Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 191
Blue Wave Update
As Americans express frustration with the country’s economic outlook, Vice President JD Vance told CBS News this week it could take some time to see improvement.
Said Vance: “I’ll be the first person to tell you that just as this country wasn’t broken in one presidential term, it’s gonna take more than 18 months to fix things and turn them around.”
He added: “I think what we’re doing is, we’re turning the ship around.”
“Bottom line, it’s gonna all work out. You know why? It always does.”
— President Trump, quoted by Axios.
“Elon Musk tells biographer Walter Isaacson in a new podcast interview that the fizzled DOGE experiment, which the SpaceX and Tesla CEO once headed, proved there’s ‘no way we were gonna solve the deficit from within the government,'” Axios reports.
Said Musk: “The only way we’re going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots. We’re not gonna solve it by trying to save our way there.”
“Even though President Trump’s efforts to bend elections to his will have so far largely failed, don’t mistake defeat for retreat. The federal government’s highest power centers are working overtime to tilt the election in the administration’s favor,” The Bulwark reports.
A new Gallup poll finds voters trust Democratic Party over Republican Party on the problem they consider most important, 44% to 33%.
Patrick Ruffini: “This measure happens to have an almost perfect track record of predicting election outcomes — more than pre-election horserace polls. It predicted 2016 and 2024. The parties tied in 1980 and the question wasn’t asked in 2000. The last outright miss was 1948.”
“The highest-ranking House lawmaker from Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) home state is calling for the embattled progressive to be jailed and deported if it is found that she or her father lied on federal paperwork to get her U.S. citizenship,” Fox News reports.
“Omar is under federal investigation over allegations that she or her father lied about her birth year on immigration paperwork in order to obtain her citizenship when her family fled Somalia in the late 1990s…”
“But Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) the No. 3 leader in the House of Representatives, told Fox News that ‘there have been rumors for years’ about Omar and, if proven true, she should face consequences.”
“Early in September, President Trump gathered Republicans running in competitive races for a dinner in the White House Rose Garden. Prime aged beef burgers were on the menu as the president made a pledge to spend the final month before the midterms campaigning for the approximately 30 Republican candidates in attendance,” NPR reports.
“‘I’m going to go to every one of those 35 places and we’re going to see if we can get everyone elected,’ Trump said confidently.”
“The White House hasn’t clarified which 35 places the president was talking about that night. Since then, Trump has campaigned with fewer than a third of those candidates. Rather than focus on swing states and swing districts as the president said he would, his travel schedule has taken him to a lot of Republican territory.”
“No single state in America better captures the forces and fault lines shaping the coming midterm elections than Pennsylvania,” the New York Times reports.
“Just two years ago, Pennsylvania was at the epicenter of a nationwide Republican revival. President Trump swept its electoral votes. His party ousted an entrenched Democratic senator. And it was the only state where Republicans flipped two House seats.”
“Now the pendulum has swung. Mr. Trump’s support has crumbled. And Democrats are targeting four bellwether House districts in the state that together would give them the congressional majority.”
“All these races that are showing we’ve got a two- or three-point lead or it’s a toss-up, we could end up losing all of them by two points. It’s within the margin of error.”
— Former President Barack Obama, quoted by the Washington Post.
“The Trump administration on Friday released final plans for President Donald Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch that do not include drones, snipers or other features of the ‘military complex’ that Trump said he would add to the project,” the Washington Post reports.
“White House chief of staff Susie Wiles helped set up Katie Zacharia’s appearance on Fox News Thursday night, when the embattled new press secretary struggled to answer questions about her rocky first days on the job, according to two people familiar with the internal dynamics,” Politico reports.
”She was ousted hours later on Friday.”
“The interview with host Sean Hannity, which aired during prime time, turned into a pointed examination of Zacharia’s first press briefing and her legal credentials.”
”One of the people, granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics, described the appearance as a ‘sanctioned hit’ on Zacharia, who was not Wiles’ preferred choice for the role.”
“Nationalist parties are notching election victories and leading in the polls across Europe. One recipe for their success: keeping their distance from Trump and his MAGA allies,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Leaders of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which finished first in two recent regional elections, have scaled back their public interactions with MAGA figures, acknowledged differences of interest with the U.S. and focused their message on domestic issues.”
“In France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who is polling in first ahead of next year’s election, has kept Trump and his allies out of her campaign after calling the Iran war a strategic mistake.”
“One of President Trump’s many false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which he has repeatedly, and falsely, claimed was rigged against him, was an assertion that there had been ‘thousands and thousands’ of ‘crooked votes’ cast in Wisconsin nursing homes,” the New York Times reports.
“The allegation was unfounded. Yet the view that American nursing homes are a hotbed of illegal voting, where aides regularly change the votes of unwitting residents, lives on in Trumpworld. And like a number of other enduring conspiracies about election fraud, the false claim has seeped into the mechanics of governance this year.”
“President Trump is halting implementation of most of the sanctions that were to be imposed on Russia under a bipartisan bill he signed last month,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The announcement came in an executive order on Friday night, and was part of a broader pivot by Trump toward courting Moscow as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine and keep energy prices under control ahead of the midterm elections.”
New York Times: Trump signs order exempting Russia from sanctions legislation.
“At a rally in north Georgia, Donald Trump again claimed that the 2020 election in Georgia was fraudulent, alleging that the election of U.S. senator Jon Ossoff was illegitimate,” The Guardian reports.
Said Trump: “He was never elected.”
MS NOW: Trump campaigns in Georgia, a longtime focus of his election fraud claims.