Trump Completely Forgets Where He Is After Mocking Mitch McConnell

The longest-serving Senate leader in U.S. history is now no more than a punch line.

Donald Trump railed against Mitch McConnell at this North Carolina rally on Sunday while McConnell was present, stating that he wanted the minority leader gone because he “helped” the Democrats raise inflation and overspend. Trump even went so far as to mock McConnell’s March endorsement.

“That guy. Can you believe he endorsed me? Boy, that must have been a painful day in his life. Every time I think of it he didn’t have to do that, he provided the necessary votes. What a disgrace.”

Trump then seemed to forget where he was as he went on to shout out Republicans he actually liked, telling the North Carolina crowd that they had the “best of all right here, David McCormick. Where’s David? Is he around someplace? You know, we just left him. He’s a great guy.”

The Republican Senate candidate was not “around” and had no reason to be because he is currently running for Senate in Pennsylvania, not North Carolina.

McConnell has privately railed about how much he dislikes Trump. According to a new biography, he has called the former president “stupid” and “narcissistic” and said that he had “done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete.” He also stated plainly that the MAGA movement was “completely wrong” and something that even Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize.”

But in public, it’s a different story: McConnell voted to acquit Trump during his second impeachment, focused on the January 6 insurrection, and endorsed Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

The minority leader’s spinelessness has gotten him absolutely nothing, and his party is no longer his. Now he’s mere cannon fodder for a man who can’t even remember what state he’s in.

Donald Trump left no illusions about a peaceful transfer to power in his closing message at his rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday.

First, Trump lamented how his “world’s favorite chart done by the Border Patrol” allegedly told him that “we had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left.”

“I shouldn’t have left,” Trump said.

If nearly any other politician had made a remark saying that they shouldn’t have left office, this could be interpreted as feeling bad over losing an election. In Trump’s case, however, his words evoke the chaos surrounding the 2020 election, his fake elector schemes to stay in office, and the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection for which he has neither taken responsibility nor faced accountability.

Later in the evening, in Macon, Georgia, he went on to describe what the beginning of his second term would look like should he win.

“You watch, it’s going to be so good, it’s going to be so much fun, it’ll be nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular, but it’s going to be something,” Trump said.

The former president’s comments are a reminder that he has repeatedly said during this campaign about how he wants to be a dictator “on day one.” Trump has vowed to immediately ram through far-right plans like mass deportations and ill-advised tariffs, which certainly wouldn’t stop after his day one as president.

The nastiness Trump is referring to would almost certainly be targeted toward any lawmakers or civil servants who attempt to stop his crazy decisions. To that end, while there’s (hopefully) little he can do about legislators and politicians who oppose him, the former president and convicted felon already has a plan to purge the federal workforce of those who would be disloyal to him or his far-right policies.

The election is only one day away, and Trump is telling the public how bad his second term is going to be. The question is whether this is what voters in key states want, or if Trump will be sent back to Mar-a-Lago in defeat for a second time—and if that happens peacefully.

Elon Musk’s daily $1 million giveaway to registered voters is headed back to state court after a judge on Friday rejected his bid to move a Pennsylvania lawsuit against him and his America PAC. The decision is bad news for Musk’s attempt to delay possible accountability over the blatantly pro-Trump lottery.

On Monday, Philadelphia District Attorney Lawrence Krasner sued the tech mogul and his super PAC over the lottery, which awards $1 million each day to a registered voter in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who signs a pledge to support the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. Krasner argued that under Pennsylvania law, only the state can run a lottery for the benefit of the state’s seniors. 

The Philadelphia District Attorney also alleged that neither Musk nor the PAC published clear rules for the giveaway or explained how they are protecting entrants’ personal information. The lawsuit questioned whether the million-dollar winners are actually random, considering that two of them had attended Trump rallies.

Musk was required to attend a court proceeding in Pennsylvania on Thursday and not only didn’t show up but delayed the case by asking that it be moved to federal court, claiming that the lawsuit raised questions about free speech and election interference more suited to federal law. The state judge then decided to place the lawsuit on hold until a federal court decided whether to hear the case.  

Now that a federal court has declined to take the case, it goes back to a Pennsylvania state court, which will decide if Musk or the super PAC broke any state laws. Last week, 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. 

Despite the setback, Musk still may have successfully delayed the case until after Election Day on Tuesday, as the earliest proceedings in the lawsuit could begin would be Monday and Krasner would have to hope for a favorable injunction to stop the giveaway that day. Musk could keep his giveaway going through the weekend. However, one can still hope that a billionaire openly giving away money for political purposes will face consequences.

Donald Trump doubled down Friday on his disturbing comments about placing Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad.

During a noisy campaign stop in Warren, Michigan, Trump refused to back down on his wild comments attacking Cheney, a moderate Republican who has been campaigning extensively with Kamala Harris ahead of the election.

“She’s a war hawk. She kills people. She wanted uh, even in my administration, she was pushing that we go to war with everybody,” Trump said. “And I said that if you ever gave her a rifle, [indistinguishable] if you ever do that, she wouldn’t be doing too well.”

“If she had to do it herself, and she had to face the consequences of battle, she wouldn’t be doing it. So it’s easy for her to talk, but she wouldn’t be doing it,” Trump continued. “She’s actually a disgrace.”

Trump also called Cheney a “disaster” and a “coward,” during his stop in Dearborn, Michigan, according to the Associated Press.

Trump’s original remarks to Tucker Carlson from a rally Thursday night suggested that Cheney ought to be viscerally confronted with her own hawkishness.

“They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies.’ She always wanted to go to war with people,” Trump said.

“She’s a radical war hawk,” he continued. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

(Trump reportedly dodged the Vietnam War draft by saying he had bone spurs.)

Arizona’s attorney general announced Friday that she will be investigating Trump over his violent comment about Cheney and whether it qualifies as a “death threat.”

The Republican ticket has redoubled its efforts to paint Trump as a peacemaker as it attempts to siphon support from Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, who have expressed disappointment with Harris’s nonstatements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (A particularly ridiculous pitch given Trump’s insistence that Israel should “go further” in its military campaign in the Middle East.)

Trump’s phony antiwar farce also comes as he faces criticism from moderate Republicans such as Cheney and retired generals, including Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Cheney is a veritable war hawk, but Trump’s pitch as an antiwar president is blatantly dishonest and evidence of some strange memory hole about the Trump presidency.

During his campaign, Trump has repeatedly asserted there were no wars under his administration and claimed that not a single U.S. soldier in Afghanistan was killed for an 18-month stretch while he was in office. Both claims are completely untrue.

During Trump’s presidency, there were U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as ongoing civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia. While he was in office, there were 45 hostile deaths and 63 total deaths in Afghanistan, with no alleged 18-month gap in casualties. In fact, Trump increased the number of airstrikes in Afghanistan, which led to a 330 percent increase in civilian casualties.

The reality of Trump’s time in office was much more volatile. Trump regularly stoked international conflict, nearly tweeting us into a nuclear war with North Korea on several occasions. He withdrew from a nonproliferation agreement with Iran, allegedly helped to incite a failed coup in Venezuela, and supported a Saudi-backed war in Yemen.

Editor’s Note: This piece was written after Cook Political Report noted on its website that Colorado’s 4th congressional district has been moved to “lean Republican.”

The political forecaster has since corrected an error in its original update. Cook is predicting a greater chance of Democratic victory in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, Boebert’s old district—not the 4th congressional district, where she is now running.

Boebert won the 3rd district in 2022 by a mere 546 votes. Her Democratic challenger at the time, Adam Frisch, is running again this election against Republican Jeff Hurd.

Could Representative Lauren Boebert actually lose her spot in the House? Recent polling shows it may be possible.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Friday reported that Boebert has lost ground in Colorado’s 4th congressional district, and moved the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican. Though the MAGA Republican is still holding onto a small lead, that seems to be mostly thanks to the heavily Republican makeup of the district, rather than any tactful campaigning by Boebert.

The Republican congresswoman barely hung onto her seat in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district in 2022, winning by only 546 votes. After that narrow victory, and after becoming the center of a national scandal for her behavior during a performance of Beetlejuice, Boebert made a surprise switch to run in the neighboring 4th district.

She aims to fill the seat left empty by Republican Representative Ken Buck who retired this year. At the time of her announcement, Buck didn’t have many kind words for Boebert, whom he said made “George Santos look like a saint.”

On Tuesday, Boebert will face off against Democrat Trisha Calvarese, a first-time candidate, who has attacked the Republican on IVF and veterans rights.

And though Republicans make up nearly 34 percent of registered active voters in the conservative stronghold—with Democrats holding onto only 15 percent of the electorate—Boebert has not been universally embraced in Colorado’s 4th.

“I don’t appreciate, as a Christian, people saying they’re Christian to get your vote and then turning out to be a lowlife, and now I just kind of think of her as a lowlife,” one voter told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. While some Republicans said they’d hold their nose, despite Boebert’s “antics,” just to avoid voting for the Democrat, that may not be the case for everyone.