It turns out that Donald Trump had something nice to say about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020.
At the time, ABC News reported Wednesday, Trump praised the now-Democratic vice presidential nominee, telling a group of state governors that Walz “dominated” and saying he was an example for other governors to follow.
“I know Governor Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said on the June 1, 2020, phone call, a recording of which was obtained by ABC.
“I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim,” Trump added. “You called up big numbers, and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”
Trump also claimed on the call that it was his suggestion that Walz call in the National Guard to help manage the protests, which the Harris campaign categorically denied. The Trump campaign said Wednesday that Trump only praised Walz for listening to him.
“Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump’s offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal Mayor of Minneapolis,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News.
“In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city,” Leavitt added.
The audio puts a serious damper on the Trump campaign’s claim that Walz was supposedly soft on crime and mishandled the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Since Harris announced Walz as her running mate, both Trump and J.D. Vance have accused Democrats of antisemitism, Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Walz far left and was trolled for her efforts, and Vance has taken hollow shots at Walz’s two decades of military service. While it’s too early to tell if any of those attacks will stick, right now it seems like Trump, Vance, and the rest of the GOP are struggling for a rhetorical win, and Democrats hope that will translate to an electoral win for Harris and Walz.
J.D. Vance was not seen as the popular choice when Donald Trump selected him as his number two—and the Ohio senator has proven even less popular since joining the ticket.
Several polls have indicated that Vance has overwhelmingly underperformed among American voters, making him the least popular nonincumbent veep candidate since 1980. Vance’s popularity has sunk by 8.8 percentage points since his vice presidential candidacy was announced at the Republican National Convention, according to a polling average aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.
One poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on July 31 found that 47 percent of polled Americans found Vance to be unfavorable, while just 30 percent considered him favorable. An ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted between July 20 and July 27 found that Vance’s favorability had dropped by nine points, and an AP-NORC poll conducted between July 15 and July 29 saw Vance’s favorably drop by eight points.
That’s in stark contrast to other recent vice presidential nominees, who all managed to keep their heads above water in the weeks following their nominations.
Voting blocs that have turned away en masse from Vance include women, independents, and Black voters. His favorability with those groups has tanked by double digits, according to The Washington Post. Vance’s reputation has also collapsed with college-educated voters, with whom his image has declined by 28 percent, according to an August Marist poll.
But confusingly, Trump has continued to send Vance out to campaign events all week, while the Republican presidential nominee has remained largely out of the public eye. Given Vance’s low appeal, it’s unclear how this strategy helps the campaign.
Donald Trump has tried desperately to back out of his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, which was previously scheduled for September 10—so now, J.D. Vance has offered to take it off his plate.
During Vance’s rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Wednesday, the Republican vice presidential nominee inexplicably invited Harris to debate next week.
“So here’s my offer to Kamala Harris: If she’d like to do a debate with me on August 13, I’ll do it,” Vance said.
Before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Harris had agreed to debate Vance on CBS News on either July 23 or August 13. But Trump declined to commit his running mate to a debate.
In the weeks since, Harris has been elevated to the Democratic presidential nominee (she was officially certified as the nominee on Tuesday), challenging Trump to a debate. While Harris’s circumstances have obviously changed, Vance voiced his skepticism that anything was certain.
“I don’t think she wants to anymore, because one, she probably doesn’t even know that she’s going to be the Democratic nominee, and two we don’t know who the vice presidential nominee is going to be, either,” he said.
Vance claimed that it was still unclear whether Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, whom Harris tapped on Tuesday, would be the nominee because “he’s got a lot of skeletons that are coming out of the closet.”
“We’ll see if the Democrats pull a bait and switch on Tim Walz, or on Kamala Harris, just like they did with Joe Biden,” Vance warned.
Just as Vance can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that he’s not debating Harris anymore, Trump can’t seem to cope without Biden.
On Tuesday night, Trump wrote a surreal post on Truth Social in which he imagined Biden crashing the Democratic National Convention to seize the nomination back from Harris.
Fanfiction aside, Trump and Vance just can’t seem to face the reality that this is a fundamentally different race from the one they signed on for. Their slate of bad excuses for not debating Harris and Walz respectively has betrayed the depths of their obstinate, delusional approach to campaigning, as well as something much more troubling: that the two are plainly incapable of adapting to their new opponents.
Meanwhile, Walz seems more than happy to debate Vance. “I can’t wait to debate the guy,” Walz said at a rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday night. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Read more about the debates:
Kamala Harris has officially pulled ahead of Donald Trump, according to two key national polling averages.
Harris and Trump were neck and neck toward the end of July, with Harris leading by a narrow 0.2 percent on July 28, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Over the course of little more than a week, the gap between Harris and her Republican opponent widened to 1.8 percent, after several recent polls found that she was polling between one and four points ahead of Trump.
As of Wednesday, the vice president was leading Trump 45.2 percent to 43.3 percent, according to Project 538.
Real Clear Politics, another poll aggregator, had Harris trailing Trump by 1.8 to 2 percent at the end of July. Over the course of the last week, Harris officially surpassed Trump, leading 47.4 percent to 46.9 percent.
While that polling average reported a smaller lead for Harris, only 0.5 percent, it represents a major change in momentum for the Democratic Party, which has uniformly trailed Trump over the last six months, according to RCP.
Several other polls have also found Harris seizing the lead. VoteHub’s national poll aggregation found that Harris was leading by 0.3 percent. A poll The Economist published Tuesday had Harris in the lead, as well, beating the former president 47 percent to 46 percent. An NPR/Marist poll published Tuesday found that Harris had secured a lead, at 51 percent to Trump’s 48 percent.
Across the board, Harris has seen a significant uptick in positive polling in early August, which should cause Trump some concern.
Last week, the former president claimed he didn’t need to debate Harris because he was “leading in the polls, it seems, by quite a bit, still,” though Harris had already begun to pass him.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s personal finances are much different from what one would expect from a politician.
Axios reports that the Democratic vice presidential nominee doesn’t own any stocks, nor does his wife, Gwen. His financial disclosures as a member of Congress from 2007 to 2019 and as governor don’t show him owning bonds, private equities, mutual funds, or other securities. He and Gwen’s only investments appear to be in state pensions, including teacher pensions from their years as educators.
Walz also has never earned money from book sales, because, unlike other elected officials, he has never published a book. He doesn’t have extensive real estate assets, with he and Gwen selling their house in Mankato, Minnesota, for below the $315,000 asking price after he was elected governor. Unlike Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, he doesn’t own any crypto, and unlike Donald Trump, he doesn’t have his own currency.
These revelations seem to provide another justification for Kamala Harris selecting Walz as her running mate. There are no embarrassing business deals that Walz is hiding, nor real estate scandals, nor tone-deaf remarks about wealth. In fact, Walz has more in common with the average American when it comes to money, and as a congressman, he often showed he could relate to financial struggles.
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He even has legislation to back up his words: While serving in the House, Walz introduced the STOCK Act, which was meant to prohibit insider trading by members of Congress and other government employees. The bill was signed into law in 2012 by President Barack Obama. His refusal to own stocks adds to his sterling record for labor and his appeal to heartland voters. The only question is whether all of this can translate to success for Democrats and the Harris ticket in November.
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance claimed Wednesday that he had never suggested Kamala Harris hadn’t tapped Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate due to his faith.
During a press conference at a campaign stop in Michigan, a reporter from NBC News asked Vance to clear up some confusion surrounding his assertion that Shapiro had been skipped over for antisemitic reasons.
“You have repeatedly suggested that the only reason Kamala Harris didn’t pick Josh Shapiro to be her running mate was because of his Jewish faith,” the reporter asked. “Do you have any evidence to support that assertion, that a person who is married to a Jewish man is somehow antisemitic, or bowing to antisemites?”
Vance responded with hostility, refusing to answer the question.
“Well, I reject the premise of the question. I did not say that was the only reason that Kamala Harris didn’t choose Josh Shapiro,” Vance replied. “So you should, you know, take a little less DNC talking points when you ask your questions, and ask a real question.”
Reporter: You have repeatedly suggested that the only reason Kamala Harris didn’t pick Josh Shapiro is because of his Jewish faith. Do you have any evidence to support that assertion that a person who is married to a Jewish man is somehow anti-semitic.. pic.twitter.com/EZD2GqXJ1a
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 7, 2024
But just two days earlier, Vance had said precisely the opposite.
“I think that they will have not picked Shapiro, frankly, out of antisemitism in their own caucus and in their own party,” Vance told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, hours before Harris’s campaign had even announced her pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Vance would continue to trot out this argument over the next 48 hours. On Tuesday, Vance responded to the news of Walz’s pick by claiming that Harris had “listened to the Hamas wing of her party.”
At a rally in Philadelphia later that day, Vance immediately piggybacked off that sentiment and the statements of other Republicans who had begun claiming that Harris hadn’t picked Shapiro because he’s Jewish.
“I genuinely feel bad that for days, maybe even weeks, the guy actually had to run away from his Jewish heritage because of what the Democrats are saying about him. I think that’s scandalous and disgraceful,” Vance said. “Whatever disagreements on policy you have about somebody, the fact that that race, the vice presidential race on the Democratic side, became so focused on his ethnicity, I think is absolutely disgraceful.”
Vance’s weak attempt to walk back his statements on Wednesday fell flat, as it came just hours after Trump proudly repeated the exact same argument the Ohio senator claimed he’d never made.
On Wednesday morning, Trump suggested that Harris had not chosen Shapiro “because of the fact that he’s Jewish, and they think they’re going to offend somebody else.” In the same breath, Trump suggested that Jewish voters not supporting him ought to have their heads examined.
Read more about the conspiracy:
One of the leaders of the conservative manifesto Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, is delaying a book he wrote until after the 2024 election.
“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours—and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” Roberts told RealClearPolitics. “That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”
The book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, includes an introduction by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and was due to be published in September. The book will now come out on November 12, one week after Election Day.
Vance’s foreword to the book lauds Roberts for criticizing corporations and breaking with the Republican establishment, as well as his strong emphasis on family. Most notably, Vance endorses Roberts’s call for revolution:
As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.
It’s highly likely that Roberts is delaying his book due to the negative publicity that Project 2025 has brought to Republicans and the Trump campaign. It contains plans to dismantle abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, labor rights, and numerous other protections. Trump has tried and failed to distance himself from the project, belying his own past support for the manifesto and Vance’s extensive ties to it.
Trump’s frustration with being tied to Project 2025 has led to one of its leaders stepping down from his role, bad blood between Trump’s campaign staff and the project’s operatives, conflict within MAGA world over the former president’s disavowals, and now a delayed book. But the Heritage Foundation’s massive effort means the project won’t go away, no matter how much Trump wants, and if he’s elected, Project 2025’s architects will put its dangerous ideas into practice.
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