Trump Takes His War With the Media to Gruesome New Level

In the final stretch of the presidential race, Donald Trump has started to showcase the full extent of his disdain for the media.

During a Sunday rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the former reality TV star pondered how another potential assassin could make an attempt on his life—and whose lives would have to be taken first before they got to him.

“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much because I don’t mind. I don’t mind that,” Trump told a cheering crowd.

Trump has spent years deriding and eroding public trust in the media and government institutions, often to the benefit of his own political ambitions, which have skyrocketed as a growing demographic of the public pulls away from legitimate facts and reporting, effectively permitting Trump’s myriad lies and conspiracies to fester unfettered.

A Gallup poll published in October revealed that public trust in Democratic institutions, including the executive office and the legislative branches of government, is practically abysmal, with just 40 and 34 percent of Americans, respectively, believing that they’re trustworthy.

But somehow, the news media got even more demerits, with confidence in the information apparatus hitting its lowest point on record. Just 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the industry’s ability to report news “fully, accurately and fairly.” Last week, Trump personally celebrated his role in creating that sentiment, bragging to a crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that it was, largely, thanks to him.

America’s trust in the media disintegrated in 2016 during his first run for the White House, when Trump routinely platformed the notion that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was receiving more positive media coverage than he was. He also levied attacks on the media to undermine the industry’s coverage of his myriad scandals, including his criminal trials.

That year, confidence in news dropped by eight percentage points—the most in a single year since the metric was first recorded in 1976—and for the first time in U.S. history sank below 40 percent. It was dragged down, predominantly, by Republican respondents, whose faith in the media plummeted from 32 percent in 2015 to just 14 percent in 2016, while surveyed Democrats and registered independents reported relatively minor dents in their confidence.

This year has shown the disheartening effects of that loss of trust: Newspapers and stations alike have laid off thousands of journalists, with dozens of major outlets downsizing or outright folding as the business side of the industry struggles to keep up with the market, the changing technological landscape (i.e., artificial intelligence), and rapidly changing leadership.

But encouraging the death of journalists echoes a more insidious political threat, harkening back to the fascist policies of Adolf Hitler, who squashed Germany’s trust in the press until he was able to turn the news media into a propaganda arm of the Nazi Party, a key component of his ascent to complete and total control of the nation.

And while traditional outlets failed to underscore the depth of Trump’s threat, some of the country’s biggest conservative outlets saw the writing on the wall. On Monday, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator—Drudge Report—topped its site with one headline: “MOVE OVER CHENEY, NOW HE WANTS REPORTERS SHOT!”

The longest-serving Senate leader in U.S. history is now no more than a punch line.

Donald Trump railed against Mitch McConnell at this North Carolina rally on Sunday while McConnell was present, stating that he wanted the minority leader gone because he “helped” the Democrats raise inflation and overspend. Trump even went so far as to mock McConnell’s March endorsement.

“That guy. Can you believe he endorsed me? Boy, that must have been a painful day in his life. Every time I think of it he didn’t have to do that, he provided the necessary votes. What a disgrace.”

Trump then seemed to forget where he was as he went on to shout out Republicans he actually liked, telling the North Carolina crowd that they had the “best of all right here, David McCormick. Where’s David? Is he around someplace? You know, we just left him. He’s a great guy.”

The Republican Senate candidate was not “around” and had no reason to be because he is currently running for Senate in Pennsylvania, not North Carolina.

McConnell has privately railed about how much he dislikes Trump. According to a new biography, he has called the former president “stupid” and “narcissistic” and said that he had “done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete.” He also stated plainly that the MAGA movement was “completely wrong” and something that even Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize.”

But in public, it’s a different story: McConnell voted to acquit Trump during his second impeachment, focused on the January 6 insurrection, and endorsed Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

The minority leader’s spinelessness has gotten him absolutely nothing, and his party is no longer his. Now he’s mere cannon fodder for a man who can’t even remember what state he’s in.

Donald Trump left no illusions about a peaceful transfer to power in his closing message at his rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday.

First, Trump lamented how his “world’s favorite chart done by the Border Patrol” allegedly told him that “we had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left.”

“I shouldn’t have left,” Trump said.

If nearly any other politician had made a remark saying that they shouldn’t have left office, this could be interpreted as feeling bad over losing an election. In Trump’s case, however, his words evoke the chaos surrounding the 2020 election, his fake elector schemes to stay in office, and the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection for which he has neither taken responsibility nor faced accountability.

Later in the evening, in Macon, Georgia, he went on to describe what the beginning of his second term would look like should he win.

“You watch, it’s going to be so good, it’s going to be so much fun, it’ll be nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular, but it’s going to be something,” Trump said.

The former president’s comments are a reminder that he has repeatedly said during this campaign about how he wants to be a dictator “on day one.” Trump has vowed to immediately ram through far-right plans like mass deportations and ill-advised tariffs, which certainly wouldn’t stop after his day one as president.

The nastiness Trump is referring to would almost certainly be targeted toward any lawmakers or civil servants who attempt to stop his crazy decisions. To that end, while there’s (hopefully) little he can do about legislators and politicians who oppose him, the former president and convicted felon already has a plan to purge the federal workforce of those who would be disloyal to him or his far-right policies.

The election is only one day away, and Trump is telling the public how bad his second term is going to be. The question is whether this is what voters in key states want, or if Trump will be sent back to Mar-a-Lago in defeat for a second time—and if that happens peacefully.

Elon Musk’s daily $1 million giveaway to registered voters is headed back to state court after a judge on Friday rejected his bid to move a Pennsylvania lawsuit against him and his America PAC. The decision is bad news for Musk’s attempt to delay possible accountability over the blatantly pro-Trump lottery.

On Monday, Philadelphia District Attorney Lawrence Krasner sued the tech mogul and his super PAC over the lottery, which awards $1 million each day to a registered voter in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who signs a pledge to support the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. Krasner argued that under Pennsylvania law, only the state can run a lottery for the benefit of the state’s seniors. 

The Philadelphia District Attorney also alleged that neither Musk nor the PAC published clear rules for the giveaway or explained how they are protecting entrants’ personal information. The lawsuit questioned whether the million-dollar winners are actually random, considering that two of them had attended Trump rallies.

Musk was required to attend a court proceeding in Pennsylvania on Thursday and not only didn’t show up but delayed the case by asking that it be moved to federal court, claiming that the lawsuit raised questions about free speech and election interference more suited to federal law. The state judge then decided to place the lawsuit on hold until a federal court decided whether to hear the case.  

Now that a federal court has declined to take the case, it goes back to a Pennsylvania state court, which will decide if Musk or the super PAC broke any state laws. Last week, the Justice Department sent the PAC a warning letter stating that the lottery may violate federal laws against paying people to register to vote. For one day, the giveaway seemed to stop, only to resume the next day with two prizes awarded. 

Despite the setback, Musk still may have successfully delayed the case until after Election Day on Tuesday, as the earliest proceedings in the lawsuit could begin would be Monday and Krasner would have to hope for a favorable injunction to stop the giveaway that day. Musk could keep his giveaway going through the weekend. However, one can still hope that a billionaire openly giving away money for political purposes will face consequences.

Donald Trump doubled down Friday on his disturbing comments about placing Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad.

During a noisy campaign stop in Warren, Michigan, Trump refused to back down on his wild comments attacking Cheney, a moderate Republican who has been campaigning extensively with Kamala Harris ahead of the election.

“She’s a war hawk. She kills people. She wanted uh, even in my administration, she was pushing that we go to war with everybody,” Trump said. “And I said that if you ever gave her a rifle, [indistinguishable] if you ever do that, she wouldn’t be doing too well.”

“If she had to do it herself, and she had to face the consequences of battle, she wouldn’t be doing it. So it’s easy for her to talk, but she wouldn’t be doing it,” Trump continued. “She’s actually a disgrace.”

Trump also called Cheney a “disaster” and a “coward,” during his stop in Dearborn, Michigan, according to the Associated Press.

Trump’s original remarks to Tucker Carlson from a rally Thursday night suggested that Cheney ought to be viscerally confronted with her own hawkishness.

“They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies.’ She always wanted to go to war with people,” Trump said.

“She’s a radical war hawk,” he continued. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

(Trump reportedly dodged the Vietnam War draft by saying he had bone spurs.)

Arizona’s attorney general announced Friday that she will be investigating Trump over his violent comment about Cheney and whether it qualifies as a “death threat.”

The Republican ticket has redoubled its efforts to paint Trump as a peacemaker as it attempts to siphon support from Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, who have expressed disappointment with Harris’s nonstatements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (A particularly ridiculous pitch given Trump’s insistence that Israel should “go further” in its military campaign in the Middle East.)

Trump’s phony antiwar farce also comes as he faces criticism from moderate Republicans such as Cheney and retired generals, including Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Cheney is a veritable war hawk, but Trump’s pitch as an antiwar president is blatantly dishonest and evidence of some strange memory hole about the Trump presidency.

During his campaign, Trump has repeatedly asserted there were no wars under his administration and claimed that not a single U.S. soldier in Afghanistan was killed for an 18-month stretch while he was in office. Both claims are completely untrue.

During Trump’s presidency, there were U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as ongoing civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia. While he was in office, there were 45 hostile deaths and 63 total deaths in Afghanistan, with no alleged 18-month gap in casualties. In fact, Trump increased the number of airstrikes in Afghanistan, which led to a 330 percent increase in civilian casualties.

The reality of Trump’s time in office was much more volatile. Trump regularly stoked international conflict, nearly tweeting us into a nuclear war with North Korea on several occasions. He withdrew from a nonproliferation agreement with Iran, allegedly helped to incite a failed coup in Venezuela, and supported a Saudi-backed war in Yemen.

Editor’s Note: This piece was written after Cook Political Report noted on its website that Colorado’s 4th congressional district has been moved to “lean Republican.”

The political forecaster has since corrected an error in its original update. Cook is predicting a greater chance of Democratic victory in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, Boebert’s old district—not the 4th congressional district, where she is now running.

Boebert won the 3rd district in 2022 by a mere 546 votes. Her Democratic challenger at the time, Adam Frisch, is running again this election against Republican Jeff Hurd.

Could Representative Lauren Boebert actually lose her spot in the House? Recent polling shows it may be possible.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Friday reported that Boebert has lost ground in Colorado’s 4th congressional district, and moved the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican. Though the MAGA Republican is still holding onto a small lead, that seems to be mostly thanks to the heavily Republican makeup of the district, rather than any tactful campaigning by Boebert.

The Republican congresswoman barely hung onto her seat in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district in 2022, winning by only 546 votes. After that narrow victory, and after becoming the center of a national scandal for her behavior during a performance of Beetlejuice, Boebert made a surprise switch to run in the neighboring 4th district.

She aims to fill the seat left empty by Republican Representative Ken Buck who retired this year. At the time of her announcement, Buck didn’t have many kind words for Boebert, whom he said made “George Santos look like a saint.”

On Tuesday, Boebert will face off against Democrat Trisha Calvarese, a first-time candidate, who has attacked the Republican on IVF and veterans rights.

And though Republicans make up nearly 34 percent of registered active voters in the conservative stronghold—with Democrats holding onto only 15 percent of the electorate—Boebert has not been universally embraced in Colorado’s 4th.

“I don’t appreciate, as a Christian, people saying they’re Christian to get your vote and then turning out to be a lowlife, and now I just kind of think of her as a lowlife,” one voter told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. While some Republicans said they’d hold their nose, despite Boebert’s “antics,” just to avoid voting for the Democrat, that may not be the case for everyone. 

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is launching another frivolous legal attack against a media outlet. This time, it’s The Washington Post.

The Trump-Vance campaign filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against the Post, alleging that the newspaper made “illegal in-kind contributions to [Kamala] Harris for President.” In their complaint, the campaign’s lawyers said that the Post spent money boosting stories on social media that were critical of Trump, citing a Wednesday report from Semafor.

The FEC complaint, filed Thursday, came despite the Post’s decision not to endorse any presidential candidates and nix an already written endorsement of Harris from its editorial board, due to an order from the paper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos. The decision has cost the Post more than 250,000 subscribers but apparently didn’t curry any favor with Trump or his campaign.

Also on Thursday, Trump’s campaign filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS, claiming that the network engaged in election interference for favorably editing a 60 Minutes interview with Harris. Previously, he threatened to have CBS’s license revoked because of the edits, and had backed out of a planned interview of his own with 60 Minutes. After his poor showing at ABC’s presidential debate with Harris in September, Trump complained that it was rigged and called for that network’s broadcast license to be revoked.

With Election Day only four days away, Trump’s attacks on the media appear to be calculated attempts at intimidation in order to force favorable coverage and undermine trust in political journalism. The former president has reportedly asked Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, to hide negative political ads against him.

On Wednesday, Trump even proudly bragged, at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, about driving down trust in the news media’s credibility. His plan seems to be ensuring that critical reports of his behavior won’t be believed and that if election returns come in showing him losing, his supporters won’t trust them, creating chaos.

Elon Musk’s America PAC has Republican operatives more than a little concerned about Donald Trump’s ground game.

Nine Republican operatives and canvassers seemed alarmed about issues with the super PAC, which has reportedly collected a plethora of faked canvassing data, NBC News reported Friday.

As the PAC’s phony canvassing numbers were revealed, an operative close to the effort told NBC that “all hell has broken loose” inside the America PAC.

The PAC has reportedly received a large quantity of suspicious data from its canvassers, following reports that some had learned how to spoof their location to create the impression that they’d visited voters’ homes.

Earlier this month, data leaks revealed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada in a single week had been flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric used to indicate fake door-knocks. America PAC has spent more than $54 million on its vendor in those states, Blitz Canvassing, which is also organizing efforts in Michigan and North Carolina. Blitz Canvassing is one of four vendors employed by the PAC.

The PAC has pushed back on reports that fake canvassing was impeding Trump’s get-out-the-vote effort.

America PAC has also reportedly engaged in dubious treatment of its canvassers. Two canvassers anonymously told NBC News they were made to knock on doors outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, as Hurricane Helene rolled in on September 27. One of them said that their direct manager told them to go door to door, despite leadership instructing them to make calls instead.

“If I go into the troubles that we went through just getting into the field, working, I’m talking about soggy literature, right?” the canvasser told NBC News. “Ponchos on ponchos.”

“It was very bad,” they added.

The second canvasser said that many canvassers quit after that experience.

In Michigan, some canvassers funded by America PAC were reportedly given unrealistically high expectations, under extremely poor working conditions. They claimed that they were threatened financially if they performed poorly. Canvassers said that they’d been misled by the PAC and a video showed that they’d been carted around in the back of a U-Haul, instead of the rental cars they were promised. One canvasser even said they were surprised to learn that they were canvassing on behalf of Trump.

Trump’s allies have practically begged the former president to ditch Musk, and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders in battleground states reported that they’ve seen little return from the America PAC’s efforts.

The western Pennsylvania borough of Mount Pleasant is drawing negative attention over an exceptionally violent Halloween parade float depicting Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris in chains.

On Wednesday night, the borough held its parade, and one float featured a person with a Trump mask riding in a golf cart, with a fake sniper rifle mounted to the top of the vehicle. And trailing the vehicle was a rope or chain tied around the wrists of a woman dressed as Harris, who was also wearing handcuffs.

The depiction set off a backlash online and even within the borough, which is located 45 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The borough’s Democratic mayor, Diane Bailey, criticized the float on Pittsburgh TV news channel WXPI along with at least one local resident. Bailey said she was looking into how the float was even approved in the first place.

The NAACP’s Pittsburgh chapter condemned the float, with its president Daylon Davis issuing a statement saying in part, “This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America.”

The parade’s organizer, the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, released a statement apologizing for the float.

“We, the members of the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, want to take a moment to sincerely apologize for allowing the offensive participants to take part in the Mount Pleasant Annual Halloween Parade last evening,” the statement read. “We do not share in the values represented by those participants, and we understand how it may have hurt or offended members of our community.”

Displays like this in a battleground state only days before the election do a lot of harm to the political atmosphere, particularly in an election where the Republican presidential nominee has threatened violence against his enemies and called them “the enemy within.” The racial component of the display can’t be overlooked, either, with one resident saying the float “is simulating a lynching down Main Street in Mount Pleasant.” Hopefully, this small-town float isn’t a harbinger of what’s to come.

Europe’s Green Party is telling third-party candidate Jill Stein to step aside for the sake of America and the world.

European Green Party representatives from Italy, Ireland, Spain, and 13 other countries across the continent came together to sign onto a letter asking the U.S. Green Party’s Stein to withdraw her candidacy and endorse Democrat Kamala Harris for the sake of democracy.

“Right now, the race for the White House is too close for comfort,” wrote the French and Austrian co-chairs of the coalition in a statement released Friday. “We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House.”

There is no longer any formal relationship between the U.S. Green Party and the European Greens across the pond, in part because of key differences in policy around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so the statement is just a plea rather than a binding resolution. In their letter, the Europeans highlighted the connection between Trump’s “authoritarianism” and his close relationships with right-wing leaders Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Jair Bolsonaro, arguing that electing Trump would embolden anti-democratic actions around the globe.

Further, they also argued that by taking away votes from Harris and allowing a Trump win, Stein will not be able to help “bring about a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East,” an issue in which the U.S. Green Party candidate has staked her 2024 campaign upon.

In previous statements to The Guardian, U.S. Green Party spokespeople said they’ve been disappointed by the European Greens’ “silence and complicity” over Israel and Gaza, stating that the parties have “relied too much on US corporate news media” regarding the ongoing genocide.

Stein is polling at less than 2 percent nationally but may take home a larger share of the vote in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Arab and Muslim voters alongside others on the left have rallied around the call to cast a “conscience vote” against the U.S.-backed Israeli onslaught on Gaza.

Others, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, see Stein’s candidacy as a potential spoiler for the election. “All you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious,” said the congresswoman.