Raw Story

House Speaker Mike Johnson struggled Tuesday to explain away former President Donald Trump's demand that he shut down the federal government should controversial legislation fail to pass.

Johnson said he and Trump were equally committed to passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act hours after telling Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman he didn't want to shut down the government.

“He and I are saying exactly the same thing," Johnson told Punchbowl News' Melanie Zanona.

Zanona pointed to Trump's Truth Social post Tuesday in which the former president and Republican presidential nominee threw full support behind a shutdown.

"If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET," Trump wrote. "THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO 'STUFF' VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN - CLOSE IT DOWN!!!"

Johnson replied to Zanona, “He’s trying to make the point, as I am, that this is critically important."

ALSO READ: Mike Johnson forced to risk shutdown over Trump's election fraud 'delusions': columnist

But the SAVE Act does not appear to be critically important to Republicans who are showing signs of doubt it can pass — and fear what it's defeat could do to Trump's campaign, Politico reported Tuesday afternoon.

Nor is it important to critics who say the SAVE Act — which would mandate would-be voters prove their U.S. citizenship to register — cracks down on a unproven problem already banned by federal law.

House Democrats are likely to vote against the SAVE Act with Appropriations Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro calling it "reckless" and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dubbing it "dead on arrival," Politico reported.

A looming deadline puts extra pressure on Johnson.

Congress has only funded the federal government until the end of the fiscal year ending on Sept. 30, at which point it must pass a stopgap measure or continuing resolution to reset the clock until a new spending bill is approved.

A New York Times poll released on Sunday showing Vice President Kamala Harris trailing former President Donald Trump by a point nationally set off a wave of alarm among many progressives.

However, former Republican pollster Sarah Longwell is advising Democrats to take a closer look at the poll — and understand that it is full of opportunities for their 2024 presidential nominee.

Writing in The Bulwark, Longwell says that the poll shows that Harris and her campaign have significant work to do, but she says that work is far from an impossible task.

"If you look at the numbers and talk to these people, it’s evident that Harris has room to win them over; Trump far less so," she writes.

ALSO READ: 'Fully radicalized' Republicans are ready to carry out 'really dangerous plan': columnist

Longwell then shares quotes from several members of her focus groups that show a strong curiosity about Harris and an interest in learning more about her and what she stands for.

Crucially, says Longwell, these voters already know enough about Trump to have made a negative decision about him — but they don't yet feel comfortable voting for Harris.

"The debate is Harris’s best opportunity to give voters like these a sense of who she is and what kind of president she will be," writes Longwell. "Which is why she should focus on clearly articulating what her policy priorities will be and not letting Trump turn the debate into a circus. People already know why they don’t like Trump. They need to figure out why they like Harris."

Longwell then goes through a series of quotes from undecided voters saying they like certain things about Harris — such as her sense of humor or the fact that she behaves "like an adult" — but they need more information to make them completely comfortable.

"Every one of those voters should be gettable for Harris — because they already voted against Trump at least once," she writes. "But they’re not on board yet. Harris’s first job at the debate is to bring them home and they’re saying very clearly what they want to hear from her."

Read the full analysis here.

A recent interview with Donald Trump published in New York Magazine Monday detailed why the ex-president hired back controversial 2016 campaign adviser, Corey Lewandowski.

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi wrote that the campaign had, relatively speaking, been quiet compared to Trump's previous runs for president. But commentators claimed Trump's decision last month to bring back Lewandowski, who headed previous runs, could shake that up.

"The campaign itself, headquartered in West Palm Beach, hummed along quietly compared to the 2016 and 2020 organizations, which had not hummed so much as blared like car horns in the night," she described.

ALSO READ: Trump’s RFK Jr. endorsement actually helps Harris

"By this standard, Trump 2024 is a monastery (with the exception of that reported recent fistfight at Arlington National Cemetery)."

While senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita are running the Trump campaign "on paper," Nuzzi wrote, Trump brought back his combative ex-aide — despite saying he didn't intend to replace anybody.

“I just like him. Corey’s a character,” Trump told Nuzzi. “But I’m very happy with everybody.”

Lewandowski had left the Trump team after being accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, including a campaign donor's wife who alleged he made unwanted sexual advances and threw a drink at her in 2021.

Lewandowski faced charges, but avoided a guilty plea by completing community service and counseling.

Last month, Trump took to Truth Social to dispel claims Lewandowski's hire was to save a failing campaign.

"The Enthusiasm is GREAT, and the Management Team, headed up by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, is THE BEST," wrote Trump. "Many people want to join the Campaign for the final push, some from the first two Campaigns - And we want as many as we can get!"

Among Lewandowski's first acts after his return was an interview on MSNBC where he refused to disavow the idea that COVID was a biological weapon targeting "to target 'both Caucasians and Black people."

Read the full report here.

President Donald Trump's rhetoric and ideas are being "sanewashed" by the mainstream media as they pull selective quotes from his speeches and mask otherwise obvious extremism, argued Jon Allsop for the Columbia Journalism Review.

"As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants — be they on social media or at in-person events — and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing," wrote Allsop.

Examples would include how some outlets paraphrased Trump's bizarre rant about child care and tariffs into something that, on the surface, sounded far more coherent than it was.

ALSO READ: How the press corps is Trump’s assisted living program

These complaints about coverage of Trump are nothing new, noted Allsop — in fact, they have gone on for years. And moreover there are some reasonable defenses of the media's actions, including a reluctance to diagnose mental illness from the newsroom and a genuine need to inform voters what Trump's policymaking could look like, even if that means dressing it up more intelligently than he phrases things.

However, he wrote, "I find the sanewashing criticism persuasive, on the whole. Too often, major outlets clean up Trump’s language — especially in shorter formats, like headlines and ledes — to the point where it barely resembles what he actually said."

The real harm being done here, Allsop continued, is "not journalists’ failure to resolve an unresolvable debate about exposure, but their failure to accurately describe Trump’s rhetoric ... and to do so with due prominence." For example, Allsop previously criticized the press for taking seriously Republicans' defenses of Trump's claim at a rally that his defeat would mean a "bloodbath in the country," that he really just meant the auto industry would collapse.

Not only is this not what he said, Allsop wrote, but he also said a number of other violent or conspiratorial things in that same rally that didn't get any attention because the press let a debate over what "bloodbath" means suck up all the oxygen.

"Tomorrow night, viewers will get an unadulterated dose of Trump when they tune in for his debate against Harris on ABC," Allsop concluded. "Unavoidably, it’ll be all our jobs to describe what Trump said with the mics on."

Republican Party officials are increasingly worried as the Trump campaign's voter turnout operation in battleground states is vastly smaller and being built later than it needs to be, according to The Guardian.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, meanwhile, has spent weeks engaging in a ramp-up of hiring and opening campaign offices across the country.

The Republican National Committee was originally planning to open 90 offices around the country — but when former President Donald Trump pushed out longtime chair Ronna McDaniel and installed a new leadership team of loyalists that includes his own daughter-in-law, the plan was abandoned and the GOP strategy shifted to hiring a team of election observers, instead leaving voter turnout to other GOP organizations.

As a consequence, said the report, "The Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter — and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential."

The Trump campaign told The Guardian in response that it already has 350 staffers in battleground campaign offices — but by comparison, the Harris campaign has 375 staffers just in Pennsylvania, the battleground state widely considered most likely to decide the election.

Moreover, the outside GOP groups the Trump campaign was hoping to rely on for voter outreach, like Turnout for America, Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Elon Musk-backed America PAC, have only now begun to ramp up hiring, putting them in a time crunch to get properly organized for the main push of election season.

ALSO READ: Is Trump's dementia the real reason behind his flip-flopping?

The Trump campaign has now ramped up a program of its own called Trump Force 47, where volunteers receive "limited edition" MAGA hats and a list of 10 neighbors to focus efforts to get out the vote in return for merchandise. This strategy, which matches how the campaign secured wins in the primary, stands in contrast to the longstanding RNC strategy of using machine learning to target voters. Other GOP officials "have been wary of the program, sniping that they saw the volunteers as being as incentivized to rush through the process simply to get the hats."

GOP vice presidential candidate and Ohio Senator JD Vance is responsible for a "surge" of new Democratic Party donors and volunteers, the House minority whip said on Monday.

Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) was interviewed on CNN Monday morning by Kate Bolduan about the November election. During her interview, she talked about what voters "in purple, red and blue districts" thought about Vance.

"They don't trust JD Vance to order doughnuts. They certainly don't trust him to order American families on if, when and how they can have children. So we're seeing a surge of volunteers, a surge of first time donors, and we know that Kamala Harris is the underdog going into this, but momentum remains on her side," Clark said.

READ MORE: ‘Bullying Needs to Stop’ Says Ex-Beauty Pageant Winner After JD Vance Refuses to Apologize

The line about ordering doughnuts refers to an August stop by Vance to Holt's Sweet Shop in Valdosta, Georgia that was broadcast by C-SPAN and went viral. In the awkward clip, Vance ends up asking for "just whatever makes sense," instead of ordering a specific type of doughnut. Vance later expressed sympathy for the doughnut shop clerk who served him in an interview with NBC News.

“I just felt terrible for that woman,” Vance said. “We walked in, and there’s 20 Secret Service agents, and there’s 15 cameras, and she clearly had not been properly warned, and she was terrified, right? I just felt awful for her.

"We don’t want to have these scripted events — I don’t want to go and do three takes of buying Doritos at a Sheetz. I like to get out there and talk to people, and we want to make sure we’re doing it but definitely make sure that people are at least OK with being on camera, or we’re going to walk in and you’re going to have a person who has, practically, a panic attack because she’s got 15 cameras in her face.”

Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign has made headlines for the amount of funding it's raised. During August alone, her campaign raised three times more money than former President Donald Trump's campaign, according to the Guardian. And in July, at the very start of the Harris campaign, over 170,000 volunteers joined with her, according to Axios.

Current polling shows Harris and Trump in a dead heat. A New York Times poll published Monday shows Trump leading Harris by only 1%, with 48% of polled voters saying they'd pick the former president.

— (@)