Allies of Kennedy were left displeased that Lutnick had stated on air that the Democratic presidential candidate-turned-MAGA disciple would not be getting a cabinet level post. Meanwhile, Trump allies felt that Lutnick had freelanced too much by suggesting the ex-president could be okay with banning long-approved vaccines. They were similarly dismayed that Lutnick had decided to casually discuss a presidential transition and appointees just six days before Election Day, worried that it sent the wrong message to the public.
Their displeasure morphed into pain when they saw the unflattering headlines the next day in the New York Post and the New York Times, which hold preeminent places in the mind of Trump and therefore the campaign. Now, the knives are coming out for Lutnick, a billionaire financier whose business acumen outmatches his Trump world emotional IQ.
“What the hell is a transition chair publicly talking about all this stuff before we even win?” huffed one Trump campaign adviser, one of five who spoke on condition of anonymity for this story to express their frustration and describe internal discussions.
“Lutnick cut Bobby’s legs out from under him. He’s talking about all this stuff,” the adviser said. “We need to be focused on the election. Period.”
The internal complaints about Lutnick, 63, haven’t yet reached a boiling point in Trump world, the sources say, noting that his position helping run the transition remains firm, as does a possible spot as Treasury secretary.
I hadn’t heard before that Lutnick was on tap for Treasury Secretary. That’s this guy:
Let’s Cut Straight To The Chase! 😳
Did you guys see this?!?👀
Talk about a game changer….WoW! 😲 Can you imagine the conversations around conference rooms this morning? 🔥🧨🔥
Trump apologists are trying to say that his pantomimed blow job on stage last night is being “taken out of context.” No. Not this time. He complained about his “bad mic” for almost five minutes, particularly about how his throat was sore because of it. Then he did his little pantomime which the audience clearly understood as exactly what it was:
He is just letting his freak flag fly.
Tim Alberta has published a massive story about the inside of the Trump campaign, obviously fed by top operatives like campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. Here’s the lede:
At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.
“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”
The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)
Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.
“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
There you go.
This article is a MUST READ. Here is a gift link. Grab a cup of tea or a stiff drink and read the whole thing.
He is actually much worse than before. Much worse. And his campaign is a dumpster fire.
Republicans sue to extend the early voting registrations in Pennsylvania (and prevail) but in Georgia they don’t think people should be allowed to hand deliver their absentee ballots on the weekend:
Georgia State Election Board rules state:
"A board of registrars may establish additional sites as additional registrar's offices or places of registration for the purpose of receiving absentee ballots under O.C.G.A. Section 21-2-381."https://t.co/TYhWsf3s2fpic.twitter.com/5430WeVWht
There is obviously going to be no principled consistency in their election lawsuits. They just want to cause chaos and spread the Big Lie that the election is rigged, by any means necessary. I hope the Democrats’ lawyers have plenty of strong coffee to keep them going over the next few weeks. They’re going to need it.
Trump: "Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she's voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that? Even if you had a horrible — if you had a bad relationship, you're gonna tell your husband." pic.twitter.com/gd5of817VY
Tucker Carlson says he was physically attacked by a demon in bed at night: “I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re bleeding.”
Alex Jones confirmed that Tucker Carlson told him about being mauled by demons in his sleep last year at his house, and they figured out it was connected to someone “laying hands” on him. Alex says he was also attacked by a poltergeist who threw him around and separated his shoulder.
Alex Jones says Tucker Carlson told him about being mauled by demons in his sleep last year at his house, and they figured out it was connected to someone “laying hands” on him. Alex says he was also attacked by a poltergeist who threw him around and separated his shoulder. pic.twitter.com/xkjJPrghwj
Sometimes, when Tucker Carlson is in the shower, he takes a quiet moment to reflect on whether his haters may be right about him. I know this not firsthand but because he recently mentioned it to a few thousand fans in Rosenberg, Texas. He said, “I have been through this process for so many years, where they call you something”—in his case, a very incomplete list would include “venomous demagogue,” “crypto-Nazi blowhard,” “anti-science ignoramus,” and “a dick”—“and I actually do try to take stock. Like, am I that person?”
These reveries always lead him to the same conclusion: he’s clean. It is the haters who are wrong. That night, in Rosenberg, the epithet he lingered on was “extremist.” He drew out the syllables in a derisive growl, followed by his foppish hyena bark of a laugh—a familiar sequence to anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson heap scorn on his enemies, which is to say, anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson. “Whatever else I am, I’m the opposite of an extremist,” he continued. “My parents got divorced. I’m totally opposed to change.” He claims that his vision for the country’s future is actually a vision of the country’s past, one that strikes him as modest, even obvious: “I liked America in 1985.”
This was the ninth stop on the Tucker Carlson Live Tour—sixteen arenas, this fall, from Anaheim, California, to Sunrise, Florida, but mostly in the heartland. At each stop, before bringing out his special guest (Kid Rock in Grand Rapids; Donald Trump, Jr., in Jacksonville), Carlson delivered a semi-improvised monologue, usually starting with some geo-targeted pandering. In Michigan, he praised the local muskie fishing before slamming the state’s “brain-dead robot” of a governor. In Pennsylvania, he extolled the beauty of the Conestoga River before describing that state’s governor as “evil, actually.” In Texas, he said, “There’s something about being in a room full of people you agree with that is so great. It’s like a spa treatment.”
Trump was his guest on Thursday:
During a Thursday night appearance in Arizona with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump once again used violent and graphic speech to criticize someone who opposes his campaign for the presidency in an attack against former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney.
It’s very hard to believe that anyone would describe Trump or Carlson as “venomous demagogues” “crypto-Nazi blowhards” “anti-science ignoramuses” of “dicks.” So weird.
Nevaeh Crain, it seems. On Friday, ProPublica told the story of her tragic death in MAGAstan after the Dobbs decision in June 2022 triggered an effective abortion ban in Texas. Crain was an early victim:
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.
From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.
Furthermore:
Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1.
Also: Johns Hopkins this summer estimated “that infant deaths in Texas increased more than expected in the year following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion in early pregnancy, especially among infants with congenital anomalies.”
In 2017, at a time when maternal mortality was declining worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the U.S. was one of only two countries (along with the Dominican Republic) to report a significant increase in its maternal mortality ratio (the proportion of pregnancies that result in death of the mother) since 2000. While U.S. maternal deaths have leveled in recent years, the ratio is still higher than in comparable countries, and significant racial disparities remain.
Donald Trump and his MAGA movement want to roll back the last century. It was a time when death in childbirth was a leading cause of death for women, along with (if vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. gets a job in a second Trump administration) tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, smallpox, and more.
Beware, sister, beware
So take care getting pregnant in Texas. Depending on the outcome of this election, it could get worse elsewhere soon. Amarillo’s Proposition A, ““Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance,” is part of a larger strategy to ban abortion nationwide (The New Yorker):
Proposition A is alarming enough on its own. But it’s part of a bigger strategic play. At a time when Donald Trump is insisting that abortion should be left up to the states, a fervent group of anti-abortion activists are working behind the scenes to achieve a different goal. “The Dobbs decision really was a pro-choice decision, by leaving it up to the states instead of saying that abortion is a great social, moral, and political evil,” Mark Lee Dickson, a minister from East Texas, who is the driving force behind the sanctuary-city movement, told me, referring to the decision that overturned Roe. Dickson’s goal is nothing less than a nationwide ban on abortion, enacted by the courts. The path there may well lead through the Texas Panhandle—which means that the fight against it is happening here, too.
Amarillo became the second panhandle city in Texas (along with Clarendon) “to reject both the original and amended versions” of the ordinance in June. But Lubbock, Abilene, and San Angelo all said aye.
On June 11, 2019, Waskom, Texas, became the first city to pass the Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance. Since then, the Amarillo Tribune has verified that 69 cities have passed a Sanctuary City Ordinance in states beyond Texas, including Illinois, New Mexico, Nebraska, Iowa, Louisiana and Ohio. Lubbock is the largest city that has adopted the ordinance.
None of the 69 Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinances prohibit or ban contraceptives such as birth control. Mail-in pills that would induce an abortion and abortions performed within city limits are banned under the ordinances as well as under state law after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. No abortion clinics were in any of the cities that have adopted the Sanctuary City ordinance.
God bless her. But if you’re old enough to remember these folks in office it’s just weird so see. And good weird. But so weird. https://t.co/8mb1d3Z8Nn
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris warned voters on Thursday that Republican Donald Trump and his allies would scale back healthcare programs if he wins the White House and said his comments at a Wednesday rally were offensive to women.
In a brief press conference, Vice President Harris reminded voters that former President Trump had tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, during his 2017-2021 presidency.
#1 Ahh yes the special day when Donald Trump held a Rose Garden celebration with his best House GOP friends when they passed a bill to abolish Obamacare. What joy they felt on that special day. pic.twitter.com/vyQyjxXi7t
