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Trump expected to slam Harris on 3rd anniversary of deadly Afghanistan attack that killed 13 Americans

Trump expected to slam Harris on 3rd anniversary of deadly Afghanistan attack that killed 13 Americans

Former President Donald Trump is expected to attack Vice President Kamala Harris on the third anniversary of the deadly Abbey Gate bombing that killed 13 Americans during the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is expected to visit Arlington National Cemetery to pay his respects to the service members killed in the bombing outside the Kabul airport. Trump will then go to Michigan to address the National Guard Association of the United States conference. Monday marks three years since the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport, which killed 13 American service members and more than 100 Afghans. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack. Since President Biden ended his re-election bid, Trump has been zeroing in on Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, and her role in foreign policy decisions. He specifically highlighted the vice president’s statements that she was the last person in the room before Biden made the decision on Afghanistan. HARRIS’ ROLE IN AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL A MYSTERY DESPITE BEING ‘LAST PERSON IN THE ROOM’ WITH BIDEN “She bragged that she would be the last person in the room, and she was. She was the last person in the room with Biden when the two of them decided to pull the troops out of Afghanistan,” he said last week in a North Carolina rally. “She had the final vote. She had the final say, and she was all for it.” The relatives of some of the 13 American service members who were killed appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention last month, saying Biden had never publicly named their loved ones.  Democrats wielded allegations that Trump does not respect veterans and had previously referred to slain World War II soldiers as suckers and losers — accusations denied by Trump. HARRIS LEAVES OUT DEADLY BOTCHED AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL IN SOARING PRO-MILITARY DNC SPEECH Under Trump, the United States signed a peace agreement with the Taliban that was aimed at ending America’s longest war and bringing U.S. troops home. Biden later pointed to that agreement as he sought to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan, saying it bound him to withdraw troops and set the stage for the chaos that engulfed the country. A Biden administration review of the withdrawal acknowledged that the evacuation of Americans and allies from Afghanistan should have started sooner, but attributed the delays to the Afghan government and military, and to U.S. military and intelligence community assessments. The top two U.S. generals who oversaw the evacuation said the administration inadequately planned for the withdrawal. The nation’s top-ranking military officer at the time, then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, told lawmakers earlier this year he had urged Biden to keep a residual force of 2,500 forces to give backup. Instead, Biden decided to keep a much smaller force of 650 that would be limited to securing the U.S. embassy. The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Trump-Vance base voices support for Kennedy’s endorsement: ‘They both have my heart’

Trump-Vance base voices support for Kennedy’s endorsement: ‘They both have my heart’

Supporters of former President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. say they support Kennedy’s endorsement of the former president and GOP 2024 presidential nominee, saying both men have their “heart.” Fox News Digital spoke to supporters Friday at a Trump campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, where Trump took Kennedy onstage just hours after the now-former independent candidate and scion to the American political dynasty suspended his campaign and encouraged voters to vote for the Trump-Vance ticket in swing states. “I think it kind of makes sense that Kennedy, if he’s sincere about trying to make this country better for everybody, is going to reach out and and communicate with people that want to make this country better,” one Trump supporter said.  “I think as long as we just try to find space to make allies for people to disagree with us, I think it could be a huge,” the person said. RFK JR RESPONDS TO DRAMA WITHIN KENNEDY FAMILY, WIFE’S DISCOMFORT AFTER TRUMP ENDORSEMENT Kennedy, who adopted the slogan “Make America Healthy Again,” ran his campaign on ending chronic illness in America and overhauling its food system. “I think there’s a lot of cultural crossover between people that want to live healthy lifestyles, eat right, not have chronic diseases and try to find healthy ways of maintaining their health,” one Trump supporter said of MAGA and the RFK Jr. campaign. Another Trump supporter, a woman originally from San Francisco who recently moved to Arizona, said she believes Kennedy’s endorsement is “important.”  “Everything that he’s been vocal on the last few years are really important for Trump’s campaign, because I think a lot of Americans, myself included, are still pretty upset with him about Operation Warp Speed and not standing up against Big Pharma,” she said. Trump’s Operation Warp Speed was the project that facilitated the manufacture and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. Many Republicans and conservatives say the program rushed the vaccine without proper testing and resulted in high rates of vaccine injury. They also protested vaccine mandates. Pete and Erin, a couple originally from California and recently moved to the Grand Canyon State, said Kennedy’s message illustrates problems with government bureaucracy. ROBERT F KENNEDY JR LAMBASTES ‘DNC-ALIGNED MAINSTREAM MEDIA,’ ACCUSES THEM OF ENGINEERING HARRIS’ RISE “They both have my heart,” Erin said of Trump and Kennedy. “They speak the truth. They don’t B.S. They don’t need all the sparkle in Hollywood. I couldn’t care less about what people from Hollywood have to say … they’re just wolves in sheep’s clothing.” “I think the thing he said, [the] FDA, I mean that’s just an illustration of the bureaucracy that’s ballooned in our government,” Pete said.  Kennedy has been critical of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On “Fox News Sunday,” he told host Shannon Bream that, if he should serve in a Trump administration, he “would change the focus and would end the corruption.” “Right now, 75% of FDA’s budget is coming from pharmaceutical companies. That is a perverse incentive,” he said. Pete and Erin said they support the Trump-Vance ticket in large part due to his stance on China and the border. The couple lost their son to fentanyl, a lethal drug that authorities believe to be manufactured in China and Mexico and trafficked directly into the U.S. KENNEDY FAMILY CHOOSES POLITICS OVER FAMILY WITH ENDORSEMENT IN 2024 PRESIDENTIAL RACE The couple lamented that the fentanyl crisis, which is the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 49, was not mentioned at the Democratic National Convention last week. “When they say nothing about it … it’s just a slap in the face,” Erin said. While it was not highlighted at the Chicago convention, the Democratic Party platform unveiled last week says that the next Democrat administration will “push Congress to provide the resources and authorities that we need to secure the border,” the platform states. “This includes additional border patrol agents, immigration judges, asylum officers, cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop the flow of fentanyl, and funding for cities and states that are sheltering migrants,” it says.

Why won’t Pennsylvania voters have results on Election Night?

Why won’t Pennsylvania voters have results on Election Night?

Pennsylvania election officials – in a bid to avoid controversy in November – are telling voters ahead of time not to expect the results of the high-stakes presidential race to be ready by Election Night. The battleground state is of such significant importance this election cycle that Vice President Harris visited Pennsylvania on Aug. 18, ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and former President Trump made back-to-back visits both on Aug. 17, when he returned to Wilkes Barre for the first time since facing an assassination attempt in that town, and again on Aug. 19 in York.  To avoid repeated controversy from four years ago, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt – a Republican appointed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in 2023 – is explaining to voters that state law prohibits county boards of elections from beginning to process mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.  “The terminology is normally called pre-canvasing,” Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who clashed with Trump online after the 2020 election, explained to Fox News Digital. “Plenty of other states allow the county boards to begin that process in advance of Election Day, whether it’s three days or seven days or however long. But in Pennsylvania, counties can only begin that process at 7 a.m. on election morning.”  ATTEMPTED TRUMP ASSASSIN SEEN WALKING AROUND PENNSYLVANIA RALLY HOURS BEFORE OPENING FIRE By contrast, states like Florida, with nearly double the population size of Pennsylvania’s approximately 13 million residents, report their preliminary election results on Election Night.  “It is bologna that Florida, which has more citizens, Texas, which has more citizens and more voters by millions, are able to have their elections counted all in one day. But Pennsylvania is not,” Scott Pressler, a conservative activist leading a grassroots effort to get Republicans to register and vote early in Pennsylvania this election cycle, told Fox News Digital.  Pennsylvania is among seven states, including the fellow battleground of Wisconsin, where pre-canvassing is prohibited under state law.  It never posed a major issue until 2020, Dr. Dan Mallinson, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University, explained to Fox News Digital.  Mail-in ballots used to be granted only under special circumstances, such as when a voter is sick or traveling around the time of the election. But in October 2019, former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed what he championed as a “historic election reform bill” known as Act 77 into law, allowing most voters to apply for a mail-in ballot and vote by mail without needing to provide a reason or excuse.  The coronavirus pandemic saw a drastic surge in mail-in ballot use, and four years later, Mallinson said voting still looks similar in the Keystone State.  “There was a huge inflow of mail-in ballots in both the primary and the general in 2020,” Mallinson said. “Mail-in balloting has kept up in the 2022 cycle. I mean, it doesn’t look like it’s going to really slow down.”  More than 1.2 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail in the 2022 governor’s election.  Shapiro’s administration announced in June that mail-in ballot applications would be available two months earlier than in 2020, allowing voters more than eight weeks of additional time to apply for their ballot. For the commonwealth to begin processing mail-in ballots before 7 a.m. on Nov. 5, Schmidt said the state legislature would need to send pre-canvassing legislation to the governor’s desk.  PRE-CANVASSING BILL ‘IMPASSE’ Schmidt said he has testified in front of the Pennsylvania state House and state Senate advocating for mail-in ballot pre-canvassing, and it is frequently added to election reform bills. Most recently, the Democratic-controlled state House passed an election reform bill that includes a pre-canvassing measure, but the bill so far has not been taken up by the state’s Republican-controlled Senate.  “We knew this was an issue in 2020. It was on display for anyone paying attention to election results in Pennsylvania in 2020 and puts Pennsylvania at a unique disadvantage,” Schmidt told Fox News Digital. “It’s a technical problem with a technical solution that does not benefit any candidate. It does not benefit any party. It just allows counties to begin processing mail-in ballot envelopes prior to Election Day.”  “This is a fixable problem that we’ve just been unable to fix, you know, as a way to head off the rhetoric about, ‘there’s something shifty going on with these mail-in votes,’” Mallinson added. “The option is either the Republican-controlled Senate passes the clean bill and the governor signs it, or the Republican-controlled Senate does what has happened in the past, and they add things that they want to it, and then it probably gets rejected in the House. So we’re still kind of stuck in this impasse…. These, sort of, poison pills that get added, have got attached to the bill in the past, and that’s made it impossible to pass.”  There was a brief period in September 2020 when it appeared the state legislature, controlled by Republicans in both chambers at the time, was going to be able to a pass a clean pre-canvassing bill before going out of session and lawmakers went home to campaign, but Mallinson said a measure to ban drop-boxes was tacked on, which the Democratic Wolf administration would not agree to, so the legislation failed.  “They were close in 2020 at a much later point than right now,” Mallinson said. “There’s time, but I don’t know if there’s the political will or push.”  A margin of tens of thousands of votes handed a win to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 in Pennsylvania. The Keystone State has 19 electoral votes, tied with Illinois for the fifth most.  FORMER VP SHORTLISTER JOSH SHAPIRO STOPS SHORT OF SAYING DEMS HAVE AN ANTISEMITISM PROBLEM GOP STRATEGY SHIFT  Republicans, Mallinson noted, have shifted their strategy from emphasizing voter fraud concerns with mail-in ballots after the 2020 election to now encouraging their party to vote by mail.  Pressler, the founder of Early Vote Action, is

Minnesotan commutes out of state for ‘right to work’ after business closed under Walz’s COVID-era rules

Minnesotan commutes out of state for ‘right to work’ after business closed under Walz’s COVID-era rules

LAKEVILLE, Minn. – A Minnesota resident commutes two hours a day out of state “for the right to work,” after blaming Gov. Tim Walz’s policies for the loss of her two businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. Lifelong Minnesotan Lisa Zarza, who has been in the bar and restaurant industry for 32 years, told Fox News Digital that she operates her current business, Outpost Bar and Grill, in Wisconsin after COVID-era rules enforced by Walz forced her out of the state. “I have to travel two hours a day for the right to work as an American citizen,” Zarza said, adding that she hops on her Harley-Davidson motorcycle for the two-hour round-trip commute to work each day. “The beginning was really rough. Every time I crossed the border, I would get kind of choked up, like, this is just unfair.” Zarza previously owned Alibi Bar and Drinkery in Lakeville and Alibi at Froggy Bottoms in Wisconsin. In 2020, when Walz ordered bars and restaurants in the state to close as part of an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, Zarza defied his order and refused to shut down for two weeks in order to keep her business afloat.  GOP VETERAN-LAWMAKERS DROP SCATHING ‘STOLEN VALOR’ LETTER TO WALZ AS TRUMP CAMP RIPS ‘FREAKISH TIMOTHY’ After she refused to close her business, the state suspended her food service license, and she was sued by both the attorney general and the Minnesota Department of Health, which she says resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees.  “On Jan. 10, all bars and restaurants were allowed to reopen. The state of Minnesota refused to issue my food service license, and I operated illegally without a food service license, even though I had never violated any food service code,” she said. “They told me that if I did not close, I was going to be arrested or jailed. And eventually, I believe it was in the beginning of April, I closed.” HARRIS WEBSITE STILL LACKS POLICY DESPITE WALZ SAYING AMERICANS DESERVE TO KNOW ‘EXACTLY WHAT SHE’D DO’ “When I cross the border, I literally feel like I’m free again,” she said. “I flip off the state of Minnesota every time I cross this border and know that I can work in Wisconsin.”  When she decided to open her business in Wisconsin, where she has worked for two and a half years, Zarza said she faced no roadblocks in obtaining licenses. Zarza said that when she found out Vice President Kamala Harris selected Walz as her running mate, she rode the whole way home from work “crying, worried about what was going to happen to our country.” “This isn’t what Minnesota is. This isn’t who we want in our White House. He’s not what we represent as being a patriot,” she said. “I think Harris made a big, huge mistake when she picked her running mate.”

‘Beyond Insane’: Economists slam Biden-Harris proposal to tax unrealized investment returns

‘Beyond Insane’: Economists slam Biden-Harris proposal to tax unrealized investment returns

The Biden administration’s proposal – which the Harris campaign has indicated it supports – to tax investment returns that have not yet been realized is “insane” and “absurd,” economists told Fox News Digital.  The Biden-Harris administration’s Treasury Department released its 2025 fiscal year revenue proposals earlier this year, in March. Among the list of tax revenue proposals is a plan to include unrealized investment returns as part of someone’s taxable income if their net worth is greater than $100 million. The move to tax unrealized gains is in line with the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign reportedly told Marc Goldwein, vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, that it supports all tax increases on high earners proposed by President Joe Biden. CRITICS BLAST HARRIS’ GRASP OF INFLATION, ATTACK ON BUSINESS AHEAD OF POLICY SPEECH: ‘LUNATIC BEHAVIOR’ “The proposal would impose a minimum tax of 25% on total income, generally inclusive of unrealized capital gains, for all taxpayers with wealth (that is, the difference obtained by subtracting liabilities from assets) greater than $100 million,” the Treasury Department stated in its FY25 revenue proposals. The same proposal was also put forth by the Biden-Harris administration in fiscal year 2024 and in fiscal year 2023, but the minimum taxable amount was 20%. “This [proposal] is beyond insane,” said E.J. Antoni, a public finance economist at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. “This proposal by Harris’ handlers would literally force people to sell off a portion of their investments every year in order to pay the taxes due on unrealized gains. Until an asset is actually sold, any increase in value is purely speculative. It isn’t real, hence the classification of unrealized. The people pushing this idea are demonstrating their complete and total ignorance of both finance and economics.” Despite some concern about the proposal, others have welcomed the idea of new taxes on wealthy Americans, corporations and business owners. Upon learning of the Harris campaign’s support for all of Biden’s tax increases on high earners and corporations, University of California – Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman wrote on X, “Let’s go!” “And that includes, yes, the amazing 25% billionaire tax,” he noted. TAX RAISES HURT THE AMERICAN ECONOMY AND THE MIDDLE CLASS: DON PEEBLES In a statement to Fox News Digital, Zucman reiterated that the unrealized gains tax proposal is “important” because it addresses “a fundamental problem with the U.S. tax system, namely that billionaires can get away with paying extremely little tax, when everybody else has to contribute.” “The proposal is squarely focused on the super-rich,” he insisted. However, according to Richard Stern, the director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, the move would also impact businesses. “A tax on unrealized gains may be filed by an individual, but it is truly paid for by the workers and customers of the underlying business, and in the form of diminished economic growth,” Stern said. “Ultimately, an unrealized gains tax falls most heavily on companies with the highest price-to-earnings ratio … which is to say, companies with the most to offer in terms of future growth and technological innovation. So, this is truly a tax on optimism and innovation.” THE HARRIS-WALZ TICKET IS THE MOST ‘ANTI-BUSINESS’ IN AMERICAN HISTORY, SAYS ECONOMIST Stern pointed to the multinational technology company NVIDIA as an example of how speculating unrealized gains can be problematic for corporations. This year, Stern said, NVIDIA went from roughly a $1.18 trillion market capitalization to $3.16 trillion. He added further that if this proposed tax were extended to all unrealized gains, that would equate to a $495 billion tax bill on shareholders for a company whose annualized earning rate is only around $40 billion. Stern concluded that the tax would be an “absurd” move, and argued this proposed redistribution of productive capabilities would be “a blatant ratchet to socialism” if implemented by a potential Harris-Walz administration. In a statement Friday, Trump said, in part, of the proposed tax on unrealized capital gains: “In other words, the appraisers are going to make a lot of money, which will soon be applied to small business owners, and you will be forced to sell your restaurant immediately. And the new owner won’t do the job, and this restaurant will be closed.” Meanwhile, Antoni asserted that such a tax could also upend the financial markets by compelling investors to “unload everything at rock bottom prices to avoid taxes.” Subsequently, market valuations would plunge, as well. “That kind of extreme volatility, even if predictable, is highly inefficient and can have devastating secondary effects.”