Donald Trump

New Yorker - In Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles, a crowd gathered outside of the Trump National Golf Club to welcome the former President. (Trump bought the club in 2002, after the previous owners went bankrupt when the eighteenth hole slid into the ocean.) Several Tesla Cybertrucks were parked in the nearby lot, bearing American flags and Trump signs. Secret Service snipers set up their crosshairs on the golf course, their guns pointing past the steep face over the Pacific. Just feet away, groundskeepers mowed the grass on the course; one who was shearing a palm tree was asked to move—otherwise he would be in the frame of the press conference....

It turns out that Trump was thinking about landslides, which have lately been so bad in the area that gas and electricity have been turned off indefinitely in some homes. “About two miles up the road, they’re having some problems with slides, into a thing called the Pacific Ocean,” he said. He brought the mayor of Palos Verdes up to speak about the issue. Trump later claimed, “The government is not doing much.” He went on to praise the golf club. “I have the ocean . . . People get married literally on a nightly basis overlooking the Pacific.” ... Before launching into complaints about the debate (one of the moderators, David Muir, was a “foolish fool” whose hair is “not as good as it was five years ago”), and his usual remarks about America in decline, he said, of the sliding hills, “The mountain is moving, and it can be stopped.” 

Newsweek -  Former president Donald Trump promised his mass deportation plan would begin in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado—two cities at the center of anti-immigration talk this week. Speaking at a press conference in Los Angeles, the Republican nominee in the 2024 election repeated claims of a Venezuelan gang takeover of Aurora, as well as unfounded accusations that Haitian migrants in Springfield have been eating residents' pets. "We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country," Trump said Friday afternoon. "And we're going to start with Springfield and Aurora."

Why Trump wants to talk about immigrants eating pets

NBC News - No one can keep former President Donald Trump away from Laura Loomer. Throughout his third presidential campaign, aides and advisers have done their best to shield him from Loomer, a far-right social media influencer, and similar figures who stroke his ego and stoke his basest political instincts.

They lost that battle this week, as Loomer traveled on Trump’s jet to his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday and to Sept. 11 memorial services Wednesday. Her presence at the latter infuriated some Democrats and Republicans because one of the many conspiracy theories she has promoted is the false notion that the terrorist assault on the U.S. was an “inside job.” It wasn’t.

Loomer’s return to Trump’s side is pitting key figures in his coalition against one another, testing the strength of a campaign already reeling from his subpar debate performance Tuesday and Democrats’ resurgence in the wake of their July candidate switch. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., major Trump allies in Congress who represent opposite ends of the Republican ideological spectrum, are publicly pressing him to ditch her. Loomer fired back Thursday with a string of invective about Graham...

A senior official from Trump’s 2020 campaign team said that helps explain why Loomer is no longer being kept at arm’s length. “The people that have the authority to stop it are hanging on to their jobs,” the former official said. “So are you going to pick that fight with him?”

Loomer didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday, but fighting is a big part of her allure for Trump. She advocates as fiercely for him as she does for theories on the political fringe, like the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Trump promoted that during Tuesday’s debate, creating an unwelcome distraction from his substantive differences with Harris, according to many Republicans. Graham and Greene portray her as a counterproductive influence on Trump when he is locked in a tight battle with Harris for the presidency.