September ended with Donald Trump’s own people turning on him one after another, and Trump answering with a number he made up. He also fell asleep in the Oval Office on live TV for the second time in a week.
The last day of the month was a bad one for this president, and almost all of it came from his own side. Trump was asked about the recording of his handpicked Texas candidate saying Trump’s convention “dropped everybody’s numbers,” claimed he hadn’t heard it, and then recited a ratings figure fact-checkers had already debunked. His War Secretary stood in front of America’s generals and called the free press “treason.” A Senate seat in South Carolina that Republicans never worried about is now a one-point race, even with Trump’s handpicked candidate on the ballot. And Jim Justice, a Republican senator who’s stood with Trump through nearly everything, told the administration it’s time to “admit you’re doing something wrong” on immigration. Trump’s coalition is cracking in public, and there are 34 days until the midterms.
TRUMP DODGES ON PAXTON AND INVENTS A RATINGS NUMBER
Trump’s own Senate candidate got caught on tape saying Trump’s convention sank him. Trump’s answer was to pretend he hadn’t heard and brag about ratings that don’t exist.
Ken Paxton is the man Trump lifted over John Cornyn in a brutal Texas primary. At a private fundraiser last week, someone asked him, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” Paxton didn’t push back. “So to be honest with you, the numbers, when we did that convention, it dropped our numbers,” he said. “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”
Reporters asked Trump about it Wednesday. He said he hadn’t heard the comments, then went straight to the convention’s numbers. “We had 107 million views. But we had over 100 million views, I think 107. The NFL had 25 million views,” Trump said. “So we had four times what the NFL did.” Then he undercut himself. “And, you know, it’s possible that could be true. I don’t know if it’s possible.”
It isn’t true. CNN’s Brian Stelter found the two NFL games airing against the convention drew a combined 43 million TV viewers. The convention drew 7 million. When PolitiFact asked, the White House didn’t defend the TV number. It pointed to social media impressions instead, including a Trump adviser’s claim of more than 70 million TikTok impressions. An analyst told PolitiFact impressions are “not comparable to Nielsen ratings in any meaningful sense.”
Trump has been pushing the claim since September 10, when he posted that “the overall numbers beat the NFL.” On Wednesday he tacked on something stranger. “Somebody said it won’t do as well because I won’t be around, but I’ll be around in some form,” he said. “I don’t know what form I’m going to be around in.”
Trump says his convention was the most-watched thing on TV. The candidate it was supposed to help told donors it dropped his numbers.
Only one of them is looking at real polling, and it isn’t the one quoting TikTok impressions.
HEGSETH CALLS THE FREE PRESS TREASON IN UNHINGED SPEECH
Trump’s War Secretary gathered America’s top generals and told them the free press is committing treason.
Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address opened with the usual promises to make the military “the most capable, the most focused and the most lethal.” He said telling troops to lose weight is “not discrimination, that’s leadership.” He announced no more drag shows and “no more gender pronouns,” and he recited a slogan built on slurs, including one against transgender people we won’t print.
Then he turned on reporters. Hegseth said the “delusional media” is run by “anti-American losers” and “haters,” and called it worse than Iranian state propaganda. “A free press, of course, is important,” he said, dragging out the word. “It’s fundamentally anti-American. It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually.”
Treason is a crime that can carry the death penalty. The man running the U.S. military said it about the journalists who cover him, to the generals who command the armed forces.
The policy news was worse. Hegseth said he’s scrapping psychological testing for recruits in favor of a “merit-based assessment” of how to “win on the battlefield.” He announced an Office of Religious Affairs that will “report straight to the top,” meaning Hegseth, and said it’s “gonna have real teeth.” He said the department is done with “political correctness and secular humanism,” and told the generals, “While we wage physical war, we know the real fight is spiritual.”
He also unveiled Project Meridian, to be led by what he called three of America’s “best minds”: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and 83-year-old Newt Gingrich. The room stayed silent, so Hegseth told the generals to stand up and clap. He promised “drone warfare supercharged by SI-enabled functioning” and “autonomous war fighters” with no red tape in the way.
Five weeks before the election, Trump’s defense chief spent the generals’ time cutting mental health screening, setting up a religious office that answers to him, and calling the press traitors.
REPUBLICANS PANIC AS A SAFE SOUTH CAROLINA SEAT SLIPS
A South Carolina Senate seat Republicans never worried about is now a one-point race, and the party is scrambling to save Trump’s pick.
A Trafalgar Group poll of likely voters last week had Sen. Darline Graham at 43.4 percent and Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews at 42.3 percent, with 8.5 percent undecided. No Democrat has won a Senate race in South Carolina since Fritz Hollings in 1998. Her late brother, Lindsey Graham, beat Jaime Harrison by more than 10 points in 2020.
This wasn’t a friendly poll for Democrats. Its sample was 59.1 percent Republican, and Graham still led by barely a point. Andrews won voters under 50 and women. An InsiderAdvantage poll this month also had Andrews within the margin of error, with 8 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of independents backing her.
Republicans are acting like it’s real. Cook Political Report moved the race from Solid Republican to Likely Republican last week. Politico reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune is adding South Carolina to his campaign swing. Majority Whip John Barrasso already rushed down during the runoff, and Trump held a rally in the state to get Graham past Rep. Ralph Norman.
The party is still fighting itself, too. Norman’s wife, Elaine, keeps posting anti-Graham content on Facebook and promoting a write-in campaign for her husband, and Cook cited that write-in push in its rating change. Republican strategists warn that a split vote could hand Democrats the seat.
Graham debates Andrews on October 11. In her runoff debate, she drew criticism from both parties for admitting national security is “not my thing.”
Trump handpicked her, campaigned for her and got her the nomination. In one of the reddest states in America, she’s now barely ahead.
TRUMP ALLY BREAKS RANKS ON HIS IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN
One of Trump’s closest Senate allies just told his administration to admit it’s getting immigration wrong.
“To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you’re doing something wrong,” Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia told Politico. “We probably got to step back from it and say: ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that.”
Then he described what’s going wrong. “Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff,” Justice said.
His own state’s numbers back him up. An ACLU of West Virginia investigation found that about three-quarters of the more than 593 people ICE arrested there during “Operation Country Roads” in January had no criminal record. The administration keeps saying these raids target dangerous criminals. In West Virginia, most of the people swept up weren’t criminals at all.
Farm country is saying it too. The Kansas Livestock Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association and Texas Cattle Feeders Association said last week that ICE activity has had “a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers” who keep beef production running. “If we had a concerted effort to have enforcement activities within agriculture, you could really harm our ability to produce food to feed ourselves,” Rick Naerebout of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association told NPR. West Virginia alone has more than 22,700 ranchers, most of them family-owned.
Justice isn’t alone. Florida Republican Maria Elvira Salazar recently ran an ad telling Trump his “immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” And in the first half of September, less than 1 percent of Republican ads even mentioned Trump.
Immigration was supposed to be the issue Trump couldn’t lose on. Now his own allies are asking him to back off, on the record, with their names attached.
