Project 2025 Head Resigns After Backlash From Trump (2024)

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed up a blatantly antisemitic claim about Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband.

During an interview on WABC 77’s radio show Sid & Friends in the Morning, Trump agreed with host Sid Rosenberg, who criticized Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, on the basis of his faith.

“They tell me that this Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, Mr. President, is Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “He’s Jewish like Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Are you kidding me? He’s a crappy Jew, he’s a horrible Jew!”

“Yes, yes,” Trump replied under Rosenberg’s rant. As Trump made perfectly clear throughout the interview, to him, the only good Jewish person is one who’s voting Republican.

During the interview, Trump repeated his old attack against Jewish Americans who refused to support his presidential bid.

“Any Jewish person that voted for her, or him, or whoever it’s going to be, I assume it’s going to be her; anybody that did that should have their head examined,” Trump said. “If you love Israel, or if you’re Jewish—because a lot of Jewish people do not like Israel, and they happen to be in New York, you know that?”

“Yes,” chirped Rosenberg, whose radio talk show is local to New York City.

“If you are Jewish,” Trump continued, “regardless of Israel, if you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat you’re a fool. An absolute fool.”

Trump has previously suggested that any Jewish person who did not vote for him “does not love Israel” and “should be spoken to.” The former president seems to have a pretty limited idea of what a Jewish person can and cannot think. He also claimed in March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

On Tuesday, Trump complained that Democrats no longer felt afraid to criticize Israel.

“You know, 15 years ago the strongest lobby in all of Washington was Israel. It was by far the strongest. Nobody would say anything bad about Israel! Today, it’s like nobody says anything good—except for Republicans by the way,” Trump griped.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not the biggest lobby in U.S. politics, its impact is still felt in crucial races. Earlier this year, AIPAC gave a whopping $14.5 million in the New York Democratic primary election to George Latimer, funding his ultimately successful effort to unseat progressive Representative Jamaal Bowman, a staunch critic of Israel.

During the radio interview, Trump also claimed that Harris looked uncomfortable during her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he said suggested that she secretly dislikes Jewish people—despite being married to one, of course.

“You can see the disdain,” Trump said. “Number one, she doesn’t like Israel. Number two, she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it.”

It looks like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had his mind made up on presidential immunity from the start, and made no effort to negotiate with the court’s liberal justices.

According to a stunning new report from CNN citing unnamed sources, Roberts looked past any chance of coming to a compromise outside of the conservative majority on the court, as was typical in past cases on presidential power. He instead thought that he could persuade the court’s liberals to look beyond Donald Trump.

The oral arguments for the case on April 25 didn’t indicate such a clear-cut breakdown, as justices seemed ready to vindicate Trump in only some of his legal team’s arguments, while also accepting some of special counsel Jack Smith’s points.

But the justices’ private session the next day did not reflect any of that, with votes quickly breaking down on ideological lines and Roberts ready to rule that presidents have near-absolute immunity for all “official acts.” He tried to steer the conversation away from Trump, writing in his opinion that ​​“unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.”

Roberts’s actions flew in the face of his previous rulings, such as the court’s 2022 decision Jackson v. Women’s Health Organization. While Roberts sided with the conservative majority in that case in ruling against the organization, he dissented on overturning the abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. And a decade earlier, he cast the deciding vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act, breaking with his fellow conservatives in a 5–4 decision.

But this time, Roberts did not seem amenable to compromise, and in fact one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was the lone conservative on the court who sought any kind of compromise with the liberal justices. In her opinion on the immunity case, she said the Trump plan to use alternative slates of electors should be considered a “private” and not an official act, and thus subject to criminal prosecution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, led by Roberts, has upended precedent and put all of Trump’s legal cases in jeopardy. The one criminal case that was decided prior to the court’s ruling has had sentencing delayed. Of the two federal cases that are still being decided, one was dismissed pending appeal by a judge seemingly on Trump’s side, and the other is in limbo. In short, Roberts may have presented himself as moderate before, but his decision on immunity shows that his conservative beliefs come first.

Yet another video of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has resurfaced, and unfortunately for him, he explicitly said in it that racism helped elect Donald Trump president.

Mother Jones reports that in February 2017, Vance gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics as part of a series called “America in the Trump Era” after his book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a bestseller.

Discussing the 2016 presidential election, journalist Alex Kotlowitz asked Vance, “Where do you think race played into all this? Because I think the sort of myth is that all these Trump supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you think it played?”

Vance gave an answer that seems surprising today.

“Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election. I think race will always play a role in our country, It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons,” Vance responded.

Vance couched his answer by saying he didn’t think racism was the main motivator for Trump voters, but jobs were. But he did say that the 2016 election was “hyper-racialized,” and he blamed conservative extremists.

“The people that I blame for that are actually typically well-educated coastal elitists, people like Richard Spencer and the alt-right,” Vance said. “It’s telling that the alt-right is driven by primarily very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Michelle Obama in these really nasty ways.”

“Like Steve Bannon?” Kotlowitz asked.

“Right,” Vance replied, taking a shot at the Republican strategist who is now serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress.

In an answer quite different from his present-day half-hearted defense of his Indian American wife, Usha, Vance addressed racism against his marriage head-on back then.

“There were all these alt-right people, and I’m in an interracial marriage, and I got a lot of stuff directed at me and my wife on online message boards and Twitter and so forth. So I definitely buy this was a racialized discourse unlike any that we’ve had in a really long time,” Vance said.

Senator J.D. Vance knows that Vice President Kamala Harris is a big threat. While he may not be willing to say it publicly, he’s certainly admitting it to donors.

In a new recording released Monday by The Washington Post, Vance spoke candidly at a fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minnesota, on Saturday, where the Ohio senator’s line to donors was far different from the about-face that he and former President Donald Trump had been presenting publicly.

“All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” said Vance. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”

While Vance’s admission was not particularly surprising given Harris’s slate of high-profile Democratic endorsem*nts and how successful her initial fundraising efforts have been, it was a tune that the public hasn’t heard Vance sing.

As CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out Monday night, this line was extremely different from what Trump was saying concurrently, over on Fox News.

“I think she’s a worse candidate than him,” Trump said in an interview with Laura Ingraham. She’s far more radical left. She is younger, but I mean she’s 60 years old. A lotta people—I didn’t know she was 60 years old, I thought she was a little younger.”

In general, the “Kamala’s worse than Biden” line seems to be the main strategy for the Trump campaign, but it certainly isn’t the reality they’re facing.

In the leaked audio, Vance admitted that the Trump campaign had the “unique opportunity” to shape public perception of a candidate that voters are far less familiar with, trying out different lines of attack to see what has the most impact.

“Love ’em or hate ’em, everybody has an opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden after the past eight years,” Vance said to the room of donors. “But Kamala Harris, people don’t really know.”

But shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out, Vance acted like nothing had changed.

“I don’t think the political calculus changes at all,” Vance told reporters on July 22. “We were running against Joe Biden’s open border, Kamala Harris’s open border. Kamala Harris supported the Green New Scam. Kamala Harris, frankly, covered Joe Biden even though it was obvious he was mentally incompetent for a very long time.”