Former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump took a victory lap on Wednesday over ads from swing state Democratic senators touting their relationships with him on Truth Social on Wednesday, arguing that Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign had become “TOXIC.”
In recent days, Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), both of whom are locked in tight reelection battles, have unveiled ads emphasizing
their common ground and ability to work with Trump.
“Casey bucked Biden to protect fracking and he sided with Trump to end NAFTA and put tariffs on China to stop them from cheating,” asserted the narrator of Casey’s ad.
“Tammy Baldwin got President Trump to sign her Made in America bill,” boasted the narrator of Baldwin’s.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who is running for Senate in the last of the trio of Blue Wall states, also ran an ad beginning this summer about how she had written “a law signed by President Trump forcing drug companies to show their actual prices.”
Trump
gloated over the trend on Truth Social, writing “Kamala Harris’ sinking Campaign has become so TOXIC, that Democrat Senators in four different States are using me in their advertisements, and stating that they are with President Trump on Tariffs, and numerous other things.”
“While it is a great compliment, it is not fair to those Republican Senate Candidates, Bernie Moreno, Dave McCormick, Eric Hovde, and Sam Brown, who are with me all the time.” he continued. “These Democrats have voted with Crooked Joe Biden almost 100% of the time. They only pretend to be on my side when Elections roll around. OHIO, PENNSYLVANIA, WISCONSIN, NEVADA: VOTE FOR BERNIE MORENO, DAVE MCCORMICK, ERIC HOVDE, AND SAM BROWN – THEY ARE THE ONES WHO ARE WITH US!”
Most polls still indicate that each of the seven expected swing states could tilt toward Trump or Harris, although they have all been moving
in the former’s direction in recent days.
Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Communications Director for former President Donald Trump for eleven days, appeared on CNN to discuss the very same man who fired him — Gen. John Kelly.
Kelly told The New York Times in a bombshell interview
published on Tuesday that Trump had positive things
to say about Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler “more than once,” saying that “Hitler did some good things,” then had to “try to explain to Mr. Trump why those comments about Hitler were problematic.”
CNN’s Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez asked Scaramucci about Kelly and if this matched up with his own experience with the four-star general. Scaramucci noted that despite their past professional run-in, his family and Kelly’s are actually friends:
Sanchez: Anthony, I do want to get your reaction to these reports from General John Kelly. I do hate to bring this up, but I think we have to point out to our viewers, John Kelly is the person who actually dismissed you from the White House. Do you believe what he’s saying?
Scaramucci: You could have said “fired,” Boris, I think people know I got fired.
Keilar: We’re being nice!
Sanchez: Diplomatic!
Scaramucci: He fired me at nine — and just in case your viewers or listeners are having a bad day out there, he fired me at 9:32 AM on the 31st of July 2017. So if you having a bad day, couldn’t have been as bad as that day unless it was a health reason. But General Kelly and I are close friends. Karen and my wife Deirdre, our close friends, and I have a personal relationship with him. And I would tell you that he has said this privately for many years. He’s been very, very concerned. I think he stayed in the White House 18 months, the longest serving chief-of-staff, because he was so worried about the different things that Donald Trump was doing.
One of the things that he didn’t add in that interview was a lot of times he had to push the president back from doing things that were illegal or against the Constitution or even against the institution of the presidency. So, I applaud him for being out there.
Scarmucci also said that while Kelly wants to express his concerns publicly, there’s at least one show he won’t be appearing on:
He sent me a text last night that he will not be doing The View, so I’ll just give you some a newsflash there. He’s not going to be doing The View, but I think he wants to get his words out there on record so that people know.
Geraldo Rivera told MSNBC’s Ari Melber he is “disappointed” he did not jump “off the Trump train” sooner, describing himself as having a “kind of blindness” to his former buddy’s flaws.
Rivera joined Melber on Tuesday to discuss the election and his recent endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris over his once friend, former President Donald Trump. Melber brought up Ret. Gen. John Kelly’s recent claim
that Trump told him Adolf Hitler “did some good things” when asking Rivera if he takes the “threat” of Trump seriously.
Rivera had participated on Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice just before he announced a run for president and Rivera called it an “intoxicating situation.”
“In my personal point of view, here I was, my hangout buddy was suddenly going to be in the oval office, the president of the United States, or running for president of the United States,” Rivera said. “That is a very, very heady mix. That is a very intoxicating kind of situation. A lot, I would submit, a lot of why people go do work in Washington and the White House can be close to power, and I don’t know what consciously my thought process was, except to think that it was pretty cool.”
The former Fox News contributor
admitted he “overlooked” some controversies, including Trump’s public insults
against the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his rhetoric about the southern border and migrants. Rivera first broke with Trump when the former president claimed the presidential election of 2020 was fraudulent without proof of the widespread fraud he was describing. He has not spoken to Trump since November 2020.
“He was horrible toward the memory, the sacred memory of of Sen. John McCain. It was just his service to the country and all the, you know, the flag at half staff at the White House. Why the hell is that flag down, famously or infamously said Trump,” Rivera said.
His friend, according to Rivera, turned out to be exactly the person his critics were describing.
“You forgive so much and I am so disappointed in my kind of blindness because when push came to shove, he was revealed by his own actions to be exactly the person that his critics were saying that he was,” he said.
Rivera would not agree that he felt “contrite” or “embarrassed” by his support of Trump, but he said he wished he “jumped off the Trump train” much sooner.
In his endorsement of Harris, Rivera said
his former friend Trump “cannot be trusted to honor the Constitution.”
CNN’s Jim Acosta interviewed The Atlantic’sTom Nichols on Wednesday to discuss the latest bombshell revelations from Gen. John Kelly and the impact on the 2024 race.
“This morning, the Trump campaign is vehemently denying a stunning and damning report in The Atlantic. The magazine cites two sources claiming to have heard the former president say he wanted the kind of generals that Hitler had during private White House conversations,” Acosta began, adding:
Trump’s former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, confirms the report. And Kelly tellsThe York Times that he does not take lightly Trump’s recent comments on using the US military against his political rivals.
“I think there’s this issue of using the military to go after American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing. Even to say it for political purposes to get elected is a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Kelly
is then heard on tape saying.
“Joining us now is Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic. Tom, you write about international security and the challenges to democracy in the U.S. and abroad. I mean, did you what are your thoughts on this word that keeps coming up as it relates to Donald Trump, ‘fascism,’ and coming from two respected retired generals, General Milley and General Kelly?” asked Acosta of Nichols, who is also a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
“I think it’s really important to pay attention to them. It’s a word that I was very hesitant to use for a long time because, as you know, I taught politics for many years before I became a writer. And, you know, the word fascist has a pretty scalding meaning,” Nichols replied, adding:
But there comes a time when Trump’s behavior, when the shoe finally, when the boot finally fits. And when you’re hearing people like Milley and General Kelly and others use that word, people need to pay attention to it. And I think that’s part of the problem, is that people really don’t pay attention to it. They’ve become desensitized and kind of numb to it. And they think it’s just part of the give and take of politics.
And I think they just don’t realize what deadly serious business this is and how dangerous Trump really has become. Even if they hear it from people that worked side by side, even if they heard from a four-star general who worked side by side with Trump every day, they still just kind of shrug it off as, you know, just another episode of reality TV, unfortunately.
“No, you’re absolutely right. And we’ve seen Republican lawmakers, powerbrokers showing this unwavering support of Trump, including his lies about the 2020 election being rigged. I was asking Congressman Castro about this earlier on. If Trump gets back into the White House, are there enough checks and balances in place to protect democracy? If Trump gets in there and behaves like a fascist dictator? He has said that he would be a dictator on day one. You have generals saying he is fascist. Are the checks and balances strong enough? Will they hold?” Acosta followed up.
“They’re not strong enough because they’re not made to deal with somebody like Donald Trump. We already saw that in his first term,” Nichols replied, adding:
You know, one of the great myths around Trump at this point is that we got through four years and it was fine. We weren’t fine. Trump really assaulted the Constitution. He tried to overthrow an election. He tried to undermine our constitutional order. He tried to assault the rule of law. And in a lot of cases, he got away with it and he’s still getting away with it. The guardrails in American political life are agreements.
They’re not really iron doors or, you know, concrete walls. They’re there because we all agree to be decent people and to be responsible voters and to be alert citizens. And if, as James Madison said, ‘If there is no decency among us, then we are in a wretched situation.’ Black letter law of checks and balances aren’t going to matter if you have a lawless administration that just wants to tear up the Constitution, whenever they want to do, whatever they want to do. And that’s, Trump has vowed to do that. And I think people should take him seriously.
Squawk Box co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin pressed billionaire Bill Ackman for his support of Donald Trump despite his alleged praise of Adolf Hitler.
On Tuesday, The New York Times released audio of Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly saying Trump told him saying Hitler “did some good things.”
Hours prior, The Atlantic
published a report claiming Trump once asked why his generals weren’t loyal to him like “Hitler’s generals.”
Appearing on Squawk Box on Wednesday, Ackman — who’s Jewish — brushed Kelly’s comments off as “one person stating a series of things.”
SORKIN: First of all, you were a longtime Democrat. You’ve supported Democrats. We talked about this.
ACKMAN: I would say I’ve always been a centrist, but I’ve supported more Democrats by far than Republicans.
SORKIN: I just want to read you [something]. This is John Kelly, the former chief of staff of Trump. He worked with him directly and he says that, “In many cases, I would agree with some of his policies.” So, you agree with the policy piece of this that I think Trump is presenting; but he says, “It’s very dangerous. It’s a dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected in high office.” He goes on to say in his opinion, he believes that Trump “meets the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and has no understanding of the constitution or the concept of the rule of law.” He goes on to say that Trump had made “admiring statements to him about Hitler.” You’re Jewish and care about Israel [Trump] had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the U.S. as “losers and suckers.” How do you get your head around that?
ACKMAN: One, it’s one person stating a series of things, which I don’t know —
SORKIN: There are 28 people who have worked for the president — not just in close proximity, but in the oval office with him — who have come out publicly and expressed things of this sort.
JOE KERNEN: Kamala Harris lost 92% of her staff, too.
ACKMAN: I think that’s a relevant point. So, if you want to talk about, you know —
SORKIN: By the way, one piece on that: there are people who would argue that maybe she was not an organized person and was not a good executive in that regard, right? But I don’t know of anybody who came out publicly against Kamala Harris claiming that she was for Hitler, that she was against the Constitution., and that she was calling people who died on the battlefield on our behalf “losers.” Let’s stipulate that!
ACKMAN: Ok, let me address. Number one, I don’t think Trump is for Hitler. I think that’s absurd.
KERNEN: And you know that, so why say it when you know that that’s — you know it’s not true. Why say it?
ACKMAN: So one, Trump’s not for Hitler. Most of Trump’s friends are Jewish. He grew up in the New York City real estate community. He’s got a daughter who’s Jewish, he’s got grandchildren who are Jewish. He was probably the most pro Israel president in terms of committing to do things and actually executing on them —
SORKIN: But what he said!
ACKMAN — you know, moving the embassy, delivering the control of the Golan Heights to Israel. I think it’s absurd.
Sixty-year-old Jeffrey Michael Kelly was arrested on Tuesday and charged with several felonies including “unlawful discharge of a firearm, shooting at a non-residential structure and committing an act of terrorism, and misdemeanor criminal damage,” according to NBC News
. Kelly was also suspected of displaying political signs in the village of Ahwatukee that had “suspicious bags of white powder” taped to them and were also “lined with razor blades.”
ABC 15 Arizona
also reported that Kelly was suspected in three other shooting incidents at the same Tempe office, which also houses the campaign operation for Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to the Arizona Republic
, the FBI were at Kelly’s residence on Wednesday:
About a dozen personnel, some FBI, were taking inventory of long guns in the carport of his home on Wednesday morning.
A man, who identified himself as being with the FBI, asked a Republic reporter to stay across the street.
A reporter heard one man point to an array of handguns and say they were found in the safe in the master bathroom. Also overhead was a mention of silencers and one machine gun.
The shootings at the campaign office occurred during the overnight hours when no one was present. The first shootings happened September 16 and 23, and a third shooting happened on October 9. The incidents were initially being treated as property crimes.
Politico’s Jonathan Martin slammed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris for continuing to campaign for the votes of those already supporting her instead of swing voters in a column on Tuesday, writing that her rhetoric is better suited for fans of The Lincoln Project than those who remain persuadable.
In particular, Martin
took issue with Harris’s performance at an she attended beside former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney on Monday.
“The event was explicitly aimed at those moderates and onetime Republicans who remain up for grabs, and may decide the election, but the rhetoric seemed better suited for those in the audience wearing ‘The Lincoln Project’ and ‘LA’ t-shirts,” observed Martin about Cheney and Harris’s remarks in the suburbs of Milwaukee.
“The political odd couple criticized former President Donald Trump’s lack of decency, his disregard for the Constitution and rule of law, and asked those in attendance to imagine him without guardrails,” he continued. “Those are all profoundly serious issues and are part of the reason why the race, in an otherwise turbulent year for Democrats, remains competitive. But reams of voting results and research indicate those issues long ago pushed so many people away from Trump’s GOP. They are not what animates that small number of people who remain undecided in the second-to-last week of October.”
According to Martin, it was “backward-looking and Trump-focused… all about yesterday and him rather than tomorrow and her.”
When asked explicitly to make her pitch to disenchanted Republicans, Harris talked about Americans’ “lived experience,” her love of her country, and respect for the Constitution, and “invoked her service on the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
Harris said nothing specific about how she’d govern, mentioned no looming issue on which she’d work with Republicans and offered no reassurances about leading the country from the political center.
And, of course, there was no critique of her own party or even an expression of sympathy or understanding about why voting for a liberal could be difficult for a longtime conservative.
He concluded by submitting that “if she says nothing to contradict” the far-left portrait Trump is painting of her, “voters will believe it. No matter how much she says Donald Trump is a bad man.”
Swing state polls have swung
toward Trump in recent days, leading one senior Harris campaign official to tell
NBC News that they are concerned “Michigan or Wisconsin will fall.” Still, most pundits still believe — and polls still indicate — the presidential race is a dead heat going into its final days.
Conservative fiirebrand Ben Shapiro is defending former President Donald Trump from accusations that he praised Adolf Hitler while in the White House.
On Tuesday, The New York Times
released audio recordings of Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief-of-staff, claiming his former boss praised Hitler by saying “he did some good things.” Kelly also told the press that Trump wished his own generals were more like the generals who served Hitler during World War II.
Kelly warned the public that Trump meets the definition of a “fascist” and would govern as a “dictator” if he regains control of the Oval Office. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign denied the exchange stating, “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”
Shapiro reacted to the latest scandal during a Wednesday post on X, formerly Twitter, by claiming it was the “left-wing media’s latest oppo dump.”
The Daily Wire co-founder then went into a rant about how the quality of life is declining in America and that Trump’s controversies are not the concern of voters.
“You want to know why nobody cares about the Left-wing media’s latest oppo dump? The answer is obvious: people care about the quality of their lives. And life is getting worse under Democratic governance,” Shapiro wrote.
You want to know why nobody cares about the Left-wing media’s latest oppo dump? The answer is obvious: people care about the quality of their lives. And life is getting worse under Democratic governance.
He added, “This is why people increasingly don’t give a shit about the media’s latest horror story about Trump Saying Bad Things. The same people who maintain that street crime is no big deal, or a reflection of institutional racism, or that inflation is hunky dory, or that biggest issue in American life is whether or not Billy has the right to be called Susan…these are not serious people. But people’s lives are serious business. And bad governance means worse lives for people.”
NBC News NOW anchor and senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson asked Vice President Kamala Harris straight-up if she believes “the country is ready now for a woman and a woman of color to be president?”
While Harris hasn’t stressed her historic candidacy the way former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did, race and gender have been a strong current in this race. Trump has relentlessly attacked
Harris over her race and gender, and polls have shown significant gender gaps between the two candidates.
Harris sat for a one-on-one interview with Jackson on Tuesday night’s edition
of NBC Nightly News
, during which Jackson asked the VP about not “leaning in” on her historic firsts — and if the country is ready for them:
JACKSON: Let me ask you about something that you said when you were running for president the last time around, back in 2019. At the time, you said that the elephant in the room was whether the country was ready for a woman and a woman of color to be president. So, let me ask you, as you sit here today, do you think the country is ready now for a woman and a woman of color to be president?
HARRIS: Absolutely, absolutely. And I am seeing that in terms of every walk of life of our country. You know I think part of what is important in this election is really not only turning the page, but closing the page and the chapter on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.
What I know from personal experience, from lived experience, and from my travels, even most recently, the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us. And what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans, which is the type and kind of president I pledge to be.
This is my life’s work. As you know, I started as a prosecutor, I never asked a victim of crime, a witness to crime, are you a Republican or Democrat. The only thing I ever asked them is, are you OK? And that’s what the American people want to know, regardless of their race, regardless of their gender, or their age. They want to know that they have a president who sees them and understands their needs and focuses on their needs, understanding we all deserve to have a president who is focused on solutions and not just fanning the flames of division and hate.
JACKSON: You’ve been reluctant to lean into, to talk about the historic nature of your candidacy on the campaign trail. Why is that?
HARRIS: Well, I’m clearly a woman, [laughs] I don’t need to point that out to anyone. The point that most people really care about is, can you do the job, and do you have a plan to actually focus on them?
JACKSON: I hear you on that.
HARRIS: That is, that is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions, and aspirations of the American people. They deserve to have a president who’s focused on them, as opposed to a Donald Trump who’s constantly focused on himself.
I think that’s part of why people are exhausted with Donald Trump and his approach, because it’s all about himself and his personal grievances, and not about the American people, not about how are you going to help families, how are you going to help small businesses, how are you going to strengthen our economy?
These are the things I’m focused on. I’m focused on investing in the new industries, on which America should lead and be a global leader.
JACKSON: I ask because to implement the agenda that you want to implement, you have to win first. You have to win the White House.
HARRIS: Of course. Of course.
JACKSON: And right now, there is a big gender gap in this race. Fewer men support you right now than they did President Biden. Some of your allies have suggested there’s sexism at play. I wonder, do you think there is sexism at play here?
HARRIS: Let me just tell you something, you’ve come to my events, and you will see there are men and women at those events, whether it be small events or events with 10,000 people. So, the experience that I am having is one in which it is clear that regardless of someone’s gender, they want to know that their president has a plan to lower costs, that their president has a plan to secure America in the context of our position around the world.
They want a president of the United States who honors our military, who understands the importance of America’s leadership around international rules and norms, and that is regardless of gender.
JACKSON: So, is that a no?
HARRIS: And that’s how I will lead.
JACKSON: Do you not see sexism as a factor in this race at all?
HARRIS: I don’t think of it that way. My challenge is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote. And I will never assume that anyone in our country should elect a leader based on their gender or their race, instead that that leader needs to earn the vote based on substance and what they will do to address challenges, and to inspire people to know that their aspirations and their ambitions can and will be achieved through the opportunity to do that.
Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to reporters on Wednesday the day after The New York Timespublished
audio recordings of Gen. John Kelly, who served under former President Donald Trump as his chief-of-staff, saying that the ex-president praised Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler
.
The remarks were delivered as a warning of Trump’s “character,” and Harris called the ex-president “incredibly dangerous.” Here are her full remarks:
So, yesterday, we learned that Donald Trump’s former chief-of-staff, John Kelly, a retired four-star general, confirmed that while Donald Trump was president, he said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had.
Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution. He wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States.
In just the past week, Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans “the enemy from within” and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens. And let’s be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within. Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify, in his mind, as the enemy within. Like judges, like journalists, like nonpartisan election officials. It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans.
All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is. From the people who know him best, from the people who worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room. And it is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone who, I quote, “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist,” who in fact vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.
Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in. So, the bottom line is this — we know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, what do the American people want? Thank you.
