A new poll found that a whopping zero percent of Black voters in Michigan plan to vote for Donald Trump, despite all of the former president’s underwhelming attempts to shore up support in that state.
A survey of 600 likely general election voters in Michigan, released late Thursday by WDIV Local 4/Detroit News, found that zero African American respondents said that they supported Trump, while 82.1 percent said they supported Vice President Kamala Harris.
While President Joe Biden was reportedly experiencing a loss of support from Black communities, it certainly doesn’t appear that Harris will face the same difficulties now that she’s taken over the Democratic ticket. Of course, Trump has done plenty of things to dissuade Black voters from backing him in November, in just the last month or so.
In June, Trump held a campaign event at a Black church in Detroit that revealed itself to be a blatant stunt. The campaign boasted 8,000 attendees in a space that could only seat a few hundred. At the event, which was meant to shore up his support among Black voters, roughly half of the attendees were white, WDET’s Russ McNamara noted. After Trump’s church stunt, the former president ran across town to give the keynote address to his real base of white nationalists at Turning Point’s “The People’s Convention.”
Trump has repeatedly overstated his support among Black voters, who he claimed were abandoning Biden in droves. He bragged about the formation of a group called Black Americans for Trump—but he failed to mention that at least three of his new endorsers were on his family’s payroll.
Trump also found himself under fire for a remark he made in the first presidential debate about immigrants taking “Black jobs,” which had many asking, what exactly is a Black job?
Read about Trump’s outreach to Black voters:
One of the lead authors of Project 2025, the disturbing blueprint for a potential second Trump presidency, has close ties to a controversial international Catholic group, Opus Dei.
The Guardian reports that Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, receives weekly spiritual guidance from the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., led by an Opus Dei priest. He attends the institution weekly for mass and religious guidance.
In a speech last year at the CIC, Roberts echoed some of the same extreme measures that the Project 2025 manifesto is infamous for, such as outlawing birth control, and called on conservatives to adopt “radical incrementalism” to achieve their policy objectives.
Opus Dei has been criticized as radical, cultlike, and secretive. The organization was founded in 1928 in Spain to combat the anti-Catholic left in the country, and was later granted special rights and privileges by Pope John Paul II to respond to the rise of progressive liberation theology in Latin America. Opus Dei does not believe in the separation of church and state, seeing a symbiotic relationship between the two, and its American adherents view the United States as the last stronghold of Christianity.
Roberts’s ties to Opus Dei don’t end with the CIC. He founded a school in Louisiana, John Paul the Great Academy, that recognizes the organization’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, as its patron. He also was involved in an Opus Dei–affiliated high school leadership program in Austin, Texas, and has spoken at other Opus Dei-linked schools.
Roberts isn’t the only leading conservative close to Opus Dei, either. Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society co-chair who has led the conservative takeover of the judiciary up to the Supreme Court, is also linked to the CIC, even accepting an award from the organization in 2022. In his acceptance speech, Leo praised the center and called his political adversaries “vile and amoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots” influenced by the devil.
Donald Trump and the GOP have been trying, unconvincingly, to distance themselves from the radical Project 2025, and now comes the news that the 900-page document’s leading author also has ties to a powerful religious organization opposed to the separation of church and state. Leo’s involvement only appears to be stronger evidence of the conservative movement seeking to impose a radical religious agenda if Trump wins the presidential election in November.
Election authorities from around the country have officially weighed in on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s desperate claims that states won’t allow Vice President Kamala Harris on the ballot as the Democratic nominee. Their message was just the opposite: Harris is good to go.
A CNN survey published Friday found that election authorities from 48 states and the District of Columbia said Harris would have no trouble getting on their respective ballots.
Officials from Montana and Florida did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment, but experts indicated that those states’ election rules suggest that the vice president won’t face any friction there, either.
Across the board, election authorities said that the Democratic Party’s decision to back a different candidate couldn’t possibly be a problem because President Joe Biden hadn’t been officially nominated. That process will take place via a virtual roll call early next month, and then more ceremonially at the Democratic National Convention later in August.
Once a candidate and their running mate are formally nominated at the convention, their names are then submitted to the states to be placed on the ballot. Since Biden was never the nominee, he’s not technically being replaced.
This wasn’t just the word in blue states, either: Reliably pro-Donald Trump states said the same thing. All seven swing states also confirmed that Harris would face no issues getting her name on the ballot if nominated next month.
Johnson has repeatedly referenced vague “impediments” and “legal hurdles” the Democrats might face in installing Harris as the candidate across different states’ electoral systems, but he has neglected to explain what those issues would be.
“It would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the backroom and switch it out because they’re—they don’t like the candidate any longer,” Johnson told ABC News Monday.
Johnson’s office failed to respond to CNN’s questions about his claims.
Read more about the Democratic ticket:
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is fighting back against Donald Trump’s move to throw out his hush-money convictions.
After the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have immunity for “official acts” last month, Trump asked the state of New York to throw out his 34 felony convictions. Bragg’s office replied with a legal filing of its own asking the state to reject Trump’s bid, arguing that even if official acts were excluded, they were “only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof” the jury saw before voting to convict Trump.
The filing, made public Thursday, stated that the evidence Trump’s lawyers are challenging isn’t protected, citing a footnote in the Supreme Court’s ruling that includes a “public records exception” for introducing evidence from protected official acts. Even if protected evidence was introduced, “any error was harmless in light of other overwhelming evidence of defendant’s guilt.”
“The Supreme Court has long recognized that a President can act in an unofficial, personal capacity,” the filing, written by Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo, states. “Nothing in the Court’s recent immunity decision changes that basic fact.… This case involved evidence of defendant’s personal conduct, not his official acts.”
In May, Trump was convicted of falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree by using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug before the 2016 presidential election. He has long alleged that the case, along with his other criminal and civil cases, is part of a plot against him by those opposed to his presidency.
Judge Juan Merchan is expected to rule on Trump’s immunity in early September. If he rules in favor of the district attorney’s office, sentencing for Trump’s conviction will take place on September 18, possibly leading to the first prison sentence ever for a former president.
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