Kamala Harris’s Closing Message

In anticipation of sizable crowds, NBC News reports that the Harris campaign has updated its permit application for the Ellipse to request accommodations for a minimum of 40,000 attendees for the vice president’s Tuesday evening speech.

The chief of the Metropolitan Police Department is reportedly expecting even more people in attendance in the nation’s capital.

On Tuesday, the Harris campaign announced that the vice president will take part in five interviews aimed at key markets in battleground states.

In addition, a pre-taped interview with Harris on The Breakfast Club is scheduled to air today while her running mate Walz is set to appear on the Dan Le Betard Show Tuesday morning.

Harris’ recent trip to Texas prompted questions about whether the vice president might finally be sitting down with Joe Rogan who records his podcast in his Austin studio as reports suggested the two sides had been in talks. However, that visit came and went without a taping with Rogan who ended up recording with Trump for three hours.

Early Tuesday morning, Rogan tried to clarify his discussions with the Harris campaign, saying that the vice president hasn’t turned down an interview as some supporters of Trump have suggested. “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin,” he wrote on X. “My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”

While it remains unclear if a Rogan and Harris conversation will happen prior to Election Day, the podcaster is set to sit down with Trump’s running mate Vance on Wednesday.

NBC News previews Kamala Harris’s big Tuesday-night rally on the Ellipse in Washington, where she will urge voters to move on from the chaos stirred up by Donald Trump:

Harris will call on Americans to “turn the page” on the Trump era and present herself as a pragmatist who will put results over party, according to a senior Harris campaign official who requested anonymity. The official said she will continue to press a line she has invoked frequently in recent days, that Trump’s focus would be an “enemies list” — a reference to his recent comments about wielding the power of government against political rivals — and hers a “to-do list” that centers on lowering costs for people.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, was released from prison after serving four months behind bars on a conviction for contempt of Congress. CNN reports he’s ready to resume spreading election denialism on his (weakened) War Room podcast, just in time for Election Day:

… Bannon’s MAGA megaphone has suffered in his absence. “War Room,” which frequently appeared in Apple’s Top Podcasts before Bannon reported to prison, fell off the charts by early July, according to data from Podchaser. By another measure, the podcast was once near the top of the Apple political podcast charts and has since fallen out of the top 25, per Podchaser data.

There are some signs that it’s ticking up slightly as Bannon prepares to return.

“Though we’ve been seeing election denial activists coming on the show still as a central hub, you see that ‘War Room,’ it wasn’t able to sustain itself without Bannon,” said Madeline Peltz, deputy director for rapid response at Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit that does extensive media monitoring.

Peltz still predicted Bannon would be a prominent voice for election denialism if it appears Trump is coming up short after Election Day.

Earlier in the race it seemed trump was poised to do surprisingly well with Black voters, but according to a NAACP poll his numbers may be slipping. Per Politico:

The poll found Black men under 50 years old decreased their likelihood of voting for the former president, dropping from 27 percent to 21 percent since a previous survey asking the same question was released last month.

Researchers involved with the survey say Vice President Kamala Harris’ support among this bloc jumped from 51 percent to 59 percent over that same time frame.

Several of the Trump allies and GOP strategists who spoke with Politico on Monday plainly acknowledged how badly the Trump campaign screwed up, though there were differing opinions on how damaging it would ultimately be:

John Fredericks, a conservative radio host and Trump ally, said the selection of radio host Sid Rosenberg and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, in particular, was “asinine,” and that they “should have been better vetted.”

“Here we are talking about two obscure people that have nothing to do with this election, instead of the 100,000 people that were there, the tremendous speeches, the love for President Trump, the great closing of the campaign that Trump is doing,” Fredericks said. Madison Square Garden can hold about 20,000 people, though thousands more than that lined up to gain entry to the rally. …

“Apparently the October surprise was a presidential campaign committing mass political suicide on stage at MSG,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee. …

[Harris on Monday] said that the remarks cast no new light on Trumpism. “What he did last night is not a discovery, it is just more of the same,” she said.

On that matter, Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, agreed. “It was more noise in the ‘Trump is dangerous and a bad person’ narrative,” he said. “But who didn’t know this? This is just example 732 of Trump being divisive and un-American. Will it change one person’s mind? I don’t think so. Is it wrong? Is it hurtful? Of course. It isn’t different.” …

Fredericks said, “I think it’s a tempest in the teapot at the end of the day, but with eight days to go, we shouldn’t be wasting 10 seconds on it, and we’re now wasting a day.”

Read the rest of the report here.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that “political lawn signs have become a flash point in the Philadelphia suburbs, with both Republican and Democratic organizers reporting upticks in theft and vandalism.” It’s also illegal. In one community, AirTags have been deployed:

Over in Upper Providence Township, Montgomery County, the sign theft became so rampant that the local Democratic committee started outfitting Harris signs with AirTag tracking devices to trace disappearances. About 50 signs went missing before committee members made the change in mid-October, said Ben Stevens, chair of the Upper Providence Democrats. Since then, they’ve discovered that the state Department of Transportation had taken some signs, while others had been pulled off the street by confused residents.

A few had been genuinely stolen. Earlier this month, Stevens tailed a truck outfitted with Trump stickers to a local supermarket after the AirTag reported that a sign he had just placed at Egypt and Black Rock Roads in Oaks was missing. After calling the police and deputizing another volunteer to confront the purported thief, Stevens got the sign back. It was a relatively civil exchange, he said. The AirTag experiment “makes me feel a little bit more in control,” Stevens said. “We can actually get a sense of what’s happening and do something productive about it.”

It’s not just in Pennsylvania. An AirTagged Harris/Walz sign recently made news in Springfield, Missouri, as the Kansas City Star reports:

“This is the 4th time my sign has been stolen,” Laura McCaskill said in an Oct. 21 Facebook post, sharing a video of the encounter. Tired of her signs vanishing from her front yard, McCaskill and her partner decided to attach an Apple AirTag to one of them, she said. When it happened again on the night of Oct. 18, they followed the tracker, and it led them to an encounter with the alleged culprit outside a home in the neighboring town of Nixa. “John and I followed up on this one as it wasn’t just a few but 59 signs on Friday night (perhaps more), were stolen in the neighborhood,” McCaskill said in the post. The couple talks to someone outside the home, who appears to be a young man or teenager, telling them about the missing sign, explaining that the AirTag brought them there. Then he opens the trunk of an SUV, revealing not one, but dozens of campaign signs.

In Sheridan, Indiana, a stolen GPS-equipped yard sign led to an arrest over the weekend. And there are some lower-tech but higher-ick solutions, too, per the Cincinnati Enquirer:

A Reddit thread last week discussing Cincinnati-area thefts provided some unsavory homemade options that would mark, embarrass or inconvenience any thieves. They include coating yard signs in Vaseline and glitter, spraying them with fox or deer urine, attaching trackers to them (a la the Missouri woman) and installing motion-activated lights near them.

Semafor’s Shelby Talcott reports that people in Trump’s inner circle are suffering a novel anxiety:

The suspicion is not because the campaign is seeing dire numbers — in fact, it’s the exact opposite: The data, both internal and external, actually looks promising, something that Trump veterans aren’t used to after heading into the final days of 2016 and 2020 as clear underdogs in swing state polling. Instead, there’s a persistent fear that some factor they haven’t spotted, from a polling error to unexpected turnout issues, might swing the race. …

The Trump campaign has been spending time poring over the numbers to ensure nothing has been missed as election day draws near, three people told Semafor. Advisors, who have different opinions on which external data is the best, have compared publicly available polls to their internal figures, which one person said are slightly “more positive.” They’re also encouraged by early voting data, which experts warn can be fickle, but at minimum suggests relatively more Republicans are voting early this year after Trump reversed his prior opposition to the practice.

“Everything we are seeing is beyond good for us,” a person on the campaign noted, trying to capture the distrustful attitude toward the news. “So naturally, because we spend all of our time in adverse conditions, we’re all looking around going, ‘Is this happening? Are you seeing what we are?’”

Maybe, as Sean Trende wonders in an X thread:

This PR thing is the rare campaign event that might make a difference in the election, if only because it’s happening in a close election so close to the election that there isn’t enough time for it to fade into the background of various competing Trump narratives.

NBC News reports that he tested out the material on Saturday night and it didn’t go over well:

It was not the first time Hinchcliffe had used the Puerto Rico line — he practiced it at The Stand comedy club in New York City, where he made a surprise appearance Saturday night, according to an NBC News producer and three other people who happened to be in the audience. The joke did not draw laughs, just a handful of awkward chuckles. Hinchcliffe told the audience that he would be performing at the Madison Square Garden rally the next day and said multiple times during his routine that he would get a better reaction “tomorrow at the rally.”

On Monday night in Georgia, Trump didn’t mention the backlash over his MSG rally, but he did complain about Harris using harsh language, in addition to insisting he isn’t a Nazi:

And he at one point inserted an aside noting that Michelle Obama, who gave an impassioned speech over the weekend calling on voters to reject Trump and protect women, was “nasty”:

With your support on Nov. 5— you know, who is nasty to me? Michelle Obama. I always try to be so nice and respectful. Oh, she opened up a little bit of a box… she was nasty.

Earlier Monday at gathering of faith leaders at a church in Georgia, Trump explained why using “foul” language at his rallies was justified: “Not hard foul, but soft foul. We call it soft foul, but, you know, to emphasize something about somebody’s abilities, or whatever I might be talking about.”

The billionaire Post owner’s new op-ed appears to be written as much for the publication’s staff as it is for the scores of angry subscribers:

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

He also said that “I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” before explaining that Trump’s Friday meeting with Blue Origin executives was just coincidentally bad timing. “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests,” he added. “Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up.”

Bezos framed his decision as celebration of, and an attempt to fight for, the Post’s relevance:

While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it.

Since billionaire Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong nixed the paper’s Harris endorsement a week ago, according to Max Tani’s sources.

There are more than 400,000 Puerto Ricans living in the swing state. Politico passes along some anecdotal evidence that the garbage island line from Trump’s rally is getting a lot of attention:

Evidence of the backlash was immediate on Monday: A nonpartisan Puerto Rican group drafted a letter urging its members to oppose Trump on election day. Other Puerto Rican voters were lighting up WhatsApp chats with reactions to the vulgar display and raising it in morning conversations at their bodegas. Some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday in Allentown, a majority-Latino city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the state.

And the arena Trump is speaking at is located in the middle of the city’s Puerto Rican neighborhood. “It’s spreading like wildfire through the community,” said Norberto Dominguez, a precinct captain with the local Democratic party in Allentown, who noted his own family is half Republican and half Democratic voters. …

“This was just like a gift from the gods,” said Victor Martinez, an Allentown resident who owns the Spanish language radio station La Mega, noting some Puerto Rican voters in the area have been on the fence about voting at all.

“If we weren’t engaged before, we’re all paying attention now,” Martinez said. He added the morning radio show he hosts was chock-full of callers Monday sounding off on the Trump rally comments, including a Puerto Rican Trump supporter who is now telling people not to vote for the former president.

David Hoffman, Molly Roberts, and Mili Mitra all resigned from the board on Monday, indicating the internal turmoil over the Post’s Bezos-nixed Harris endorsement is far from over. They aren’t resigning from the Post, just the board. “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said in his resignation letter. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice.”

The campaign on Monday put out a new ad, opening with Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist joke from the MSG rally, which it says is being targeted to Latinos in battleground states:

A somewhat similar ad, without Hinchcliffe’s line, is also out featuring Marc Anthony.

He addressed the controversy at a rally in Wisconsin on Monday and tried to flip all of it on Harris:

On Sunday night, a Trump campaign adviser said the campaign hadn’t vetted the MSG speakers’ speeches. But the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo reports that campaign staff struck part of Tony Hinchcliffe’s set where he called Harris a “cunt” — but apparently didn’t catch the racist stuff he ultimately did say:

[F]our top campaign sources said it could have been even worse.

“He had a joke calling [Vice President Kamala] Harris a ‘cunt,’” a campaign insider involved in the discussions about the event told The Bulwark. “Let’s say it was a red flag.”

Hinchcliffe’s remarks—and the ensuing backlash—has sparked questions about how such an offensive speech was allowed at such a high-profile rally; whether it was deliberate; and why a presidential campaign would elevate a roast-master comic edgelord in the closing days of a tight race for the White House.

Campaign staffers had asked all speakers to submit drafts of their speeches ahead of time—before they were loaded into the teleprompter—according to the aforementioned sources. Once the objectionable “cunt” joke was spotted, the sources said, a staffer asked Hinchcliffe to strike it. He complied.

Those sources insisted that they did not spot the other objectionable lines in Hinchcliffe’s speech prior to him delivering it because they were ad-libbed. Hinchcliffe couldn’t be reached for comment.

NPR reports on the fallout from the canceled-endorsement mess:

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

On Sunday night, the Post itself reported that amid the cancellation drive, “Instead of using an internal analytics tool to check traffic to their own stories, some Post journalists used it to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions.”

The New York Times passes along what apparently counts as “quietly growing more bullish” at this point in the presidential race:

Top Democratic strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast former President Donald J. Trump as a fascist — paired with an expansive battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the end of federal abortion rights — will carry Ms. Harris to a narrow triumph. Even some close to Mr. Trump worry that the push to label him a budding dictator who has praised Hitler could move small but potentially meaningful numbers of persuadable voters.

Officials within the Harris campaign and people with whom they have shared candid assessments believe she remains in a solid position in the Northern “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, saying internal polling shows her slightly ahead in all three — though by as little as half a percentage point.

They think she remains competitive across the four Sun Belt battleground states. Arizona and North Carolina appear to be the toughest swing states for Ms. Harris, these Democrats said, and they feel better about Georgia and Nevada.

While the culprits behind the destruction of ballot drop-off boxes in Washington and Oregon are not yet known, Wired reported earlier this month that the Department of Homeland Security has been warning law-enforcement agencies to watch out for similar attacks:

United States intelligence officials have been quietly issuing warnings to government agencies all summer about a rising threat of extremist violence tied to the 2024 presidential election, including plots to destroy bins full of paper ballots and promote “lone wolf” attacks against election facilities throughout the country. In a series of reports between July and September, analysts at the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “heightened risk” of extremists carrying out attacks in response to the race. …

The documents show that DHS alerted dozens of agencies this summer to online chatter indicating potential attacks on election drop boxes—secured receptacles used in more than 30 states to collect mail-in voter ballots. The text highlights the efforts of an unnamed group to crowdsource information about “incendiary and explosive materials” capable of destroying the boxes and ballots. An extensive list of household mixtures and solvents, which are said to render voter ballots “impossible to process,” was also compiled by members of the group, the report says, and openly shared online.

Read the rest of Wired’s report here.

His talent agency, WME, dropped him after the resulting outcry. Per the Daily Dot at the time:

A clip of comic Tony Hinchcliffe using a racial slur to mock another comedian during a recent set in Austin, Texas has gone viral. The clip, which is just over 30 seconds, was posted on Monday by Dallas comedian Peng Dang. The caption reads, “Last week in Austin, I got to bring up Tony Hinchcliffe. This is what he said. Happy Asian (AAPI) Heritage Month!”

Hinchcliffe goes on to call Dang a “filthy little fucking ch**k,” and parody a stereotypical Chinese accent.

With his history, it’s not clear why the Trump campaign invited Hinchcliffe to do a set at the MSG rally, or didn’t at least review what he planned to say beforehand.

Nate Silver notes that the MSG rally has gone viral on search:

there’s some initial evidence that the rally is drawing broader attention: today and yesterday are the top days of Google search traffic for Trump since the second assassination attempt against him in September. … [T]he MSG rally does show some signs of going viral. Google searches for Hinchliffe have — presumably temporarily — surpassed those for Taylor Swift.

As I wrote about last week, Harris is more popular than Trump, but has had trouble driving a substantive message — in part because she’s running away both from her unpopular positions in 2019 and her unpopular boss, Joe Biden. So a final week that’s all about Trump — and shows off some of the most unappealing elements of his campaign — could throw Harris a lifeline.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump digs into the census data:

Census Bureau data from 2022 indicate that there are about 2 million U.S. residents who were born in Puerto Rico but no longer live there. Many live in New York and Florida, but there are large populations of Puerto Rico natives in other states as well. There are more than a quarter of a million Puerto Ricans living in the seven states generally viewed as those on which the 2024 presidential election will hinge. In four of those states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the number of residents born in Puerto Rico is larger than the vote margin between Joe Biden and Trump in the 2020 election.

Though Representative Elise Stefanik called New York “Trump country” during her remarks at the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally, many of her colleagues are continuing to denounce the rhetoric from the event.

On Monday, Representative Nydia Velázquez announced that she would be holding an event with Representative Adriano Espaillat that afternoon to “condemn the racist hate speech from Donald Trump and MAGA extremists last night.”

In an interview with CNN, Representative Ritchie Torres called out the rhetoric used at the rally. “Hatred is not a bug, but a feature of Donald Trump’s campaign. He creates an atmosphere that not only enables the kind of hatred that we saw at Madison Square Garden, but he emboldens it,” he said.

KATU, a Oregon ABC affiliate, is reporting that hundreds of ballots were lost after a fire was reported at ballot drop-off box in Vancouver, Washington. First responders were on the scene early Monday morning to extinguish the fire. Investigators tell the outlet that it appears that an “incendiary device” was used to set the fire in the box.

A similar incident occurred in Oregon with law enforcement reporting that a ballot box in Southeast Portland was also on fire. Officials also believe that an “incendiary device” was used in this instance.

The Trump campaign says its Election Night watch party will be a short drive from Mar-a-Lago at the Palm Beach Convention Center.

Elon Musk’s $1 million voter giveaways have gotten their first legal challenge. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney, has filed a lawsuit claiming that the promotion is illegal. Earlier this month, Musk announced that he would be giving away the large sum to one registered voter in a swing state who signs a petition backing the first and second amendments every day until Election Day. Pennsylvania is one of the states included in the giveaways.

“America PAC and Musk must be stopped, immediately, before the upcoming Presidential Election on Nov. 5,” the lawsuit reads. “That is because America PAC and Musk hatched their illegal lottery scheme to influence voters in that election.”

It was just last week that Musk’s America PAC, which is helming the giveaways, received a warning from the Justice Department that they could run afoul of election law.

At the start of the final full week before Election Day, both campaigns are continuing their swing-state push. Harris and Walz are slated to be in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a rally, where they’ll be joined by singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers. Trump will be stumping in Georgia, rallying in Atlanta after attending a summit held by the National Faith Advisory Board.

Barack Obama will also be joined by Bruce Springsteen and John Legend at a rally at Temple University’s Liacouras Center in North Philadelphia.

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned Trump’s Madison Square Garden event, calling it a “hate rally.”

“This was a hate rally. This was not just a presidential rally, this was not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez said the aim of the rally was to sow seeds of doubt about the upcoming election results. “We have to understand how unhinged this campaign has gotten and the only reason that the rhetoric has gotten this far is precisely because they’re trying to prime the kind of froth that led up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”

In a statement issued Monday, the U.S. Postal Service is advising people to to submit their mail ballots as soon as possible while stressing that the agency is “ready to deliver your ballot on time.” For those whose mail ballots need to be received by Election Day, the USPS says that voters should mail their ballot by Tuesday, October 29 in order to ensure there are no delays.

The agency said that it has implemented “extraordinary measures” to ensure election mail is received on time including extra deliveries and collection, special pick-ups and specific sorting plans at processing facilities.

“The Postal Service remains fully ready to successfully deliver the nation’s mail-in ballots for voters who choose to use us to vote. And to be clear, even for return ballots that are entered in our system after Tuesday, we will continue to deploy our ‘extraordinary measures,’ which are designed to accelerate the delivery of Ballot Mail in the final weeks of the election season,” the statement read.

Several prominent Puerto Rican celebrities came out to denounce the racist jokes made at Trump’s rally, signaling support for Kamala Harris’s candidacy. Bad Bunny, the international superstar, shared a video of Harris discussing her policy plans for Puerto Rico multiple times to his 45 million Instagram followers. A spokesman for Bad Bunny told the Associated Press that the post was an official endorsement of Harris.

Musicians Luis Fonsi, Ricky Martin, and Jennifer Lopez also took to social media after the jokes went public.

At Donald Trump’s incendiary Madison Square Garden rally Sunday night, comedian Tony Hinchliffe made a series of jokes about Puerto Ricans (calling it a “floating island of garbage”), Latinos, Jews, and other groups. His words upset Democrats and even some Republicans, to the point that the Trump campaign disavowed his views. Later in the evening, Hinchcliffe pled his case on X, in reaction to AOC and VP candidate Tim Walz’s condemnation of his routine:

These people have no sense of humor. Wild that a vice presidential candidate would take time out of his “busy schedule” to analyze a joke taken out of context to make it seem racist. I love Puerto Rico and vacation there. I made fun of everyone…watch the whole set. I’m a comedian Tim…might be time to change your tampon.

A New York Times–Siena poll released on Monday morning showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 12 points in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which receives its own electoral-college vote separate from the rest of the otherwise deep-red state. President Biden won the district by seven points. The Second District, known as Nebraska’s “Blue Dot,” encompasses liberal-leaning Omaha, but a marked improvement from his showing there could bode well for Harris’s standing in the nearby “Blue Wall” Midwest states of Wisconsin and Michigan.

Intriguingly, the poll also showed that independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn is within two points of Republican incumbent Deb Fischer. If he managed to pull off a shock victory, Democratic control of the upper chamber — which some had all but written off — might still be a possibility.

Senior adviser Danielle Alvarez says in a statement that comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke at the beginning of Trump’s MSG rally on Sunday calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Another adviser reportedly said the speeches weren’t vetted by the campaign.

At least three Republicans in Congress have already denounced the jokes. The latest is Long Island congressman Anthony D’Esposito, who next week is facing a competitive rematch against Democratic challenger Laura Gillen in New York’s 4th District in Nassau County, and, like other New York Republicans in competitive 2024 House races, was not given a speaking slot at Trump’s big Manhattan event. “The only thing that’s ‘garbage’ was a bad comedy set,” he said after the rally.

As John Podhoretz joked on X after Trump thanked and celebrated MSG owner James Dolan:

Trump just lost 10 million votes by saying something nice about the Dolan family. Nobody on earth likes the Dolan family.

Notes Politico:

Donald Trump’s two-minute ad that aired during Sunday’s Philadelphia Eagles game and said the country had “gone to hell” during the Biden and Harris administration featured an image from a protest during Trump’s presidency, not Biden’s.

The “Never Quit” spot featured an image from a photo gallery published by KPIC, a CBS affiliate, from a story headlined “After day of fiery protests, uneasy calm in Seattle” — in 2020. The protests erupted in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

No surprise, the takeaway from the new report is that the plan isn’t realistic, including some skeptical views from current and former ICE officials.

Trump spoke for about 80 minutes, and there were few surprises. Maybe 20 to 30 of those minutes were spent on various-length digressions from his prepared speech. What happened beforehand at the rally, which was essentially a six-hour mini-RNC with lower guardrails, may overshadow anything Trump said.

Giving RFK Jr. authority in any of these areas would probably be a disaster.

He has now on several occasions pointed out how he was sticking to the teleprompter, which he rarely does. He has veered off a few times with asides, then seems bored when he reads from the prepared remarks — which his advisers had undoubtedly encouraged him to do as much as possible with such a high profile speech.

Regardless, Trump is making all kinds of false claims and reiterating his standard campaign pitch, and has played a few videos as visual aids. He also praised early American laws as better than today’s:

He also notably claimed that he would win Colorado — but he hasn’t yet claimed he can or will win New York, as previous speakers did.

Trump did make one policy announcement, declaring that he would, as president, pass tax credits for family caregivers.

Meanwhile, outside MSG, the DNC is projecting messages like “Trump praised Hitler” on the outer wall of the arena.

The three major cable-news networks are all broadcasting his speech, or at least the beginning of it. He seems restrained to prewritten remarks so far. After being sang on by Lee Greenwood, Trump began by asking the crowd “are you better off than you were four years ago.”

She introduced her husband with a short speech, then greeted him with a weird non-kiss. (The former First Lady did not speak at the RNC.)

After Trump transition chair Howard Lutnick — who in his own speech screamed “We must crush jihad!” — introduced him as the greatest capitalist in history, Musk literally roared in triumph:

He then called himself “dark gothic MAGA,” promptly suggested the election could be stolen, and claimed he would cut $2 trillion in federal spending if Trump wins.

Musk also tried to lead a chant.

The fallout is already underway following a comedian’s racist jokes in a set opening Trump’s MSG rally. Notes NBC News:

Battleground Pennsylvania, where polling margins show a razor-thin race between Trump and Harris, is home to the third-largest Puerto Rican diaspora in the country. Last month, the former president invited Puerto Rican artist Anuel AA onstage at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to publicly throw his support behind the Republican ticket.

Two Florida Republicans, Senator Rick Scott and Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, have already put out statements condemning the jokes.

It’s worth noting that by any reasonable standard, Trump’s two adult sons are far from the best public speakers on the MAGA circuit. They got top slots tonight though.

Anyway, Don Jr. thinks his dad is bigger than Moses.

Lara Trump is making the case for her father-in-law’s impact on New York, highlighting the Trump Organization’s renovation of the Wollman Rink in Central Park. She then suggested Trump would “turn New York red.”

J.D. Vance is giving a standard stump speech. When he mentioned Tim Walz, this happened:

Hogan had quite an entrance, including some difficulty with his trademark shirt rip:

And then Hogan got into why it wasn’t a Nazi rally.

Now Dr. Phil is offering remarks warning about the evil of bullying. In his apparently expert opinion, Trump isn’t a bully, because there is “no imbalance of power.”

Update: Dr. Phil gave what seemed like the longest speech of the night, and most of it was about bullying.

How it started:

Then he celebrated how poorly understood the MAGA movement was to liberals and the media, claimed Trump was showing his love by serving fries at a McDonald’s photo op, and made fun of Harris’s diversity:

Gabbard and Kennedy both highlighted Harris’s links to the Cheneys and neocons — who were clearly personae non grata for the MSG crowd neocons. RFK Jr. sounded like he was sick, or perhaps had tried to eat a bear carcass beforehand. Either way, he spent the bulk of his remarks explaining how the Democratic Party isn’t what it once was. He emphasized that he wanted Trump would “make America healthy again.”

The mild-mannered Speaker of the House looks like a fish out of water at this MAGA RAW rally. But he gets credit for being one of the only speakers who hasn’t shouted into the microphone.

The congresswoman’s district is about four hours from the city, but the crowd ate it up. Later, failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called New York a “swing state.”

The pace is speeding up, with speaker and speaker delivering short speeches before the next one quickly takes the stage — but they are higher-profile MAGA world people now. Not surprisingly, nativist Trump adviser Stephen Miller used his speech to demonize migrants, yelling out at one point that in a Trump-led nation, “America is for Americans and Americans only!”

Not surprisingly, the assassination attempts on Trump are being consistently framed as us versus “them.” Most speakers have also shouted, along with the crowd, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, at some point in their remarks.

Queens native (and Trump friend) David Rem got emotional telling the story of how Trump’s father, Fred, paid for his and his siblings’ private-school tuition after his own father died. Then he said that he could never imagine Kamala Harris doing something like that. “She is the devil! She is the Antichrist!” Rem said before holding up a cross and saying that Trump knows “Christ is king.” At the end of his speech, he announced he was running for mayor.

The former mayor, onstage at the MSG rally, pointed out the presence of former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik, a convicted felon who Trump pardoned in 2020. Giuliani noted that Kerik had saved his life on September 11.

He mentioned 9/11 again later, before transitioning to October 7 and telling the crowd that all Palestinians are terrorists and warned that Harris would bring them to America.

He did a lot of yelling, overall, then ended with a wild scream.

Comedian and Kill Tony podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe made some racist jokes:

Then it was radio host Sid Rosenberg’s turn to call Hillary Clinton a “sick bastard” and Democrats “fucking degenerates,” as well as offer some cognitive dissonace:

Then Trump lawyer Alina Habba opened her speech by shout-asking the crowd if they were ready to make liberals cry. (Even the “live painter” who appeared on stage gave the finger to the “art world.”)

And then a “teacher” and businessman Grant Cardone said Kamala Harris had “pimp handlers”:

Trump’s speech at the Madison Square Garden rally is scheduled to begin at 5 p.m., but who knows if that’s accurate.

Maggie Haberman goes through the various rationales for Trump bringing MAGA to MSG with just over a week before Election Day, including the media blitz it will bring, the opportunity to troll liberals and the city itself — and how it’s arguably the arena he has most wanted to play:

For years, Mr. Trump has measured the significance of his rally venues in part by who had appeared there before. And his yardsticks were usually not other politicians, but singers and other celebrities.

“Do you know how many arenas I’ve beaten Elton John’s record?” Mr. Trump once asked Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, as he prepared to hold an event during his presidency at the Fargodome at North Dakota State University.

And when he appeared at a rally last month at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, Mr. Trump noted proudly that Elvis Presley had played there.

Mr. Trump has wanted to hold a rally at the Garden for a very long time. It styles itself as “the World’s Most Famous Arena” and has presented some of his favorite artists, including Elton John, Frank Sinatra and the Village People, whose song “Y.M.C.A.” is a staple at his events. (As president, he took in an Ultimate Fighting Championship match there, entering the arena to a mix of boos and cheers, and in 2013, before he was a candidate, he was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame there.)

CNN reports that the Trump campaign expects to make a lot of money, too:

Sunday’s rally will also serve as one of Trump’s largest fundraisers to date, according to multiple sources familiar with the logistics. Donors have been offered a series of packages, including VIP suites, tickets to an exclusive “pre event” at the venue, backstage passes and photo opportunities.

“The Trump campaign is going to make an insane amount of money off this event,” one source familiar with the guest list told CNN.

In addition to Trump, 29 other people are listed as speakers and performers. It’s not at all clear how long the rally will need to go on to fit them all in, particularly if Trump himself goes long at the end. Here’s who the Trump campaign says will appear:

• J.D. Vance

• Speaker of the House Mike Johnson

• Congresswoman Elise Stefanik

• Congressman Byron Donalds

• Former congresswoman Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

• Former mayor Rudy Giuliani

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Lara Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr.,

• Elon Musk

• Trump advisor Dan Scavino

• Trump advisor Stephen Miller

• UFC CEO Dana White

• Tucker Carlson

• America First Policy Institute president Brooke Rollins

• Businessman Steve Witkoff

• Businessman Howard Lutnick

• Businessman Grant Cardone

• Right for America PAC founder Sergio Gor

• Death Row Records founder Michael Harris Jr.

• Moms for Liberty founder Tiffany Justice

• Singer Lee Greenwood

• Opera singer Christopher Macchio

• Singer Mary Millben

• Radio jock Sid Rosenberg

• Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe

• “Live painter” Scott Lobaido

• Childhood Trump friend David Rem

CNN reports:

Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook chatted last week about the iPhone maker’s ongoing legal issues in Europe, the former president divulged in an interview Thursday. Later in the day, Trump told a Las Vegas audience that the “head of Google,” who is CEO Sundar Pichai, called to marvel over the Republican nominee’s campaign stop slinging french fries at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.

“He said, ‘This is one of the hottest things. We have never seen anything like this,’” Trump recalled. He retold the story Friday on Joe Rogan’s podcast and identified the executive as Pichai.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also recently reached out to check in with the former president, two sources familiar with their phone call told CNN. And Mark Zuckerberg called him up this summer after the first failed assassination attempt on Trump, during which the Meta CEO told the Republican nominee he admired the way he handled the shooting and wished him a quick recovery, a person familiar with the conversation said. Despite their once fraught relationship, the two have spoken glowingly about each other through the media in the months since. …

A person with knowledge of the conversation with Jassy said it was instigated at the request of the company and called the exchange with Trump a “general, hello-type thing.” Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

Both highlight disparaging comments Trump has made about the cities, as the campaign did in the Detroit vs. Trump ad it put out earlier this month.

Bucks Head Coach Doc Rivers narrates the Milwaukee ad.

Politico’s Adam Wren talked to people within the movement about what might happen next, should Trump finally be vanquished as they so desperately hope. One of the open questions is whether it could be productive (and rewarded) bloc within the Harris coalition. Here’s one argument in support of that:

“This group of voters has made themselves known,” said HEATH MAYO, a conservative activist who founded the advocacy group Principles First. “They’re showing up at rallies. They’re convening separately. We’ve hosted dinners around the country in several states. So I think it is a segment of voters that has sort of found a collective identity and built a community. And when that happens, I don’t think it goes away easily.”

Far from dissolving, Never Trump could “be more energized if it is responsible in some of these states for dealing a knockout blow to Trumpism in places like the Pennsylvania suburbs and Arizona,” Mayo said.

If that happens, would the movement have the power to extract policy concessions from a potential Harris administration?

“This is the million-dollar question,” Mayo said. “After she wins, how do we use this political leverage — because we will have delivered her the White House — how do we use that leverage to communicate what it looks like for a Harris administration to tack in our direction? What does that mean for NATO and our commitments to our allies abroad? What does the foreign policy look like? What does an economic policy look like?”

Read the rest here.

The New York Times reports that Bezos signaled reservations about the Post endorsing anyone during a late September meeting with publisher Will Lewis and opinion editor David Shipley, but didn’t make the final decision until this past week:

By the end of the meeting, according to four people familiar with it who spoke on condition of anonymity to relay private conversations, it appeared to Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis that Mr. Bezos had reservations about the Post endorsing either candidate in the presidential race. But they also thought he was open to persuasion. …

[Bezos’s ultimate decision to nix the endorsement] came after additional discussion between Mr. Bezos and the two Post leaders, Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis, who privately made a case not to abandon the tradition so close to an election. … The decision by Mr. Bezos had been in the making for weeks. It is not clear what motivated his final determination or its timing.

The VP candidate went on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, where host Jake Tapper repeatedly confronted Vance with various statements Trump has made. Vance clearly enjoys playing this role in the campaign.

A representative sample:

Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin reports that in addition to cost and budget issues, another dynamic which has reduced polling efforts is the rise of the poll aggregators. For potential pollsters, “There’s less incentive to get involved thanks to a more sophisticated polling audience and greater costs of failure”:

We’re now well over a decade into the era of the star election forecaster, led by Nate Silver and his rivals and proteges. His biggest influence may be teaching most news junkies to turn to curated averages of polls rather than fret over each one. This has created a bit of a Heisenberg effect, in which observing something — in this case, that the best analysis comes from mixing together lots of polls with a sophisticated model —might actually change it. What’s the point of shelling out five-figures on a horse race poll if it’s just going to get tossed into an average by an audience trained to scoff at individual surveys?

“It does become a problem when there are as many aggregators as pollsters,” Dave Wasserman, a veteran forecaster at Cook Political Report, said. “As the aggregators gain prominence, the pollsters lose some prominence, and the incentives for polling decline.”

After major misses in 2016 and 2020, the reputational stakes are also higher, especially with a national audience that’s equal parts skeptical and obsessed with pollsters’ work. 

A tight-as-hell race. Harris is slightly up in the new ABC/Ipsos poll. And from CBS/YouGov:

Axios reports that the Harris campaign is still keeping its distance, which is irking some of Biden’s inner circle — and Biden apparently sort of went rogue:

Many on Biden’s team — including some still on the campaign that Harris inherited from the president — believe Biden could help Harris in the final days.

They also believe Harris’ team is underestimating Biden’s appeal among white, working-class communities in the Rust Belt — including in the critical state of Pennsylvania, where Biden has spent extensive time during his life and career. In 2020, Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers with some of those voters — helping him to defeat Donald Trump.Biden’s team — responding to the president’s wishes — recently has become more assertive.

Biden’s announcement this past week that he would campaign solo in Pittsburgh this weekend caught many on Harris’ team off-guard, two people familiar with the matter told Axios.

Biden’s spoke with union members on Saturday. “Donald Trump is a loser. He’s a loser of a candidate, and he’s a loser of a man,” the president told the crowd. Here’s more on the event via the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Biden rallied Saturday afternoon with about 100 members of the Pennsylvania District Council of the Laborers International Union of North America at their hall in Downtown Pittsburgh. He then met with campaign volunteers at the Allegheny-Fayette Labor Council apprentice training center in Pittsburgh’s Beechview neighborhood.

Biden said the contrast between his chosen successor, Harris, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump could not be clearer in relation to union rights. “I have walked the picket line, and so has Kamala,” Biden said during a 20-minute speech to a cheering crowd of union members. “This is about decency versus lack of decency. This is about character.”

Though Biden has suffered from poor approval ratings nationally throughout most of his presidency, that wasn’t evident among the Pittsburgh laborers. The union workers shouted “Joe! Joe! Joe!” several times throughout his speech and took selfies with the president.

Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Elon Musk’s attention grabbing stunt of handing out million dollar checks to a registered swing-state voters who sign his petition to protect the Constitution has raised eyebrows and drawn the attention of the Department of Justice. Election law experts have suggested it is an illegal bribe.

But the billionaire admitted Saturday night at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that the point of the lottery is simply to gain attention for his pro-Trump efforts by making the “legacy media” upset.

After handing out an oversized check to tonight’s winner, Musk said:

People wonder what’s up with million dollar prizes. Well we need to get legacy media to talk about it and I knew they would be, like, complaining like hell about it … got every newspaper and TV station complaining like crazy.

Musk added, reflecting on his strategy, “Great, that’s going to get the word out.”

The national early-voting frenzy is also happening in New York City, notes NBC News:

New York City experienced its highest turnout for the first day of early in-person voting in history, according to the city’s Board of Elections. As of close of polls, more than 140,000 voters were checked in at polling sites across the five boroughs today, according to the board’s unofficial estimates.

Max Tani reports on X:

One result of the WaPo non-endorsement: I’m told the NYT has been experiencing a small but noticeable wave of cancelations since yesterday, as well as emails to the effect of “fuck Bezos.” There’s been some internal discussion about what (if anything) to do about the confusion.

The editorial board of the Times, which is not owned by Jeff Bezos, endorsed Harris on September 30 — and reemphasized that on Saturday night.

The embattled mayor pushed back on the label Saturday while discussing the security measures for Trump’s big rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night. Per the Daily News:

“I have had those terms hurled at me,” Adams said at a press conference at police headquarters in Manhattan on security efforts for Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden.

“I know what Hitler has done and I know what a fascist regime looks like. Trump has nothing to do with either,” he said, referring to reports former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly said the former president told him “Hitler did some good things” and expressed admiration for the loyalty of his Nazi generals.

Earlier in the press conference, Adams had implored New Yorkers to “to take down the temperature.” Rather than causing “problems” in the city, he urged New Yorkers to participate in the democratic process by voting.

A new Times/Siena poll found that Trump currently has more support in New York City than he did in 2020:

Overall, Kamala Harris leads Donald J. Trump, 66 percent to 27 percent. Although it’s a significant advantage, it also represents a major decline in Democratic support since 2020, when President Biden won the city, 76-23. If it held, it would represent the worst showing for a Democratic presidential candidate in the city since 1988.

The poll also found that a slim majority (53 percent) of registered voters in the city think Adams should resign in light of his recent indictment.

The vice presidential candidate on Saturday reacted to a now-deleted tweet containing a screenshot of a Reddit post in which someone describes seeing a woman dressed in pro-Trump outfit curse out election workers at a early voting site in New Jersey. The post, which included a NSFW picture of the women after she had removed her apparently pro-Trump shirt in order to vote, said:

Went to early vote today. There’s a no political merch sign. Woman comes to vote wearing Trump gear. They tell her she can’t. She calls one poll worker a d*ckhead and rips her shirt off. She told another poll worker to “suck her c**t” and this is the reason she votes Trump.

The details of the alleged incident have not been confirmed, but the Reddit post went viral on Saturday, prompting the retweet from Vance, who added, “What a patriot.”

New Jersey is one of 21 states that restrict campaign apparel in or near polling locations, as Democracy Docket notes:

These states’ electioneering laws prohibit people from wearing anything that displays a political party, candidate name or ballot issue, which includes shirts, hats, buttons and stickers. In many places, this isn’t allowed within 50 to 100 feet of the entrance to a voting site, but in places like Kansas and Maine, the bans apply to a 250-foot distance.

On Thursday in San Antonio, Texas, a man was arrested after allegedly assaulting an election clerk who tried to get him to remove his MAGA hat at a polling site. Reports the Texas Tribune:

According to a sheriff’s report, the suspect, 63-year-old Jesse Lutzenberger, walked into the polling location on San Antonio’s west side, wearing a Make America Great Again hat in support of former President Donald Trump, which is considered electioneering and against the law in Texas. The poll worker, 69, asked Lutzenberger to remove the hat, which he did, officials said. Lutzenberger went on to cast his ballot. While still inside the polling location, Lutzenberger put the hat back on as he walked toward the door. The poll worker approached the man to tell him that was unacceptable and then began to escort the man out as they were approaching the doors of the location.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said a surveillance video showed Lutzenberger “throw an arm back toward the victim.”

“The victim seemed to push off of the suspect. At that point, the suspect then turned and threw several punches right at the face of the victim,” Salazar said.

Appearing at Harris’s rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Saturday, the former first lady delivered a passionate speech on the stakes of the election for women’s health.

She called for men to stand up for women, and also tried to get anyone considering a third-party protest vote to think again:

Your rage does not exist in a vacuum. If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage. So are you as men prepared to look into the eyes of the women and children that you love and tell them you supported this assault on our safety?

There’s simply no escaping politics this fall:

More mixed messaging from Trump, reports the Detroit News:

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign urged his supporters, during a Saturday afternoon rally in Oakland County, to cast their ballots ahead of Election Day, but the Republican nominee personally labeled lengthy early voting windows a “ridiculous system.”

“You know what the ridiculous system is?” Trump asked the crowd, at one point. “You have the rest of your life to vote. Anytime you want.”

Trump’s speech inside the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi came as a nine-day period of early, in-person voting ahead of the Nov. 5 election opened across the state of Michigan. Large screens inside the convention hall encouraged attendees to “swamp the vote” and to “pledge to vote early, in-person today.”

As David Freedlander reported today, a lot of Republicans are in fact voting early this time around.

Ugh:

Notes the New York Times:

Nika Soon-Shiong, 31, a progressive political activist who has frequently been accused of trying to meddle in the paper’s news coverage, said the decision was motivated by Ms. Harris’s continued support for Israel in its war in Gaza.

“Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has no formal role at the paper, said in a statement to The New York Times. “As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”

Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong soon released a statement denying his daughter had a role in the endorsement decision:

Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do. She does not have any role at the L.A. Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board, as has been made clear many times.

Good to know:

In Novi, Michigan, on Saturday:

I think Detroit and some of our areas makes us a developing nation. China doesn’t have any place like that.

Lewis has released a new statement sort of implying the billionaire owner wasn’t behind the quashed Harris endorsement, which the Post itself has already reported Bezos was. Lewis says Bezos didn’t “opine on any draft” of the endorsement, but that doesn’t mean Bezos didn’t nix what was obviously going to be an endorsement for Harris.

Reliable Sources’ Brian Stelter captures the ongoing fallout:

 “If we want to know how Trump is going to stifle the free press in the U.S., this is the answer,” Robert Kagan told Erin Burnett last night. Kagan, a columnist at the Post for decades, resigned in protest yesterday. “This is how it’s going to happen,” Kagan said, “especially when the media is owned by corporate titans who have a lot to lose if Trump is angry at them.” He called Bezos’s action a warning about the near-future – “a sort of anticipatory capitulation on the part of a major media organization.”

I think it’s crucial to see the other side of the story as well, the sense of satisfaction from Trump loyalists. This is what they want: For Trump’s critics to cave. For billionaires to be intimidated. For Trump to break the backs of institutions like the Washington Post. Breitbart’s article about the Post filled up with celebratory comments. National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar mocked the media’s “garment-rending peals of agony” over the move.

 

Bottom line: No one is buying Post publisher William Lewis’s explanation that “we are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates” – especially in light of the NYT’s report that “Lewis and the opinions editor, David Shipley, made their case” to Bezos “not to end The Post’s tradition of making a presidential endorsement.” When Bezos nixed the endorsement anyway (without ever reading the Harris draft) Lewis was left to explain it to the public, according to the NYT. 

Stelter also notes:

I’m reliably told that the number of subscriber cancellations is in the thousands. (The Post isn’t commenting.) An editorial writer told me this morning, “I am overwhelmed with the number of heartfelt messages from readers cancelling but expressing personal appreciation for what I do. It breaks my heart.”

Matt Stieb notes that Jeffrey Epstein, who Rogan is obsessed with, didn’t come up once:

There was much Rogan could have asked about, such as Trump’s long friendship with Epstein in the 1990s. He did not ask about flying on Epstein’s infamous plane. He did not ask about the (unsubstantiated) claims from Epstein’s alleged victims that Trump had sex with them. He did not ask about the new allegation, this week, from model Stacey Williams, who claimed that Trump groped her in Trump Tower in 1993 as Epstein watched. And he did not ask Trump about his comment in 2002 that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” (Trump has denied wrongdoing in all the above allegations.)

Read the rest here.

A couple more notable comments from the three-hour Rogan interview, including Trump’s praise of Xi and a comparison of him and, presumably, those who oppose Trump inside the U.S.:

Speaking of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Trump said he wasn’t as big a problem as the “enemy from within,” echoing previous comments he’s made dismissing foreign threats as less important than domestic political ones:

We had no problem with him. I say it to people, we have a bigger problem, in my opinion, with the enemy from within.

From David Freedlander’s must-read report:

A large reason for the strong Republican showing so far is that Donald Trump, after disparaging in-person and by-mail early voting in 2020, has been sending at least some new messages on the topic. “Swamp the vote” signs are displayed above his rallies, and Trump told the podcaster Don Bongino last week that “I am telling everyone to vote early” (though he also called early voting “stupid stuff” and suggesting that vote-by-mail is rife with fraud). The rest of the party and the SuperPAC’s pouring money into Trump’s re-election however been less conflicted, pummeling prime Republican voters with mailers and digital outreach urging them to come to the polls in such numbers that the 2024 election becomes “too big to rig.”

The perils however of comparing early vote from this year to previous election cycles is that widespread early voting is so new that it is nearly impossible to draw lessons from one year to the next. The midterm electorate, either voting early or not, is older, whiter, and wealthier than the presidential electorate. 2020 was the Covid year — for Democrats voting by mail became a public signal of taking the pandemic seriously, while for Republicans waiting until Election Day–at Trump’s urging–was a symbolic rejection of lockdown and social distancing. But prior to that election, early vote and vote-by-mail had been largely the provenance of Republicans.

Michael P. McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who tracks early voting, agrees that the first days of early voting, when what he calls “The Super-Voters” come to cast their ballot, are not particularly indicative of the eventual outcome. But as we get closer to Election Day, he said, the early vote starts to become more predictive of the eventual outcome than polls. In 2016 and 2020, while polls had Democrats winning North Carolina, McDonald’s analysis of early vote totals told him (correctly) that the polls were wrong. Analyzing vote data, he said, is similar to how pollsters model the electorate when they construct their surveys, looking at past voting patterns and making adjustments based on the demographics of the early vote totals and factoring in changes in state voting laws. “It’s all information you want to take in, and in a lot of cases it is more of a true signal than what most polls tell you.”

McDonald said he would have to wait until early voting ends in the weekend before Election Day to get a clearer picture of the state of the race, but for now, “It has been a good early vote period for Republicans,” citing North Carolina and Florida in particular. “That doesn’t mean Trump is going to win — but they are doing better than they have been in the early state of the early voting period. If the trajectory stays on track, we are going to have a very close election again.”

Read the rest here.

Most of the MAGA stars will be there, but none of the seven Republicans who face competitive House races this fall.

A video shared online this week which purported to show someone destroying mail-in votes for Trump in Bucks County, Pennsylvania was not only false, but “manufactured and amplified” abroad, according to federal law enforcement officials. Per the AP:

Russian actors made a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania, U.S. officials said Friday. A video that showed mail-in ballots for Trump apparently being destroyed in a suburban Philadelphia county took off quickly on social media Thursday afternoon. U.S. officials said in a statement sent by the FBI that they believe the video was “manufactured and amplified” by Russian actors. The officials say it’s part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans.”

Axios reports that Harris, should she win the election, will be making some staffing changes, both because of normal turnover — and a little bit of revenge:

Biden aides and allies privately have trash-talked the vice president during the past 3½ years — and Harris, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and others in her inner circle know it. Harris and Emhoff — along with Harris’ sister Maya and her husband, Tony West — have taken note of Biden advisers and big-dollar donors they suspect of knifing the vice president to reporters or fellow Democrats, two people familiar with the matter tell Axios. Beyond those grudges, Harris has a dim view of some members of Biden’s team and would want her own people in place, the sources said.

The swap-outs will also be because of expected departures with Biden no longer in charge:

[M]any Biden officials were preparing to stay for a second term before the 81-year-old president abruptly dropped his re-election bid in July, under pressure from Democratic leaders. Others in Biden’s administration were looking for potential promotions, with some eyeing Cabinet posts. Those plans have changed. Harris’ sudden ascension has set off a furious scramble inside the White House, as aides either look for a new job for next year, or suck up to Harris’ team in hopes of gaining favor.

The Washington Post dug into his early career:

Musk has not publicly disclosed is that he did not have the legal right to work while building the company that became Zip2, which sold for about $300 million in 1999. It was Musk’s steppingstone to Tesla and the other ventures that have made him the world’s wealthiest person — and arguably America’s most successful immigrant.

Musk and his brother, Kimbal, have often described their immigrant journey in romantic terms, as a time of personal austerity, undeterred ambition and a willingness to flout conventions. Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up. Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to legal experts.

His first company’s board was aware of the problem:

“Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S.,” said Derek Proudian, a Zip2 board member at the time who later became chief executive. Investors agreed, Proudian said: “We don’t want our founder being deported.”

“I see you,” she said:

Harris also devoted the bulk of her speech, as expected, to reproductive rights and the threat GOP leaders, like those in Texas, pose to them:

He made it to the stage of his Traverse City rally three hours late, then stood there as they played the full Undertaker theme song (instead of the typical Lee Greenwood).

Per the Harris campaign, it’s here.

Beyoncé is introducing Harris in Houston:

I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother. A monther who cares deeply about the world our children live in. A world where we have the freedom to control our bodies. A world where we’re not divided.

Her mom is there, too:

The Joe Rogan Experience episode, which was recorded on Friday, is nearly three hours long. It’s available on YouTube here.

The campaign says more than 30,000 people are there.

From Jon Ralston’s latest look in at the totals thus far:

What we are seeing is just an unusual and unprecedented (for a presidential year) pattern of how the votes are coming in: The GOP advantage will come early, where the Dem advantage used to, and the Dem advantage (thanks to urban mail) will come later. No one really disputes this. Why? Because we know Republicans have been encouraged to vote earlier and we know that turnout will be upwards of 75 percent for each party because it’s a presidential year.

I assume, until the data and common sense tell me differently, that the turnout mix is going to be at or around what it as in 2020 and 2016, where the Rs had about a 5 percent overall advantage. The huge difference is that the Dem registration edge usually gave them a cushion. This cycle, because the gap has closed, they have almost no margin for error and thus the indie split becomes critical.

His bottom line, as of now:

Harris will need to win indies by at least 4 points and probably a little more to win. The Dems believe their indies are younger, likely to vote later and the children are their future. Even if Harris hits her indie goals, it will be close – and you all know what chaos could ensue after that (that’s why all the GOP lawsuits, poll watching checklists, etc.). It’s not going to be pretty, and it seems highly unlikely this race will be over here on Nov. 5.

As of Friday night, 2.61 million people have already voted, which is more than half of the expected total.

The brief meeting in Austin, Texas came the same day that the news broke that Jeff Bezos had nixed the Washington Post’s Harris endorsement. Reports the Post:

 The editorial decision — which The Post said in its news article was made by Bezos — prompted outrage among media critics who wanted the news outlet to weigh in on the significant race and speculation that the billionaire could be trying to curry favor with the former president. Both Amazon and Blue Origin are federal contractors. Blue Origin CEO David Limp and government relations vice president Megan Mitchell shook hands with Trump and spoke with him before he departed in his motorcade.

The Wrap reports that in addition to the Times editorial board’s now shelved Harris endorsement, it was going to make its case against Trump across several days:

According to internal memos viewed by TheWrap, the series, tentatively called “The Case Against Trump,” would have ran throughout this week. The endorsement of Kamala Harris would then have been published on Sunday. However, Soon-Shiong ordered the cancellation of the series and the endorsement without explanation, current and now former staffers have confirmed, setting off a massive crisis for the 142-year-old paper. The South African-American billionaire’s interference in his paper’s editorial independence has sparked a rise in canceled subscriptions and several high profile resignations, and there are also signs of growing unrest among staffers.

According to his campaign. It’s going to make Trump pretty late for his rally in Traverse City, Michigan. He told rallygoers there, via a video, that he would be at least three hours late for the event.

A lot of them are leaving.

I took a look back in my new post:

Old-timers may remember the one and only time since 1976 that the Post refused to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate. It happened in 1988, when the Post’s late abandonment of Michael Dukakis on November 1 was widely interpreted as a sign of doom for his candidacy. But on that occasion, the Post didn’t cite some ancient hands-off tradition that it had suddenly at the last minute decided to reassume; its “No Endorsement” editorial went on at inordinate length about both candidates’ shortcomings.

It then went on to endorse every Democratic presidential candidate in every election until this one:

[N]o matter how much Will Lewis pontificates about the Post’s “independence,” this very late no-endorsement comes across as either one of two things: an expression of disdain for Kamala Harris or an act of cowardice in the face of threats made by Trump against journalists and/or against Bezos’s company Amazon. Certainly the Post’s own coverage of the 2024 campaign rules out a third possibility: that the paper thinks the latest version of Donald Trump is an improvement.

Read the rest here.

Jonathan Chait responds to the Post’s sudden non-endorsement:

The Post’s argument is that it is adopting a policy of abstaining from endorsements in presidential races. I believe that policy is, in the abstract, correct. Endorsements in local races make a huge difference because readers have often paid little attention and need an authoritative recommendation. People who read newspapers like the Post don’t need suggestions like this. Endorsing national candidates merely creates the appearance of bias for little practical benefit. The paper can explain that its endorsement does not impact its news coverage, and that explanation is correct, but there’s no reason to force every journalist to rebut the appearance of partiality created by national endorsements.

That said, the process by which the Post arrived at this decision stinks to high heaven. The newspaper’s editorial board had planned and reportedly written its endorsement before management quashed it. The abstract journalistic reason to end national endorsements was knowable months and years in advance. The Post announced its decision at the last minute of a razor-thin campaign, in an atmosphere in which conventional wisdom (if not necessarily the polls) is increasingly treating Trump as the favorite.

The absence of a Post endorsement does not matter. What matters is the very live prospect that Bezos will continue leaning on the journalists in his employ to make their work less offensive to a president who has proven he is willing and able to take money out of Bezos’s pockets if he defies him.

Read the rest here.

To be clear, this case involves Mississippi, but it will really matter in the one battleground state that allows post-election-day ballots to be counted: Nevada. The 5th Circuit rejected applying this to 2024, citing Purcell. There could still be an appeal to SCOTUS, but my guess is they’ll agree on the timing argument.

But we now have our first guaranteed post-election “stealing” complaint if Trump loses Nevada. (Though they would have said that anyway without the 5th Circuit’s concurrence.)

I suppose it’s possible the district court judge could simply reverse the earlier decision and let it go into effect immediately, but that seems unlikely.

Donald Trump wants to sue the election:

CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.

Nearly 2,000 Los Angeles Times subscribers pulled the plug after its non-endorsement this week, per The Guardian. Now a number of Washington Post subscribers are loudly making it known they are unsubbing, too.

Reports Semafor’s Max Tani:

One person familiar with the figures told Semafor that the decision already seemed to be impacting subscriptions. In the 24 hours ending Friday afternoon, about 2,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions, an unusually high number, an employee said. Another email that the Post sent out to subscribers on Friday also prompted a flurry of complaints from readers about the paper’s lack of an endorsement.

Others are posting about (or posting screenshots of) their cancellations:

But as one Post staffer has pointed out on X, subscription canceling doesn’t really punish publication owners:

It was a heavily debated question before the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post decided to abandon the practice.

The Washington Post, where “democracy dies in darkness,” is sitting out the 2024 presidential endorsement race. For the first time since the 1988 election, the paper’s editorial board won’t be making an endorsement for president. Publisher-CEO Will Lewis announced the move to readers on Friday as “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

Not surprisingly, there’s apparently (a lot) more to this story, which comes a few days after the Los Angeles Times announced a similar move at the behest of its billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, prompting the publication’s editorials editor and two members of its editorial board to resign.

A billionaire owner was behind the Post’s non-endorsement, too. Here’s the Post’s reporting on itself:

An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners),” former Post executive editor Martin Baron, who led the paper while Trump was president, said in a text message to The Post. “History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

NPR reports that editorial-page editor David Shipley broke the news internally at a “tense meeting” shortly before Lewis made his announcement:

Shipley had approved an editorial endorsement for Harris that was being drafted earlier this month, according to three people with direct knowledge. He told colleagues the decision was to endorse was being reviewed by the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. That’s the owner’s prerogative and is a common practice. On Friday, Shipley said that he told other editorial board leaders on Thursday that management had decided there would be no endorsement, though Shipley had known about the decision for awhile. He added that he “owns” this outcome. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

Lewis’s stated rationale has been met with skepticism by others in the business:

Current staffers at the Post are also expressing alarm and/or outrage over the move:

Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned:

The Post’s union says its “deeply concerned,” too:

The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the Post’s Harris endorsement had been in the works for weeks:

Over a period of several weeks, a Post staffer told me, two Post board members, Charles Lane and Stephen W. Stromberg, had worked on drafts of a Harris endorsement. (Neither was contacted for this article.) “Normally we’d have had a meeting, review a draft, make suggestions, do editing,” the staffer told me. Editorial writers started to feel angsty a few weeks ago, per the staffer; the process stalled. Around a week ago, editorial page editor David Shipley told the editorial board that the endorsement was on track, adding that “this is obviously something our owner has an interest in.”

“We thought we were dickering over language—not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said. So the Post, both news and opinion departments, were stunned Friday after Shipley told the editorial board at a meeting that it would not take a position after all. 

As far as suspending America’s democracy goes, this is a novel approach:

John Kelly made waves earlier this week for saying Trump, his former boss, met the definition of a “fascist.” Now, the former chief of staff is receiving support from other ex-members of the Trump administration, who are praising him for his public warning.

Politico reports that more than a dozen former Trump aides have signed onto a letter in support of Kelly, writing that his words were “disturbing and shocking” but not surprising as people who have worked closely with Trump. Among the signees include former press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former Pence national security adviser Olivia Troye, and former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security Miles Taylor.

“We applaud General Kelly for highlighting in stark details the danger of a second Trump term. Like General Kelly, we did not take the decision to come forward lightly. We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments,” they wrote.

Friday is a big day for big famous people mixing it up with the 2024 presidential race (in Texas). Harris is going to campaign in Houston with Beyoncé, and Trump is recording an interview with top podcaster Joe Rogan. From NPR’s primer:

Harris plans to focus on Texas’ strict abortion ban at her rally in Houston, as Democrats have spent years hammering Republicans over unpopular crackdowns on reproductive rights — to great success at the ballot box. Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court and the subsequent overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a key liability for him. … The Houston rally will also feature hometown superstar Beyoncé, whose song “Freedom” has been Harris’ campaign anthem. …

Meanwhile, Trump will deliver remarks on immigration and the border in Austin before taping a podcast with Joe Rogan, who has millions of followers and an audience overwhelmingly younger and more male — a key constituency for the former president.

Unlike other more friendly interviews Trump has sat for in recent weeks, Rogan has not always been uncritical of him. In an August podcast, Rogan appeared to offer praise for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who at the time was running for president as a third-party candidate. In the episode, Rogan said that politicians from both sides of the aisle “gaslight you, they manipulate you, they promote narratives.”

That drew Trump’s ire, and Rogan quickly tried to smooth things over.