Trump Says Free Speech Is Only for People He Likes in Chilling Speech

Donald Trump, who recently led a monthslong smear campaign against the judge overseeing his hush-money trial, the judge’s daughter, and all of his employees, now has a serious problem with people complaining about judges.  

During a speech at the 11th Hour Faith Leaders Meeting in Concord, North Carolina, Monday, the former president took issue with people criticizing judges who appear to like him.

“I actually think it’s illegal what they do,” Trump said, before going on a long tangent about basketball coach Bobby Knight. When Trump finally returned to his point, he explained his plot to limit free speech.

“They play the ref, they start screaming about ‘The judge is no good,’ and ‘This one’s no good,’ and ‘They’re slow’ and ‘They’re lousy judges’ and ‘The judge should be impeached,’ and all of this crap, when you have a brilliant judge that’s doing the right thing,” Trump said.

The Republican presidential nominee is evidently still touchy about Judge Aileen Cannon, whose bias in favor of Trump was apparent throughout the proceedings of his classified documents case. Her unprecedented decision to toss out the felony case by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment unconstitutional has been criticized by legal scholars. 

“And some people will fold a little bit, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ll get them off my back, let me just give a bad ruling here or there,’ and some will do that actually but, uh fortunately, most have courage and they understand,” Trump said, suggesting that some judges bend to pressure. 

“I really believe it’s illegal what they do, and I know there’s some great lawyers in there who are gonna look at it, because what they do is so obvious, what they’ve done to the Supreme Court, even with the protection of their houses, you’re not supposed to be allowed to march in front. They didn’t stop it,” he continued. 

Trump asserted that judges would “give a bad ruling” to silence critics, and specifically mentioned the Supreme Court, which he packed with conservative justices, who tossed him a blanket presidential immunity for official acts and, on Monday, denied a bid from his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump and other officials had him placed in solitary confinement as punishment for his tell-all book.

Trump clearly believes a “bad ruling” is any one that does not favor him. Just months ago, Trump went on several tirades against New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, his family, and his staff, leading a slew of threats against him that resulted in a gag order being placed on the former president. 

Speaking to the room full of Christian voters, Trump promised that he would continue to install conservative judges to protect their interests. 

“I will once again appoint rock solid pro-constitutional judges to faithfully interpret the law and the Constitution; the 300 judges that we appointed changed the whole …” Trump trailed off, shaking his head. “I mean, it was so bad, it was so bad.”

Trump’s slate of 234 conservative judges are some of the most influential in the country, and have already sowed chaos. Take, for instance, Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the only federal judge in Amarillo, Texas. Kacsmaryk was responsible for a ruling that threatened mifepristone access nationwide. Now conservatives are going out of their way to file their suits in his district. 

When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he has a specific ideal year in mind: 1798, when slavery was legal and America carried out mass deportations with little pretext.

Speaking to a crowd in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump on Monday vowed to “rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered,” by jailing and deporting immigrants, utilizing an arcane 200-year-old law.

“I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 18– no, of 1798,” said Trump, first mixing up his dates. “Think of that, 1798. That’s when we had real politicians that said, ‘We are not gonna play games.’ We have to go back to 1798.”

Believe it or not, this is not the first time he has made such a ridiculous claim.

Over the past month, Trump has regularly suggested sending America back more than two centuries in order to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Speaking on October 11 in Aurora, Colorado, he suggested he’d bring back the law to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” He also spread misinformation about “migrant crime” in the area and nationwide, and called his plan to target suspected gang members “Operation Aurora.”

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is one part of four laws put in place by President John Adams as part of the “Alien and Sedition Acts” meant to protect against French invasion. These laws allowed the government to increase citizenship requirements, crack down on disloyalty, and deport noncitizens en masse. The law was meant to protect the United States only during “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government,” or if a foreign nation had threatened war. Notably, it was used by President Franklin Roosevelt to detain thousands of people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps during World War II.

It’s unclear under exactly what pretext Trump would use the law. Would he make the case that MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua gang is a foreign nation? Or would he settle for the GOP’s language of declaring war on Mexico?

As Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Axios, “The rhetorical framing of migration as an invasion is not only something that turns up the temperature in the political landscape, but it’s also something that is meant to conflate legal and rhetorical concepts.”

Even if he has no real plan to use a 200-year-old law in an authoritarian crackdown, as we’ve seen in Springfield, Ohio, this type of language can result in vigilante violence against everyday people.

Donald Trump’s weekend work trip to a closed McDonald’s franchise was intended to help him connect with working-class voters—but regulars and staff members alike at the burger chain weren’t so impressed.

Reviewers on Yelp torched the former president’s performance, even though the Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, location where Trump “worked” had actually closed for the photo-op.

“Customer service was a joke. Senile old man got bronzer on my fries, didn’t wear gloves,” one reviewer, “Karen S,” wrote on the review site. “Repeated himself several times, something about Ronald McDonald in the showers at the golf club? … 0 stars. Do not recommend.”

Another critic, “Christopher F,” complained that a “creepy old man” working the drive-through window “offered to pay me some hush money to keep this story quiet.”

But Trump’s performance drew some legitimate ire from workers at the international restaurant.

A cashier at a McDonald’s location in Astoria, Queens, felt that the campaign stop minimized the work of her and her colleagues, and managers were wholly unimpressed by Trump’s workplace etiquette. One Flatbush, Brooklyn, area manager shook her head at a clip of Trump playfully throwing salt over his left shoulder to ward off bad luck.

“You don’t throw salt like that,” Kishia, who asked that her last name not be used since she was on the clock, told The New York Times. “Somebody could have been behind him, you know?”

But perhaps most egregious was Trump’s french fry form.

While surveying damage from Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on Monday, Trump was awarded one of McDonald’s honors—a “french fry certification” pin—for playing make believe behind the fryer. The gift came from North Carolina Representative Chuck Edwards, who said that he owned several locations of the fast food purveyor.

“The box is, like, backwards,” New York McDonald’s employee David Ye told the Times, referring to the fry carton. “He doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

Donald Trump has sent a legal demand to CBS demanding the full unedited transcript from the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Truth Social Monday night, Trump posted pictures from a letter his attorneys sent to CBS claiming that the network “and its 60 Minutes producers intentionally misled the public,” and that CBS’s “manipulative editing was aimed at causing confusion among the electorate regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’s abilities, intelligence, and appeal.”

If CBS does not release the transcript, Trump is threatening legal action against the network, asking that it keeps all of its communications and documents relating to Harris’s interview in case of future potential litigation. Needless to say, Trump is driving himself nuts over the whole thing, just because he thinks the network edited Harris’s interview to make her look better.

In reality, CBS News has already responded to Trump, noting that any claims of a doctored interview are completely “false.” Still, Trump’s campaign won’t give up its outlandish war. He has bizarrely demanded that Harris drop out of the race, and his campaign has been calling for the release of the interview transcript for nearly two weeks. The former president has even called for CBS’s broadcast license to be revoked, drawing a rebuke from the Federal Communications Commission.

Trump had his own opportunity to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes, but he backed out at the last minute, making tons of excuses. First, his campaign complained about the interview being fact-checked, and then it demanded an apology for Trump’s 2020 interview, in which he stormed off set. Ultimately, the network aired all of these shifting explanations, which probably contributed to making Trump upset.

If Trump really thinks that CBS’s interview had the effect of making Harris look better, he has the option of sitting down for his own interview with 60 Minutes. But lately, the former president has canceled several interviews for outlets that won’t go out of their way to flatter him, perhaps because he knows that he’ll hurt his image just weeks before the election.

If Donald Trump wanted to distance himself from Project 2025, he sure isn’t doing a great job.

Joining Trump for his bus tour across Pennsylvania this week is Monica Crowley, his former Treasury assistant secretary for public affairs. But perhaps more importantly, Crowley is also a signed contributor to the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, which Trump has been desperately trying to disavow as the election nears.

A footnote in Project 2025 shows that Crowley is not simply a passive signatory. “All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Monica Crowley [and others] deserve special mention,” the document reads.

Crowley will join Trump as he stumps at nearly dozens stops across the state. This comes after Crowley took on a role helping JD Vance prepare for his vice presidential debate last month, serving as a mock moderator for the senator during practice sessions.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has denied his many connections to the Project 2025 manifesto and its signatories. Earlier in October, Trump ranted about “Lyin’ Kamal [sic] Harris” and her mission to “make a thing called Project 2025 the central theme of her campaign, advertising and all.”

Trump claims he has “nothing to do with it, NEVER READ IT, NEVER SAW IT,” but evidence says otherwise.

Donald Trump is no longer simply trying to distance himself from North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Now the former president is outright pretending he doesn’t know anything about the scandal-plagued gubernatorial candidate.

At a campaign stop in the Tar Heel state on Monday, Politico asked Trump whether he would still urge his supporters to vote for Robinson. “I’m not familiar with the race right now. I haven’t looked, I haven’t seen it,” Trump said.

Within the span of eight months, Trump has gone from endorsing Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” to dodging questions about him.

Last month, a bombshell CNN report alleged that Robinson had left inflammatory and lewd comments on a pornography website’s message board, including calling himself a “Black Nazi.” Trump has neglected to withdraw his endorsement of Robinson or really address the scandal at all.

Still, as Trump has sought to drum up votes in North Carolina, Robinson has been notably absent and hasn’t appeared with the Republican presidential nominee since August.

Earlier this month, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was plagued by MAGA rumors that he had sexually groomed a former student of his. Now it appears that unfounded gossip was funded by a familiar source of misinformation: Russia.

Last week, an anonymous account on X, “DocNetyoutube,” claimed that he had spoken with a former student of Walz’s who had been abused by him during Walz’s tenure as a high school teacher and football coach. That same account had a history of elevating other conspiracies and, conveniently, was deactivated shortly after the accusations gained ground. It was unclear whether the account had been offlined by the account owner or if X had removed it.

Experts believe that the Russia-aligned network called Storm-1516 was behind the account, reported Wired. Storm-1516’s content relies heavily on faked primary sources, fooling American viewers into believing that fabricated documents, audio, and video support their baseless conspiracies. NBC News estimated that the prolific group—whose false narratives have lured politicians at the highest levels of government, including Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance—is responsible for at least 50 conspiracies in the last year alone.

A video circulated by another account on X elevated a deepfake of a man identifying himself as the former student, Matthew Metro. But the real Metro—who was tracked down by The Washington Post on Monday—dispelled the outlandish smear, telling the paper that he was dismayed to find out that a group had used his identity to fuel a vicious and false attack on Walz. Metro told the Post that he had attended one of the schools that Walz taught at but had never met him.

Last month, another pro-Trump misinformation superspreader was outed as a beneficiary of Russian state-controlled media. Tenet Media, which funded the work of popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern, folded under the pressure of a Justice Department investigation that found the company had been backed to the tune of millions of dollars by Russian state-controlled media.

Weeks later, another burgeoning MAGA outlet, Intelligencer—which has no apparent connection with New York magazine’s Intelligencer—was caught with ties to Russia. Some of Trump’s closest allies were tied to the outlet, including former Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiant. Nearly half of the company’s board members are former aides, surrogates, or fake electors for Trump’s previous campaigns.

The site’s financial backing did not indicate that it had received funds directly from the Kremlin. Instead, Intelligencer began as a subsidiary of a right-wing radio station in Australia that covers a host of conservative U.S. issues, including climate change denial and Covid-19 conspiracies, until George Eliason, an American journalist with experience in Ukraine, took over the website. In recent months, Intelligencer’s conspiracy-laden articles were shared by the likes of Alex Jones and former Trump aide Roger Stone.

Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans’ outlandish claims undermining election integrity could end up hurting him in the polls, according to one prominent Republican.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defended his state’s election processes during an interview with NewsNation on Sunday, after GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged Friday that there was something wrong with voting machines in Georgia’s Whitfield County. In a post on X, she had claimed that one “voter’s printed ballot had been changed from their selections made on the machine.”

Raffensberger told NewsNation that “spreading stories like that” would “really hurt our turnout on our side,” according to The Guardian. “You know, you can trust the results,” he added.

Raffensperger argued that Greene’s approach was “self-defeating”: If Republicans felt that claims of widespread voter fraud were actually true, they might be less likely to participate in an election.

It’s happened before: In 2021, according to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one in six Republicans said they were less likely to vote in the 2022 midterms because no “forensic audits” had been done on the 2020 election results.

Whitfield County has already had a record 7,500 people cast their votes, News Channel 9 reported Monday, part of the record-breaking voting surge since Georgia first opened its polls last week.

During an appearance on Face the Nation on CBS Sunday, Raffensperger said that the issue Greene was referencing had been due to voter error.

“What happened with Whitfield County was the lady thought she had pressed a certain, you know, selection, and then when she printed out the ballot, she noted that, she saw that, and so then she made them aware of it, and it got corrected,” Raffensperger said, adding that the rumor about a faulty machine was “blown out of proportion.”

Election officials say they have not encountered any issues with the voting machines.

JD Vance offered a strange defense Monday morning of Donald Trump’s recent comments calling Democrats and his other political opponents the “enemy within,” saying Trump’s words are “unfiltered” and “from the heart.”

Fox’s Bill Hemmer asked Vance what the former president means when he uses the phrase and why such language is necessary. Vance responded dismissively, claiming that Trump was just being himself.

“Donald Trump is unfiltered,” Vance told Hemmer. “I think this is one of the reasons why the campaign has gone well, is because he’s not doing a basement campaign strategy. He’s not just running on slogans. When people ask him questions, he speaks from the heart.”

Vance then claimed Trump’s comments on using the military against his enemies were actually in regard to the “rioters” protesting for racial justice during the summer of 2020.

“Why wasn’t law enforcement empowered to put down these riots, to reimpose law and order on American cities? That’s to me what President Trump is talking about here,” Vance said, claiming that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz encouraged “rioters” to attack police stations back then.

Hemmer then corrected Vance, pointing out that Trump specifically mentioned Representatives Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi by name. The Republican vice presidential candidate quickly pivoted, accusing Schiff and Pelosi of being “really part of weaponizing the Department of Justice against our country.”

“I think what Donald Trump is saying is, ‘Look, we’ve got the strongest country in the world. We’ve got the best people in the world, but we do have some broken leadership,’” Vance said, accusing Pelosi of “getting rich off of insider stock trades even as her own country has gotten poor.”

“We do have people on the left, not most people to be clear, but some people on the left who are encouraging violent responses to what we believe is going to be a Donald Trump victory in a couple of weeks,” Vance added. “That’s not okay, and I think it’s totally reasonable to point out that yes, we’ve got the strongest country in the world, but we do have some broken leaders in Washington, and it’s why we’re [winning] this race.”

Vance is clearly doing his best to spin and add some depth to Trump’s comments to make them appear reasonable, trying to sanewash what clearly is the former president characterizing his political opponents as national enemies that he plans to target if he returns to the White House. The Ohio senator also is trying to redirect the very real threat of Trump supporters resorting to violence if the former president loses in November by accusing liberals of the same thing, even though the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots have not faded from public memory.

Vance is only the latest Republican to dismiss Trump’s violent rhetoric, but others in the GOP were not able to invent such a detailed explanation. Meanwhile, ex-officials from the Trump administration, including his former secretary of defense Mark Esper, think the former president’s comments are alarming and should be taken very seriously.

Donald Trump was awarded with a “french fry certification” pin as he surveyed the damage of Hurricane Helene, in North Carolina Monday.

North Carolina Republican Chuck Edwards joined Trump at the event in Swannanoa, bestowing the Republican nominee with a fake award for his few hours pretending to work at a McDonalds Sunday.*

“I know that you perfected your skills behind the counter, a day or so ago, and it was my honor to present um, the uh french fry certification pin,” Edwards said, noting that he also owned McDonald’s franchises. The awkward ceremony was particularly dystopian given the destruction feet behind them.

Edwards previously published a list thoroughly debunking “myths” about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, many of which were largely perpetuated by Trump and other MAGA Republicans. Trump continued to criticize the efforts of FEMA and hurricane relief workers on Monday.

One reporter asked Trump if his constant slander of emergency relief efforts was actually helpful, in light of the recent arrest of an armed gunman who threatened FEMA workers. Trump told reporters, “Well, I think you have to let people know how they’re doing.

“If they were doing a great job, I think we should say that too because I think they should be rewarded.… If they’re doing a poor job, we’re supposed to not say it?

“These people are entitled to say it,” Trump said, implying that making threats against federal employees was well within their rights as Americans.

Trump continued to claim that FEMA had no money because it had been spent on “illegal migrants” and “terrorists.”

* This article originally misidentified the city where this event took place.