Trump rally turns violent as Talarico conspiracy collapses

David Pakman (0:00)

Coming up today, a woman is beaten at a Trump rally. And Trump's response is to call her a fat man and call for more aggression. And that's not even the only disturbing thing that happened at this godforsaken rally. Trump on a bizarre rant about examining another man's ass, mangling his words, telling a cheering crowd he would love to do for more years. Now, meanwhile, very serious, Elon Musk and MAGA influencers are spreading an outrageous conspiracy theory about Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, who supposedly had a mental breakdown and was at a psych ward. It all collapsed. It was all fake. And we have new questions speaking of Elon Musk. What is he doing with Americans' private government data? And Trump was confronted over a Ukraine ceasefire that both sides say we don't know what he's talking about. Plus, Steve Bannon is warning Trump's administration could face a wave of impeachments. If Democrats win in November, it wouldn't just be Trump getting impeached. It could be Hegsteth. It could be RFK Junior. It could be a bloodbath. All of that and more today.

Well, there is a really disturbing theory circulating about Trump and Elon Musk and these upcoming midterms. And there's a new documentary about Elon Musk that is raising even more questions. I think this deserves some attention. Now, I want to sort of remind you or set some context. Elon Musk did help Trump get elected in 2024, but that's not all that he did because he went into the federal government with DOGE and they were going to find waste, fraud and abuse. And once his people got inside, according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, who has this new documentary Musk, what the DOGE staffers did, first of all, they didn't know a damn thing about the agencies they were supposedly reforming, but they knew how to access data. And what the film argues is that within days of getting access, some of these young DOGE staffers obtained what's called super administrator access to government systems. So that means they have access to super sensitive information about Americans. Social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, all sorts of information. And then it starts to get interesting. Ronan Farrow is an executive producer of the documentary. And what Ronan said to HuffPost is that there are some serious unanswered questions about what the hell happened to that information, because what we believe happened is that the data was harvested. It was transferred. It was provided to third parties. And we don't have a clear accounting of all of the places that our data ended up. And then we get to the electoral implications of that. Think about what somebody could do with all of that information. You could combine government records with commercial databases, identify individual voters and use AI to develop really sophisticated political targeting to those individuals. So we have to distinguish between changing votes and influencing elections. When we talk about election interference, it doesn't mean you've hacked voting machines, something that the Trump people have accused Democrats of doing for many election cycles. Now, election interference could mean we got information about people improperly or illegally and we're using that information we obtained improperly or illegally to target voters with misinformation or to impersonate a trusted institution to trick people or to discourage certain people from voting at all. And Elon Musk happens to own X, one of the largest social media platforms, by the way, along with XAI, which is the company that owns the chat bot grok. So what we have is someone with huge tech resources, access to major communications infrastructure and this relationship with Donald Trump and sort of an eagerness and an interest in pleasing Trump. So that's already bad enough. Now add to it another really strange piece of the story. The documentary Musk from Alex Gibney includes text messages that Ashley St. Claire, who's been a guest on this show, she's one of the, you know, look, I don't know if this term is inappropriate. She's called one of Elon's baby mamas. Some others call her one of the breeders. Anyway, she has a bunch of text messages that she says Elon sent her just days before the twenty twenty four election. And Elon Musk reportedly told her he's optimistic about the election because they are about to unleash the anomaly in the matrix or the anomaly. Both pronunciations are appropriate, interestingly enough. And when Ashley St. Clair said to Elon, what do you mean?

He said, oh, we've got thousands of lasers in space. And according to additional reporting about those messages, Musk also said on election night, we have the best real time data. So the implication, the suggestion here is maybe Elon Musk was referring to unusually early access to election reporting info, not changing or manipulating votes. But it raises some interesting questions about the kind of information that Elon Musk believed that he had access to. And that brings us to the midterms that are now just three weeks away. Right. Yeah, three, two or three weeks away, three weeks away.