Right Wing Round-Up: The Trump Effect

Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, said Monday that if he were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s place, he would not have certified the election on January 6, 2021.

It’s been a surreal experience for Dorsainvil, but Vance’s tweet seized on a conspiracy theory that has been bouncing around the right-wing echo chamber. The core allegation that Haitians in Springfield had “abducted and eaten” pets followed a meandering path, from local Facebook groups to the online, right-wing influencers that Vance follows, and onwards to the current vice presidential candidate. It’s an example of the engine that drives modern right-wing politics: wild and false claims start off scattered across the internet, before being vacuumed up and boosted to mass audiences, sometimes by high-profile politicians whose status as public figures lends credence to what, only days before, had been random, unverified posts.

On Saturday, Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer Stew Peters claimed that he had been denied entry at an event hosted by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In a post on his X account, Peters wrote that he was “BANNED from entry to a ticketed VIP event” in Salt Lake City, UT which was part of Carlson’s ongoing “Live Tour.”

The connection between Republican voters and their leaders was never primarily about abortion. Rather, as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s bond with his supporters is forged from different material: namely, his militant mission to return power to white Christian America.

Donald Trump is probably fuming about this interview with former Project 2025 director Paul Dans.

Lawfair, founded by the well-known litigator Adam Mortara, is a boutique right-wing firm currently engaged by the state of Tennessee to provide counsel on a contentious Supreme Court case that could affect the availability of gender-affirming care for transgender minors across the country. Aside from Mortara, the only other lawyer known to have worked or done work for the firm is a project-based contract attorney named Christopher Roach. He no longer does so, after WIRED asked questions about his apparent ties—revealed exclusively in this story for the first time—to online accounts with a long history of posting white supremacist and antisemitic content.

Candace Owens announced on X Monday that she was suspended from YouTube for a week following her recent interview with anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West, which YouTube said platformed anti-Semitic claims that “Jewish people control the media.”

While swing state Republican officials, former Republican National Committee leaders and strategists are ringing alarm bells over the party’s lackluster get-out-the-vote effort, some pro-Trump organizers suggest that the GOP ground game is successfully targeting voters at the margins.

In 2016, he tried to stop Trump from becoming president. By 2020, he was trying to help Trump overturn the election. Now he could become Trump’s attorney general.