Team Trump’s Final Plea to Voters Is, Frankly, Nuts | The New Republic

In the final hours of the presidential race, the leaders of the far right are “fired up” about one issue that’s sure to resonate with voters across the country: the death of Peanut the squirrel.

Peanut was a social media–famous rodent who was euthanized by New York state wildlife officials over the weekend during a test for rabies after the squirrel bit a person. State law prohibits keeping wild animals as pets, but that didn’t stop conservatives from latching onto the issue.

Peanut reemerged as a topic of concern at a rally in Georgia, where Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins tied the squirrel’s death into an unfounded conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.

“Trump’s running against a socialistic, big-government, control-everything-about-you, woke regime,” Collins told the crowd. “This thing’s gotten so bad that they’re killing the pets, they’re killing the squirrels, they’re killing the raccoons.”

Greene took the lie a little further, claiming that “Democrats in New York City went in and raided a home to kill a squirrel.” Peanut was actually euthanized in Pine City, according to the report—not the Big Apple. And police did not raid Peanut’s owner’s home.

“They did—to kill a squirrel,” the 50-year-old insisted.

Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance also took the time to memorialize Peanut, claiming Monday in North Carolina that he had spoken to Donald Trump about the dead squirrel, with the Republican presidential nominee allegedly describing the bushy-tailed critter as the “Elon Musk of squirrels.”

Meanwhile, conservatives have spent years ardently advocating for the expansion of the death penalty. At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, last month, Trump escalated his own language on capital punishment, promising to make immigrants—whom he referred to as the “enemy from within” and “animals”—face harsher punishments for potential wrongdoing.

“Think of that!” he said. “We have to live with these animals. But we won’t live with them for long!”

To which someone in the crowd shouted back, “Kill them!”

A senior Democrat called bullshit on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s weak excuse for saying he planned to repeal the lucrative CHIPS Act.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly appeared on Fox News Sunday to urge Americans to believe Johnson and Donald Trump when they voiced their intention to repeal the CHIPS Act, a program that created subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.

“Donald Trump last week said he was going to kill the CHIPS Act, which is bringing all these semiconductor manufacturing jobs, and just this week the speaker of the House Mike Johnson confirmed that if Donald Trump is president, they’re going to end this program. We’re talking about tens of thousands of good paying jobs,” Kelly said.

During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast two weeks ago, Trump called the CHIPS Act a “bad deal.” When Johnson was asked Friday whether he and Trump planned to repeal that program, the House speaker said that he expected they “probably will” try to repeal it, even though it wasn’t currently on their agenda.

During Sunday’s interview, host Shannon Bream interrupted Kelly, saying that Johnson has since walked back his statement, claiming that he “misheard” the question.

“Yeah, Shannon, I went back and listened multiple times to what he said and the question. It’s very clear to me that he didn’t misunderstand what was said there; he actually repeated part of the question in the answer,” Kelly responded, unconvinced.

Kelly went on to say that the CHIPS Act was probably “the biggest foreign investment in our country,” bringing $100 billion in investments from private companies to Arizona alone.

“You heard it one way. He says he didn’t hear the question,” Bream insisted.

MARK KELLY: Trump last week said he's going to kill the CHIPS Act, which is bringing all these semiconductor manufacturing jobs, and just this week Mike Johnson confirmed they'll end that program. We're talking about tens of thousands of good paying jobs.BREAM: Well, the… pic.twitter.com/kfWb3KKzPR

That excuse didn’t come from Johnson but instead from Republican Representative Brandon Williams, who was attending the same event with Johnson in Syracuse, New York.

Williams was quick to clean up Johnson’s mistake, calling the CHIPS Act “hugely impactful.”

Micron Technology plans to break ground on a $100 billion chip-making factory in central New York next year, providing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the area, according to Syracuse.com. The CHIPS Act is providing $20 billion to Micron, which has said that without CHIPS Act subsidies, it would not build in the U.S.

“I will remind [Johnson] night and day how important the CHIPS Act is, and that we break ground on Micron,” Williams said in a statement released Friday. Johnson voted against the CHIPS Act, and Williams, who was not in office when it was passed, criticized the measure on the campaign trail in 2022.

“I spoke privately with the speaker immediately after the event. He apologized profusely, saying he misheard the question,” Williams said.

A photograph posted by Luke Radal, the journalist who asked a question, revealed that he was standing inches away from Johnson when the House speaker “misheard” his question.

Later that day, Johnson released a statement of his own. “As I have further explained and clarified, I fully support Micron coming to Central NY, and the CHIPS Act is not on the agenda for repeal,” Johnson said. “To the contrary, there could be legislation to further streamline and improve the primary purpose of the bill—to eliminate its costly regulations and Green New Deal requirements.”

As Johnson had originally said when he answered the question, the CHIPS Act isn’t on the agenda—but it “probably” will be.

In a preelection interview with Steve Bannon Monday, Tucker Carlson decided to broach the very pertinent topic of how nuclear technology has demonic origins.

Talking on Bannon’s show War Room on Real America’s Voice, Carlson and Bannon discussed how America seemed to take a turn for the worse after the development and use of the atomic bomb in World War II. But then, Carlson went on to say it was “obviously” not “human forces” who created the nuclear bomb.

“I’ve never met a person who can isolate the moment where nuclear technology became known to man. And so where did it come from, exactly? Oh, German scientists in the ’30s. Really? When, name the date. And I’ve never heard anybody do that,” Carlson said.

“It’s very clear to me that these are demonic, I mean these are evil. Their only purpose is to destroy the innocent,” the conservative pundit told Bannon.

Tucker Carlson says "human forces" did not create nuclear technology. Instead, it was demons."I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when nuclear technology became known to man. So, where did it come from exactly? ... it's very clear to me these are demonic." pic.twitter.com/Sml55hUF3t

There’s a lot to unpack in Carlson’s words, but at the very least, we do know when “nuclear technology” became known to man. A simple Google search would tell Carlson, or anyone else, that English physicist John Cockroft and the Irish physicist Ernest Walton first produced nuclear transformations in 1932 and that in the next few years, scientists Irene Curie, Frederic Joliot, and Enrico Fermi progressed the science further.

Nuclear fission itself was discovered by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin, working under Niels Bohr, in late 1938, which would spark massive developments in nuclear science in the next year. In a matter of minutes, it’s pretty easy to find a timeline disproving Carlson’s contention that people don’t know when nuclear technology was discovered.

Carlson did not acquit himself well in the rest of the interview, claiming that increased hurricanes were not the result of global warming but were “probably abortion, actually.”

“People are like, ‘Oh, well, we had another hurricane, it must be global warming.’ No! It’s probably abortion, actually. Just being honest. You can’t kill children on purpose, knowing that you’re doing that in exchange for power, or freedom, or happiness. Whatever you think you’re getting in return, you can’t participate in human sacrifice without consequences,” Carlson said.

Tucker Carlson: "People are like, 'oh, well, we had another hurricane, it must be global warming.' No! It's probably abortion, actually. Just being honest. You can't kill children on purpose. You can't participate in human sacrifice without consequences." pic.twitter.com/k8LBaQYX17

While some far-right Republicans, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, came up with a left-wing, antisemitic conspiracy theory that the government controls the weather when hurricanes struck the southeastern U.S. last month, Carlson’s comments have broached a weird brand of theology. It’s a window into how some on the right see apocalyptic, earth-ending machinations in today’s politics and also begs the question of why pundits like Carlson are ever taken seriously.

One of Nevada’s foremost election experts has predicted that Kamala Harris will narrowly win the presidential election in the state.

Jon Ralston, editor of The Nevada Independent, predicted that Harris will beat Donald Trump 48.5 percent to 48.2 percent—a margin of only 0.3 percent.

Ralston predicted that Harris voters would be able to catch up with Republicans’ early lead because the plurality of non–major party voters would ultimately swing for Harris.

“There are a lot of nonpartisans who are closet Democrats who were purposely registered by Democrat-aligned groups as nonpartisans,” Ralston wrote. “The machine knows who they are and will get them to vote. It will be just enough to overcome the Republican lead—along with women motivated by abortion and crossover votes that issue also will cause.”

Of the slightly more than one million votes submitted during the mail-in and early voting period, Republicans accounted for 38.4 percent, Democrats 33.6 percent, and nonpartisans and other parties represented 28 percent, according to the Nevada Current.

The winner of Nevada’s presidential election would not be clear on election night, according to Ralston. Results from the Silver State are more likely to come in on Wednesday or Thursday.

Ralston has correctly called the winner of the state’s presidential election for decades, including in 2016 and 2020, when the state went for Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden respectively.

Over the weekend, The Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll, conducted by Selzer & Co., found that Harris had “leapfrogged” Trump in Iowa and was leading him by 47 percent to 44 percent. The Iowa poll correctly predicted Trump’s victory in the state in 2020 and 2016, and is considered the gold standard of accurate polling.

Steve Bannon isn’t predicting a blowout election result for Donald Trump—rather, he seems to have resigned himself to a painfully close presidential race.

During Monday’s episode of the War Room podcast, the former Trump strategist said that the margins in swing states would be “razor-thin at best.”

National polls do show an incredibly close race: FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates national polls, found Trump and Kamala Harris were in a dead heat Monday, with Harris leading Trump 48 percent to 46.9 percent, within the margin of error.

But Bannon’s willingness to deliver hard truths represents a notable shift for the mastermind behind the MAGA movement. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s ex–national security adviser, once described Bannon as Trump’s “fawning court jester” during his first administration. Now, even Bannon has given up on padding the former president’s ego.

In an interview with Newsweek Monday, Bannon said that in 2016, he’d had “100 percent metaphysical certitude” Trump would win, Now, he was “close to 100 percent” certain Trump would win, if Republicans were able to “execute” their ground game on Election Day. Unfortunately for him, early voting has indicated that Trump’s ground game has been falling apart in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state.

Acknowledging the close race between Trump and Harris likely won’t change Bannon’s strategy for what the Republican presidential nominee should do on Tuesday night: Declare victory regardless before the election has been called.

Only days before the 2020 presidential election, Bannon said that Trump would announce himself as the winner regardless of how Americans had voted, according to leaked audio obtained by Mother Jones.

“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon said. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

Trump was able to claim that the election had been stolen by seizing on early returns and voter perception that he’d been ahead. After being released from jail last month, Bannon urged Trump to do the exact same thing.

“If the votes come in like it looks like they’re gonna come in, he should step up and inform American citizens of exactly what’s going on and not keep people in the dark like was done in 2020,” Bannon said.

Bannon isn’t the only Trump ally whose unshakeable faith in their beloved leader has begun to falter. Susie Wiles, co-manager of Trump’s campaign, issued an internal memo Sunday filled with qualifying phrases like “should we be victorious,” “regardless of the outcome of the election,” and “God willing” seeming to acknowledge that Trump no longer had the election in the bag.

With less than 24 hours on the clock until Election Day, Donald Trump is attempting to sway undecided voters with an ad featuring a bright vision of America—except it has one fatal flaw: None of the images used are actually of America.

In a campaign flub that almost seems too basic to be true, the ad connects images and a narrative that are entirely unrelated, according to NBC News, which obtained the clip through a strategist that opposes Trump.

During a portion of the hit that claims that American “values were labeled shameful,” the advertisement features a still shot taken in Germany during 2012, according to Getty, which sells the image. Two more clips from the ad were taken from Thailand—a model in Thailand dressed as a construction worker appears with narration questioning if America can make a comeback. Then a voiceover tying the notion that Americans have effectively “surrendered” their paychecks runs alongside footage from a grocery store parking lot in Thailand recorded during 2020.

It’s not even the first time that Trump’s team has made this mistake. While attempting to capitalize on a late summer jobs report during the 2020 campaign season, Trump’s campaign featured stock footage from Italy and Ukraine while playing it off as images from the U.S.

Donald Trump’s most recent tariffs announcement reaffirms what we already knew: He’s just making things up as he goes along.

At a North Carolina campaign rally on Monday that covered everything from the Space Force to Van Jones’s tears, the former president took time to offer some new economic policy on Mexico.

“We’re being invaded by Mexico. But now they have a new president in Mexico … very, a very nice woman, they say, I haven’t met her. And I’m gonna inform her, on day one or sooner, that, if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25 percent tariff on everything they send in to the United States of America.… You’re the first ones I’ve told it to, congratulations, North Carolina.”

Trump said the tariffs have a “100 percent chance of working” because if the 25 percent tariff doesn’t work, he’ll increase it to 50 percent, then 75 percent, and then 100 percent.

This isn’t the first time Trump has proposed sprawling tariffs on imports, and it’s something that economists everywhere think is an incredibly foolish plan. Such a steep tariff hike would lead to absurd price increases on good working families everywhere, especially on avocados, beer, and alcohol—all significant imports from Mexico. Trump has heard this all before but shrugs it off because he believes that the tariffs will force companies to return to the U.S.

This is far from Trump’s most ridiculous take on tariffs. Just weeks ago he stated to Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait that he wanted “a 100, 200, 2,000 percent tariff” on imports. “The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States.”

But Mexico is America’s number one trading partner. And his latest proposal to increase tariffs whenever he feels like it reveals how little he understands about the impacts here.

This is a candidate that is so completely out of touch with reality that he would make goods incredibly expensive for the normal Americans he claims to care about just to strong-arm businesses into coming back here. Trump is flying blind, and we’re all stuck along for the ride.

Elon Musk has admitted that his $1 million daily giveaway isn’t really a lottery at all.

In Pennsylvania court on Monday, the lawyers for Musk and his America super PAC told Common Pleas Court Judge Angelo Foglietta that the prizes were not part of a giveaway or lottery, as “there is no prize to be won” and winners “are not chosen at random.”

Instead, attorney Chris Gober argued that the cash, which since early October was given each day to a registered voter in a battleground state who signed a pledge to uphold the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution, is a salary the recipients supposedly “earn” to be a spokesperson for the PAC. The recipients, registered to vote in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, aren’t chosen randomly but are picked based on their personal story and “suitability to serve,” according to Gober.

“The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance,” Gober said. “We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”

In response, lawyers for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, who are suing Musk and the PAC for operating an illegal lottery in the Keystone State, argued that this was a “complete admission of liability,” especially since Musk said when he first announced the giveaway that the recipients would be chosen “randomly.” To make their point explicit, the lawyers for the district attorney’s office showed Musk’s statement to the judge. In response, Gober tried to make the argument that “randomly” and “by chance” are two different things, in his case that Musk’s giveaway is not an illegal lottery.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner took the witness stand himself, calling the giveaway a scam and asked for it to be shut down.

“This was all a political marketing masquerading as a lottery,” Krasner said. “That’s what it is. A grift.”

Musk’s lawyers said that they plan to stop the giveaway after the election Tuesday, and the PAC has pledged to give the recipients their money by November 30, according to evidence they presented in court. More than one million people have registered for the chance to win the cash prize, and Krasner in court questioned what Musk and the PAC will do with their personal data.

“They were scammed for their information,” Krasner said. “It has almost unlimited use.”

Two weeks ago, the Justice Department sent the PAC a warning letter stating that the lottery may violate federal laws against paying people to register to vote. For one day, the giveaway seemed to stop, only to resume the next day with two prizes awarded. Musk tried to have the Philadelphia lawsuit moved to federal court, but a federal judge rejected the request on Friday. Now, if the world’s richest man faces any consequences for giving away money for political purposes, it will come from a civil lawsuit in a Pennsylvania state court.

Alleged corruption at the highest rungs of Eric Adams’s administration in New York City has really brought down the reputation of the office, leaving some of the nation’s most legally embattled scoundrels thinking they have a legitimate shot at Gracie Mansion.

On Monday, disbarred attorney, unpaid ex–Donald Trump staffer, and disgraced politico Rudy Giuliani floated the idea that he could resume his position as Gotham’s mayor—23 years after he left the office.

When reached by the New York Post about a potential bid, Giuliani reportedly refused to outright reject the idea, telling the publication that he was “not going to say never, ever, ever.” But, as of right now, he’s not running for mayor.

It’s hard to imagine how Giuliani even has time to consider the costly and stressful endeavor of running for office—especially in a city that has openly denounced him for driving Trump’s election conspiracies.

Giuliani rose to prominence busting the mafia as a federal prosecutor, winning the mayoral race in 1993, and earning the moniker “America’s Mayor” for his stewardship through the 9/11 attacks. But Giuliani’s decision to serve at Trump’s side has lost him practically every merit in the years since.

Giuliani was ordered in December to pay nearly $150 million in damages to mother-daughter duo Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a pair of 2020 Georgia poll workers whom he had repeatedly defamed, before being court-ordered to hand over his Manhattan penthouse to the duo in October after failing to pay up.

Between then, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, begged Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees (he refused), had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies, and miserably started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash. He ultimately lost his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the presiding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”

Giuliani is also under the gun for a lawsuit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses. Giuliani, meanwhile, claimed he was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.

Amazingly, Giuliani’s legal troubles don’t end there: The MAGA henchman is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case and was named in April in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. In October, an Arizona judge torched a legal filing Giuliani made in the case, ruling that the ex–Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.

Still, Giuliani legitimately believes he has a shot. Citing Adams’s indictment and allegedly far-left candidates, the 80-year-old politico insisted the idea wasn’t far-flung.

“Everyone running for mayor looks like they’re from Red China. They don’t look American,” Giuliani told the Post. “I’m concerned about the city becoming a Democratic dictatorship.”

The twice-indicted politico then insisted that it would be Democrats—not Republicans—who steer corruption into City Hall.

“The only time since Fiorello LaGuardia a century ago that city government was honest was under me and Mike Bloomberg,” he said. “If you don’t have a Republican or independent mayor, you will have corruption at City Hall.”

Donald Trump’s allies are “completely exasperated” after the candidate’s wildly disturbing speech over the weekend in a key battleground state.

During Trump’s Sunday address in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the former president said that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after being voted out of office in 2020, and said that he “wouldn’t mind” if members of the press took a bullet meant for him. Both represent significant escalations in Trump’s explicit election denialism and violent threats.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported later that day that Trump’s allies are fed up with their candidate’s use of extreme rhetoric in a crucial state.

“I spoke to a number of allies who were completely exasperated after that Pennsylvania rally,” Holmes said. “We cannot talk about how critical Pennsylvania is as a state. There are many people inside of Trump’s inner circle who believe that Pennsylvania will decide the election.”

“One of these allies telling me, ‘How hard is it to just go up there and say, Kamala broke it and I’m going to fix it?’” Holmes said. “Another one telling me that they have spent an enormous amount of time talking to campaign advisers, trying to get Donald Trump to focus on the economy, to focus on inflation. They believe these are the matters that voters actually care about.”

“These allies are incredibly frustrated about the language that he is using on the campaign trail. The darkness of the rhetoric, at least how they see it, they believe that he can win this election, but he’s going to have to actually change how he is talking,” she continued.

Trump’s latest remarks come after other disturbing escalations, including threatening to turn the U.S. military on its own citizens. Last week, he doubled down on attacks against Liz Cheney, a Kamala Harris ally, after he suggested the former representative ought to be put in front of a firing squad.

A panel led by CNN’s Erin Burnett unpacked the concerns of Trump’s top allies, highlighting just how weird and gruesome the former president’s rhetoric has become. Jonah Goldberg, a political commentator, said that the problem with Trump was that he always managed to “unload with craziness, and that’s what gets covered.”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, an opinion podcast host for The New York Times, said that Trump’s remarks about the press were “not normal” and “not right.”

“Everything that [Trump] has done has sabotaged his campaign. I don’t know a single person, even people who like Donald Trump, even people who support Donald Trump, who think this is a winning message,” said Garcia-Navarro.

Shermichael Singleton, a conservative political commentator, said that he’d spoken to multiple Trump supporters who agreed.

“I called a bunch of folks that I know, who are Trump supporters, some just regular people, some who are doing grassroots stuff in critical states,” Singleton said. “And every last one of them said, ‘What in the hell is the president doing?’”

“These are people who love Donald Trump and respect Donald Trump,” Singleton explained. “I’m hearing them say, ‘It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to win.’”

Trump’s allies’ panic comes after early voting numbers suggested that the former president could be in trouble in Pennsylvania, a state that is critical to ensuring his victory. Last week, more than 100,000 new voters, a majority of whom were women, had already cast their ballots in Pennsylvania ahead of Election Day.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party in Scranton, Pennsylvania, appeared to be a lot more focused Saturday on signing up poll watchers than signing up voters, according to The Washington Post.