In picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris has doubled down on his influential critique that the Republican ticket is “weird.”
Trump, in the meantime, has doubled down on being weird.
As the Harris-Walz team plans a blitz of swing states, Trump is not scheduled to visit a single battleground state this week. Instead, he’s relying on the uber-weird Ohio Sen. JD Vance to shadow their rivals’ campaign.
As the Harris-Walz team plans a blitz of swing states, Trump is not scheduled to visit a single battleground state this week.
Trump himself spent part of the day Monday chatting with Adin Ross, a controversial 22-year-old livestreamer.
“My sons told me about and, you know, they told me about how big,” Trump said, adding that his youngest son, Barron, told him: “’Dad, he’s really big.’”
Ross is also exceedingly weird, and not at all subtly racist.
He was banned by the livestream platform Twitch for displaying racist and anti-Jewish messages and for his use of homophobic slurs. His past guests have included white nationalist Nick Fuentes (who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022), and a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi. Ross is also known to be a friend of notorious misogynist Andrew Tate, who was arrested in March on rape and human trafficking charges.
None of that, apparently, was a problem for Trump.
During the interview, Trump again displayed his odd attitudes toward strongmen when he gave a backhanded compliment to Venezuela’s left-wing dictator Nicolas Maduro. Trump gave the thuggish Maduro, who is in the process of trying to steal that country’s presidential election, credit for making Venezuela’s big cities safer than many American cities. (In fact, Venezuela has a violent death rate that’s several times higher than America’s and more than double the homicide rate in Mexico.) During their chat, Ross also gave the former president a Rolex and a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped in an image of the flag and a picture of Trump after he was shot. Afterward, the former president made a TikTok video showing him dancing with the far-right streamer. American voters are being introduced to the Democrats’ new team today. Meanwhile, Team Trump continues to remind us what is really at stake in this election.
Charlie Sykes is an MS NOW contributor and the author of the newsletter "To the Contrary." 
