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Should former President Donald Trump come up short in the 2024 presidential election, he has an army of MAGA activists who have nonetheless been preparing to undermine the results and try to reinstall him in power.

CNN reports that the "Stop the Steal" movement "has reemerged in force" ahead of the 2024 election and that its leaders have created "a step-by-step guide to undermine the results if he falls short again."

Donald Trump taunted his critics by saying he would "protect women ... whether the women like it or not," and a Republican operative who served in his administration had a hard time defending his remarks.

Tricia McLaughlin, who served in several roles in the departments of state and treasury, insisted that Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance stood strongly in favor of protecting women's health and reproductive rights, despite the former president's boasts that he assembled the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.

On Thursday morning, newly-anointed "Morning Joe" co-host Jonathan Lemire relayed to a national TV audience concerns from the editorial board of Nevada's largest paper that Donald Trump is mentally unfit to lead the country.

On Wednesday, the Las Vegas Sun went where the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wouldn't go and alerted their readers that the former president is "not healthy enough to become the oldest president ever inaugurated after canceling numerous public appearances due to exhaustion and struggling to complete sentences when he does show up."

Journalist Mehdi Hasan responded at length Wednesday to a bigoted attack he faced from a fellow CNN panelist earlier this week, warning that the kinds of people who would incite violence against a Palestinian rights advocate on live television could soon be in charge of U.S. foreign policy if Republican nominee Donald Trump wins the November 5 election.

Hasan, the founder of Zeteo, said he has never in 25 years of working in media "been so stunned" as he was when Ryan Girdusky—a right-wing commentator and Trump supporter—said that "I hope your beeper doesn't go off" after Hasan expressed support for Palestinian rights.

While former President Donald Trump and his allies are exuding confidence at him winning the 2024 presidential election, Semafor's Benjy Sarlin is seeing the potential for significant hubris in the final days of the campaign.

Even though polling shows that the race for the White House is a dead heat, Sarlin notes that "maybe too confident" MAGA allies such as X CEO Elon Musk and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are making brash claims about their plans after a Trump win that could spook undecided voters.

A Republican operative told CNN he was "having flashbacks" to previous campaign after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) dropped a "gift" into the laps of Democrats just ahead of Election Day.

The Louisiana Republican promised "no Obamacare" during a campaign rally Monday for House candidate Ryan Mackenzie in Pennsylvania, and GOP operative Matt Gorman was reminded of past campaigns he had worked on where opposition to the Affordable Care Act had cost votes.

The entire panel on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" lit into Donald Trump on Thursday morning over new comments he made about controlling women's lives –– and then tied him to the death of a pregnant woman in Texas.

During Trump's rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Wednesday night, he followed up on his previous boast that he is a "protector" of women, and told the crowd of MAGA diehards, "I want to protect the people, I want to protect the women of our country, I want to protect the women, " before adding, "Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”

Although it may take a while for final results to be tabulated in many swing states on election night, one elections analyst has flagged a key signal about whether Vice President Kamala Harris is in a good position to win Georgia.

Writing on Twitter, Split Ticket analyst Lakshya Jain gave his followers a pointer about what to look for in the Peach State next week.

Donald Trump has donned an orange vest and an apron in the final days of the election campaign, and a Wall Street Journal reporter explained the strategic reasoning behind those stunts.

The former president briefly staffed the fry station at a McDonald's in last week after baselessly claiming Kamala Harris had lied about working there decades ago and awkwardly climbed into the cab of a sanitation truck Wednesday to needle President Joe Biden, who the campaign says called Trump supporters "garbage," and the Journal's senior political correspondent Molly Ball explained the thinking behind those stunts.

According to political analyst Mark Leibovich, Donald Trump's campaign may not have time to recover from the stumbles of the past week with less than a week before voters head to the polls.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Way Too Early," the Atlantic columnist was asked by host Jonathan Lemire what direction voters appear to be going and Leibovich noted the former president's much-maligned Madison Square Garden rally was a setback from which he has little to no time to recover from.

"Well, I mean, I think Trump's closing argument has been really muddled, as you kind of would expect," he told the host. "He is a muddled messenger at this point."

ALSO READ: Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose

"The Madison Square Garden event the other day has really hobbled him at the end," he then added. "It's not the kind of thing –– I don't care how glib they are about it –– that you want to be talking about in the final days. It is an ugly message."

"You can say the Access Hollywood thing in 2016 he survived, but this was uglier. It was a sanctioned, current political event that is fresh in everyone's mind," he added.

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Larry Hogan, former Maryland governor and current Republican Senate candidate, has repeatedly said he would not vote for Donald Trump this year and didn't vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020. And in June, Hogan said he had "no interest" in Trump's endorsement, stressing that Trump's support would not be promoted by his campaign.

But a new CNN report shows Hogan did just that behind the scenes in a call to donors.

Public health experts reacted with alarm Wednesday to reports that former President Donald Trump promised anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. control over federal agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Agriculture should the Republican nominee defeat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in next week's election.

Speaking at last week's bigotry-laden campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, Trump said that if he wins, he'll let Kennedy—who in August suspended his Independent presidential campaign and endorsed the GOP nominee—"go wild on health."

The United States' 2024 presidential election is less than a week away, and countless national and battleground state polls released in late October are indicating that the race continues to be a toss-up. Republican former President Donald Trump is slightly ahead in some polls, while Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is slightly ahead in others.

Democratic strategist James Carville and conservative attorney George Conway have expressed confidence that Harris will win, while election law expert Rick Hasen believes the election is a "coin flip" and could go either way on Tuesday, November 5.