Donald Trump pulled out of another mainstream interview Thursday–this time nixing a sit-down with NBC News.

The interview, CNN reported, would be in Philadelphia with NBC News' senior business correspondent, Christine Romans. CNN’s Brian Stelter said one source suggested that it had only been “postponed.”

It was the second time in a week that he had canceled a scheduled appearance outside the conservative news sphere, CNN’s Reliable Sources reported Thursday. He had canceled an in-studio appearance on the CNBC flagship show, Squawk Box, which was due on Friday.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, a “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” and “despicable human being,” according to his own records.

McConnell made the withering assessments in a series of private “personal oral histories” that he gave to Michael Tackett, the deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, who has a forthcoming biography about the Kentucky senator called The Price of Power. The AP conveniently reported the book’s juicy details.

McConnell’s remarks were made after the 2020 election that Trump lost, and the senator was apparently elated to see the backside of the former president, musing, “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until he leaves office.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Disaster was averted at a Kentucky hospital when an ostensibly deceased organ donor began “thrashing” around in the operating theater, a preservationist tells NPR.

“He was moving around,” Natasha Miller recalled of the patient, whom NPR identified as Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II. “He was crying visibly.”

The two surgeons assigned to the transplant naturally refused to go through with the procedure, which was reportedly scheduled to take place at Baptist Health Richmond Hospital in October 2021. But when her colleague called Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, which coordinated the harvest, Miller said the supervisor told them they “were going to do the case” and needed to “find another doctor.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Relatives of Lyle and Erik Menendez spoke in an interview Wednesday about their long-running fears that the brothers had been abused for years before they killed their parents.

After a press conference in which they’d called for the imprisoned siblings’ freedom, the family members told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation about how their suspicions only deepened as time passed.

“Over the years we really did know that there was abuse at gut-level. But as time goes on and we all talked to each other more and more, it validates the fears and the gut-level reactions that we had,” the brothers’ cousin Karen VanderMolen-Copley told Cuomo. “That solidified the knowledge that the sexual abuse actually did occur, because that’s not something you want to believe, and then once you talk to each other it becomes more and more obvious.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A hotel worker called 911 to request urgent assistance before musician Liam Payne fell to his death from the third floor of the building in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.

The 31-year-old British singer and former member of the boy band One Direction died after he “jumped from the balcony of his room,” Buenos Aires Security Ministry Communications Director Pablo Policicchio told the Associated Press. He added that police had been called to the Casa Sur Hotel in the Argentine capital after receiving an emergency call shortly after 5 p.m. local time about an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”

A transcript of a 911 call published by the BBC shows a worker at the hotel telling the operator that they have “a guest who is high on drugs and who is trashing the room” and the staff therefore “need someone to come.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It appears Donald Trump is once again attempting to silence Stormy Daniels, despite his recent convictions in that category.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports that Trump’s lawyers tried to “get another hush money deal” with the adult film star, to keep her from making any “public or private statements related to any alleged past interactions” with the former president. In exchange for her written agreement, Trump’s team reportedly offered to adjust the debt she owes Trump for the unsuccessful defamation case her lawyer brought against him in 2018.

Daniels still needs to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in legal fees, Maddow explained, and in hammering out the exact amount, Trump’s lawyers allegedly offered to “pretend” she owed their client “less than they actually believed” she did. Whereas they first estimated Daniels’ debt at $650,000, Maddow reported, they said they would settle her tab for $620,000, if she promised not to make any “defamatory or disparaging statements about him, his business, and/or any affiliates, or his suitability as a candidate for president.” They then adjusted the fee, asking $635,000 if she refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Daniels reportedly turned them down, paying $627,500 and declining to sign the NDA.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Jan. 6, 2021— the day his supporters occupied Congress in a failed insurrection to try to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory—was a “day of love.”

Trump made the baffling claim during a televised election town hall hosted by Univision.

Ramiro González, a construction worker from Tampa, told the meeting he deregistered as a Republican because he found Trump’s “inaction” during both Jan. 6 and the COVID-19 pandemic “disturbing.” He asked Trump to square his controversial behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol—and the fact that many of his own former administration officials don’t support him any longer—with why he should be re-elected.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Online interactions are based on trust, since there are few definitive ways to certify the identity of the person with whom one is communicating. Naturally, this situation can lead to deception and manipulation, as it has—to tormenting effect—for Tegan and Sara, the popular indie rock duo whose lives have been turned upside down by a mysterious bad faith actor who, for more than a decade, has impersonated Tegan with fans, friends, and business partners.

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is an investigation into the myriad means by which the internet can be wielded to nefarious ends. More than that, though, it’s an anatomy of a crime and the complicated wreckage wrought by it, not just for the famous artists but also for the innocent admirers who were tricked into believing that fiction was reality.

Premiering on Hulu on Oct. 18, following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Erin Lee Carr’s documentary is a chilling snapshot of the unholy marriage of corrosive fandom and online duplicity. At its center are Tegan and Sara, the identical twin songstresses who began making a name for themselves in the early 2000s both for their talent and for being openly gay. This earned them a loyal fanbase of queer women and men who saw themselves reflected in Tegan and Sara, and that bond was strengthened by the siblings’ active interest in interacting with fans in person—Tegan would chat with show attendees in line and at the merch table—and on LiveJournal and other budding message-board platforms that afforded a previously unavailable degree of contact.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Movies can’t, by definition, be all things to all people, and yet Anora—winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or—manages to vacillate between assorted registers with stunning, and ultimately affecting, aplomb.

Another of The Florida Project and Red Rocket writer/director Sean Baker’s tales of marginalized individuals struggling to survive and find themselves in an often-unforgiving world, the film is a character study, romance, crime saga, screwball comedy, and vérité drama all wrapped into one unique and dexterous package. More impressive than its nimbleness, however, is its poise and empathy, the latter of which is chiefly bestowed upon its protagonist, whose life is thrown for a rollercoaster-grade loop-di-loop thanks to a chance introduction.

Ani (Mikey Madison, in a star-making turn) is a Brighton Beach 23-year-old who lives with her sister and earns a living stripping at a local club. Anora, which hits theaters Oct. 18, introduces her at the end of a long pan along a bench where men are receiving lap dances from erotic professionals. Fixating on Ani’s face as she flashes the fake smile that her customers crave and her superiors demand, Baker’s camera creates immediate, intimate engagement with the young woman, and that continues as it presents snapshots of her daily (or, rather, nightly) routine at her place of employment.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

In his monologue Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel played a montage of Fox News anchors praising Bret Baier for his interview with Kamala Harris, where they described Baier’s performance as “incredible” and “a masterful job.”

Kimmel responded, “Alright, save it for the post-show orgy, everybody! Come on now.”

The late night host was skeptical that the Fox News pundits’ praise came from a genuine place of journalistic integrity. “They all sit there in fear, imagining Donald Trump on the toilet watching them,” he said.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Donald Trump praised Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier for a “great job” in his interview with Democratic 2024 presidential hopeful Kamala Harris on Wednesday night, claiming Baier had “showed how totally incompetent Kamala is” while himself demanding she undergo a cognitive ability test.

Trump joined his campaign in calling the interview a total disaster for Harris. During the interview, Harris and Baier engaged in multiple back-and-forths; at one point, on the topic of immigration, Harris clapped back at Baier as he interrupted her: “May I finish responding to you?”

Immediately after the interview aired, the campaign—notably advisers Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung—took to X to decry Harris’ responses.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was flabbergasted Wednesday by a surrogate’s defense of Donald Trump, calling his explanation for the former president’s bombastic statements literal “bulls---.”

On AC360, former California Lieutenant Gov. Abel Maldonado, a Republican, said that Trump’s recent comments calling for the military to “handle” Democrats were simply his way of expressing his inner New Yorker. “He’s a fighter,” Maldonado added.

The conversation began when Cooper brought up Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, who, alongside other military leaders, have begun to warn of the dangers of re-electing the former president. Milley has called Trump a “fascist to his core.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Liam Payne was seemingly having a “lovely day in Argentina” just hours before his death on Wednesday, according to what appear to be a series of final posts made to his Snapchat account.

The former One Direction member was found dead in the courtyard of a Buenos Aires hotel, having apparently plunged 13 to 14 meters from his balcony, according to local police. A cause of death has not officially been determined, and it was unclear whether the fall was accidental or intentional.

On his Snapchat Story, however, it would have appeared to any fan that Payne was having a relaxing vacation. In since-deleted posts in the hours before his death, he posted a front-facing video in which he told followers, “It’s a lovely day here in Argentina. This is the breakfast table. Just enjoying coffee and breakfast even though it’s 1 p.m.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called out Fox News for not showing the full context of Donald Trump’s “enemy within” comments during Vice President Kamala Harris’ interview on the network earlier Wednesday.

The anchor of All In opened his broadcast by calling attention to something that Harris herself did in the sit-down with Fox’s Bret Baier. The clip that the right-wing network showed to Harris as part of Baier’s question was of Trump during his all-female town hall event in Georgia—the one where Trump bizarrely argued he was the “father of IVF.”

In the clip that Fox aired directly to Harris during her interview, Trump wasn’t heard talking about how former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Rep. Adam Schiff are the “enemy within.” Instead, Fox made it so Harris had to react to him talking more mildly about “phony investigations.” The network omitted Trump’s line about “the enemy within.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is TV’s best soap opera, week after week offering twists more shocking than secret twins and characters returning from the dead. That’s because it’s all real, happening in the most haunted suburb in the continental United States.

Where else do two women connect over knowing the long-lost birth father of one’s child? Is there another city where women squabble over body positivity in a parking lot off the side of a snowy mountain? Surely, there’s no other place on Earth where Lisa Barlow could come across anywhere near a voice of reason.

But that all happens here in Salt Lake City. Five episodes in, Season 5 has continued to evolve into the most captivating season in modern Real Housewives history, carried by the ever-changing bonds between our OGs and a team of wonderfully bizarre newbies.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It doesn’t matter how long a play is: sometimes 75 minutes can feel like 3 hours if the play is bad, while a three-hour play may first elicit an inner groan, then flow pleasurably by if the writing and performances are in well-oiled tandem.

Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold on to Me Darling (Lucille Lortel Theatre, to Dec. 22) belongs, mostly, to the latter category: it is long, and it feels long, but that’s OK; not gold-standard wow, but far more than pleasant. This is down to Lonergan’s engaging writing and a collection of differently distinctive, carefully drawn performances, led by Adam Driver as a famous country star called Strings (real name Clarence), wondering if he could/should give up all the trappings of fame for a simpler life after his mother’s death.

It is an off-Broadway treat to see Driver, most recently seen on the big screen as the star of Francis Ford Coppola’s polarizing epic Megalopolis, here bestriding—he is so tall, he is really bestriding—the compact Lucille Lortel stage. Theater fans last saw him on Broadway in Burn This, for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. He is renowned for playing powder-keg personas. With characters like Adam in Girls, Charlie in Marriage Story, and Pale in Burn This, the question, the bubbling menace, was when will Adam Driver go off? Those characters memorably combusted—thrashing, shouting, snarling and occupying spaces that could barely contain them—and Driver made it so that you recoiled from their crackling fury.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox News host Bret Baier recapped his Wednesday night interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, telling his colleagues that he got a sense early on that Harris “was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt.”

The interview, Harris’ first on the right-wing network since becoming the Democratic nominee, was broadcast on Special Report after being filmed in the previous hour. According to Baier, the interview had been scheduled for 5 p.m., but Harris showed up 15 minutes late. This, he complained, was like “icing the kicker” in football.

“We were supposed to start at 5 p.m. This was the time they gave us. Originally, we were going to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came in and said, ‘Well, maybe 20.’ So, it’s already getting whittled down. And then the vice president showed up at about 5:15 p.m. We were pushing the envelope to be able to turn it around for the top of the 6 p.m.. So that’s how it started,” Baier said.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance boldly said “no,” Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election, when pressed on the issue at a campaign event Wednesday in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

The Ohio senator has avoided directly denying the results over the past few weeks.

When quizzed by The New York Times about the results over the weekend, for example, he refused multiple times to answer the question, on one occasion claiming he was “focused on the future”—echoing an answer he gave to Democratic opponent Tim Walz at the vice presidential debate.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Prior to his untimely death in Argentina on Wednesday, One Direction’s Liam Payne, 31, was in the middle of a legal spat with his ex-fiancée Maya Henry.

On Monday, The Sun reported that Henry, 23, had lawyered up in an attempt to stop Payne from constantly messaging her family and friends.

“Maya Henry issued a cease and desist last week to Liam Payne following the emergence of new and concerning information…She has retained attorneys Marco Crawford and Daniel Cerna to represent her. At this time, that is her only comment on the matter,” a spokesperson for Henry told the tabloid.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

In a contentious interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, Fox News host Bret Baier spent no time going after the vice president with a laundry list of the subjects often highlighted by former President Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

Immediately after the interview kicked off, Baier opened by asking: “How many illegal immigrants would you estimate your administration has released into the country over the last three and a half years?”

Harris began a carefully worded answer, but Baier consistently interrupted her before she could finish a sentence.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A collective gasp echoed like a thunderclap in a valley in our Daily Beast newsroom late Wednesday afternoon at the news that singer Liam Payne, who became famous as a member of the group One Direction, died at age 31.

TMZ reports that Payne fell from a hotel balcony in Argentina, where he had reunited with bandmates at 1D-er Niall Horan’s concert. He had, according to the site, been behaving “erratically,” earlier in the day, and was spotted smashing a laptop in the hotel lobby and having to be carried back to his room. He had been in headlines on gossip blogs over tension with his ex-fiancée Maya Henry, who, TMZ says, alleged “he'd left her after asking her to get an abortion.”

In the shock of his death, fans couldn’t ignore the eerie nature that Payne had just connected with his One Direction bandmates. Dark questions emerge when a celebrity dies so young: What role did the often horrific toll of fame have on a person like Payne, who has been open about addiction and suicidal ideation? But there’s also an impulse to go back to the roots of a person’s talent, to revisit what it was that we all fell in love with—and was their passion—in the first place.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Billionaire Bill Ackman spent days after the ABC presidential debate promoting false claims that a network “whistleblower” had allegedly uncovered collusion between ABC and Kamala Harris’ campaign. Now, a month and multiple denials later, he sees the claims differently.

“It seems pretty clear that the alleged @abc whistleblower debate story claiming that @KamalaHarris was given questions in advance and other advantages was a fake,” Ackman posted on X alongside a blog post by Megyn Kelly discussing the dubious claims.

What Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, did not acknowledge, however, is that he was one of falsehood’s early boosters. After an X account named “Black Insurrectionist” claimed it had been in touch with a whistleblower who alleged the Harris campaign had been given debate topics ahead of the showdown with Donald Trump and had demanded Trump—and Trump alone—be fact-checked.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Journalists at CNN, including some of the network’s biggest personalities, are living in fear of “inevitable” layoffs and pay cuts as its new CEO looks to shore up finances amid declining ratings.

That’s according to The Ankler, which reported Wednesday that 77-year-old Chris Wallace—whose already been relegated to a weekend program—is among the network’s most well-known names whose future is in limbo.

Wallace’s $8.5 million contract, signed by the ex-CNN boss Jeff Zucker to recruit him away from Fox News three years ago, is reportedly up and he was spotted in CEO Mark Thompson’s office on Tuesday.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Liam Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, was found dead in a hotel courtyard in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Wednesday evening, according to CNN and La Nacion, both of which cited local police.

The singer died after an apparent fall from the balcony of his third-floor hotel room. Argentinian authorities told Good Morning America that Payne had been staying at the hotel CasaSur in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo.

He was 31.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

WASHINGTON CROSSING, Pennsylvania—At a campaign rally in the most important swing state in the country, anti-Trump activist George Conway told the Daily Beast why he thinks Kamala Harris can win over Republicans.

“She’s kind of done it already,” he said. “Look at all those people who voted for [Nikki] Haley when she was already done. I actually think there’s kind of a hidden Harris vote for Republicans who are just exhausted by Donald Trump.”

Turnout is another factor that plays to Democrat’s advantage, Conway predicted. “I also think that even the people who are still for Trump and won’t vote for Harris, I don’t think the turnout’s going to be great for him.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.