for Fox News. The second ex-producer said that it was “interesting to see Bret Baier for who he really is now that I’m on the outside looking in.” They added that Baier is “just so completely in the tank it’s hard to believe anyone sees him as a real journalist.”

Other journalists weren’t too pleased, either.

“I’d like to congratulate Kamala Harris on her victory in the Presidential Debate against Bret Baier despite Baier’s compulsive interruptions,” wrote Keith Olbermann in a post on X.

Writer Peter Wehner also gave his two cents in a post on X. “My take: Bret Baier has rarely looked as bad (or tendentious) as he did in his interview with Kamala Harris,” Wehner wrote. “On the flip side, this was one of her best interviews. She dominated Bret. All in all it was quite a bad day for MAGA world’s most important media outlet.”

For his faultless regurgitation of Trump’s talking points, Baier did earn the approval of the former president, at least.

“Great job by Bret Baier in his Interview with Lyin’ Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social before ranting about Trump Derangement Syndrome. “Again, congratulations to Bret Baier on a tough but very fair interview, one that clearly showed how totally incompetent Kamala is. For the good of our Nation, her inferior Cognitive ability must be tested at once!”

Surprise, surprise: Donald Trump has been lying about how he supposedly saved American jobs by threatening John Deere with tariffs.

In Trump’s telling, the farm equipment manufacturer had planned to outsource some of its production to Mexico but abandoned the plan when Trump threatened to hit the company with tariffs.

“John Deere … announced about a year ago they’re gonna build big plants outside of the United States. Right? They’re going to build them in Mexico,” Trump told the Economic Club of Chicago Tuesday. “I said, ‘If John Deere builds those plants, they’re not selling anything into the United States.’ They just announced yesterday they’re probably not going to build the plants, OK? I kept the jobs here.”

But the company had made no such announcement, CNN reported Wednesday, finding nothing in any media reports or John Deere’s corporate releases. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that they hadn’t made any such announcements or changed their plans to shift some of their production. 

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign to ask for evidence or comment on the Journal’s report but did not receive a response. The former president is known for making false claims on days ending in -y, but according to polls, the economy is a topic where voters trust him more than Kamala Harris.

Trump did not help his economic credentials in Chicago Tuesday, with the event’s moderator, Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait pointing out that his promises, including tariffs, would wreck the economy. He also lashed out at Micklethwait for fact-checking his outrageous claims during their interview and wasn’t able to stay on topic for many of the questions he was asked. Trump’s many made-up claims and anecdotes during the Tuesday interview seem to indicate that his ongoing cognitive decline is worsening as the election nears.

During a Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, Donald Trump revealed that transgender people will be one of his first set of victims—appearing to suggest a sweeping executive order.

At the town hall dedicated to “women’s issues,” Trump was asked about what he would do as president to tackle the “transgender issue” in women’s sports. Trump responded by first saying something true: “It’s such an easy question” for him to answer.

“We’re not going to let it happen,” he said.

Trump then went on to discuss one California transgender NCAA volleyball player who has been the target of the right for the past month. “I never saw a ball hit so hard,” said Trump, referring to a viral video of the athlete. Under his watch, transgender athletes competing in sports that match their gender will “absolutely stop,” he added.

When Fox’s Harris Faulkner asked a slightly more difficult question, how Trump would actually logistically stop the issue, Trump replied, “You just ban it. The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.”

The question of transgender people competing in athletics is an easy culture-war question for the right. It doesn’t address any real hardship for women or issues that impact everyday Americans’ lives. Despite half of states placing some kind of ban on transgender athletes, experts estimate there are probably fewer than 100 transgender women competing in NCAA sports. This type of question that allows Trump to pontificate about gender is exactly the kind of easy question he adores.

Meanwhile on the other side of the aisle, Kamala Harris’s team also felt comfortable using transgender people as a political pawn. In a post on X Wednesday, KamalaHQ faced blowback after trying to drag Trump for offering gender-affirming care to migrants and incarcerated people during his presidency.

Elon Musk is playing Jewish and Arab American voters against each other.

The tech billionaire is funding a super PAC, Future Coalition PAC, that is running digital ads that tout Kamala Harris’s support for Israel in Michigan, in areas heavily populated with Muslim and Arab voters. At the same time, the super PAC is running ads aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania attacking Harris as promoting anti-Israel policies, HuffPost reports.

One of the ads in Michigan touts Harris and the Jewish identity of her husband, Doug Emhoff, calling them “America’s pro-Israel power couple,” and mentions Israel’s “noble fight against the terrorists in Gaza.” A mailer paid for by the group also states that Harris leans on her “Jewish husband” to craft her policies on Israel. The ads’s focus on Emhoff to bolster a pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian message has been called antisemitic by Jewish Democrats.

Meanwhile, the super PAC’s ads in Pennsylvania send the opposite message, asking, for example, “Why did Kamala Harris support denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands? And why did Harris show sympathy for college protesters who are rabidly antisemitic?”

The aim of the two ads is to try to use the crisis in Gaza  to undermine Harris’s support from two major communities in key battleground states.

The New York Times confirmed Tuesday, shortly before FEC filings became public, that Building America’s Future is the dark money group behind the PAC. And The Wall Street Journal had already reported that Musk is one of the group’s major contributors. The tech CEO has pushed antisemitic conspiracy theories on his social media platform, X, and curried favor with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect criticism.

The super PAC’s ads may prove to be effective with many Muslim and Arab American voters frustrated with President Biden and Harris’s stance over Israel’s brutal war in the Middle East, which has killed 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza and has expanded to include Lebanon. The Democratic National Convention snubbed opponents of Israel’s actions and refused to feature any Palestinian speakers. The Harris campaign has also refused to signal any change in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine. 

For weeks, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has skirted and dodged answering whether he believes that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But on Wednesday, Vance offered his most eyebrow-raising take thus far: “Not by the words that I would use.”

Speaking before a crowd in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the MAGA movement’s second-in-command insisted that he had already answered the question when it was posed to him in dozens of previous interviews. In a word-salad reply, Vance refused to yield to the idea that Trump had not secured the presidency in 2020—but he also suggested that Trump may not have lost at all.

“I think there were serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance said.

Vance isn’t the only MAGA ally still holding out on the 2020 election results in the waning days of the 2024 race. Speaking with NBC News’s Meet the Press on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson couldn’t help but qualify his answer as to whether he would certify the results of the upcoming election no matter the outcome.

“Regardless of who wins, you’ll certify the results?” asked host Kristen Welker.

“Regardless? Of course, yes, if the election is free and fair and legal, and we pray and hope that it is, there’s a lot of work being done to make sure that’s true,” Johnson said. “I think this one’s going to be so large there’ll be no question. I think Donald J. Trump is your next president, and that can’t happen soon enough.”

When Welker pointed out that saying “if” the election is fair, as well as Trump’s continued lack of a concession over the 2020 vote, was likely to undermine voter confidence in the upcoming election, Johnson was quick to brush off her concerns.

“The point is the process works. We have the peaceful transfer of power. We did in 2020,” he said, conveniently ignoring the fact that an armed and violent mob stormed the Capitol to try to prevent that transfer of power.

Loyalty, after all, has a premium in any future Trump administration.

Pennsylvania Democrats are sounding the alarm that Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign may be mismanaged, Politico reported Wednesday. 

“I feel like we’re going to win here, but we’re going to win it in spite of the Harris state campaign,” said a Democratic elected official in the state, who, like others for this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive matter. “Pennsylvania is such a mess, and it’s incredibly frustrating.”

Specifically, it seems that Pennsylvania Democratic leaders are worried about the efforts of one person in particular: Nikki Lu, Harris’s campaign manager in the state.

Ryan Boyer, the first Black leader of Philadelphia’s powerful building trade council, spoke on the record about his worries over the campaign management. “I have concerns about Nikki Lu,” Boyer told Politico. “I don’t think she understands Philadelphia.”

Others criticized Lu for failing to connect with state Democratic leaders. A second Democratic state official described Lu as “AWOL,” while a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist told Politico that Lu “empowers a culture” in Harris’s presidential camp that has left elected officials feeling left out in the cold. 

Late last month, Latino and Black Democratic leaders met with officials from the Harris campaign to discuss their concerns, according to five people who attended or were briefed on the proceedings. Officials asked for increased presence at local events, improved surrogate operation, and a more sophisticated approach for engaging with diverse voting blocs. 

Harris’s national campaign manager Julie Rodriguez Chavez responded to criticism of Harris’s Pennsylvania campaign, saying that they were running “the largest and most sophisticated operation in Pennsylvania history.” 

“We have 50 coordinated offices and nearly 400 staff on the ground,” she said, touting the large investments the campaign has made in advertising  and outreach targeting Black and Latino voters. Both presidential campaigns have spent more in Pennsylvania than in any other state in the country. 

In recent weeks, Harris’s campaign has been joined by Paulette Aniskoff, who served as a field director for Barack Obama in 2008. Democratic leaders have been enthusiastic about Aniskoff’s presence and what they view as a softening of Lu’s authority in the campaign. Leaders were also encouraged by the work of two advisers, Brendan McPhillips and Kellan White, whom they saw as having a strong understanding of Philadelphia voters. 

While Harris needs to shore up support in Democratic-leaning Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the surrounding suburbs, the vice president’s campaign has devoted significant resources toward attracting disaffected Republican voters throughout the state. 

Aniskoff seems all for it. “I do think these suburban folks—Nikki Haley folks—are very uncomfortable with Trump, uncomfortable with all of his crazy shit, and we have such a great opening,” she said. 

Unsurprisingly, that seems to involve cavorting with Republicans, which could explain why Democratic leaders appear to feel a little iced out. 

On Wednesday, Harris spoke in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she was joined by former Georgia Republican Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan, as well as Olivia Troye, former Homeland Security adviser to Mike Pence. Troye previously spoke at the Democratic National Convention and was Harris’s guest at her presidential debate in September. 

Harris held a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday, where she called Trump “increasingly unstable and unhinged.” Both Erie and Bucks County supported President Joe Biden in 2020. 

The Nebraska Supreme Court has delivered a last-minute ruling that could impact one of the most important Senate races this November and one crucial Electoral College vote.

On Wednesday, a judge ruled that Nebraskans with past felony convictions can vote in the November elections and cannot be barred by county elections officials. Individuals with felony convictions in that state can register online through Friday or in person by October 25.

This comes as the Cornhusker State has garnered national attention over its exciting Senate matchup between independent Dan Osborn and Republican Deb Fischer, who are currently neck and neck in the polls.

Further, Nebraska’s particular split-electoral-vote system, which Republicans tried to challenge earlier this year, means that the blue dot of Omaha could be Kamala Harris’s key to winning in November. 

Nearly 7,000 voters could now be eligible to vote in less than three weeks. Many of Nebraska’s former felons live in or near Omaha. The overlapping 2nd congressional district race between Republican Don Bacon and Democrat Tony Vargas is also too close to call.

For the past 20 years, Nebraskans with past felony convictions were forced to wait two years before registering to vote, until legislation passed this April ending the waiting period. Voters were held in limbo after the Nebraska attorney general challenged the decision. Wednesday’s ruling sets the record straight. And these new voters may just determine the future of the White House, Congress, and the Senate—if they can register to vote in time.

Donald Trump had no idea what in vitro fertilization was until after Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling against the practice in February, needing Senator Katie Britt to explain it to him.

The former president made the startling revelation during a Fox News town hall in Georgia about women’s issues that aired Wednesday, shortly after calling himself the “father of IVF” and saying, “Nobody talks about that.”

“I got a call from Katie Britt, a young, just a fantastically attractive person from Alabama, she’s a senator, and she called me up like ‘Emergency, emergency’ because an Alabama judge had ruled that the IVF clinics were illegal and had to be closed down,” Trump told Fox News’s Harris Faulkner.

“I didn’t know they were even involved in [IVF]; nobody talks about that, they don’t talk about it, but now that they can’t do it, she said I was attacked in a certain way, I was attacked, and I said explain IVF very quickly, and within about two minutes I understood it. I said, ‘No no, we’re totally in favor of IVF,’” Trump continued incoherently.

Trump admitting he had never heard of IVF until February would be damning for most political candidates, let alone one running for president. Trump’s supposed vow to protect IVF is even worse, as he has constantly flip-flopped on the issue, with his running mate, JD Vance, struggling to keep up and explain Trump’s policy.

Trump’s fellow Republicans, including Britt, have refused to protect the practice at the federal level, voting against multiple measures in Congress. But so far, Trump and the GOP have escaped any blowback for failing to protect IVF or their numerous other attacks on reproductive rights. It looks like the only accountability they’ll face will be at the ballot box in November.

Fox News built Donald Trump his own safe space in Georgia on Tuesday, reportedly inviting local chapters of conservative organizations to bolster the crowds.

From the jump, the all-women audience-led town hall at Reid Barn in Cumming, Georgia, was notably more energetic than Trump’s recent media appearances. Attendees roared and cheered for the Republican presidential nominee, even while his responses failed to answer their questions or completely went off the rails.

With less than 30 days on the clock until Election Day, the interview was intended to soften Trump’s image with female voters in swing states. But rather than offer an honest depiction of Trump’s popularity among women—which currently drags behind Kamala Harris’s by a 14-point margin, according to a national NBC News poll—Fox opted to plant some of the former president’s biggest fans to help him out.

Some of the women who attended the town hall were spotted in conservative clothing, including one who wore a hat that read “RNC Delegate.” And one of the individuals chosen to ask Trump a question bore a striking resemblance to Lisa Cauley, the president of Fulton County Republican Women.

Behind the scenes, some women openly admitted that they had received “personal invitations” from the network to appear.

“We got a personal invitation from Fox News,” Emily Harris, the vice president of Republican Women of Forsyth, told The Independent. “We were ecstatic.… We were all very, very excited.”

Trump has long fretted over his reputation with women, but that hasn’t stopped him from pushing policies that actively harm women across the country. Those include making rolling back abortion a key component of all three of his campaigns, repeatedly promising over the last eight years to ban the medical procedure at every available opportunity. While in office, he expressed support for a bill that would have banned abortion nationwide at 20 weeks.

He’s actively spread disinformation about the procedure, attempting to turn voters against permitting access to the medical treatment by claiming there are some states and Democrats who support abortions “after birth,” otherwise known as infanticide or, simply, murder. And Trump’s direct actions include the most egregious offense against national access to the lifesaving procedure: the appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The resulting nationwide constriction has sent several states into crisis mode, air-dropping pregnant patients to hospitals in nearby states for critical care that they themselves are no longer able to legally provide.

The former president has also caught flak for his treatment of porn star Stormy Daniels, whom he covered up an affair with ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, said at the time that Trump believed the story could torpedo his rising political star, sharing that he believed it was a “disaster” and that “women are going to hate me.”

Trump’s casual, gross remarks about women haven’t helped his popularity, either. Perhaps most egregiously, the real estate mogul was caught on a hot mic claiming that he could do whatever he wanted to women since he was famous, like “grab ’em by the pussy.”

But none of those reasons came to mind when Trump’s supporters at Tuesday’s town hall were tasked with rationalizing why women are peeling away from the MAGA leader.

“I don’t know where that comes from,” Cynthia Brown, treasurer for Republican Women of Forsyth County, told The Independent. “Because everyone I talk to just loves and appreciate[s] what he is doing, because he’s protecting our children, protecting women from sex trafficking, human trafficking and all the … things that bringing, having open borders allows.”