Politics

Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and host of the War Room podcast, was released from FCI Danbury, the federal prison where he was incarcerated as a political prisoner for the last four months Tuesday. His tort? The same thing that Eric Holder and Merrick Garland were guilty of: refusing to respond to a Congressional subpoena. Neither Holder nor Garland were indicted or incarcerated, of course, because neither supports Donald Trump.   That was Bannon’s real outrage: supporting the man whom Kamala Harris describes as “literally Hitler” and a “fascist” and whose supporters Joe Biden just described as “garbage.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: Vice President Kamala Harris would speak at the Ellipse, just as Donald Trump did on January 6, 2021, before his supporters entered the US Capitol in order to prevent the certification of the last presidential election. Harris would strike a stark contrast; she would deliver a disciplined address to all Americans, a week before polls close, and show that the Democrats were still in the fight, despite the recent “vibe shift” toward Trump. Tens of thousands would attend. The visuals would be striking.Everything went to plan. Enter Joe Biden.

New York For New Yorkers fed up with the Jets, Giants and Yankees, this weekend offered no shortage of entertainment, with former president Donald Trump returning to his hometown for a sold-out rally at Madison Square Garden, the “world’s most famous arena.”While the election isn’t over for more than a week, Trump made what is likely his highest-profile event before Election Day in the heart of deep-blue New York City. While his speech did not deviate from his traditional remarks about the border, Vice President Kamala Harris being a “very low-IQ” person, no taxes on tips and more, it was a clear display of confidence in the home stretch of the 2024 campaign.

Democrats including presidential nominee Kamala Harris and 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton are accusing their Republican opponent of being a Hitler-esque fascist. Spurred by a curiously thin report from the Atlantic claiming that former president Donald Trump disrespected the memory of a fallen soldier and praised Adolf Hitler and his generals, Harris held a press conference on Wednesday in front of her Washington, DC residence in which she warned Trump is “increasingly unhinged and unstable.” During a CNN town hall later that evening, Harris answered in the affirmative when she was asked if she believes Trump is a fascist. Meanwhile, Clinton likened the upcoming Sunday Trump rally at Madison Square Garden to an event held by Nazis at the same venue in 1939.

Vice President Kamala Harris is spending millions on new ads against Green Party candidate Jill Stein in swing state Wisconsin, warning potential supporters that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. The advertisement also attempts to smear Stein by asserting that she has links to KKK leader David Duke and Russian president Vladimir Putin. “You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep,” a voiceover says. “Stein isn’t sorry about swinging the 2016 election to Trump.” The ad was paid for by the Democratic National Committee but approved by the Harris campaign.Why would Harris be using air-time to attack Stein just two weeks out from the election? There are a couple of theories.

I don’t understand why Liz Cheney thinks we would trust Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff with our children when we know there’s a non-zero possibility that the would-be first gentleman will attempt to knock up our nanny, but apparently that’s what they're going with on the campaign trail these days. For years, I’ve suggested an essential method to deciding who to support for president would be based on who you trusted to run a McDonald’s for a day or watch your children for an afternoon. Perhaps intimidated by the former president’s success at the former measure, Cheney suggested at her event with Vice President Harris this weekend that the latter measure would disqualify Donald Trump — who she endorsed in 2020 — as an unacceptable giver of childcare.

A bipartisan House task force released an initial report detailing the calamitous security failures preceding the first failed assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump earlier this year. The failures are “stunning,” one of the staffers involved with its drafting told The Spectator. “Put simply, the evidence obtained by the Task Force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the report says.Those who worked on the report noted to The Spectator that the failures that allowed a would-be presidential assassin to nearly kill Trump on live television and fatally shoot Corey Comperatore predated the Butler rally by days.

Vice President Kamala Harris was the first presidential candidate since Walter Mondale to skip the traditional Al Smith dinner, which raises money for Catholic Charities, and former president Donald Trump would not let her forget it. He called her absence “deeply disrespectful” to Catholics, earning applause from some in the audience. Trump joked, “Instead of attending tonight, she’s in Michigan receiving Communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” referring to a viral video of the Michigan governor feeding a Dorito chip to a liberal activist kneeling before her.

Welcome to Thunderdome. Tonight I invite you all to tune into a live conversation at 8 p.m. Eastern with Kmele Foster of the Fifth Column on the shifting race, gender and class divides in 2024, part of the Substack Election Dialogues series — more details are here!We’ve already surpassed 8 million early votes in this election, so that means we’re at the beginning of the final rounds with fewer than twenty days to go. For Kamala Harris, she’s still sprinting around with a media tour (well, really only 60 Minutes and last night’s Fox News interview count as media) that she really should have done months ago.

Vice President Kamala Harris will finally sit down with Fox News this evening after months of pundits justifiably criticizing her campaign for mostly avoiding challenging media. Chief political anchor Bret Baier will conduct the interview, which will air during his show in the 6 p.m. hour. It will be a thirty-minute live-to-tape sit-down and will run in its entirety with no edits and no commercial breaks. Based on recent appearances, this could end quite poorly for Kamala. The Democratic nominee struggled to justify the Biden-Harris immigration policy during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the network felt the need to edit out a word salad answer about her relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Former president Barack Obama made his pitch on Thursday to black men on why they should vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing them of having hang-ups about voting for a woman. Obama stopped off at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh ahead of a rally in the city and said he wanted to “speak some truths” to black men as recent polls show former Donald Trump doing comparatively well with the group.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where the vibe is Miller High Life — which should only ever be enjoyed in a longneck as befitting the champagne of beers — and a Kamala Harris campaign that is turning from ebullience to despondence in short order. As my colleague Amber Duke and I discuss in the latest Thunderdome podcast, the refrain is a simple one: the joy is gone. The summer vibes that once sent a thrill down the pant-legs of everyone on the set of Morning Joe, including Mika and her lower-T colleagues, are now reduced to a point of constant contention: what is Kamala doing wrong — and how can she right the ship? And: why can’t Tim Walz be more like Josh Shapiro? And, even more: why won’t Joe Biden just shut up?

Amid lingering questions about what Kamala Harris stands for — plus a precipitous decline of the momentum the vice president enjoyed after leaping to the top of the Democratic ticket — her campaign decided it was time to send her into the media fray. This was a very calculated media tour, of course. With the exception of the traditional 60 Minutes interview on CBS (which Trump declined this time around, as his team claimed the outlet wanted to do “live fact-checking”), Harris stuck to friendly, low-risk outlets where she was unlikely to make any major fumbles.Unfortunately for the Harris campaign, this simple task would prove to be too much for the veep.

President Donald Trump triumphantly returned to Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday — exactly twelve weeks after an attempted assassin shot Trump in the ear, killed a rally attendee, Corey Comperatore, and injured several others.Trump previously promised he would go back to finish his rally in Butler, and he did indeed show up at the same spot where he was very nearly killed, kicking off the event with an acknowledgment that the last time he was there, his speech was cut short. “As I was saying...” Trump said to cheers and laughter. He referenced the famous illegal immigration chart that likely saved his life, as he turned his head to look at it at the exact moment the shooter fired, ensuring the bullet grazed his ear and did not go through his head. “I love that chart.

“I didn’t know which storm you’re talking about,” President Joe Biden said this week, as Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States. “They’ve gotten everything they need. They’re very happy across the board,” he said, as private citizens have stepped in to fill the void created by the federal government’s lackluster response.Some Americans who have flown helicopters to rescue victims from the storm have reportedly been threatened with arrest, including one who is a volunteer firefighter. Nevertheless, Biden insists that Americans have what they need, and Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to rush to the scene after promising one-time payments of $750.