Trump claims he’s ‘healthier than Kamala’ in rant about medical information: Live

Speaking in Oaks yesterday, Trump called on voters to get out and vote on January 5 2025, two months after Election Day – inviting very much the snorts of derision you might expect.

James Liddell has the details.

Stumping for Harris-Walz in Georgia, the 44th president took the opportunity to lay into the local MAGA congresswoman over her latest line of nonsense.

Here’s Graig Graziosi on his being mistaken for Joe Biden during a stop at McDonald’s during the same trip.

Here’s an unlikely Democrat voter.

Rivera, a long-time Fox News commentator, explained his decision to break with Trump at length on X yesterday, noting that he had stuck with the 45th president throughout his many scandals in office but has not spoken to him since November 2020, shortly after he began his election denial narrative.

“Geraldo who?” was Steven Cheung’s only comment when asked about this yesterday but it’s hard to see Trump being able to resist attacking his old friend on Truth Social.

Here’s Sarah Matthews, the Republican’s own former White House deputy press secretary, not holding back on what’s at stake in conversation with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell yesterday.

Speaking of the cost of living, economists are warning that the Republican’s nominee’s proposals would actually make matters worse for American consumers, not better.

Not much of any substance came out of the Republican’s weird failed town hall in Pennsylvania last night but he did explain why he keeps going on about Thomas Harris’s fictional cannibal gourmet.

“You know when I go Hannibal Lecter, you know what I am talking about,” Trump told his audience, having been asked about, er, inflation.

“It’s a way of demeaning, they say ‘Hannibal Lecter, why would he mention him?’ Well you know why – because he was a sick puppy, and we have sick puppies coming into our country.

“I figure that’s better than wasting a lot of words, you just say, ‘Hannibal Lecter, we don’t want him’.”

This was another excruciating moment, since we’re on the subject.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson says he will give an update today on his own investigation into last month’s CNN report alleging that he posted lewd and racist comments on a website called Nude Africa 10 years ago.

Robinson has threatened to sue the network over its reporting, which alleged, among other things, that he declared on the site that he was a “Black NAZI” and dreamed of owning slaves.

Robinson has since hired a Virginia law firm to investigate and will speak about the matter at a press conference in Raleigh at 9am today, local time.

Fireworks assured.

Here’s Rhian Lubin’s most recent report on his faltering race for the governor’s mansion against the state’s Attorney General Josh Stein.

A conservative activist has accused the Democratic presidential nominee of plagiarising passages in her 2009 book Smart on Crime, co-authored with Joan O’C Hamilton.

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute think-tank, published a thread on X yesterday featuring analysis by Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber, alleging that the VP lifted “verbatim language” from uncited sources in the book 15 years ago.

The book in question focuses on policy and draws on Harris’s experience prosecuting crimes ranging from child sexual assault to murder in Alameda County and San Francisco, California.

The Harris campaign responded to the allegation by saying the candidate “clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout”.

“Right-wing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election, as Trump retreats to a conservative echo chamber refusing to face questions about his lies,” said Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer.

“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.”

That hasn’t stopped the likes of JD Vance making merry with the accusation, naturally.

The Republican nominee is still trying to move his hush money case away from Judge Juan Merchan, who has already obligingly moved his sentencing date to November 26, three weeks after the United States goes to the polls.

As you will no doubt recall, Trump was found guilty on May 30 this year by a New York jury on all 34 felony counts of falsifying documents to conceal a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in October 2016 to stay quiet about an affair she alleges they had a decade earlier.

Lawyers on Monday again pushed to transfer the matter to federal court, a move that would give him the ability to end the prosecution if he regains the presidency.

Trump’s attorneys renewed the request in a brief filed with the Manhattan-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals as they appealed US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s September 3 ruling rejecting the shift.

In their brief, Trump’s advocates cited the US Supreme Court’s July 1 decision that former president’s cannot be prosecuted for official actions taken in office.

In the hush money case, they said, jurors had improperly seen evidence of Trump’s official acts as president.

His lawyers said the state charges intruded on the authority of the presidency under the US Constitution.

If Trump beats Kamala Harris to the White House next month, he could seek to pardon himself for any federal crime or have his new Justice Department leadership dismiss any criminal cases pending against him in federal court.

But state criminal charges are beyond the reach of presidential pardon authority or Justice Department action.

Under American law, civil or criminal cases pursued against federal officials may be moved to federal court if they relate to do their duties in office.

Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote that prosecutors’ “use of official-acts evidence in grand jury proceedings and at trial violated the Constitution and threatens the ability of all future Presidents to fulfil that role”.

The former president was also in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania last night, taking part in a town hall event in suburban Philadelphia – Oaks, Montgomery County, to be exact – hosted by puppy killer and sometime South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

But the event quickly turned into a confused, impromptu dance party when two people in the audience suffered medical emergencies, leaving Trump awkwardly bopping his head on stage to a selection of pop music and show tunes while the afflicted were assisted by medics, having apparently fainted in the heat of the auditorium.

The bizarre interlude was rightly ridiculed by Kamala Harris and drew some truly desperate spinning from Trump’s embattled spokesman Steven Cheung:

The playlist, since you ask, ranged from Luciano Pavarotti belting out “Ave Maria” and Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman doing “Time To Say Goodbye” through “It’s a Man’s World” by James Brown, “YMCA” by The Village People, “Hallelujah” by Rufus Wainwright, “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinead O’Connor, “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses and Barbara Streisand singing “Memory” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats.

Io Dodds has this report on a weird evening, even by Trump’s standards.