Trump’s New Post on Obama Proves He’s Losing It

Donald Trump appears convinced that his lead over Vice President Kamala Harris is so impressive, even his old archnemesis will vote for him.

In a Truth Social post Friday, the Republican presidential nominee suggested that former President Barack Obama was in his camp.

“Obama admits a total lack of enthusiasm for Kamala, especially with Black Men,” Trump wrote. “I think Obama will be voting for me because he doesn’t like the fact that Kamala is an extremely Low IQ Person!”

That is despite the fact that Trump has attacked Obama for the better part of the last two decades, spending his time launching personal barbs at the former president and dogging the legitimacy of Obamacare.

In 2010, Trump stoked the flames of a right-wing rumor that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, participating in calls for the former president to publish his birth certificate (which, once distributed by the White House, revealed that Obama was born in Hawaii). Obama did not respond to Trump by name in the document’s announcement but alluded to the real estate developer’s request as one of “sideshows and carnival barkers.”

Days after unveiling his birth certificate, Obama addressed Trump directly at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner over the political stunt, mocking him for supercharging the conspiracy while the former reality TV star sat unamused in the crowd.

“I know that he’s taken some flak lately,” Obama said at the time. “But no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate issue to rest, and that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

During his first bid for the Oval Office, Trump repeatedly derided his predecessor, decrying Obama as “the worst president maybe in the history of our country.” At a campaign rally during that election season, Trump flagrantly described the former president as a “founder of ISIS.”

Obama has since consistently endorsed Trump’s opponents. In 2016, Obama endorsed and campaigned for Hillary Clinton in her race for president. In 2020, he heralded Joe Biden, and this year, he has made several appearances since the Democratic National Convention in campaign ads and interviews rooting for Harris.

Right-wing figures are latching on to an outlandish claim that Kamala Harris used a teleprompter to answer audience questions during a Univision town hall Thursday.

Fox News’s Sean Hannity, pro-Israel violence-funding billionaire Bill Ackman, and allegedly unwitting Russian propagandist Benny Johnson are among several MAGA pundits and influencers who have begun to claim that Harris must have been using a teleprompter to respond to audience questions, because one was visible on the set of her town hall.

Both Hannity and Ackman have since deleted their posts criticizing Harris—probably because a little digging quickly revealed the claim to be an obvious lie.

Enrique Acevedo, the town hall’s moderator, offered a helpful fact-check of the right-wing claims, given that he was the one actually using the teleprompter.

“The prompter displayed my introduction (in Spanish) and then it switched to a timer,” Acevedo wrote late Thursday on X. “Any claim to the contrary is simply untrue.”

Daniel Coronell, the president of Univision News, was also quick to shut down the right-wing chatter Thursday evening, resharing one of the conspiratorial posts on X with some crucial context.

“That’s not true. The teleprompter that displays a text written in Spanish was a support element for the town hall moderator. I can tell you this with first-hand knowledge because I was in charge of the television program,” Coronell wrote.

It makes sense that MAGAites are a little touchy about the whole teleprompter situation. Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that he doesn’t use one—even when one is sitting right in front of him. In reality, Trump regularly uses a teleprompter, before veering wildly off-script into incoherent rambling he calls “the weave.”

Israel has released American journalist Jeremy Loffredo four days after arresting and detaining him for reporting on Iranian missile strikes in the country.

Still, the judge who ordered Loffredo’s release said that the journalist must remain in the country until October 20 to give investigators more time to bring forth additional charges or for further interrogation, his attorney Lea Tsemel told The Intercept. An Israeli news outlet also reported that police took Loffredo’s phone, jailbroke the device, and are searching it for more evidence.

Loffredo, an independent journalist working for The Grayzone, reported on where Iran’s missiles landed in Israel, including the Israel Defense Force’s Nevatim Air Base as well as an intelligence base, according to Israeli news site Ynetnews.

Loffredo’s charges included aiding the enemy during wartime and providing information to the enemy. He reported that Israel’s attacks on Gaza were launched from the Nevatim base and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private jet was located there.

Much of the information Loffredo reported on was similar to reports from Israeli media, as well as footage of where a missile landed feet away from Mossad headquarters. The arrest drew the attention of the U.S. government, and representatives from the U.S. Embassy in Israel attended a hearing at the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court where police requested to extend his detention.

According to Tsemel, the charges against Loffredo carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or death. Israeli authorities argue that Loffredo’s reporting aids Iran in studying future targets. The IDF censor barred Israeli media from publishing the exact locations where Iran’s missiles landed.

“He published the information openly and fully, without attempting to hide anything. If this information constitutes aiding the enemy, many other journalists in Israel, including Israeli reporters, should also be arrested,” said Tsemel. “A spy would not have acted so publicly and transparently.”

Police in Israel argued for Loffredo to be detained for seven days, only to be overruled by a judge who ordered a one-day detention. On Thursday, a different judge ordered Loffredo’s release, and an Israeli journalist testified that Loffredo’s reporting did not violate the government censor, saying that Israel’s outlets had produced similar work. However, police filed a last-minute appeal late Thursday to keep Loffredo in custody.

On Friday morning, a district court judge finally ordered Loffredo’s release, citing a lack of evidence and stating that he doesn’t pose a threat, Tsemel said.

Israel’s year-long war in Gaza has killed at least 128 journalists and media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Israel has refused to allow international journalists into the territory to report on the war. It seems the country might be afraid of what independent journalists might discover.

Finally, the mainstream media is willing to say it: Elon Musk is meddling in November’s election.

As The New York Times reported Friday in a sweeping roundup of Musk’s campaign to elect Donald Trump, “the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.”

As the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), Musk has been able to propagate conspiracy theories about the election, immigrants, and Democrats freely without pushback to his 201 million followers and the platform’s 500 million monthly active users. As the Times pointed out, since he endorsed Trump in July, Musk has posted at least 109 times about the Republican candidate and the election.

But the Times also confirmed something not previously known: Musk is coordinating with the Trump campaign to suppress negative stories about Trump.

Last month, X deactivated a reporter’s account after he shared leaked information from the Trump campaign about JD Vance. X blocked links to the findings and the journalist remains banned from the platform. The Times reported that X did so after the Trump campaign “connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events.”

Musk has used X to help Trump in other ways as well. Most recently, Musk took over the @America handle on the website to promote his America PAC, which now aims to mobilize nearly one million voters to cast ballots for Trump in November.

They are doing so by building out a ground game with 2,500 organizers in the field but also through digital efforts such as paying individuals $47 to get information on swing-state voters. As the Times highlights, Trump’s team seems to be leaning on Musk’s PAC and other outside groups to carry out these operations. This is, in part, because of new federal guidelines that allow this kind of campaign outsourcing.

It appears that Musk is trying his best to become the “unofficial president” and take over the Trump campaign, like he’s taken over all his other failed projects.

A nine-minute, unedited, undercover interview with Roger Stone revealed some of the MAGA ally’s more disturbing goals for a second Trump administration.

The covert recording of a discussion between Stone and an undercover journalist at a meet and greet in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 4, published by documentarian Lauren Windsor, caught Stone admitting live on camera that he already intends to send “armed guards to dispute the election in Detroit” and to imprison “former Attorney General Bill Barr if Trump returns to power.”

Under the guise of discussing a far-right program to get more like-minded people back into the federal government, Stone shared his disdain for Barr, deriding him as a “traitorous piece of human garbage.” He also lamented that, while president, “Donald Trump never controlled the Justice Department.”

“He’s a CIA general counsel,” Stone said. “He’s a piece of shit. Trump read a law review article, never checked his background, and made him attorney general. Once we get back in, he has to go to prison! He has to go to prison. He’s a criminal.”

On the topic of retaking the government, Stone specified that it’s a “state question, not a federal question.”

“So it’s not who controls the federal government, it’s who controls the state government,” Stone continued. “They use the election system to harass you when you’re in office, but this is about an election. We gotta fight it out on a state-to-state basis.”

At the same event, Stone was witnessed insisting that millions of voters were being purged from voter rolls in battleground states, including North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Nevada, as well as Republican strongholds like Florida.

It’s not even the first time this year that Windsor has caught Stone on a hot mic.

During a Catholics for Catholics event at Mar-a-Lago in March, the liberal filmmaker got Stone to spill the beans on the right’s preemptive effort to undermine the 2024 election results.

“We’re working on this,” Stone said at the time, noting that “overconfidence” in voter turnout was one of the biggest issues for Republicans. He then said that Trump’s side would be armed with “lawyers, judges, [and] technology” to challenge the official results if necessary.

“At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge—his home phone number standing by—so you can stop it,” Stone said. “We made no preparations last time, none.… There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done.”