Donald Trump went back to the place that made him, in the reddest corner of the reddest state, and he couldn’t fill the room. That’s where this presidency is five weeks out from the election. He spent Friday night announcing another round of desperate checks to voters, this time paid out of a fund he himself called a “slush fund.” Samuel Alito said he’s thinking about retiring, which would hand Trump a fourth Supreme Court seat if Republicans hold the Senate. And the $400 million jet Qatar gave him has quietly disappeared from service. There are 31 days until the midterms.
Trump Could Not Fill the Room Where MAGA Was Born
Eleven years ago, 30,000 people packed a football stadium in Mobile to see Donald Trump. On Friday night he came back to a much smaller arena, and it was empty.
Mobile is where it started. In August 2015, with his campaign still treated as a joke run out of Trump Tower, his team took a risk and booked a huge open-air stadium. The crowd showed up. “It was a big friggin’ deal,” said Michael Glassner, who worked for Trump that day. He’d been around presidential campaigns since 1988 and had never seen anything like it for a primary candidate. That was when he knew it “was going to break all of the rules.”
Corey Lewandowski rode in Trump’s car to the venue. “We passed a number of homes that were in communities that weren’t affluent at all, and there were people outside sitting in their chairs, holding handmade signs, waving, supporting,” he said. “It was very, very humbling.”
Trump went back Friday to feel that again. “I’m really here because, sometimes, you’ve got to pay respect to the people that loved you right from the beginning,” he told the crowd. “I don’t know if you know. It sort of all began here.” Later he said, “We packed the stadium and the rest was history, right here in Mobile.”
There was no stadium this time. Trump rarely speaks outdoors anymore because of security, so the rally was in an indoor arena at the University of South Alabama, a fraction of the size. He still couldn’t fill it. Some upper sections were almost completely empty.
Kris Rouse, 76, voted for Trump three times. A reporter found her in a Walmart in Pass Christian, Mississippi. “I’m very disheartened right now,” she said. “Most of the things that he said were going to happen have not happened. The gas has gone up, the groceries have gone up, and my taxes on my property have gone up. I’m a senior citizen on a fixed income, and it’s hard right now.” After 33 years at a bank, she’s working part-time as a door hostess at Waffle House because “it’s necessary.” She isn’t voting for anyone in November. Asked about Trump’s $5,000 checks: “Nope. I don’t think we’re going to get anything else from Trump.”
Even MAGA influencer Adam Francisco, driving the coast to rally the base, admitted the problem. “If he doesn’t get them down by between now and Nov. 3, I’m going to say that I’m a little concerned about the Republicans’ chances,” he said of gas prices. “I’m not in denial about it.” At a three-pump gas station in Pearlington, Mississippi, a woman behind the counter said she’d never paid this much to fill her truck. She figured half the people around there have turned on Trump.
Trump went to Mobile to feel like the man who filled that stadium. He got a smaller room he couldn’t fill, in the state that loved him first.
Trump Announces Another Desperate Vote-Buying Scheme
Late Friday night, Trump announced a second round of checks to voters, and he said exactly where the money is coming from.
“I am pleased to announce that my Administration will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts,” Trump posted on Truth Social. The White House says the one-time $90 payments go out early this month to more than 20 million Medicare enrollees, mostly by direct deposit.
Then he named the source. “This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs,” Trump wrote. The president is emptying what he calls a slush fund into 20 million mailboxes a month before an election.
It’s the second round of checks this week. The administration is already mailing $500 payments to about a million people on ACA plans, each with a letter from Trump taking credit. Those go to households above 400 percent of the poverty line, not to the people who lost their subsidies when Republicans let them expire and then voted against bringing them back.
On top of that is the promise he keeps repeating. Trump has pledged $5,000 to every adult if Republicans hold the House and Senate, and he said it again in Mobile on Friday. He also says he doesn’t need Congress to do it. So why hasn’t he? The giveaway would cost more than $1 trillion, and there’s almost no support for it in Congress.
His own voters aren’t buying it. Asked about the $5,000, Kris Rouse, the three-time Trump voter in Mississippi, didn’t hesitate. “Nope,” she said. “I don’t think we’re going to get anything else from Trump.”
When your own supporters don’t believe the check is coming, the bribe doesn’t work. The desperation still shows.
Alito Floats Retirement and Raises the Stakes for the Senate
Justice Samuel Alito said this week that he’s thinking about retiring, which would hand Trump a fourth seat on the Supreme Court.
“It’s something that I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term,” the 76-year-old told CBS News in a clip from an interview airing Monday. “But I thought that I could still make a valuable contribution.” He added that it’s “too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement.”
He’s already under pressure to go. CBS’s Jan Crawford put it to him directly: he “decided not to retire this year despite, I think, some pretty intense pressure from Republicans who thought, well, Republicans are in control of the Senate, so it would be easier to confirm your replacement.” Asked about Alito in April, Trump didn’t hide what he wants. “It’d be nice to say now I have somebody for 40 years,” Trump said.
Trump already put three justices on the court: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. A fourth would mean almost half the court picked by one man. And this week Trump said he regrets the three he has because “they voted against me too often.” He isn’t looking for judges. He’s looking for a majority that does what he wants.
Republicans have shown how they play this. When Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, more than 11 months before the next president took office, Senate Republicans refused to even consider Merrick Garland. Trump filled the seat with Gorsuch. Nobody should expect restraint this time.
Trump has two years left. If Alito steps down and Republicans hold the Senate, Trump picks someone who sits on the court for 40 years. If Democrats take the Senate, that gets much harder.
North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Kansas: every Senate race people are watching is also a vote on the next Supreme Court seat.
Trump Quietly Stops Flying His Qatari Grift Plane
The $400 million jet the Qatari royal family gave Trump has disappeared from service, and the administration won’t give a straight answer about why.
An administration source told ABC News on Friday that the plane is getting “cosmetic upgrades” to its interior. That’s not what Trump told ABC’s Rachel Scott last month. “It’s going to be maxed out. Yeah, it’s going to go away and, to make magnificent plane. Interior wise, the best. Engines, the best,” he said. “To max it out, meaning you can go into any territory, it’ll take about 60 days. And it’s being sent in October to be maxed out.”
The source didn’t mention security work. The White House didn’t answer when ABC asked whether security upgrades are included, when the work will be done, or when the plane comes back.
The security questions are real. The New York Times reported in July that the Qatari jet lacks the anti-missile capabilities of the older Air Force One. Around then, Trump secretly switched planes leaving the NATO summit in Turkey amid threats from Iran, and sources told ABC the Secret Service urged him onto the older aircraft. The White House insisted the gift plane “has been fitted with high-level security protocols.”
The last documented trip on the Qatari jet was September 16 to North Carolina. Since then, Trump has flown the old Air Force One to Texas and Oklahoma, to Chicago for the Presidents Cup, to Tennessee, and to the UN in New York. The new plane’s big moment, flying Trump to the GOP convention in Dallas, got delayed when military personnel accidentally set off an emergency slide on the tarmac.
If Trump’s 60-day timeline holds, the plane will still be in the shop for the ASEAN summit in the Philippines and the APEC summit in China in November. Trump says he’s going to APEC.
He took a $400 million plane from a foreign government, called it “the world’s most luxurious plane,” and took heat from lawmakers and ethics experts for it. Now the 14-year-old jet is sitting in a hangar getting its interior redone, and the president is back on the plane he already had.
