I’m reading through a Puck newsletter, sent out under the heading “The Vibes Election.” Some of this is similar to what I discussed in yesterday’s Backchannel — Happy v. Mad, etc. But most of it zeroes in on the idea that Harris’ campaign is all vibes and no substance, a sugar high, something that can’t last. Will it be enough to carry her to Election Day? Here’s one snippet.
Put another way: Vibes, baby! Harris has not outlined any specific economic agenda, speaking only in generic terms about corporate greed, standing with labor unions, protecting Social Security and Obamacare, and fighting for the middle class. She is framing the election simply as “the choice about what direction this country will go in”—conveying an agreeable set of center-left values against Trump rather than a 10-point plan for this or a white paper for that.
A number of new developments since yesterday in the hack-and-dump attack on the Trump campaign, but none stands out with as much color and irony as the cameo by longtime Trump acolyte Roger Stone.
Stone was apparently the victim of a phishing attack, according to multiple news outlets, citing anonymous investigators. Stone also said so himself, for what that’s worth.
The hackers used access to Stone’s email account to try to break into the account of a senior Trump campaign official as part of a persistent effort to access campaign networks, one of the sources said. The hacking incident, which occurred in June, set off a scramble in the Trump campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, which spotted the intrusion attempts, to contain the incident and to determine if there was a broader cyber threat from Iran.
The implication of the day’s reporting was that Stone was the weak link point of entry for the hack-and-dump, but I want to be clear that no one as far as I can tell has yet confirmed that the attack on Stone directly led to the hack-and-dump operation against the Trump campaign.
Stone told the NYT that both his Hotmail (old school!) and his Gmail accounts were compromised. Stone said he was first contacted by Microsoft a few months ago, and then a few weeks later by the FBI. Using Stone, who was convicted in the Mueller investigation then later corruptly pardoned by President Trump only to turn up again in the thick of Jan. 6, to exploit access to the Trump campaign is a scriptwriter’s fantasy plot twist.
Among the other developments:
The FBI publicly confirmed it is investigating the hack-and-dump operation (though it didn’t name Trump), apparently as part of a larger investigation.
The Biden-Harris campaign was also reportedly targeted:
At least three staffers on the Biden-Harris campaign were targeted with so-called spear-phishing emails intended to trick recipients into clicking on seemingly legitimate links or files in a bid to gain access to their internal communications, the person said, adding that the attempts took place before President Biden stepped aside for re-election and was succeeded by Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. The hacking attempts were apparently unsuccessful, the person said.
The FBI briefed the Biden-Harris campaign in June “about Iranian hackers targeting that campaign,” CNN reported, citing an anonymous source.
Iran remains a prime suspect in the hack, but the U.S. government hasn’t yet pointed the finger at Iran. It’s reportedly less clear whether Iran was involved in the dump.
“[I]nvestigators anticipate further attempts by the hackers to disseminate other materials,” the NYT reported.
It remains to be seen if the documents already confirmed to have been dumped with Politico, the NYT, and WaPo will yield more news stories beyond the one Politico published Saturday.
Tina Peters Convicted
Former Mesa County, Colorado clerk Tina Peters was convicted by a jury in state court of tampering with voting machines that were under her control in the aftermath of the 2020 election – part of her now-notorious effort to prove elements of Donald Trump’s Big Lie.
The jury deliberated for nearly five hours before convicting Peters on seven of the 10 counts against her. The top two bulleted items are felonies:
three counts of attempting to influence a public servant;
one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation;
first-degree official misconduct;
violation of duty; and
failure to comply with an order from the Secretary of State.
Let’s begin by acknowledging the alarming tableau of the world’s richest man inserting himself forcefully into the presidential campaign of a would-be authoritarian and co-opting his potent global information platform to do so.
As ominous as that sounds, it is also buffoonish – and there’s no reason for those two things to be mutually exclusive.
Last evening’s Elon Musk interview with Donald Trump on the occasion of his return to X/Twitter faced the same kind of comical technical snafus that bedeviled Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch with Musk.
Musk blamed a denial of service attack, which is to say malign outside actors trying to shut down the Trump interview. But The Verge throws cold water on that claim, reporting:
The rest of X appears to be working normally, however, and a source at the company confirmed to The Verge that there wasn’t actually a denial-of-service attack. Another X staffer said there was a “99 percent” chance Elon was lying about an attack.
Nothing that was said (or mumbled) rose to the same level of newsworthiness as the grotesque symbolism of the moment.
A pro-Trump super PAC is launching a $100 million TV ad buy between now and Labor Day in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
In a decision that, if upheld, would keep Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., off the presidential ballot in New York and possibly jeopardize his ballot access in other states, a New York state judge ruled that Kennedy falsely claimed to be a resident there when in fact he lives in California.
Kamala Harris’ popularity “has driven a large correction in economic sentiment,” Brian Beutler notes, which requires some rethinking of the lessons of the past three years.
Abortion Watch
TPM’s Kate Riga: SCOTUS Didn’t Go Nuclear On Abortion In 2024. It’ll Have Plenty Of Options To In 2025
AP: “More than 100 pregnant women in medical distress who sought help from emergency rooms were turned away or negligently treated since 2022, an Associated Press analysis of federal hospital investigations found.”
No Other Way Out
Lawfare’s Natalie Orpett, on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s disastrous decision to revoke the plea agreements entered into with the accused 9/11 plotters:
What makes Secretary Austin’s order so destructive is that guilty pleas are the only way out. They represent the sole possibility for 9/11 families to see some semblance of the public reckoning a trial is meant to provide. The defense, the prosecutors, and the convening authority all recognize this. That’s why they made these deals. But Austin chose to ignore this reality—just the latest in a long tradition of political leaders determined to avoid the choices necessary to bring this case to an end.
Words To Live By
I keep referring back to a comment that basketball great Kevin Durant made to the international media at the Paris Olympics: “A lot of bullshit happens in our country. But a lot of great things happen, too.” Indeed.
The Republican-controlled Georgia State Election Board approved a rule last week, only a few months shy of the presidential election, giving county officials new authority over election certification — and potentially giving the board the ability to delay certification of election results in a state that served as a hotbed for conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump himself in 2020.
The Supreme Court punted on the major abortion cases it heard during the term that ended last month. And while the Court’s inaction was initially celebrated, it means we head into the 2024 election with some of the biggest threats to the procedure delayed, but not permanently denied.
One case is all but certain to return; others have been steadily working their way up the federal judiciary in the meantime.
I’m not the first to note this. I saw a headline somewhere over the weekend that the campaign had reset to one between the Happy Tribe and the Angry Tribe. It’s always reductive to try to capture the vast complexity of two national campaigns in a simple catch phrase or binary opposition. But those broad descriptions can capture realities that transcend the details; they are often the takeaway for those watching only at a distance.
It doesn’t take much imagination to think of Trump and the MAGA movement as the Angry Tribe. I mean, they’ve always been Team Angry, or maybe Team Grievance or Team Vengeance. But what about the Harris campaign and the earlier Biden campaign? The Biden campaign, which I supported greatly, was not a happy tribe. I don’t mean that as a criticism. Happy isn’t the only or most important part of a political campaign. Especially when there’s quite a lot not to be happy about.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, falsely saying that he knew nothing about it and had “no idea who is behind it.” In fact, he flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025. And in a 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said, “This is a great group and 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.”
A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”
The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”
Project 2025’s 887-page “Mandate for Leadership” document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.
Democrats and liberal groups have criticized the project’s policy agenda as “extreme” and “authoritarian” while pointing out the many connections between Trump and the hundreds of people who contributed to the project.
“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have always been disingenuous,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are alumni of the Trump administration or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is unsurprising further evidence of the close connection there.”
Several speakers in the videos acknowledge that the Trump administration was slowed by staffing challenges and the inexperience of its political appointees, and they offer lessons learned from their stumbles. Some of the advice appears at odds with conservative dogma, including a suggestion that the next administration may need to expand key government agencies to achieve the larger goal of slashing federal regulations.
Rick Dearborn, who helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team and later served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, recalled in one video how “tough” it was to find people to fill all of the key positions in the early days of the administration.
The personnel part of Project 2025 is “so important to the next president,” Dearborn says. “Establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now about what is a transition about, why do I want to be engaged in it, what would my role be — that’s a luxury that we didn’t have,” referring to a database of potential political appointees.
Dan Huff, a former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, says in another video that future appointees should be prepared to enact significant changes in American government and be ready to face blowback when they do.
“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”
“Eradicate Climate Change References”
The project’s experts outline regulatory and policy changes that future political appointees should prepare for in a Republican administration.
One video, titled “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” is a 50-minute discussion of supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out. In that video, Kozma says that U.S. intelligence agencies have named climate change as an increasingly dire threat to global stability, which, she says, illustrates how the issue “has infiltrated every part of the federal government.”
She then tells viewers that she sees climate change as merely a cover to engage in population control. “I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the” — here she makes air-quotes — “impact on the environment.” She adds, “This is part of their ultimate goal to control people.”
Later in the video, Katie Sullivan, the former acting assistant attorney general under Trump, advocates for removing so-called critical race theory from public education without saying how the federal government would accomplish that. (Elementary and secondary education curricula are typically set at the state and local level, not by the federal government.)
“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says. (Reached by phone, Sullivan told ProPublica to contact her press representative and hung up. A representative did not respond.)
Burton, in the Project 2025 video, urges future political appointees to work in OIRA and argues that the office should “increase its staffing levels considerably” in service of the conservative goal of reining in the so-called administrative state, namely the federal agencies that craft and issue new regulations.
“Fifty people are not enough to adequately police the regulatory actions of the entire federal government,” Burton says. “OIRA is one of the few government agencies that limits the regulatory ambitions of other agencies.” (Burton confirmed in a brief interview that he appeared in the video and endorsed expanding OIRA’s staffing levels.)
Expanding the federal workforce — even an office tasked with scrutinizing regulations — would seem to cut against the conservative movement’s long-standing goal of shrinking government. For anyone confused by Project 2025’s insistence that a conservative president should fill all appointee slots and potentially grow certain functions, Spencer Chretien, a former Trump White House aide who is now Project 2025’s associate director, addresses the tension in one video.
“Some on the right even say that we, because we believe in small government, should just lead by example and not fill certain political positions,” Chretien says. “I suggest that it would be almost impossible to bring any conservative change to America if the president did that.”
A Trump Government-in-Waiting
The speakers in the Project 2025 videos are careful not to explicitly side with Trump or talk about what a future Trump administration might do. They instead refer to a future “conservative president” or “conservative administration.”
But the links between the speakers in the videos and Trump are many. Most of those served Trump during his administration, working at the White House, the National Security Council, NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, USAID and the departments of Justice, Interior, State, Homeland Security, Transportation and Health and Human Services. Another speaker has worked in the Senate office of J.D. Vance, Trump’s 2024 running mate.
Sullivan, the former DOJ acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which oversees billions in grant funding, appears in three different videos. Leavitt, who is in a training video titled “The Art of Professionalism,” worked in the White House press office during Trump’s first presidency and is now the national press secretary for his reelection campaign.
A consistent theme in the advice and testimonials offered by these Trump alums is that Project 2025 trainees should expect a hostile reception if they go to work in the federal government. Kozma, the former USAID deputy chief of staff, says in one video that “many” of her fellow Trump appointees experienced “persecution” during their time in government.
In a video titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration, warns viewers that Washington is a place that “does not share your conservative values,” and that new hires will find that “there’s so much hostility to basic traditional values.”
In the same video, Kristen Eichamer, a former deputy press secretary at the Trump-era NASA, says that the media pushed false narratives about then-President Trump and people who worked in his administration. “Being defamed on Twitter is almost a badge of honor in the Trump administration,” she says.
Outthinking “the Left”
The videos also offer less overtly political tutorials for future appointees, covering everything from how a regulation gets made to working with the media, the mechanics of a presidential transition process to obtaining a security clearance, and best practices for time management.
One recurring theme in the videos is how the next Republican administration can avoid the mistakes of the first Trump presidency. In one video, Roger Severino, the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Trump-era Department of Health and Human Services, explains that failure to meticulously follow federal procedure led to courts delaying or throwing out certain regulatory efforts on technical grounds.
Severino, who is also a longtime leader in the anti-abortion movement, goes on to walk viewers through the ins and outs of procedural law and says that they should prepare for “the left” to use every tool possible to derail the next conservative president. “This is a game of 3D chess,” Severino says. “You have to be always anticipating what the left is going to do to try to throw sand in the gears and trip you up and block your rule.” (In an email, Severino said he would forward ProPublica’s interview request to Heritage’s spokespeople, who did not respond.)
Operating under the assumption that some career employees might seek to thwart a future conservative president’s agenda, some of the advice pertains to how political appointees can avoid being derailed or bogged down by the government bureaucrats who work with them.
Sullivan urges viewers to “empower your political staff,” limit access to appointees’ calendars and leave out career staff from early meetings with more senior agency officials. “You are making it clear to career staff that your political appointees are in charge,” Sullivan says.
Other tips from the videos include scrubbing personal social media accounts of any content that’s “damaging, vulgar or contradict the policies you are there to implement” well before the new administration begins, as Kozma put it.
Alexei Woltornist, a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, encourages future appointees to bypass mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Instead, they should focus on conservative media outlets because those are the only outlets conservative voters trust.
“The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times, they’re not reading The Washington Post,” Woltornist says. “To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.”
And in a video about oversight and investigations, a group of conservative investigators advise future appointees on how to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by congressional committees or outside groups under the Freedom of Information Act.
“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” says Tom Jones, a former Senate investigator who now runs the American Accountability Foundation.
Jones adds that it’s possible that agency lawyers could cite exemptions in the public-records law to prevent the release of certain documents. But appointees are best served, he argues, if they don’t put important communications in writing in the first place.
“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”
Do you have any information about Project 2025 that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.
I don’t normally promote Morning Memo in the Editor’s Blog (though you should definitely sign up to receive it in your inbox), but you can’t really understand the Trump campaign hack and Iran’s attempt to interfere in the U.S. election without seeing all the key elements laid out in a timeline from June through today.
We’ve entered the mean season for the dark arts: foreign influence, computer hacks, and disinformation.
The question is whether we’re any better prepared to withstand them than we were in 2016. The outlook isn’t promising.
Let me pull together and try to bring into focus what’s happened in recent weeks, and especially over the past few days, that harkens back to the Russian influence scheme of 2016 but with the focus this time on Iran:
June 2024: “Mint Sandstorm—a group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit—sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor,” Microsoft would later reveal in a report on Iran’s malign activities.
July 9: In a briefing with reporters, U.S. intel officials declare Russia the “preeminent threat” to U.S. election security in 2024 and characterize Iran as a “chaos agent” without a specific preference in this election.
July 22: Politico begins receiving emails from an anonymous AOL account that a user, identified only as “Robert,” uses over the following weeks to provide “internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official.”
July 29: In second briefing with reporters, U.S. intel officials change their tune and declare that Iran now prefers that Trump lose and is engaged in covert online influence operations toward that end.
Aug. 8: The WaPo also receives material from an anonymous AOL user going by the name “Robert,” but the newspaper doesn’t immediately report on it.
Aug. 9: Microsoft issues a new warning that Iran has ramped up its cyber-enabled influence campaign to include fakes news sites and hacking attempts. For the first time, Microsoft publicly reveals the June phishing incident targeting a high-ranking official in a U.S. presidential campaign.
Aug 10: Politico reports on internal Trump campaign documents, revealing for the first time the communications with “Robert” that began July 22. Among the hacked materials was a 271-page research dossier used in the vetting of vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The Trump campaign confirms that some of its internal communications were hacked and blames Iran, pointing to the Microsoft report.
Aug. 11: While neither the U.S. government nor Microsoft have confirmed that the documents sent to news outlets were the product of an Iranian hack or identified which U.S. presidential campaign was the target of the Iranian phishing incident, the WaPo reports that “a person familiar with Microsoft’s work confirmed that the report’s reference was to the Trump campaign.” For the first time, the WaPo reveals that it, too, received the 271-page dossier marked as “privileged & confidential.”
Aug 12: The NYT reveals that it received “what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico,” but the newspaper doesn’t pinpoint when it received the trove.
It’s only August. There’s a long way until November.
“Buckle up,” warned Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired by Trump after the 2020 election for debunking Trump’s Big Lie.
Trump Confuses His Black Politicians
Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city council member and state senator, came forward Friday to say it was he and not former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown who was aboard a helicopter with Trump that ran into problems mid-flight and had to make an emergency landing:
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Trump had insisted Brown was aboard and threatened to the sue the NYT over the issue.
Indeed, Mr. Trump has often been in a foul mood the past few weeks. He has ranted about Ms. Harris. He has called her “nasty,” on “Fox & Friends,” and a “bitch,” repeatedly, in private, according to two people who heard the remark on different occasions. (“That is not language President Trump has used to describe Kamala, and it’s not how the campaign would characterize her,” Mr. Cheung said.)
‘The Nice Men Of The Left’
Rebecca Traister on the stark differences currently on display between how the men of the right and the left define masculinity:
On the one hand is the Republican Party’s view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership. …
This is not to suggest that these Democratic guys represent some perfect specimen of evolved masculinity. But taken as a whole, as male Democrats fall over one another in an effort to elect a woman to the presidency, they are presenting a different definition of masculine strength tied to women’s liberation and full civic participation and all but declaring it a new norm.
2024 Ephemera
NYT battleground state polls show Harris shoring up the Blue Wall that had been threatening to crumble on Biden: She now leads Trump among likely voters by the identical 50%-46% margin in each of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
NBC News: “False or misleading claims about the U.S. election that Elon Musk has posted to X this year have generated nearly 1.2 billion views, according to an analysis published Thursday by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.”
What In The World?
Every time I’m ready to move on from the tedium of NYT headline scrutiny, stuff like this happens:
NYT reaches new level of hyperbolic Trumpian unreality, calling Biden’s America “a nation consumed by war” pic.twitter.com/zfmpUCR1EG
The revised version currently still live is “Biden Promised Peace, but Will Leave His Successor a Nation Entangled in War.”
Judge Chutkan Agrees To Delay Jan. 6 Case
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s unopposed motion to delay the Jan. 6 case while the Justice Department sorts out the implications of the Supreme Court’s staggeringly ahistorical ruling on presidential immunity.
Chutkan set new deadlines of Aug. 30 for a joint status report from the parties and Sept. 5 for a status conference.
No Degradation Is Too Great For Vance
JD Vance on Trump dining with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who made racist comments about his wife and Trump has never fully disavowed: "The one thing I like about Donald Trump is he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn't mean you endorse… pic.twitter.com/gB1vr8G2qi
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