The Terrifying Group About to Stage a Pro-Trump Comeback

Far-right groups that rioted through the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, are readying themselves for the aftermath of Election Day.

Local chapters of the Proud Boys are congregating on Telegram, a popular anonymous messaging app that played a key role in organizing the insurrection, to prepare a response to what they believe is widespread voter fraud in the 2024 race. In closed chats, users that affiliate themselves with the neofascist, white supremacist–adjacent group are sharing telling and suggestive images, including photos of armed men and guns, while suggesting that they’re ready to revolt unless Donald Trump wins.

“The day is fast approaching when fence sitting will no longer be possible,” read one post from an Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, according to a New York Times analysis of one million messages across several dozen Telegram channels with more than 500,000 collective members. “You will either stand with the resistance or take a knee and willingly accept the yoke of tyranny and oppression.”

Other users in the Ohio chapter warned that the nonviolent, antifascist political movement antifa will riot “once Trump wins,” telling its members to “prepare accordingly,” reported The Wall Street Journal.

“While other platforms are primarily about self-expression, ‘owning the libs’ and hateful buffoonery, Telegram often generates an ambience of ‘let’s get something done,’” Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, told the Times.

The Telegram chat of a Texas chapter of the decentralized paramilitary group recently shared a post claiming that it was Vice President Kamala Harris—and not Trump—who planned to leverage allegations of “millions of fake ballots” to retake the White House.

One commenter with a Proud Boys flag in the background of their profile picture replied: “So we can shoot them then, right?”

But Telegram isn’t the only place that the group is spreading the plan, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. A North Phoenix chapter of the group posted pictures of a gun arsenal on Trump’s platform Truth Social last month, writing that the “Proud Boys stocking up getting ready for Nov.… It’s going to be biggley!!”

Many of the groups calling people to action are labeling themselves as “election integrity” networks. But in reality, they are spreading false or misleading information about the vote that could disrupt the election, including encouraging members to grill local officials in person about absentee ballot tallies or elevating claims that election workers are giving Republican voters writing tools for their ballots that won’t be compatible with voting machines to undermine the results.

Trump has tacitly embraced the Proud Boys’ support, infamously telling the group to “stand back and stand by” when asked during his September 2020 presidential debate against Joe Biden to condemn the white supremacists.

During a political rally in Aston, Pennsylvania, Sunday, JD Vance told quite a whopper about Donald Trump: that the Republican presidential nominee doesn’t believe in censorship and would not suppress Americans’ free speech.

“You know something Donald Trump will never do? Donald Trump will never go out there and say that his fellow citizens should be censored or silenced for disagreeing with them,” Vance said to cheers from the pro-MAGA crowd.

Vance said this about a man who has threatened multiple media outlets in the last month alone, whether it was filing an FEC complaint against The Washington Post, suing CBS for $10 million over an interview of Kamala Harris, or calling for ABC’s broadcast license to be revoked because he thought his debate with Harris on the network was rigged.

Trump has even bragged that his attacks have undermined the credibility of where much of his criticism comes from: the news media. Naturally, Vance’s words elicited incredulous reactions on social media.

It’s not just the media. Trump has also named his political opponents part of the “enemy within” and has threatened to unleash the military against them. Previously, Vance seemed to be earning his keep as Trump’s running mate by attempting to sanitize and explain away the former president’s rhetoric, calling Trump’s threats “unfiltered” and “from the heart.” It seems that the Ohio senator has graduated to out-and-out lying about what Trump actually stands for.

Herschel Walker is back and ready to lead our country’s missile defense system.

That is not some cruel joke, but a very real thing Donald Trump proposed at his Georgia rally on Sunday—minutes after Walker confused Trump with his eldest son while encouraging people to go out and vote

“We will build a missile defense shield, all made in the USA—wrapped around our country to defend ourselves and our country. It’s all gonna be made in the United States, and a lot of it in your great state. We’ll put Herschel Walker in charge of that little sucker.” 

Walker, a devoted Trump acolyte, is one of the most famous Black men in Georgia. The college football legend was thrust into the national political eye when he ran against and lost to Democrat Raphael Warnock in the heated 2022 Senate race.

That campaign was plagued by countless gaffes and scandals of Walker’s own creation. He lambasted absent Black fathers while lying to his campaign about being one himself. He criticized abortion rights, even as it was revealed he paid for his girlfriend’s abortion. He lied about his college degree, where he lived, a charity he claimed to have founded, and so much more. As a Black Republican, he denied racism even existed, as he told a crowd of (mostly) white voters that “we use Black power to create white guilt.… Reparations teaches separation.”

On Sunday, Walker kept the gaffes going, as he ended his speech by telling rallygoers to “get to the polls and vote for my friend, and your friend, Donald Trump Jr.” Walker awkwardly tried to correct himself afterward, speaking back into the microphone. “Donald Trump—Donald J. Trump.”

“Bringing back Herschel Walker is the kind of shit I would do if I were trying to lose an election but what do I know,” journalist Louis Peitzman said on X.

Walker is a walking faux pas, and will continue to be so in a nightmare scenario where he leads missile defense. We can only hope that Georgians heard him the first time and decide to write in Donald Trump Jr. on Election Day.   

MAGA Republicans are demanding equal time for Donald Trump after Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live over the weekend, even though the former president already received equal airtime within a day of her appearance.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brandon Carr, a Trump appointee, raised the alarm Saturday about Harris’s surprise appearance after it was announced just hours before the show aired. In a post on X, Carr wrote that Harris’s cameo was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct—a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” he wrote. “Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.”

When Trump hosted SNL in 2015, his appearance triggered the Equal Time rule, and NBC offered Trump’s opponents 12 minutes of free air time on NBC affiliate stations.

Trump was offered the same deal after Harris’s appearance. On Sunday afternoon, the Republican presidential nominee aired a short 60-second message after the end of a NASCAR race, according to CNN. Harris had been given around 30 seconds “without charge,” according to the FCC filing.

That certainly didn’t satisfy grievance-fueled MAGA acolytes, who seem to think Trump is somehow entitled to a booking on SNL.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio complained Sunday that her appearance was part of a “full-scale assault” to “depress and suppress Republican votes” and that it had happened “in violation of the law.”

“I hope she laughed on Saturday Night Live, in front of millions of people who heard her laughing for a few minutes, cause that’s probably worth two to three million votes right there,” he sneered.

During an appearance Monday on Fox News’s Mornings With Maria, Carr claimed that the FCC might consider “license revocation” as a possible remedy if they find Harris’s appearance to be “egregious.”

“The whole purpose of this rule is to give people a fair shot,” Carr said, not acknowledging that Trump had already been given equal time.

Elon Musk also boosted allegations Sunday that Harris’s appearance was illegal (it wasn’t), alongside claims that SNL had committed election inference because it “did a skit *literally* aimed at boosting the name recognition” of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.

The post implied that Kaine’s race was tightening against Republican candidate Hung Cao, after one single poll found Kaine’s 9–14 point lead shrank to only two points. It’s not illegal, however, for a political candidate to appear on a television show.

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.