Donald Trump has virtually—or all but virtually, if you factor in the conversation with Elon Musk on X—stopped campaigning for president. Or so it seems. Vice President Kamala Harris has been traveling from city to city in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada to large and enthusiastic crowds. Crowds so large—15,000 each in Detroit, Las Vegas and Phoenix—Trump has insisted videos of the events are AI generated.
While Harris has been filling stadiums, Trump has only gone to one rally, in Montana, ostensibly to stump for the GOP Senate candidate, but mostly to call Harris, “dumb,” “low IQ,” “lacking mental capacity” and a “b*tch.”
Harris’s blitz of swing states has added to enthusiasm for the three-weeks-old Democratic ticket and bolstered her polling. Where a month ago, Trump led President Joe Biden in every swing state, Harris now leads.
Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, has been picking up the slack for Trump’s lack of campaign energy, stalking Harris in several cities—even crossing her path on the tarmac. Vance also toured the Sunday shows Aug. 11, appearing on ABC, CBS and CNN, touting the Trump campaign’s plans for 2025, which include rolling back women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and rounding up one million undocumented immigrants as a “start” to deporting 20 million overall.
Some of Vance’s most stunning statements came in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” with ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent, Jon Karl. In what became an increasingly contentious interview, Karl asked Vance about his promise to be honest with American voters.
Karl then said Trump had claimed at his Montana rally that Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “signed a law letting the state kidnap children to change their gender.” Karl said the accusation “isn’t true, it’s not even remotely true” and called it “crazy.”
Vance disagreed. Instead he falsely claimed that Walz supports the government taking children away from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender transition treatments.
“What President Trump said, Jon, is that Tim Walz has supported taking children from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender reassignment, that is crazy,” Vance said. “Tim Walz gets on his high horse about ‘mind your own damn business.’ One way of minding your own damn business, Jon, is to not try to take my children away from me.”
Vance said, “What I just explained to you I would describe as kidnapping.”
Walz has not signed any legislation allowing the state to remove children from their parent’s custody if they don’t consent to gender transition treatment. On Aug. 8, the Washington Post reported, “In March 2023, Walz issued an executive order protecting trans patients’ ability to receive medical care that helps them live according to their gender identity. The order also shields patients, parents and providers from punishment by other states for seeking and delivering such care. The next month, he signed legislation enshrining similar protections that supporters said would establish Minnesota as a ‘trans refuge.’”
That law protects transgender patients, parents and health-care providers from out-of-state laws that would punish them for receiving care. Walz has been attacked by Minnesota Republicans for his support for those protections which do not involve taking children from their parents.
Karl asked Vance about Trump’s widely criticized 2022 dinner with white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes and hip-hop mogul Ye, who has repeatedly expressed antisemitic and pro-Hitler views. Vance was also asked about Fuentes’ recent comments that Trump shouldn’t have picked Vance as a running mate in part because Vance’s wife, Usha, is Indian American.
Vance said, “One thing I like about Donald Trump is he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse them.” Trump didn’t just talk with Fuentes, he ate dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago.
Vance falsely claimed Trump had condemned the dinner with Fuentes, but Karl said that wasn’t true—that Trump has never condemned Fuentes or his views. Then Vance used his wife to pivot from the discomfiting discussion, noting, “I wish people would keep it focused on me, but whatever. They’re going to say what they’re going to say. My wife’s tough enough to handle it, and that’s a good thing.”
Vance also said Trump “always calls his wife beautiful and jokes around with her” when they are together. He had no comment about the white supremacy, despite Karl’s questions.
In that same interview Vance spoke at length about his and Trump’s plans to “reverse the policies” of the Biden-Harris administration and “deport illegal aliens.” Vance said that “once you stop Kamala Harris’s open border policies, you’ve got to do something with the people who are already here…You are going to have to deport some people.”
On “day one,” he and Trump will start with rounding up and deporting one million “illegal aliens,” because you have to start somewhere and “there are 20 million illegal aliens in this country and they have to go.”
One million people is more than the entire population of Vermont. Or Wyoming. Or North Dakota or South Dakota. Or Alaska. The same as the population of Delaware or Montana. Vance did not detail how this deportation would be accomplished, just that it was a promise the campaign was making to the American people.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Vance accused Harris of being “anti-family” in response to questions about his previous description of the Democratic Party as being run by “childless cat ladies,” including Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig. Harris is the stepmother to two children and Buttigeig is raising adopted twins with his husband Chasten.
Vance said, “I’m pro-family. I want us to have more families. And obviously, sometimes it doesn’t work out, sometimes for medical reasons, sometimes because you don’t meet the right person. But the point is that our country has become anti-family in its public policy.”
Vance said, “I criticize Kamala Harris for being part of a set of ideas that exist in American leadership that is anti-family.”
Buttigieg appeared on CNN following the Vance interview and said Vance’s comments were part of a “politics of disparagement and destruction and insult” that were fundamental to Trump’s presidency.
Buttigieg said of Trump, “He seems incapable of talking about a vision for this country in terms of lifting people up or building people up or helping people out. It’s always disparagement.”
Buttigieg said, “If you disagree with him, if you disagree with JD Vance, Donald Trump and Republicans’ agenda to dismantle the Department of Education or any of the other things they’re proposing to do, you’re not just disagreeing, you’re anti-child. This is exactly the kind of politics that people are sick of.”
Those politics were on full display Aug. 12 when Trump returned to Twitter/X for what was deemed an “interview” with owner Elon Musk. The duo spoke for a choppy, messy, rambling two hours. It was Trump’s first return to the site after he was banned by the previous owners in response to the Jan. 6 insurrection Trump fomented. While the conversation—Musk called it an interview, but only asked one question—was initially delayed due to technical issues that prevented many from joining, Musk claimed about a million people were in the forum listening throughout. Trump claims 25 million have listened to the interview since.
Trump and Musk discussed a series of topics, including the recent assassination attempt on Trump, Trump’s stance on immigration, and his perspectives on the economy, energy production and climate change. There was also discussion of the COVID crisis about which Trump said he never got the credit for what he did during COVID.
Musk previously endorsed Trump in the 2024 campaign.
The conversation was largely a sharing of conspiracy theories about immigration, gangs and the border, attacks on President Biden and Vice President Harris and some interesting points about sustainability and solar energy from Musk. Trump quite obviously had no understanding of the latter and said that “they” had to change the name from “global warming to climate change” because, he said, “not every place is warming from global warming. Some places are going in the other direction.”
The entire planet is warming. This has been established science for decades. Musk did not question Trump’s comments, even though Musk was making the case for addressing it in his own work and cars.
The Trump-Musk match was not the huge success Trump was hoping for. But it was his only pass at campaigning in more than a week. Trump is set to give a policy speech in North Carolina Aug. 14 in which he will repeat many of his previous claims about the Biden-Harris economy and contrast it to his own. Republican strategists have said Trump needs to pivot from personal attacks on Harris and focus more on policy.