Democrat Politics

During football season, when many are cheering for their beloved teams, former high school football coach turned Minnesota governor, and now running mate, Tim Walz knows just how to break down the American political landscape. He took us back to school, drawing on his coaching days to give voters the play-by-play of Project 2025 in a post on X on Sunday. 

With circles and squares on a whiteboard in a locker room, Walz laid out Project 2025’s plan in three points: an abortion ban, raising costs, and unchecked power. We’re all Coach Walz’s players now. 

The proposed rule on contraception coverage could help 52 million women of reproductive age, officials said.

By Nadra Nittle, Shefali Luthra for The 19th

President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday announced a plan that would eliminate out-of-pocket expenses for most birth control for a majority of Americans.

Officials called the proposed rule, which affects people with private health insurance, the most significant expansion of contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in over a decade. They estimate it could benefit 52 million women of reproductive age.

“For the first time ever, women would be able to obtain over-the-counter contraception without a prescription at no additional cost, and health plans would have to cover even more prescribed contraceptives without cost sharing,” said Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the White House Gender Policy Council, in a call with reporters.

Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk’s $75 million effort to go door-to-door to get out the vote for Donald Trump is in disarray, according to multiple reports.

Finding itself out-raised by Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s campaign outsourced much of its get-out-the-vote operation to a Musk-backed super PAC this cycle. But Musk’s effort has been hit with allegations that paid canvassers are lying about the number of doors they are knocking, that the app the canvassers use doesn’t work, and that other canvassers are quitting because the pay is not good enough for the amount of work they are required to do. 

What’s more, other canvassers who are actually doing the door-knocking they are tasked with say the technology they are given to find homes to target and log their interactions with voters doesn’t work properly, making their jobs difficult or impossible.

Alysia McMillan, a paid canvasser working for Musk’s operation, told The Washington Post that the app Musk’s PAC uses to identify homes with possible Trump supporters is glitchy and forced her to randomly choose doors to knock. It led to hours of work, with few voter interactions and little payoff, as many of the homes were of voters who were not open to backing Trump.

Reuters also reported that in Nevada—another battleground that the Trump campaign is trying to peel off—Musk’s PAC had to fire canvassers because auditors for the PAC “keep catching people cheating,” with those people allegedly not actually going to the homes they claimed they were visiting.

On top of all that? Musk is also possibly engaged in an illegal scheme to get people to register to vote. 

A cartoon by Clay Jones.

Campaign Action

During a CNN appearance on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson deflected concerns about Donald Trump’s mental state following Trump’s rant about golfer Arnold Palmer’s manhood.

At a campaign rally the day before, Trump spoke at length about the deceased athlete’s genitals, telling an audience of his supporters, “When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’”

In an interview with the Associated Press, one of Palmer’s daughters, Peg Palmer Wears, said Trump’s rhetoric was “a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father.”

Donald Trump’s incoherence has gotten even worse over the past few weeks, with the former president rambling on about the size of the legendary late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Comments like this have led Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign to ask: Is he okay?

At a campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Trump went on a 12-minute-long rambling tangent about Palmer, concluding with the comment about the late golfer’s genitals.

“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women,” Trump said. “But this guy, this guy—this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough, and I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it. I had to say it.”

xTrump: “Arnold Palmer was all man and I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this is a guy that was all man…When he took showers with the other pros they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’” pic.twitter.com/3GcW8ImFjS— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 19, 2024

Donald Trump pretended to be working at a McDonald’s location closed to the public and stocked with his supporters on Sunday. The staged event at the restaurant in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, was part of the long-time conspiracy theorist’s promotion of another evidence-free attack on Vice President Kamala Harris.

The public could not access the restaurant during Trump’s visit and the people who Trump handed food orders to were his supporters who were pre-screened by the Secret Service and put in place before Trump arrived. The supporters were not allowed to make food orders as they would during the normal course of business, but were instead handed packages that Trump gave to them.

A Reddit forum member posted a photo of a letter purportedly written by the owners of the McDonald’s franchise, DG Torresdale LLC, that was posted on the front door. It read, “We plan to be closed on Sunday, October 20 until 4 p.m., to accommodate a visit at the request of former President Trump and his campaign.”

The Republican National Committee rushed to cash-in on the moment, and is now selling T-shirts with Trump dressed up in his McDonald’s apron with the phrase “MAGADonald’s.”

One of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughters calls Donald Trump’s references to her father’s genitalia “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring his memory, adding that she wasn’t upset by the remarks.

“There’s nothing much to say. I’m not really upset,” Peg Palmer Wears, 68, told The Associated Press in an interview on Sunday. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?”

On Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — the city where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father — Trump kicked off his rally in the campaign’s closing weeks with a detailed, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the showers.

“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

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There’s a new theory of the case for Donald Trump’s path to the White House, and it goes like this: young men. 

And it’s based in truth: Young men are drifting rightward, presenting challenges both at home and abroad. But if Trump is depending on that incel-edgelord crowd, he could be in real trouble.