Trump to Get Billboard-Size Reminder of His Unpopularity at RNC

Former Donald Trump supporters will be featured on multiple billboards near the Milwaukee arena where the Republican National Convention will take place next week, with a simple message for the former president: I won’t vote for you.

The billboards are the handiwork of Republican Voters Against Trump, which has placed similar billboards around the city, sporting simple slogans like, “I won’t vote for a convicted felon.” The project, which has produced 15 billboards and one 60-second ad spot that will run in four swing states, is being funded by the Republican Accountability PAC, and targets moderate Republicans and right-leaning voters in key battlegrounds.

Scott Moore, a 63-year-old Army veteran from Nashville, Tennessee, is one of the former Trump backers whose face will be blown up and featured on the massive signs.

“I always thought a businessman could shake up the good ol’ boy system. I wasn’t thrilled about him, but I thought he was a successful businessman,” Moore told the Tennessee Lookout. He’d voted for Trump in 2016.

But later, he explained, “I saw that what he was doing was about him and not about our country.”

An estimated 2,429 delegates will attend the RNC, which begins Monday in Milwaukee, where they are expected to formally confirm Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Of those delegates, several are the very same fake electors alleged to have aided Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results in 2020.

To secure the party’s nomination, Trump must clinch 1,215 delegates. This seems likely, as he received 2,243 in the primaries, and former presidential candidate Nikki Haley released her 97 delegates this week, directing them to back Trump’s nomination.

President Joe Biden on Thursday ended a defiant press conference with a strange qualifier on his personal commitment to staying in the presidential race.

When asked directly whether he would consider withdrawing if polling numbers indicated Vice President Kamala Harris would fare better in a matchup against Donald Trump, the 81-year-old president said no, with one caveat.

“You earlier explained confidence in your vice president. If your team came back and showed you data that she would fare better against former President Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race?” a Scripps reporter asked.

“No, unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win,’” Biden said, adding “… me.”

“And no one’s saying that. No polls are saying that,” he added in a whisper, launching the room filled with the White House press corps into chaos. It was the last question of one of the most critical evenings of Biden’s presidency, as Democratic lawmakers weigh whether to formally strip their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Despite Biden’s insistence, national polls have shown Harris faring as well or better than him in a direct matchup against Trump in November.

Following a two-hour delay to the beginning of his first major press conference in recent memory, President Joe Biden flubbed almost as soon as he finished reading off the teleprompter.

Responding to a question Thursday about NATO’s reaction to Biden’s increasingly unsteady future in U.S. politics, the 81-year-old president stumbled over the names of who his vice president, and his major opponent, really were.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, mistakenly referring to Donald Trump instead of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Why did he call President Trump the Vice President?” asked the official X account of the House GOP moments after the verbal slip.

On Thursday, MSNBC dug up a clip from 2022 of Trump expressing some pretty convincing familiarity with the people behind Project 2025—and potentially hinting at knowing that the document was in the works.

“Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heridges to [sic] lay the groundwork,” Trump stumbled. “And Heridges does such an incredible job at that,” Trump added, stumbling again.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming,” Trump said, seeming to imply Project 2025.

The comments were made during an April 2022 keynote speech by Trump at a Heritage Foundation event where he was introduced by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In that speech, he praised Heritage Board Chairman Barb Van Andel-Gaby as well as Heritage fellows Tom Homan and Mark Morgan—all of whom he now claims he doesn’t know at all.

“Already we have shown the power of our winning formula, working closely with many of the great people at Heritage over the four incredible years that we’ve worked with you a lot, and we were just discussing it with Kevin,” Trump said during the 2022 speech in his typical rambling style. “They’re going to work on some other things that are going to be very exciting, I think, Kevin, I think maybe the most exciting of all.”

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump claimed late Wednesday night. Trump issued his first denial of Project 2025 last Friday, declaring to closed ears, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

CNN found nearly 140 former Trump aides and advisers who have contributed to Project 2025, including six former members of his Cabinet, four of his ambassadors, and Republican National Committee members appointed to their positions in coordination with the Trump campaign. The document functions as a sort of light-speed roadmap for an impending Republican presidency, laying pathways to actualize Trump’s mass deportation plan, consolidate federal agency power, and dismantle LGBTQ+ and abortion rights. Trump has tried in vain to distance himself from Project 2025 and its patently extreme agenda, presumably hoping to woo voters with softer stances before flipping once elected. Either Trump is struggling with a pretty sizable memory lapse, or he’s lying.

It may become easier than ever before to lock and load guns in the United States, a country plagued by gun violence, thanks to a small business keen on selling bullets in possibly the simplest way imaginable: a vending machine.

American Rounds LLC currently has its bullet vending machine operations in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas, though the company has plans to expand to several other states. The Dallas-based company claims that its “automated ammo retail machines” utilize artificial intelligence to ensure potential buyers are of legal purchasing age. The one-stop drop shops can be found in eight different supermarkets across the trio of Southern states.

“As a company our team are supporters of law abiding responsible gun ownership,” said Grant Magers, CEO of American Rounds, in an email to Gizmodo. “We believe in the second amendment and that … a safe and secure method to sell ammunition is needed in the market.”

Magers told NPR in a separate statement that the ammo supply company intends to open another vending machine in Colorado this week and has had “requests” to bring their services to Hawaii, Alaska, California, Florida, and “every state in between for the most part.”

“We have currently about 200 grocery stores that we’re working on fulfilling orders on machines for,” Magers told the radio network.

American Rounds is of the belief that its service is safer than the traditional method of ammunition sales, which typically sees boxes stocked on shelves in gun stores or big-box stores, such as Walmart or Cabela’s. But selling just ammunition requires very little government oversight: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives does not require someone to obtain a federal license in order to sell bullets, and only a handful of states have passed laws necessitating background checks for their sale or purchase.

“If you look at the way it is currently sold in our country, we are the safest and most secure method of ammo retail sales on the market today,” Magers said, noting the machines also prevent underage customers from simply stealing boxes of bullets.

Critics of the easy-access machines argue that American Rounds isn’t providing any solutions that aren’t already presented by traditional gun retailers, who have the added ability to research whether someone’s criminal convictions prohibit them from buying ammunition, as well as assess a buyer’s mental and emotional state.

“A vending machine is not going to be able to say, ‘Hey are you OK?’ or ‘Why do you need this ammunition?’” George Tita, a professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine, told NPR.

Against the background of expanding weapons access, gun violence in the United States has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent. In the first half of the year, 287 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 301 people and injured another 1,261, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.