Trump

New Republic - “This evening, I’m also officially challenging Crooked Joe to an 18-hole golf match right here on Doral’s Blue Monster,” Trump said, after challenging Biden to a debate with “no moderators, no holds barred.”...Trump then claimed Biden “doesn’t know what a synagogue is” and claimed Biden got “three or four” face lifts. “You know what took him so long to get into the race?” Trump asked the crowd. “The face lift didn’t work.”...

Trump spent much of his speech fearmongering about asylum-seekers, comparing them to Hannibal Lecter. He then floated a conspiracy that countries across South America, Asia, Africa, and “every other place” are intentionally emptying “their prisons, their jails, and their mental institutions” to send “bloodthirsty terrorists, savage gang members, and child predators into the United States to prey on our people, to prey on you, to prey on everybody.”  “Did anyone ever see The Silence of the Lambs? Did you ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” Trump asked the crowd while railing against asylum-seekers. “He was a lovely man. He would love to have you for dinner. He will take you. He had many people for dinner.”

Trump appeared cognizant of how far-fetched this comparison was, noting that the media “will say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible what Trump would say. He is rambling about Hannibal Lecter.’ No I’m not, rambling,” he said in defense of his recurring non sequitur likening asylum-seekers to a fictional character who eats people. “We are allowing people from insane asylums and mental institutions into our country by the tens of thousands.”...

Trump said he would take over Washington, D.C., so that it is “no longer a nightmare of murder and crime.” He also claimed people get “shot, mugged, raped” every time they visit the Jefferson Memorial or Washington Monument.

Mediaite -  Senator JD Vance (R-OH) is a leading candidate to be running mate for former President Donald Trump, a selection the former president is expected to make in the coming days. Yet back in 2016, when Trump was running for president for the first time, and Vance was just the author of Hillbilly Elegy, he suggested he believed one of the women accusing Trump of sexual assault. Many words have been written about Vance’s past comments about Trump, which include him declaring him an “idiot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler. In a comment that had yet to be unearthed until now, Vance went so far as to signal on MSNBC that he believed the story of Jessica Leeds, who claimed Trump groped her.

Leeds came forward with several other women who claimed they were sexually assaulted by Trump. She testified in the E. Jean Carroll civil trial of which Trump was found liable for sexual assault. Her account was dismissed by Trump and his media surrogates at the time of the 2016 race, but Vance argued during an October 2016 appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews that he was inclined to believe Leeds’s claim.

 The Intercept - The Trump campaign attempted to distance itself from the conservative Project 2025 playbook on Friday. Despite significant overlap between Project 2025 personnel and staffers from former President Donald Trump’s administration and campaign, Trump issued a statement saying he had “no idea who is behind” the project..

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump wrote. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” Trump’s vague disavowal of Project 2025 came a few days after Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, made inflammatory statements about a coming “second American Revolution” that would be “bloodless” “if the left allows it to be.”...

Despite Trump’s claims to have “nothing to do with” Project 2025, his administration and campaign personnel contributed to the project, including Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, as the Biden campaign quickly pointed out on X. Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto. One of its two primary editors, Paul Dans, who directs the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, served as the White House liaison for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, among other positions. Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto.