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A former economic advisor to Donald Trump was confronted on CNN while trying to defend the president's economy, with a host asking whether he believes Americans are "ignoring the bigger picture" as they keep giving Trump toxic economic approval ratings.

Stephen Moore is a longtime conservative economist and writer, having previously worked for The Heritage Foundation and published pieces for numerous conservative outlets like The Wall Street Journal, National Review and The Weekly Standard. He also served as an adviser for Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and later advised his administration on its 2017 tax-cut legislation.

Moore continues to make media appearances where he attempts to defend Trump's economic record, as he did on Friday with an appearance on CNN's News Central. Host John Berman pressed Moore for a reaction to a new report which found that inflation had been outpacing wage growth in the U.S. for the last five months. Moore countered that, while that may be the case recently, real wage growth has actually increased overall throughout Trump's second term.

"So we estimate right now through the month of August, that the average family is up about $2,000 in after-inflation income," Moore said. "But it's all about what have you done for me lately? And people have seen declines in the last few months."

Berman responded that wage growth had also been outpacing inflation in the final months of Joe Biden's presidency, and confronted Moore with a breakdown of various economic rates that had increased since the start of Trump's second term, including inflation, gas prices, 10-year bonds and 30-year mortgage rates.

Moore then deflected, attempting to reframe the argument around the average rates for things like inflation and unemployment across Biden's entire term.

"Stephen, can I stop you for one second?" Berman interjected. "Can I ask, can I stop you for one second? Has inflation gone up or down since President Trump took office?"

Moore conceded that inflation is now worse than it was when Trump took office, prompting another sputtering back and forth with Berman before he attempted to reframe the argument again, arguing that "Joe Biden had the worst inflation record of any president since Jimmy Carter in the 1970s."

"But John, look, you're kind of ignoring the fact that the United States economy right now is very, very strong," Moore added. "Look at all the indicators that have just come out in the last few weeks... So, you know, other than the fact that inflation is ticking up, almost all of the other indicators of the economy are strong. We have by far the strongest economy in the world today. There's no country that wouldn't trade places with the United States."

Berman responded, asking if Moore's "other than that" argument was not akin to the famous joke about President Abraham Lincoln's assassination during a play: "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?"

"Steve, let me ask the question here because, you know, AP-NORC polls that just came out on the economy: 26 percent say they approve of trump's handling of the economy, 73 percent disapprove on his handling of the cost of living, 17 percent approve, 82 percent disapprove," Berman added. "So you said I was ignoring the big picture. Are the American people ignoring the big picture?"

Moore argued in response that the economy remains strong, and that negative media coverage was contributing to the overall sense of despair among everyday Americans. Berman noted that almost the exact same dynamic was present during Biden's presidency, right as Americans turned on his economic performance and presidency overall.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis privately unloaded on President Donald Trump in a profane message, telling him that any direct threat of a primary challenge would have been met with an immediate and unmistakable response.

“If you had ever threatened me directly with a primary, I would have immediately told you to f—— yourself, and I would have announced my retirement immediately,” Tillis wrote to Trump on June 6, according to an image of the exchange shared by Politico. “Save those threats and head games for cowards and fools,” he added.

The exchange is part of a series of private messages disclosed ahead of the release of Tillis’ memoir, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, due out Oct. 6. In the book, the retiring senator describes his increasingly combative relationship with Trump and his frustration with the people around the president.

Tillis’ June message pushed back directly on Trump’s claim that he had driven the North Carolina senator into retirement.

“As I have said before, you NEVER threatened me with a primary challenge,” Tillis wrote. “I get that you may have me confused with so many Republicans that you have threatened in the past, but NEVER me.”

The message came after Trump publicly attacked Tillis during a dispute over the president’s nomination for Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general. Tillis had said he would not support Blanche unless he condemned the Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted police officers at the Capitol.

Trump responded by calling Tillis “a loser” and claiming the senator was leaving because Trump would not support him. “He’s just an angry man because he’s not going to be a senator any longer,” Trump told reporters in June.

Tillis has given a different account. He announced in June 2025 that he would not seek another term after opposing Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill, particularly over its Medicaid provisions. He later said he had already been leaning toward retirement and that the clash gave him an opportunity to make the decision public.

In the same vein as other retiring GOP members, without another election ahead of him, Tillis has become increasingly willing to criticize Trump and other Republicans. In July 2025, he told Semafor that a Trump social media attack over the spending bill convinced him he was finished dealing with the political pressure.

“If somebody wants to know why I’m not running, it’s because some bonehead told him to post something and pretend like that was going to affect me,” Tillis said at the time. “It affected me in a way that said: ‘I’m done with this bulls—— .’”

The newly disclosed messages show that frustration also made its way directly to Trump.

After nearly a decade in Congress as a Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick is leaning hard on a different label as he fights for survival in a swing district.

“I am an independent who is registered Republican,” Fitzpatrick told The Washington Sun, which profiled his reelection battle in Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District.

While he has always cultivated a moderate image, Fitzpatrick went further when asked about his place in the GOP. “I’m a registered Republican. There’s a difference,” he said, adding that if Pennsylvania allowed independents to participate in party primaries, he would leave the GOP and register as an independent.

“Right now, I’m homeless,” he said.

The comments come as Fitzpatrick faces Democrat Bob Harvie in a district that President Donald Trump lost in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Despite that terrain, Fitzpatrick has repeatedly survived, with his closest race coming in 2018, when he won by just over 2.5 percentage points.

The Washington Sun reported that Fitzpatrick is now running a more aggressive campaign than in past cycles, spending millions on negative advertising against Harvie while presenting himself as the same independent-minded Republican voters have known for years.

“I personally feel very, very close to my district,” Fitzpatrick said. “I’m more present than him by a factor of 10.”

Harvie is trying to puncture that image by tying Fitzpatrick to Trump and the Republican leadership. His campaign has highlighted Fitzpatrick’s vote for an initial version of Trump’s policy bill and a procedural vote that delayed release of the Epstein files.

“He’s hiding from his record, and we’re not going to let him hide from his record,” Harvie told The Sun.

Fitzpatrick has nevertheless broken with his party on several high-profile issues. An Inquirer analysis published last month found that he has voted with Trump’s stated positions about 70% of the time during the current Congress, less frequently than any other House Republican. He has also supported same-sex marriage, an assault-weapons ban and former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law.

Fitzpatrick said he tries to keep Trump out of his decision-making altogether. “I take him out of the equation,” he told The Sun. The congressman also offered a more nuanced explanation for why he no longer feels at home inside either major party.

“The two parties have become cults,” Fitzpatrick said.

That posture has helped him build an unusual coalition in Bucks County, including endorsements from labor unions and environmental groups that often support Democrats. But Harvie argues that Fitzpatrick’s moderate brand masks important votes with Republicans.

With Pennsylvania Democrats investing in the district, Fitzpatrick’s attempt to separate his political identity from his party may face its most consequential test yet this November.

We’ve seen any number of public political blowups lately in which, whether out of frustration, intention or distraction, one side just seems to make up allegations in hopes that the facts will catch up.

From vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that turn out to be bad contracting work to criminal cases alleging wide anti-Donald Trump electoral conspiracies that repeatedly fall apart for lack of evidence, we allow ourselves to get much more focused on the shiny new allegation than on building the case towards finding blame.

Roy Cohn-trained Trump has made a political career or two of doing so, of course, with public campaigns against the Central Park Five’s pre-judicial guilt findings and Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but continuing even this week with resignation of yet another would-be prosecutor who cannot find evidence to match Trump’s insistence of a “Grand Conspiracy” to have launched an investigation of Russian attempts to influence his 2016 election campaign.

Trump Trump’s focus on finding criminal fault with “enemies” include the case alleging that former FBI director James B. Comey Jr. wanted to assassinate him by photographing seashells arranged as “86 47” on the beach, and the unending efforts to seek perjury charges against former chief government virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Special Counsel Jack Smith.

It is the nature of what our politics have become.

Each step downward toward blame-first politics makes the next yet more slippery and easier.

Ludicrous Jack Smith Hearing

Whatever the intended purpose of bringing Smith before riled Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the effort was a laughable failure. Republicans angrily pursued Smith for obtaining congressional phone toll records – not their content, a standard investigative tactic to verify testimony about those calls before and on Jan. 6, 2021, but they never came close to challenging the meat of Smith probe of Trump’s leading role in the insurrection attempt.

Indeed, charges were dropped after a Justice Department order following a Supreme Court decision effectively granting Trump preemptive immunity for official acts. Still, the facts have never changed despite Trump’s attempts to rewrite history either about Jan. 6, 2021, nor about Trump’s holding classified information held in bathrooms and ballrooms at Mar-a-Largo.

The hearing was so short of evidence that Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri embarrassed himself and colleagues as he accused Smtih of perjury over attending a basketball game in Georgia as a pretext for some conspiratorial link-up with state prosecutors there also pursuing Trump. Schmitt cited emails and smirked, until it became clear through questions from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. that the game was wrong. Smith had not been at a basketball game played by the Atlanta Hawks, but in Maryland, at another game involving the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.

Even if it had been true, Schmitt looked foolish proving a point that went nowhere.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche attacked federal judges in Minnesota, accusing them of bias after they spoke out in news interviews against evidence-free immigrations that they had been forced to hear.

Meanwhile, it is Blanche who has called his own fight with courts a “war.” Blanche wants an investigation of those judges and for them to recuse themselves in immigration cases but sees no hypocrisy in having been Trump’s personal defense lawyer. As deputy attorney general, Blanche told a Federalist Society event in 2025 that the administration was at “war” with judges he called activists, Bloomberg Law reported.

Meanwhile, of course, there are no federal charges in the fatal deaths of citizen protesters at the hands of border patrol agents in Minneapolis.

Of course, it is Blanche who has oversight of that case in Florida where now two prosecutors have walked away claiming that there is no evidence of a conspiracy that Trump wants to find.

Pretending at the Institutions Too

The Washington Post brings us reporting to show that the Kennedy Center was solvent when Trump took over. Trump removed the professional staff, insisted on choosing the entertainment offered, and was surprised to see revenue, donations and bookings plummet.

Now we face Trump demands that because the law won’t allow him to put his name on the building, he may just raze the institution, which he claims is hopelessly in debt and failing.

The Post examined 15 years of the institution’s confidential board documents and tax filings, showing that since taking over the center, the institution has borrowed everything its bank would lend it, dipped into money donors had given on the condition it never be spent and written off pledges from supporters who stopped paying. Trump said the center was “losing hundreds of millions of dollars” when he took over, and his board has warned of “bankruptcy.”

Not to get lost in the details, there are kernels of financial dispute here, but Trump’s version does not account for his own role in cutting development staff or spending the endowment money of the National Opera or many other things that The Post lays out.

Suffice it to say, it is a lot easier to make up the financial problems than it is to document them. In like fashion, a Federal Reserve watchdog found no criminal wrongdoing by former chair Jerome Powell in its investigation of the central bank’s expensive headquarters renovation, according to a report released on Wednesday. The findings effectively clear Powell after the Justice Department opened an unprecedented criminal investigation into then-Fed chair, which became public in January.

The report did find need for better supervision, but no criminal violation, as Trump had pressured to determine.

Naturally, there is no apology to Powell nor to those fired from the Kennedy Center, to the former Olympian who faced criminal vandalism charges for examining peeling paint, nor to Fauci or Special Counsel Smith.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

Ultra-far-right Republican and failed political candidate James Fishback called out the Trump administration, asking what they are "waiting for" with a proposed new anti-immigrant move.

Fishback, previously an investor, first gained national attention during his 2026 bid for the GOP nomination in the Florida gubernatorial race, which he ultimately lost to Byron Donalds. A hardline far-right conservative, Fishback was noted for his racist, nativist and anti-immigrant ideas and beliefs, expressing support for various unfounded white nationalist conspiracy theories.

Even as his political aspirations have fizzled, Fishback has remained vocal on these issues, recently taking to his official X account to needle the Trump administration for not moving quickly or definitively enough to dismantle H-1B visas, which grant temporary work permits to foreign professionals in specialized fields and are highly favored by American tech companies.

Fishback was responding to another post sharing the news that Vice President JD Vance had spoken out against these visas, calling the system "completely broken" and suggesting that it be done away with entirely.

"If you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who is an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the programme to bring in a genius,” Vance said in a video shared to X. “That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people."

Responding to the news in his own post, Fishback took a jab at the administration for moving fast enough on the issue.

"Lol ok. Then do it," he posted. "What are you waiting for?"

H-1B visas were among the immigration systems that Fishback took aim at during his ill-fated gubernatorial campaign. At one point, in a post to X, he warned all of the companies in Florida using H-1B foreign workers that, should he be elected, they would have to get rid of those employees or face the state's wrath.

"To the 1,900 employers in Florida right now who are using H-1B foreign labor, I am warning you once and for all, fire your foreign workers, hire back qualified Floridians, or you will face the ultimate wrath of the state of Florida," he wrote in the post. "We must put our workers front of the line."

"Fishback has repeatedly called for dismantling the H-1B program in Florida," the Hindustan Times reported. "In earlier campaign statements, he pledged to remove H-1B visa holders employed by state agencies, cancel state contracts awarded to companies that rely on H-1B workers instead of what he describes as 'qualified Floridians,' and impose steep financial penalties on businesses hiring foreign professionals."

President Donald Trump’s crumbling poll numbers are leaving Republicans with fewer places to look for reassurance as the midterm campaign enters its final weeks, according to political analysts.

The i Paper reported Friday that Trump’s weak approval ratings are shaping contests even though he is not on the ballot. Around seven in 10 voters say their view of Trump will factor into their vote, according to a PBS News/NPR/Marist survey the outlet cited.

“This is bad. It’s getting to the point where Republicans can’t even find a silver lining,” Durham University political scientist David Andersen told the i.

The warning comes amid national surveys showing Trump underwater with voters. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sept. 21 put his approval rating at 32 percent, with 66 percent disapproving. The same poll found Democrats holding an eight-point advantage over Republicans on the congressional ballot.

A New York Times/Siena survey conducted Sept. 8-13 found Trump at 38 percent approval among likely voters and Democrats ahead by roughly nine points in congressional preferences. Only 28 percent approved of Trump’s handling of the affordability crisis, while a majority disapproved of his performance on every major issue tested.

Jason Reifler, a University of Southampton political science professor, told the i that Trump was facing the “worst polling that any incumbent president” approaching a midterm. Andersen said Republicans were also struggling to find an issue where public opinion clearly breaks their way.

The problems for the GOP extend beyond Trump’s plunging poll numbers. Dissatisfaction with the cost of living, tariffs and the continuing war with Iran has contributed to higher fuel prices. Those economic pressure points have given Republican candidates an incentive to emphasize local issues or their own records rather than make their campaigns solely about Trump.

The president, however, has urged Republicans to tie themselves closely to him. At the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, he told delegates to “pretend that I’m on the ballot,” according to the i.

That creates a difficult calculation for candidates in competitive states. Washington Post polling analysis published Thursday found Republican candidates running, on average, about four points ahead of Trump in national and state surveys, suggesting some can outperform the president even while carrying the burden of his low ratings.

Current polling still has important limits as district boundaries, candidate quality, turnoutt and late-moving voters can all change individual races and national generic-ballot numbers do not translate neatly into seats.

But with Election Day approaching, Republicans are confronting a narrower political path to victory. They are left with few choices that may include improving perceptions of Trump and the economy, or convincing voters to judge GOP candidates separately from a president many view negatively.

Mediaite reports Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) backed out of a planned C-SPAN appearance after his planned “gotcha” of former special counsel Jack Smith went down in flames this week.

“Politico’s Dasha Burns, who also hosts Ceasefire on C-SPAN, explained in a preview of Friday’s edition of the program that “Senator Schmitt was supposed to appear on this program with Senator [Chris] Coons [D-DE], but he pulled out a day after that hearing.”

The hearing Burns was citing is the spectacular Tuesday Senate Judiciary Committee blowout where Schmitt thought he’d pressed Smith into a corner, only to discover that he was entirely wrong about his premise.

Schmitt suggested Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks NBA game on Feb. 3, 2024, implying that Smith in Georgia to collude with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was separately prosecuting President Donald Trump.

“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game,” Smith said. “I’m sure of that.”

Bit Mediaite reports “Schmitt responded smugly, ‘I think you’ve already perjured yourself.’”

But the former special counsel later recalled that he had instead gone to the Iowa-Maryland women’s college basketball game to watch Caitlin Clark play, prompting Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) to determine that Schmitt had confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes.

She also advised Schmitt to get his case together before lobbying insults and calling people “dirtbag.”

Republicans blasted Schmitt for his colossal error while others pretended he had not been publicly dismantled. But other Republican insiders claimed Schmitt knew his assertions about Smith were unvetted, but presented them as factual anyway.

"With correct knowledge of the conversation, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt was warned ahead of time by Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Jack Smith text he wants to use to catch Smith in a line were 'unvetted,'" MS NOW anchor Michael Steele reported on Wednesday, breaking a story exclusive to the network. "Schmitt? Well, he decided to use it anyway."

Democrats like Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) mauled Schmitt, calling his mistake “abysmal” and “laughable."

Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes offered a scathing description of how Schmitt conducted himself during the confrontation, “smirking as he presented” a posterboard based on mistakes and poor research.

Other reports suggested Schmitt's gaffe was so monumental that it is already impacting the job prospects of his staff, with Ethan Harper, the general counsel to Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), expected to leave his role on Friday for the White House Staff Secretary’s office next week, according to three people familiar with the plans.

The sources said that transition was now in doubt following Schmitt's awful blunder, the people said.

Some prominent MAGA figures are dismissing a run of disastrous midterm polling for Republicans, with several expressing the belief that the numbers are not just wrong but part of a coordinated “psyop” aimed at keeping conservatives home this November.

The accusations spread as President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen and Democrats have gained ground in key races, according to WIRED. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told Fox Business that recent polling amounted to a “psyop” designed “to depress conservative turnout.”

Steve Bannon echoed that message on his War Room podcast, warning supporters not to accept talk of a Democratic wave. “That psyop is out there pretty strongly,” Bannon said. He argued that Republicans could still determine the outcome if the MAGA base turns out, saying the party’s “fate is still in our hands.”

Online, some Trump supporters have gone even further.

“The laughable fake polls are rolling out,” Phillip Buchanan, the pro-Trump influencer known as Catturd, wrote on X. Seth Keshel, a former Army colonel who has promoted election-fraud claims, declared: “Polling is so unethical now it should be outlawed.”

Another pro-Trump influencer, David Freeman, who posts under the name Gunther Eagleman, argued that polls themselves were bogus because he had never personally been contacted by one. “Polls are fake to sway votes,” he wrote.

Similar claims quickly spread across X.

The pushback comes as Republican anxiety over the midterms has become increasingly public. Trump’s approval rating fell to the lowest of his first and second term at 32 percent in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.

WIRED separately reported that some Trump aides have privately begun considering the possibility that Republicans could lose both chambers of Congress. One longtime Trumpworld operative gave the outlet a far different assessment from the public claims that the polls are fake: “Oh, yeah, we’re going to get creamed.”

Trump has repeatedly questioned the results of surveys, including negative polling from Iowa this week. WIRED reported that Media Matters has counted 39 instances since Trump returned to office in which he has described polling as fake.

There are signs of disagreement inside Trump’s coalition. Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool recently suggested Trump’s weak numbers could reflect frustration over high gas prices and the war in Iran. However, MAGA commentator Bill Mitchell responded by suggesting the polls themselves could be fake.

The way Trump supporters have reacted to the most recent surveys indicates that there is an increasing division among Trump's supporters as to whether Republicans should see the figures as a warning about growing voter dissatisfaction or regard them as yet another effort to demoralize the party's base.

President Donald Trump was seen seemingly yelling at his close assistant Natalie Harp, with whom he reportedly has an unusually close relationship. While the media has focused on the jarring image of Harp plastering a smile on her face for the cameras while Trump points at the ground near her with a scowl on his face, one Trump expert noted that the president is notorious among aides for his abusive behavior — so much so that they've developed a code for managing his moods.

“Everybody takes abuse,” Trump biographer Michael Wolff told his podcast co-host Joanne Coles, according to a report by The Daily Beast's Erkki Forster on Thursday. He added that everyone who works for the president will eventually find themselves on the receiving end of his tongue lashings.

"Wolff, who has written four tell-alls about Trump and spent time in the White House during his first term, revealed that aides devised a secret phrase to tip one another off about what awaited them before seeing the president," Forster wrote. "'People around Trump would say, ‘How’s the weather?,’' the author recounted, a discreet shorthand to find out, 'What’s his mood?'"

Forster quoted Wolff as adding, “This is a man who is wholly unfiltered. There are no restraints here... If he feels it, if he thinks it, he expresses it, and his powers of expression are... blunt force. That’s it. You’re going to get it. It’s going to come at you.”

Wolff also said that women who work for Trump are in for a particularly tough time.

According to Wolff, “And let’s remember, these women around him... they are there... in the most abject capacity... There’s no pretense that they are there for any other reason but the succor of Donald Trump. They are there to be his comfort blanket.”

Forster also pointed out that Harp, who leaves loving letters to Trump at various places in the White House where he can find them, included in one of those letters comments that seemed to be a plea for forgiveness for unspecified actions which angered him.

“If there is anything else I have done to cause you trouble, please forgive me,” Harp wrote.

In July, Anthony Scaramucci — who briefly worked for Trump as his White House Communications Director — said that no one who works for Trump sincerely likes him because of his mean-spirited behavior.

“Getting fired after 11 days was brutal, but there was also a genuine sense of relief,” Scaramucci posted on X. “Yes I had a shortcoming. I failed at the job. There was humiliation in it, but there was also relief.”

He added, “Here's what I've observed about everyone around Trump. Nobody likes him. I don't think his family members like him. I don't think his cabinet members really like him. They kiss his a—— because he's powerful.”

Scaramucci finished his point by saying, “The people who genuinely like him are one or two electron orbits away, close enough to feel the warmth, far enough to avoid the heat. I don't know a single person in his inner circle who came out unscathed.”

Speaking to AlterNet in September, Scaramucci observed that people who know Trump and are aware of his personality flaws stick by him out of fear.

"We started this interview by me saying that they only care about themselves and their own personal power, and they've become cowards," Scaramucci told AlterNet. "If they were not cowards, they would've sought Donald Trump's removal. If they were not cowards, they would've convicted Donald Trump in his second impeachment after the ridiculous, and I want to emphasize the ridiculous, Matthew, the ridiculous insurrection and the fomenting of that insurrection. If they were not cowards... But they're cowards."

CNN chief national correspondent John King says Republican sources are reacting with disbelief when hearing of President Donald Trump’s latest bid for self-enrichment.

Trump recently purported to having gotten inflation “totally in control, and we've done a great job,” while adding that “I haven't done a good job with is explaining it to people.”

But in keeping him honest, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said Thursday that “costs are not down. They're up. They're rising faster than they were when he took office.” Additionally, Trump’s approval numbers suggest a growing number of voters “simply are not buying what he is selling the way they did at the start of his second term.”

According to the latest financial filings, Cooper said cryptocurrency ventures are putting over $1 billion a year in the president's pocket, and he asked King if voters are noticing how much he's enriching himself while in office.

But King said it’s not just voters who are noticing Trump’s schemes and beating down their own doors to go vote against them in early returns.

“Among the most loyal Trump voters, I was texting a bunch of them today. Remember, a lot of them don't see these stories. They watch and live and breathe in the MAGA media ecosystem that doesn't tell them bad things or questionable things or ethical things about the president of United States,” King told Cooper. “I texted our CNN story to several today. One said, ‘this guy is out of his mind,’ but then five minutes later texted me back: ‘are you sure this [story] is legitimate?”

The story, King said, sounded so unreal as to need assurance that it was not “fake news.”

King added that a voter he interviewed in the contentious state of Georgia said she had “invested in two of Trump’s crypto funds and lost about $20,000.”

“She blames the president for that, and she's mad at the Republicans,” said King. “Now she's planning to vote Democrat for Senate in a very big race there in Georgia.”

“The most important group, Anderson, are those Republicans who voted for Trump maybe twice,” added King. “Or they voted Trump, Biden and then back to Trump because they thought he would fix the economy.”

These groups, according to voter groups King had been texting, say the president “is not focused on what they care about most. They think he's just lost, that he's doing things that are all about him and not about them.

Democrats, meanwhile, are cooking with energy this cycle, said King.

“When you talk to Democrats, ‘grift’ is a word that comes up often, and they are highly motivated by it. Don't get me wrong: ‘affordability’ is the biggest issue in this election. But Democrats who already didn't like trump, think he is using his office to enrich himself. And they are highly motivated. And they say that's the reason they will run through a brick wall to vote on Election Day," King warned.

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