Getty Images/Brendan SmialowskiA former top general in Donald Trump’s administration ”warned former colleagues” about the Republican presidential nominee’s temperament and called him a ”total fascist.”Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley was quoted in Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, War, as saying Trump is “the most dangerous person ever” who could not control his authoritarian tendencies while in the White House.“I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist,” Milley told Woodward, reported The Guardian. “He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty ImagesFormer New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took shots at fellow Republican Donald Trump for his mental decline, his childlike behavior amid Hurricane Helene and his chances to win the presidency in November during an interview with New York Times opinion journalist Frank Bruni.Christie—who previously supported Trump’s last two campaigns before speaking out against him more recently—told Bruni that he has seen declines in the GOP nominee’s mental acuity and speaking ability.“He wasn’t as good in 2020 as he was in 2016,” Christie said. “I saw decline in his skills in ’20 from ’16, and you see significant declines still. What masks it is that he is still physically pretty vibrant and energetic, unlike the president. But if you listen to him and his ability to make a point, it’s not nearly as good now as it was in 2016, not nearly.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Flagrant/YouTubeThe hustler never thinks they’ll be hustled. How else to explain Donald Trump blundering his way into his latest podcast interview with comedian Andrew Schulz?Trump’s hour and a half sit-down on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh podcast has clocked more 2.8 million views on YouTube in less than 48 hours. It also managed to provide a soundbite that Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has already has turned into a howler of an election ad.The Harris-Walz campaign captured the moment Trump froze when Schulz asked the former president what happened to his VP, Mike Pence, before cutting to the rioters of Jan. 6, 2021, shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” As Schulz quipped, “He’s hanging out somewhere?”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Michael TullbergR. Kelly’s daughter has opened up in a new documentary, alleging that her father sexually abused her when she was eight or nine.Buku Abi, born Joann Kelly, made the claims in a two-part docu-series R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey.“I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she said in the documentary, according to People. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Rebecca CookDonald Trump’s campaign reportedly wants the GOP candidate to be flown in military aircraft and driven in an array of military vehicles during the final weeks before the election.He also wants expanded flight restrictions over his residences and rallies, as well as bulletproof glass to be installed ahead of his campaign events in battleground states, according to the Washington Post.The requests for such extraordinary and unprecedented measures, first reported by the New York Times, come after the campaign was briefed on Iranian plots to kill the former president. His advisers are concerned about drones and missiles, not just the lone gunmen that targeted him twice already over the summer.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Courtesy of New York Film FestivalThere’s terror in both cacophony and silence, and Blitz is most arresting when it exploits the interplay between the chaotic and the tranquil to suggest the seesawing insanity of the Nazis’ September 1940 bombing campaign against London.Director Steve McQueen’s second straight WWII effort following his 262-minute 2023 documentary Occupied City, the formally accomplished film is an immersive descent into a hell of fear, death, and separation. Nonetheless, it’s also a narratively and emotionally disjointed journey, its fine lead performances, moving details, and racial commentary never cohering into an affecting spectacular.(Blitz was the closing night selection of this year’s New York Film Festival. It hits theaters Nov. 1 ahead of its release on Apple TV+ Nov. 22.)Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Daily BeastThe latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast sees Joanna Coles calling in from a women’s tech conference in Napa, California—with “Beast of the Week” Jessica Lessin, CEO of The Information and Silicon Valley insider. Lessin offers insight into the current state of tech CEOs, the dangers of misinformation—and how the election could shake up the Valley.Mary Jordan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, editor and author of the 2020 Melania Trump biography “The Art of Her Deal,” also joins the pod to discuss the former First Lady’s newly released self-titled memoir—or as Samantha Bee calls it, “a waste of paper.” Though Jordan calls the time she spent working on her Trump book a “miserable period,” the three dive deep into all things Barron, prenups, and Melania’s divisively enigmatic (to the extent that she and her parents spoke Slovenian while in the White House to avoid being understood, Jordan noted) persona.Bee then details an upcoming run of shows in New York City she’s doing on her journey with menopause, which she calls a “metamorphosis.” (A metamorphosis that came with “rage boils,” she noted.) For all this and more, watch the whole episode below.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Screenshot/NewYorkTimesVice presidential candidate JD Vance said he would not have certified the 2020 election results and refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss numerous times during an interview with The New York Times. Vance told The Interview host Lulu Garcia-Navarro that he was “focused on the future,” reported the New York Times.“There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020,” Vance said in the interview. “I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Pief WeymanAs word spread via countless headlines in recent weeks that The Apprentice is the film that Donald Trump doesn’t want you to see, suffice it to say that curiosity was piqued: What’s in it that’s so bad that he doesn’t want us to see it???The saying is true: All press really is good press, something that Trump and his camp should know but may have briefly forgotten when they reacted to the Venice Film Festival premiere of the biopic last month by condemning it as “election interference by Hollywood elites” that belonged “in a dumpster fire” and threatening a lawsuit to block its release. I can speak for myself and for the exhausting number of people in my life who have screamed “HAVE YOU SEEN IT?!?!” into my face over the last few weeks when I say that such censuring of the film only intensified the desire to see it.I spoke with The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi earlier this week. He admitted that he’s “obviously not naive” and knew that some choice scenes in the film would be controversial. But he also was adamant that this is not a hit piece with a pointed political agenda, as it’s been accused of in its release just weeks before the presidential election. He said that, if he watches the film, Trump “would instinctively see the difference between this and many other pieces that have been trying to be for or against him in a partisan or political way.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

C-SPANTim Walz ripped Donald Trump as a hypocrite on Friday, suggesting the former president outsources more than just his bibles to China.“We just found out his Trump-branded bibles—yeah, they’re printed in China,” Walz said at a Michigan rally. “This dude even outsourced God to China!”The Minnesota governor then feigned pity on Trump and offered to be “generous.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Karl WalterSports broadcaster Kayla Nicole, who Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce dated before moving on to Taylor Swift, has a lot to say about their relationship and its aftermath on a new episode of WNBA star Angel Reese’s podcast, Unapologetically Angel.One of the most difficult parts of being Kelce’s ex, Nicole said, is the “hate” she experiences from Swifties who continue to stalk her Instagram page and “debate” her “worth” under every post.“You could go to my most recent post and it will be people debating each other [about] why I am worthless and I’ll never be a talented person and I have no career,” she said. “I would be lying if I said that that level of hate and online chaos [doesn’t impact me].”Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast/Vogue/AnnieLeibovitzKamala Harris has appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine—but could only land the October digital version of the iconic mag with pop star Billie Eilish taking top billing on the cover of the new print issue.Some social media users suggested the photo was doctored to make the 59-year-old Democratic Party presidential nominee look younger.“Makeup magic plus airbrushing like no one has ever airbrushed,” wrote one user. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Sony PicturesSaturday Night has a compelling concept: Instead of a film tracking the history of Saturday Night Live, which is celebrating its 50th season this year, it's a crazed behind-the-scenes comedy chronicling the night before the first episode ever aired, Oct. 11, 1975.Directed by Jason Reitman, who wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan, the film is a zany whirlwind depicting the chaos, cast drama, and production issues on a night where anything you could imagine going wrong does. That whirlwind, however, does an enormous disservice: The film completely fails comedy legend Gilda Radner.Radner made an immediate impact on Saturday Night Live with her now iconic characters Roseanne Roseannadanna, Lisa Loopner, and Emily Litella, and memorable impersonations of celebrities like Lucille Ball and Patti Smith. She even won an Emmy in 1978 for her work on the show. When Rolling Stone ranked every cast member in the show’s history, she placed ninth, with the magazine praising that “Radner was the prototype for the brainy city girl with a bundle of neuroses.” Watching Saturday Night, however, you’d be forgiven for thinking she wasn’t even a cast member.Read more at The Daily Beast.

ABCOn ABC’s 9-1-1, the show’s ensemble have dealt with their fair share of natural disasters. As the series has gone on, the writers have escalated the trauma, forcing their team of first responders to tangle with escaped zoo animals and escape a sinking cruise ship. Still, nothing could prepare viewers for what was to come in Season 8, which opens with 22 million killer bees being released upon Los Angeles.Promotion for Season 8 began in July, with a short video dropping online that began with the sound of the siren and the 9-1-1 series logo. Slowly, the sound of the alarms changed, morphing into the sound of bees buzzing. They quickly came into view as the premiere date became visible, until the bees overtook the screen. At first glance, it felt like a joke that the audience wasn’t in on, but with a second teaser dropping in August claiming “Bee-Nado is coming,” it became apparent that it was real.This was the first introduction to what might be the most fun piece of event television in years; one that perfectly orchestrates why 9-1-1 is one of the only shows to understand what makes television such a fascinating medium. It’s not often that teasers or trailers don’t give away at least a semblance of what these shows are going to be about, but with these promotional materials, 9-1-1 sets its viewers up for a whirlwind of an event that promised to be more outlandish than all its other hijinks.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Quinn Glabicki / ReutersFormer President Barack Obama is stumping for Kamala Harris, making two stops in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Thursday. The first took him to a Harris campaign office in the swing state, where Obama delivered a pointed message to the Black men in the room: Don’t let gender guide your vote.“We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” he said, according to The Guardian. “You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I’ve got a problem with that.”As his source on this supposedly slack enthusiasm, Obama cited unspecified “reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities,” but one recent poll suggests that Harris isn’t getting the same traction with Black voters that Joe Biden did. Additionally, an NAACP poll from September suggests that about 25 percent of Black men under the age of 50 may support Donald Trump over Harris.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesElon Musk’s X social media platform has reportedly worked with Donald Trump’s campaign to censor material that could be harmful to the former president’s White House chances as part of a pattern of election interference that is unprecedented in U.S. history.According to The New York Times, Trump told one associate that Musk was pumping $500 million into his campaign. The two men are said to speak “multiple times a week.”The Times reported that the Trump campaign “connected with X” to prevent the spread of hacked information supposedly from a dossier drawn up by GOP staffers tasked with vetting running mate JD Vance.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesMichael Edwards issued a statement Thursday denying claims made in Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir that he sexually abused the singer for several years beginning when she was 10.“These claims are absolutely untrue. I never molested Lisa Marie and am shocked at the suggestion I did,” said Edwards, who was in a relationship with Lisa Marie’s mother Priscilla Presley at the time of the alleged abuse.According to From Here to the Great Unknown, a memoir that Lisa Marie, daughter of Elvis Presley, was writing at the time of her death in 2023, Edwards allegedly entered her room in the middle of the night and said he was going to “teach me what was going to happen when I got older” before molesting her. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesThe ghostwriter for Donald Trump’s best–selling book The Art of the Deal has warned that if he returns to the White House, the former president will seek “revenge and domination.”Tony Schwartz claims Trump is haunted by his upbringing with a hard-driving father disdainful of any form of weakness.“If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination—damn the consequences—in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough,” writes Schwartz in The New York Times.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesThe moderator for Kamala Harris’s Univision town hall personally debunked yet another teleprompter conspiracy theory cooked up by right-wing influencers.Conservative commentators claimed to have uncovered a “gotcha” moment when a Univision camera panning the room during Thursday’s event showed Harris speaking in front of a teleprompter with writing that then went black.“Watch them panic when they realized they were showing the prompter live on-air,” right-wing pundit Benny Johnson wrote on X—even though Harris was still speaking went the screen goes blank.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Jane Rosenberg/ReutersSean “Diddy” Combs has one main complaint about life in jail, his lawyer suggested outside a pre-trial hearing for the disgraced mogul on Thursday. It’s not the indignity of sharing cramped unsanitary quarters with Sam Bankman-Fried, nor the threat of a new wave of sex-abuse lawsuits from another 120 of his alleged victims, nor even the broader reality of his legal situation. According to defense attorney Marc Agnifilo, it’s the menu at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Diddy is currently awaiting trial, that his client can’t stand.“I think the food’s probably the roughest part of it,” Agnifilo informed reporters after the hearing, per People. According to a previous report from the magazine, the MDC serves inmates a 6a.m. breakfast consisting of items such as cereal, fruit, and some sort of cake, with coffee as a special extra on weekends. An 11 a.m. lunch might be hamburgers, tacos (beef), or baked fish, plus scrambled eggs and biscuits on weekends. Dinner is served at 4 p.m., with chicken fajitas, roast beef, some sort of pasta, and “heart-healthy” tofu or legumes—lentils, baked beans—as possible offerings. There’s also a long list of commissary items available for purchase from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Read more at The Daily Beast.

RSBNDonald Trump’s speech to Detroit business leaders Thursday night contained a truly bewildering riff about “Biden circles” and their beauty.The former president has made headlines over the course of his campaign with strange speeches about whether it’s better to be electrocuted or attacked by a shark and giving unintelligible, rambling answers to policy questions. Trump has defended his free-wheeling, sometimes unfollowable oratory style as a deliberate ploy he calls “the weave”—but his latest effort looked more like unraveling.During Trump’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club—which included a segment insulting the city of Detroit, prompting condemnation from the mayor—the Republican nominee was speaking about how American manufacturing can be affected by other countries’ tariffs before veering off-topic into a discussion about Elon Musk, rockets, and, for some reason, circles.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesDonald Trump faced an embarrassing takedown after claiming to have proof of the debunked claim that he was once given Michigan’s Man of the Year award.In a speech in which he trashed Detroit, the former president brandished a print-out of a story from the Oakland Press, saying he’d asked his staff to find evidence that he’d been honored with the accolade 11 years earlier.“It was like 19 years ago. It was a long time. But I was honored. And guess what? They found it. I was,” said Trump, unfolding the paper. “So here’s your article right here. It says, ‘Oakland County GOP to honor Donald Trump, former president, to speak at upcoming Lincoln Day fundraising dinner.’ And it says down here, ‘The county party gave Trump the Man of the Year award at the dinner, too.’”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyNext week, King Charles III will set off on a royal tour of Australia, which earlier this year many doubted would ever happen.In February, when the king was diagnosed with cancer, and made the unprecedented decision to announce his condition to the world, prompting his son, Prince Harry, to fly home from California at a moment’s notice and civil servants to update their funeral planning, there were few who really believed that, just eight months later, he would be able to fly around the world, undertake a series of public royal engagements, and go on to preside over his first gathering of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) as head of the Commonwealth, in Samoa.Although an add-on trip to New Zealand was canceled over the summer, and the king’s advisers have said the nature of his engagements has been “modified,” there is little doubt that when Charles climbs the steps of the British Airways jet taking him to the Antipodes in time for the tour to kick off on Friday, it will represent a great triumph of hope, duty—and medical science.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyListen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.As America bunkered down for two catastrophic weather events—Hurricanes Helene and Milton—Joe Biden and his administration were faced with another unexpected emergency: MAGA conspiracies.Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was perhaps the worst offender. Since the Georgia congresswoman claimed on X last week that “they can control the weather,” she has continued to imply that the hurricanes were part of a political plot. On Wednesday, she said that “everyone keeps asking, ‘who is they?’” claiming that “some of them are listed on NOAA,” referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Biden was forced to call out Greene as “beyond ridiculous,” while even other Republican lawmakers have called her out.Read more at The Daily Beast.

ABCIn the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ interview with The View Tuesday, Donald Trump trash-talked the show at a recent rally. He called the all-female cast “dumb,” but particularly focused on Whoopi Goldberg, who he described as “demented.” In his monologue Thursday, Jimmy Kimmel played a rally clip of Trump telling an unflattering story about Goldberg:“I’ve hired Whoopi to work for me as a comedian before this stuff,” Trump said at the rally in Pennsylvania this week. “Her mouth was so foul. Every word out of her mouth was, like, the F word... I was with a group of people, sort of nice people, and we had to leave. She was so filthy, dirty, disgusting. Half the place left.”“Yeah, just like one of your rallies,” Kimmel replied.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersVice President Kamala Harris praised the late Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2017 vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act during a campaign rally Thursday in his home state of Arizona, throwing in a reenactment of his decisive “thumbs down” gesture on the Senate floor.Harris told the Phoenix crowd how she, then a senator, saw Donald Trump’s goal thwarted.“It was late, late, late in the night. They were trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act again, and it required one more vote to keep it intact, and that was the late, great John McCain, a great American, a war hero,” she said.Read more at The Daily Beast.

ReutersDetroit Mayor Mike Duggan was just one of several prominent Michigan Democrats who responded in kind after former President Donald Trump descended on their city on Thursday armed with fighting words.Speaking before the Detroit Economic Club before an audience of Detroiters in, Trump warned that the “whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” he added.Trump quickly turned to other matters—but the glove had been cast off.Read more at The Daily Beast.

United States Coast Guard NewsThe U.S. Coast Guard rescued a man stranded off the Gulf Coast of Florida after surviving Hurricane Milton, the military branch said.Shocking footage published by the Coast Guard on Thursday showed a rescuer grab the man from the water while dangling from a helicopter. The daring rescue took place about 30 miles off the coast of Longboat Key—a town located northwest of Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall on Wednesday night.The survivor was identified as the captain of a fishing boat. On Monday, the captain and a single crewmember had to be rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter after their vessel became disabled about 20 miles off the Gulf Coast.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Daniel RaderWhatever else Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (Barrymore Theatre, booking to Jan. 19, 2025) is, it isn’t as honeyed a classic as it is sometimes imagined. Kenny Leon’s celebrity-filled Broadway revival is a brisk, tart-toned parable of small town American life that interrogates, satirizes even, the outwardly genteel setting of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and cautions us throughout to put down any rose-tinted spectacles we might be tempted to see it through. It also intends to be a more straightforward celebration of community.As written, the play, first performed in 1938, is a spare and sober anatomy of a community, rather than a cozily sentimental hymnal. In this production its characters are dressed not in the costume (by Dede Ayite) of the early 1900’s, but in a curious mash-up of back-then and right-now: so, jeans, sneakers, and post-Victorian flounce. (Perhaps the intention is to make the play timeless, or self-consciously spanning of many eras, to echo one of the piece’s themes.) Flickering lanterns on stage and hanging from the rafters form an omnipresent constellation of stars designed with dreamy intent by Allen Lee Hughes.The drama comes to center on the union, then renting asunder, of young couple George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) and Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch)—and what it all says about a whole basket of you-name-it: life, death, the universe, time, and community. We see them first as the next door neighbor kids of Dr. Gibbs (Billy Eugene Jones) and Mrs. Gibbs (Michelle Wilson), and Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) and Mrs. Webb (Katie Holmes).Read more at The Daily Beast.

MSNBCBarack Obama hit the campaign trail on Thursday in support of his old friend Kamala Harris, calling out Donald Trump in a blistering speech while wondering aloud if he has ever changed a tire—or a diaper.The question even prompted one crowd member to shout “His own!”—eliciting a laugh from the former president.At the Pittsburgh rally, Obama spent much of the time criticizing his successor. He said that while he understands why some voters are looking to “shake things up” given the current economy, “What I cannot understand is why anybody would think that Donald Trump will shake things up in a way that is good for you, Pennsylvania.”Read more at The Daily Beast.