Final polling averages suggest that Trump has the advantage—and the momentum—heading into Election Day. Real Clear Polling has Trump edging out Harris by 0.1% in national polling and up in enough swing states to pass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

There has not been an election-altering October surprise—no Hunter Biden laptop, no missing emails. If there was one, however, it was President Joe Biden calling Trump supporters garbage.

“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something,” the president said during a virtual event, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

The comments outraged Trump’s supporters, just as Hillary Clinton’s comment calling them “deplorables” did in 2016. Nevertheless, the Trump campaign took the comments in stride. Following Biden’s comments, the former president held a press conference from the cockpit of a garbage truck with full campaign branding on the side.

Trump has completely derailed my evening. I have spent 90 minutes laughing at this man’s genius.

Again, hate em if ya want, but our 45th president just showed up in a garbage truck and is now speaking at his rally in an orange garbage man vest. I can’t even. #MAGA pic.twitter.com/FN1oFORjyJ

— Lindsay In South Carolina (@LindsayJPitcher) October 30, 2024

The former president even did a rally wearing a sanitation worker’s high-visibility vest after the stunt.

Left-wing media outlets have been after Trump since his first run for office in 2016.

The Media Research Center released findings on Oct. 28 that showed Trump’s media coverage was 85% negative compared to Harris’s 78% positive coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news broadcasts for the 2024 presidential race. Media Research Center analysts reviewed 660 stories about the presidential election on the news channels from July 21, the day Biden ended his candidacy, to Oct. 25.

In the 2016 presidential race, both Trump and Clinton received high amounts of negative coverage, with 91% negative for Trump and 79% negative for Clinton. In the coverage for the 2020 race, Trump received 92% negative coverage and Biden received 66% positive coverage.

Nevertheless, media bias has not prevented Trump from broadening his support.

Standing room only at Vance rally in Holland, Michigan, with a long line out the door! pic.twitter.com/xAatpL6ARe

— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) October 29, 2024

Trump, with a bold alternative media strategy, has brought together a motley crew of voices across the political spectrum, such as former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., entrepreneur Elon Musk, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, R-Hawaii.

During a recent interview on Fox News, Gabbard said she asks people in the audience to raise their hand if they are a Democrat or a former Democrat whenever she speaks at a Trump event.

“In almost every event, somewhere between 35-50% of the room will raise their hand,” she said in the Oct. 29 interview on Fox & Friends Weekend.

What excited Gabbard even more was the reaction of Trump supporters to those whose hands were raised. Trump supporters “stood up and cheered and welcomed them [Democrats and former Democrats] and just surrounded them, really, with love and kindness.”

Gabbard said a lot of people shared their experiences with her after the event.

“I had so many people come up to me at the end of that saying, ‘I came in here afraid. I’ve never been to a political rally before. I didn’t know what to expect. I’m a Democrat, lifelong Democrat, never voted before.’ Different variations of this, but each walking out saying, ‘I’m voting for Donald Trump because of what I experienced here today,’” Gabbard said.

American voters may have come to Trump rallies for the fun, but Trump needs them to stay for Election Day to win.

Americans are tired of talking heads and the opinions of editorialists masquerading as journalists. But this should not be confused with declining interest in news or politics; viewers are simply moving to channels where they can get an unfiltered view of the candidates from personalities they trust.

If there is one clear lesson from the 2024 election cycle, it’s that candidates for public office must be prepared to engage in this new media landscape to stay competitive, especially on long-form podcasts.

The last time we had a shift this significant was 1960, when America saw the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The Kennedy-Nixon debate underscored the power of television to shape public perception.

Remember, past is prologue. Take, for example, Donald Trump’s appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Already, it’s racked up about 45 million views—just on YouTube alone. Trump’s interview with Theo Von received 14 million views. For her part, Kamala Harris’ appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast received 733,000 views and she received 665,000 views on the “All the Smoke” podcast.

While traditional media audiences are shrinking, these appearances have outperformed the average audiences of these podcasts oftentimes 10 to 1. Remarkably, the candidates’ episodes are even outpacing episodes featuring internationally known Hollywood celebrities.

Voters are hungry to hear from the candidates on an unfiltered, authentic platform, and podcasts are filling that need.

This shift is redefining how viable candidates will approach media going forward. Those who want to succeed in politics but are afraid, or unable, to allow the public a view into who they really are going to have a ceiling on their career if they don’t do long-form interviews.

Political campaigns are going to change in two ways due to this dynamic.

1. Candidates need to get comfortable in their own skin, open up and answer personal questions about heartache, addiction, and what makes their spouse smile. This open, honest, and unvarnished content mirrors what the public is receiving in their social media feeds already, so it makes sense that they are demanding the same transparency from their political leaders.
2. It’s going to transform the way political professionals engage with the electorate. According to GWI, a consumer research company, the “typical” internet user spends almost 2.5 hours each day using social media platforms, equating to more than one-third of their total time online. As a result, campaign resources should shift to talking to the electorate where they are spending their time, which is on their phone. That is where people are getting their news, listening to podcasts, vegging out, and forming opinions about who they will vote for.

The reason these podcasters and creators carry so much influence is because of the community and trust they build with their audience. As James Clear, author of The New York Times bestseller of “Atomic Habits,” says about changing opinions, “Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does.”

This election year, I was part of an effort that enlisted thousands of podcasters and social media personalities to encourage unregistered and low propensity voters to engage in the political process. Content creators in coordination with Vote4America delivered billions of impressions to tens of millions of voters. The posts calling on people to engage in the election significantly overperformed the average post of the creator, much like the success of the Trump and Harris podcast appearances.

We won’t know the full effect of all this content until all the votes are counted, but we can already see that 8.5% of all early votes are being cast by previously eligible first-time voters, meaning they are of age to have voted in past elections but decided not to.

The authenticity and trust of these podcasters and content creators is clearly having an effect on voter behavior.

What Jeff Bezos got wrong was his slight at podcasts as “unresearched.” The public clearly disagrees.

Americans are choosing podcasts over Bezos’ newspaper as their trusted source of news and information. Traditional media and candidates for office now must grapple with the new expectations of the electorate: unfiltered, unedited, authentic content.

First came the mammoth $430 billion plan birthed before the ’22 midterms that made the student loans of 40 million borrowers eligible for cancellation.

That died the following spring at the Supreme Court only to be succeeded by the “Saving on a Valuable Education” plan, which drastically reduced the income borrowers must contribute toward repaying their loans at an estimated 10-year cost of $475 billion.

SAVE, which two Democrat-appointed judges enjoined in April, was then followed by four related rules canceling the debts of borrowers who have spent a long time in repayment without actually repaying their loans.

The latest proposal is another example of the administration’s ingrained reflex to respond to its own unpopularity with spending. Although the general objections to it are familiar, still, specific features of the latest plan are worth examining, especially because of their timing.

At this stage, the proposed rules would not be finalized until 2025. Moreover, the rules’ stated pretension is to provide an avenue for debt cancellation for “student loan borrowers for generations to come.”

The rules create two new paths for cancellation: a one-time automatic cancellation initiated by the secretary of education for loans at risk of default and an ongoing option that borrowers can access by application that “holistically” demonstrates the borrower’s hardship.

Purportedly, these address borrower needs not “sufficiently” covered in the preceding rounds of rulemaking or by readily available loan deferrals. That may be the closest the administration gets to acknowledging the redundancy of its plan that layers forgiveness atop forgiveness.

Much like the previous efforts, there’s a good deal of dissonance in how the administration presents the rule to different audiences. The Department of Education heralds the rules publicly as a courageous achievement, power procured through a righteous fight to provide “hope to millions of struggling Americans,” something no other administration has done before.

At least that last bit is true. But the rules themselves attempt to speak softly and modestly to a mostly legal audience, insisting that they are not the creation of some strange new power, but only a specification of how the secretary intends to apply the discretion that he has always had.

And though the rule is supposed to help “millions,” the secretary assures would-be critics that he will exercise his discretion only in “relatively rare” circumstances where “the costs of enforcing the full amount of the debt are not justified by the expected benefits.”

So, rest assured, dear taxpayer, these rules will save you money despite all appearances that your money is being given away.

Officious paternalism works tolerably well as a description of the rules’ tenor. The administration promises to anticipate and address borrower needs before they even arise by authorizing the Department of Education to cancel loans automatically if the department deems them at risk of defaulting.

How does the department make that determination? By consulting a “non-exhaustive” 17-factor list, of course. How else?

The borrowers the administration hopes to assist are evidently so distressed that they have not even bothered to apply for relief. Perhaps after years of COVID-19-based transfer payments and the gratuitous benefits of previous loan pauses and cancellations, borrowers are just accustomed to receiving without asking.

But then it falls to the rest of us to ask: Does any other segment of the population receive this much financial solicitude from the federal government?

The proposal’s most audacious quality is not its indulgent attitude toward borrowers, but its insouciance toward the matter of legal authority.

Since it took office, the Biden-Harris administration has combed the statutes for the few stray words they could morph into transformational debt-cancelling authority.

To date, they’re still searching for a rationale that would satisfy a judge. But the fact is, they are out of plausible alternatives, so they are recycling the same tortured reading of the Higher Education Act used to justify two of the preceding attempts.

Courts have already previewed the merits of this argument: Two Democrat-appointed judges have found that opponents of the rules are “likely to succeed on the merits” of their legal challenges. But that has in no way dissuaded the administration from this fourth attempt because the administration refuses to take the hint.

In the twilight of Biden-Harris administration, its policy approach resembles a movie studio that has misunderstood its audience and run out of ideas to keep them engaged.

These rules are sequels that appeal only to the most niche audience—the coalition of organizations dedicated to the abolition of student debt and their enablers within the Department of Education.

With the broader American audience, the approach is a liability. A poll conducted by University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy found that 40% of Americans “strongly disapprove” of the Biden-Harris administration’s repeated intrigues to transfer student debt to taxpayers. Another poll from the libertarian Cato Institute found that roughly 70% of Americans disapprove of student-loan cancellation when apprised of its effects on taxes and inflation.

Nevertheless, the administration persists in offering the same non-cure for the student-debt ailment. Despite the administration’s professed interest in addressing “root causes,” these rules, like their predecessors, barely acknowledge, let alone address, the variables that have made higher education such a debt-intensive undertaking or the variables that make the American economy one in which it is difficult for borrowers to repay the burdens they have assumed.

Instead, it cues up another installment of bourgeois socialism, a redistribution of monies to those who have spent too much money to attain fewer privileges than they would like.

Trump says that states should be able to decide whether, and to what extent, to restrict abortion. Harris, as well as some Senate candidates, claim in their ads that electing Trump would lead to a “national abortion ban.” That’s unlikely, since Trump says he would veto such a ban if Congress ever passed one. “Veto,” Merriam-Webster tells us, is the opposite of “approve.” Ya don’t say.

Harris, in contrast, says that states should have no say at all and that Congress must prevent them from limiting abortion in any way. As a senator, she co-sponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act, federal legislation that would prohibit state or local governments from doing anything that could, even potentially or indirectly, limit abortion. This would include measures that large majorities of Americans, in pro-life states or even nationally, support, such as bans on elective abortions after a certain point in a pregnancy.

But it gets worse. Not only would the Women’s Health Protection Act prevent any pro-life laws or policies going forward, it would require state and local governments to repeal any already on the books. In other words, no state anywhere in America could, no matter how its citizens felt about it, ever have any laws, rules, regulations, practices, or anything else that could conceivably (yes, that pun was intended) limit abortion in any way.

Today, 41 states prohibit abortion during different stages of pregnancy. Fourteen of them ban abortion from conception, four after six weeks, two after 12 weeks, two after 15 or 18 weeks, and 19 after 20 weeks. Lest you think that these abortion “bans” actually prevent many abortions, nearly 94% of abortions nationally occur before 12 weeks.

The Women’s Health Protection Act would require every one of these 41 states to repeal its abortion ban. Mississippi’s 15-week ban, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2022, covers only 4% of abortions, but it still has to go. Utah’s 18-week ban only prohibits about 2% of abortions, but it’s still too strong. Eleven states ban abortion after “viability,” or when an unborn child might live outside the womb. That’s generally considered to be at about 24 weeks, but that law is also out the door.

Harris’ claim that the Women’s Health Protection Act simply “codifies” Roe v. Wade is not only false, but it’s especially deceptive coming from a lawyer who should know better. Even the Supreme Court in Roe said that states may ban abortion after viability and used words such as “mother” and “unborn children” more than 100 times. Except for the “W” in its title, the Women’s Health Protection Act doesn’t even use the word “woman.”

Roe v. Wade did not require taxpayers to pay for elective abortions, but this act would. Roe v. Wade also allowed states to require at least some level of parental involvement, such as notification or consent, when a young girl gets an abortion. This act would not.

In other words, the Women’s Health Protection Act would prefer coercion of a girl to have an abortion over any chance that her family or friends might help her decide otherwise.

Abortion is on the Nov. 5 ballot, and the choice is pretty stark.

Abortion advocates like Harris call themselves “pro-choice” but, it turns out, want to deny any choice to anyone about whether to protect human beings in the womb.

Thomas Jipping serves as senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.

“It’s really weird that he would come in here and know exactly that spot and have a good vibe that he was not going to be detected in any kind of preoperation surveillance by the Secret Service,” radio talk-show host and podcaster Bongino said Monday on his radio show. “Was he tipped off that he was going to be there? Is there a state actor involved? Are the Iranians involved somehow?”

Authorities identified the gunman as Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, who was pulled over and arrested shortly after the incident on Interstate 95 near West Palm Beach, Florida.

While Trump was playing golf Sunday at his course in West Palm Beach, authorities said, a man put the muzzle of a rifle through a chain link fence at the next hole.

According to Fox News, the man was between 300 and 500 yards from Trump. When he put the gun through the fence, a Secret Service agent or agents opened fire.

On Aug. 26, testifying to Republican lawmakers, Bongino predicted another “incident” with the Secret Service, claiming that the agency is worse off today than it was before the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“[If] you think this is the last incident, you’re out of your mind,” Bongino said.

Bongino said Monday that he was able to predict a second assassination attempt because the Secret Service has major problems with training and manpower.

“What they did was wrong,” he said. “The Secret Service has effed up again. They deserve no accolades at all.”

Bongino suggested there could be a mole in the Secret Service who helped the shooter identify Trump’s exact location Sunday.

“How did he know how to set up and where to set up, and that Trump was going to be there?” Bongino asked.

“Is there a guy or a woman in the Secret Service having a relationship with someone who is not who they say they are?” he continued. “The Iranians have been running these traps in Israel and elsewhere. …How do we know that there’s not some kind of ‘honeypot’ trap, and that some agent, or some DHS personnel, someone who has to be notified, is not in a relationship with someone?”

Is there a mole inside the Secret Service?
Don’t miss my show on Rumble for the story.
Watch here. https://t.co/nZ8gE2GILf

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) September 16, 2024

The Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS.

The Secret Service needs to assign security details for its protectees based on threat, not title, Bongino said.

“We do this protection by title and not by threat, which is going to get someone killed,” he said. “When is this going to sink in? After his head gets blown up on live TV?”

“Is there a political motive for the inadequate security footprint around President Trump?” Bongino asked.

The legacy media should be asking many questions about how the two shooters, on July 13 and on Sunday, could have pulled off their assassination attempts alone, he said.

“This ‘lone gunman’ thing is getting hard to believe,” the former Secret Service agent said. “Both of these shooters found holes, unique holes, from a long-distance threat in a security plan that should have been locked down [by] someone.”

Instead, higher energy prices and more regulations are the culprit, according to the John Locke Foundation documentary series “Sowing Resilience.”

It recommends a list of changes, including streamlining the zoning and permitting process and building coalitions to fight overly restrictive federal and state mandates.

The series examines policy decisions on agriculture that were made during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and the policy reactions to it exposed supply-chain and other vulnerabilities that still require solutions,” states a foundation’s report that accompanies the series. “The pandemic also worsened the growing food insecurity problem in North Carolina. Over 10% of North Carolinians struggle to secure enough food for a healthy lifestyle, according to the USDA. Only about 6% of adults in the state report consuming at least two servings of vegetables or fruits per day. Meanwhile, over one-third are obese, according to the Body Mass Indexes.” […]

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“We’ve definitely entered 25th Amendment territory,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wrote on X.

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“If you think Democrats in Washington and across the country aren’t talking about the 25th Amendment right now, you’re crazy,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wrote. “It’s not a question of whether he should be on the ballot. That ship has sailed. It’s a question of whether he can serve as president right now.” […]

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Ben Shapiro is host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire. A graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, he is a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.”

The 2024 election is Donald Trump’s to lose.

Right now, he is running even with President Joe Biden in all the national polls. He’s running ahead in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada; he’s running even in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; he’s closing within striking distance in Minnesota and New Hampshire. The map has radically expanded for him. […]

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Preston is a research fellow for tax policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the federal budget.

Politicians on the Left portray the rich in America as a bunch of freeloaders who don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

These politicians suggest that many of society’s problems could be solved if only the rich would be less greedy and hand over more of their money to the government to spend. […]

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The Louisiana Republican will lead a panel discussion with NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the Independent Women’s Forum’s Heather Higgins, and North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, who is chairwoman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

The event will take place on Wednesday afternoon on Capitol Hill, The Daily Signal has learned.

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[…]

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