President Donald Trump opened his Wednesday Minnesota rally by taking a victory lap over his big debate with Joe Biden. But he also took some shots at moderator Chris Wallace

“I said, ‘Sleepy Joe, name one law enforcement group that supports you.’ Then Chris Wallace said, ‘Don’t do that! That’s not…'” Trump said. “Can you believe this guy? I was debating two people last night.”

“If you ever became president, you have to deal with some of the toughest people in the world and Chris Wallace is very, very easy by comparison,” he added.

He went after the media coverage and said “the liberal media is upset that I took the fight to Biden and exposed his very dangerous agenda.”

And after he went after the media coverage of the riots in cities over the past few months, the president said, “You can riot, that’s okay. Arson’s okay, but challenging Sleepy Joe is totally off-limits. So disappointed in Fox.”

You can watch above, via Fox News.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D – S.C.) slammed President Donald Trump the day after the first presidential debate, and linked his failure to condemn a white supremacist group during the event to a reported surge in the hate group’s online recruiting.

During an appearance on CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett, one of the top Congressional Democrats said Trump, who has repeatedly hedged when confronted with his support among white supremacists, was implicitly fueling their rise.

In a shocking move at the debate the night before, Trump had balked at directly condemning the Proud Boys white supremacist group, prompting the hate group to celebrate the apparent tacit endorsement and then begin selling merchandise with the president’s “stand back and stand by” quote from the debate. Earlier on Wednesday, Trump had attempted to do damage control, but the president clumsily tried to clean up his outrageous remarks by claiming “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are.”

“They saw a spike in membership since Trump’s comments last night,” Burnett noted, alluding to a Washington Post report on their claimed rise in popularity. “It actually impacted that. What does that say to you?”

“That says this president is a recruiter for white supremacist groups,” Clyburn said. “That’s what he is. And that’s what he’s demonstrating every day. He knows exactly what he’s saying. But this is not the beginning — the first time. My goodness. He has a history of this.”

“This guy is just bad news, and I would hope that the people of this country wake up before it’s too late,” Clyburn adde. “This democracy is under threat, and this country cannot afford four more years of this foolishness.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

CNN White House correspondent Dana Bash explained that President Donald Trump had no idea that his performance at the first presidential debate on Tuesday had sparked outrage over his incendiary remarks and constant, belligerent interrupting. When his advisers blunty informed him after the event that the consensus, even among Republicans, was that he had not, in fact, “had a great night” as he believed, he was surprised.

During a panel discussion on Anderson Cooper 360 about the inner workings of the Trump campaign in the last 24 hours, Bash reported on the stark disconnect between the president’s own assessment of how he did versus the reality outside of pro-Trump media circles.

“So Dana, you have now reporting about how the president and his team are feeling about the debate,” Cooper noted.

“Well, I’m told from a source familiar with the president’s thinking that in private conversations, he’s insisting that he did well, that he had a great night,” Bash reporter. “When it is suggested to him strongly that he did not have a great night, that he was too aggressive and interrupted too much, that he is surprised to hear that push back.”

Bash went on to say that Trump’s camp feels confident that their candidate will eventually succumb to reality after he spends enough time consuming “his steady diet of cable news.”

“It is going to hit him, likely in the next day or so that he did in fact, interrupt too much, that he did, in fact, have a bad night like everybody around him believes that he did,” Bash said, of her source’s thinking.

When Cooper pointed out that all of Trump’s White House and campaign advisers were still insisting publicly that Trump had won the debate — a claim contradicted by several polls — Bash compared the delayed reaction to one of the most infamous moments of the past year.

“Remember when the — how can you forget — when the president suggested injecting or digesting bleach would help with coronavirus and he couldn’t believe that people actually thought that was a big deal?” Bash said “After a day or two, he got that that was a big embarrassment. That is the analogy.”

Moments later, Cooper asked if Trump’s angry, bombastic style would hurt his election chances.

“Among his supporters, the people supporting him, probably not,” Bash conceded. “Those people he doesn’t need to reach out to, despite evidence to the contrary, if you look at his actions not only over this campaign but the past four years, he’s done very little with few exceptions to reach out beyond his base.”

“What you saw on stage last night was his tweets come to life,” Bash added. “I’ll tell you one person who is familiar with his debate prep, said ‘They prepared him to be aggressive, but not Jason from Friday the 13th,’ and that is the perception of how his performance was. These are people who like him.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

President Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail and holding another rally in Duluth, Minnesota a day after his debate with Joe Biden.

The debate has been widely panned as a “shit show” and out of control, featuring numerous Trump clashes with not just his opponent but moderator Chris Wallace. Following the debate, a Frank Luntz focus group described the president with words like “arrogant,” “chaotic,” and ‘unhinged.”

The president has been taking a victory lap over the debate and has touted the high ratings it got on all the networks.

As Trump himself tweeted earlier, a Republican hasn’t won Minnesota in decades, but he believes he has a shot there.

You can watch live above, via

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson blasted Joe Biden for some of his answers at the first presidential debate, but admitted at the outset the pre-debate focus on the Democratic nominee’s mental fitness may have been a mistake.

Carlson said the big takeaway from the debate is that “America deserves better” and said it was “a painful, highly depressing 90 minutes and at times things seemed out of control.”

He also said this was one of the big takeaway:

“As a political matter, the main thing we learned last night is that it was a mistake to spend so much time focusing on Joe Biden’s mental decline. Yes, it’s real. Yes, Joe Biden is fading, we’ve showed you dozens of examples of it for months now. But on stage last night, Biden did not seem senile. If you tuned in expecting him to forget his own name — and honestly we did expect that — you may have been surprised by how precise some of his answers were — not all of them, but enough of them. Trump isn’t going to win this race by calling Joe Biden senile, nor by the way is Joe Biden going to win by calling Donald Trump a racist, as he repeatedly did last night. That slander didn’t work four years ago, it will not work now.”

He hit Biden in particular for not saying whether he would support court-packing on the Supreme Court, saying “of course’ he does “otherwise he would have denied it.”

But while Carlson said Trump “defended our system” and said “virtually nothing” radical, he added “the Biden people are very serious about politics” based on some of the candidate’s answers and remarked, “Amazingly, tragically, many people watching last night may have concluded that Joe Biden is the stable, steady alternative.”

Carlson also dismissed the exchange over white supremacy and mocked the idea it’s a serious threat, bringing up the riots that have sprung up in cities across the country in the past few months.

You can watch above, via Fox News.

Former Fox News anchor Shepard Smith made his big CNBC debut Wednesday night on his new program The News with Shepard Smith.

“Right now, on a brand-new newscast, we’d normally play the best sound and video from the debate, right? That’s the lead, the back and forth from the president and the man that wants to replace him. And then we show and tell you what else we face as a nation,” he opened by saying. “There’s a lot. That produced open, as we call it. About a minute. It’s fast, there’s music, it’s compelling and rich with emotion, and that was our pan — that’s what we’ll usually do — but it turns out, in this moment, that’s just the noise. You’ve heard it, and we need to cut through it.”

After calling out the chaotic nature of the debate, Smith immediately dove into the biggest moments from the Donald Trump–Joe Biden debate, starting by calling out the president’s comments with respect to the integrity of the election:

“Let’s mark this moment. Last night the president called into question the heart of our democracy — the peaceful transition of power. Is there assurance that it’ll happen? Asked to give it, the president declined, and openly sowed the seeds of distrust in the outcome… In the debate, the president told a group fo white supremacists — some of whom stood by those in Charlottesville with their torches — to stand back and stand by. Joe Biden declared the duly elected president of the United States unfit to lead, called him a racist, a liar, a clown, and told him to shut up. We’ve never seen any of this. Not in America. But from this we march toward the vote.”

On election integrity in particular, Smith said “every indication is there has been no widespread voter fraud, not in America, and there’s nothing to indicate there may be a problem this time.”

He contrasted Trump’s comments at the debate with what FBI director Christopher Wray said about the matter in congressional testimony last week.”NBC News and CNBC have seen no evidence to back up the president’s claims, and he’s offered nothing of substance.”

Smith brought on CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers to talk about the president’s weeks of railing against mail-in voting and pushback from state officials.

You can watch above, via CNBC.

Photo credit: Jonathan Daniel, Getty Images.

Major League Baseball announced on Wednesday that it would allow a limited number of fans to attend its National League Championship Series and World Series, which will both be held inside the league’s “bubble” at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas.

According to NBC Sports, the baseball league will begin to sell 11,5o0 tickets per game to the public for the NLCS and World Series starting on October 6th. MLB had prohibited fans from attending any of its regular season games and has only begun to allow players’ families to watch games from the stadiums for the initial playoff games.

The scaled-down attendance levels will allow the league to implement numerous safety protocols to prevent endangering the public from Covid-19. Per NBC Sports:

– Tickets in the seating bowl will be sold in groups of four contiguous seats, called pods. Individuals may purchase a limit of one pod per NLCS and World Series game.
– Seats within each pod cannot be broken apart for sale.
– Each pod will be a minimum of six feet from each other.
– No seats will be sold within 20 feet of where a player can be located on the field, in the dugouts or in the bullpen.
– Masks will be mandatory for all fans except when actively eating or drinking at their ticketed seats.
– Hand sanitizing stations will be available throughout the ballpark.
– No bags will be permitted except for those that are carried for medical reasons or manufactured diaper bags that accompany infants and young children.

The American League Championship Series, however, will not be accommodating fans. Scheduled to be held in San Diego’s Petco Park, that postseason round will play to an empty stadium because California’s coronavirus restrictions still bar large gatherings, even outdoors.

Prior to Tuesday night’s debate, Joe Biden posted a mocking message about the “earpiece and performance enhancers” he has ready for the debate.

In the weeks leading up to this first presidential debate of 2020, President Donald Trump has accused his Democratic opponent of taking performance enhancing drugs of some kind. He first leveled that allegation in an interview with Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York, who wrote Trump “based his call entirely on his own observations and not on any actual knowledge of Biden’s actions.”

Additionally, the Trump team accused Biden earlier Tuesday of refusing a “pre-debate inspection for electronic earpieces” and continued fueling that hours ahead of the debate, including trying to get #CheckJoesEars trending.

The Biden campaign responded, “Of course he’s not wearing an earpiece and we never asked for breaks. If we’re playing that game, then you know, the Trump team asked Chris Wallace not to mention the number of deaths from Covid once during the debate. You can consider that confirmed from the Biden campaign. See how easy that was to try to throw up a distraction?”

The tweet Biden sent out tonight showed off his “earpiece” (Apple headphones) and his “performance enhancers” — Jeni’s ice cream:

It’s debate night, so I’ve got my earpiece and performance enhancers ready. pic.twitter.com/EhOiWdjh1b

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 29, 2020

Former Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that Vice President and “professed Christian” Mike Pence will have to defend “the character of a president who got caught sending hush money to a porn star” during his debate with Kamala Harris next week.

“I was mayor of South Bend when Mike Pence was governor and look, I don’t envy the job he’s going to have to do next week,” Buttigieg declared on Fox News, Tuesday before referencing the Stormy Daniels scandal. “You know, you’ve got a professed Christian who is going to be in the position of defending the character of a president who got caught sending hush money to a porn star.”

“You’ve got the person who’s been placed in charge of the Coronavirus Task Force, leading the national response for our country, this country, having the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world,” he continued. “So on the issues he’s in a tough spot, but I’ll also say he’s obviously an effective politician and an effective debater, that’s part of why he is where he is.”

Buttigieg concluded, “I’m looking forward to watching that debate just as I’m looking forward to watching the debate tonight.”

Watch above via Fox News.

Vice President Mike Pence dismissed the New York Times reporting on President Donald Trump’s taxes, including how he only paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.

Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Pence, “How do you think that is going to play and do you think it makes a mark?”

Pence said, “It feels like the same old, same old, doesn’t it, Bret? These same issues and allegations came up in 2016. The American people know President Donald Trump was a job creator. He’s a builder. He saved tens of millions of dollars in state and local taxes, payroll taxes. He created thousands of jobs as he built his business over many, many years.”

He continued defending the president’s record, but Bret Baier picked up on a discrepancy in how Trump has denied the reporting.

“The president said it was all fake news. Totally fake news,” Baier said, “but he also tweeted out that ‘The Fake News Media, just like Election time 2016, is bringing up my Taxes and all sorts of other nonsense with illegally obtained information & only bad intent. I paid millions of dollars in taxes but was entitled, like everyone else, to depreciation and tax credits.’ So which is it — a totally fake news story or illegally obtained documents that were real?”

Pence again dismissed is as “the same kind of allegations” lobbed against Trump four years agi, saying, “I’m very confident they took advantage of all the legal deductions and exemptions that were available in the tax code.”

He said the American people aren’t “focused” on “the latest allegations out of the liberal New York Times.”

You can watch above, via Fox News.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper opened his show with a long, withering look at President Donald Trump’s past hypocrisy and false statements about his business success, in light of the bombshell New York Times story that details hundreds of millions of dollars of financial losses and debt.

On Monday evening, Cooper used an extended opening monologue and numerous archival clips to contrast the behind-the-scenes picture of Trump’s business acumen — or lack thereof — revealed by the Times and his many boasts about his lucrative profits over the past years. He began by snarkily noting that Trump abruptly left two White House events on Monday without taking any questions from the press.

“Good evening, the wealthiest president ever does not want to talk about reporting that says he paid less in federal income taxes in his first year in office than perhaps any president on record and maybe less than most tax-paying Americans,” Cooper noted, as video showing journalists shouting questions about his tax debts at him. “He had a chance to talk when he was in front of the microphone twice today, but walked away on both occasions. It’s rate that does he not gravitate towards a camera.”

Cooper then pointed out that, per the Times’ reporting, Trump’s paying just $750 in federal incomes taxes in 2016 and 2017 would’ve been dwarfed by the non-inflation-adjusted taxes paid by President Franklin D. Roosevelt…83 years ago.

The CNN host also pulled out a quote from Trump’s 2012 book, in which he railed against the fact that many poor Americans are exempt from paying any federal income taxes.

“So a self-proclaimed multi-billionaire says the lowest-earning Americans should pay some income tax and he’s boasting he’s smart for not paying any,” Cooper noted. “But wait, maybe you’re thinking he’s not paying income tax because he made a bunch of bad investments and they out weigh earnings. And yeah, the Times did find evidence of that. He’s a really bad businessman.”

In fact, the story found that Trump racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses over the past decade and owes more than $300 million in debt to unknown sources.

“The bottom line, he doesn’t have a Midas touch. Far from it. Very far from it,” Cooper snaked. “You’d never know it based on what he told voters when he got into the race.”

“The only way you can claim to be too rich to need help and too poor to pay taxes is if you’re lying about one or both of those things,” Cooper concluded.

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that the information in the New York Times report about President Donald Trump’s taxes indicated that Trump had committed tax fraud and that both Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump could go to jail if he loses the election.

Akerman, who also served as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, investigated President Richard Nixon’s taxes as part of the Watergate administration, and said that compared to Trump, Nixon was a “rookie amateur.”

Akerman noted that Nixon had backdated just one document after Congress had eliminated a tax deduction, but in comparison, it looked like the president had “done a whole series of activities that could qualify as tax fraud, not tax avoidance. This is a very important distinction…there is a key difference with tax fraud. Tax avoidance is simply getting, taking the tax code and getting the most deductions you can get under the code — that’s perfectly legal.”

“Tax fraud, however,” he continued, “is lying about what your income was, lying about what your deductions are, and there’s a couple items that just stand out in that report from the New York Times that really appear to go beyond tax avoidance.”

The “most glaring” issue, Akerman said, was the “consulting fees” Trump paid to his daughter Ivanka, saying there “is no legitimate reason” for her to have been paid those fees since she was already an employee of the Trump Organization.

Burnett interrupted with a “blunt question,” asking Akerman, “Do you think Trump could end up going to jail if he is not re-elected because of anything in here?” referring of the information in the Times article.

“No question about it,” said Akerman, “and his daughter could go to jail, too. Tax evasion is a five-year felony. It’s a pretty serious crime and the more money that is stolen the longer you go to jail for.”

“So you’re saying if he loses, he, also Ivanka Trump, and others in his family, could be at risk?” asked Burnett.

“Sure, absolutely,” he replied. “I mean, the only thing saving him at this point is the Department of Justice’s guideline that says you can’t indict a sitting president. Once he is no longer a sitting president, he is subject to being indicted. I think any decent prosecutor looking at this evidence will be able to put together a pretty viable tax case.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.