Josh Shapiro denies Jewish heritage cost him VP spot; Kamala Harris turns to famed Philly Twitter king to troll Trump

Former officials in Donald Trump’s administration have been helping Philly-area billionaire Jeffrey Yass work to prevent a ban of TikTok, according to the New York Times.

Yass’ Bala Cynwyd-based trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, reportedly owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yass is the richest man in Pennsylvania. Based on his assets, Forbes estimates his net worth at $28.5 billion while Bloomberg estimates it at nearly $45 billion.

Trump’s apparent help to protect the app from a U.S. government ban is a reversal of the ex-president’s previous stance.

Former Vice President Mike Pence reiterated that he doesn’t back and won’t endorse former President Donald Trump’s campaign.

“I cannot endorse this growing abandonment of our allies on the world stage that’s taken hold in parts of our party,” Pence said at a conservative conference hosted by talk show host Erick Erickson. “I cannot endorse ignoring our national debt, which reached $35 trillion just in the last week. I cannot support marginalizing the right to life.”

“And between me and my running mate, I cannot endorse President Trump’s continuing assertion that I should’ve set aside my oath to support and defend the Constitution and acted in a way that would have overturned the election in January of 2021,” Pence said.

A top Philadelphia election official resigned last month to take a job in Montgomery, but she abruptly reneged after Mayor Cherelle L. Parker intervened as November’s critically important election approaches, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

Stephanie Reid, Philadelphia’s director of election administration, is responsible for overseeing day-to-day administrative operations for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, the three-member board tasked with running the election in the largest city in the state that is poised to decide the presidency.

Reid, who has been in the role since January, accepted a new job as Montgomery County’s deputy chief operating officer in July and was slated to start on Aug. 12, according to a spokesperson for the suburban county. Reid makes $150,000 annually in Philadelphia, according to city records. Her new role in Montgomery County offered a salary range between $150,389 and $200,521, according to a job posting.

Tim Walz kept his apartment spotless, but the place definitely wasn’t nice.

It was 2007, and Walz was a freshman member of Congress who’d hit it off with another brand-new representative: Patrick Murphy, of Bucks County. The two had a shared history of military service and were each raising young families, so, for more than a year, they shared a Washington, D.C., apartment when they were in town for work.

“We were both in the market for the cheapest apartment we could possibly get on Capitol Hill,” Murphy recalled in an interview. “There was not a real kitchen. Like, it did not have an oven.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden next week are slated to make their first campaign stop together since Biden announced he would not seek reelection.

Harris and Biden will appear Thursday in Maryland, where they will "discuss the progress they are making to lower costs for the American people," the White House said. Additional details about the planned stop were not immediately available.

Since Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris as the Democratic candidate, the vice president has held several high-profile rallies around the country. Earlier this week, she appeared in Philadelphia for her first campaign event with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her newly minted running mate.

Gov. Josh Shapiro has rejected the idea that his Jewish faith played a role in Vice President Kamala Harris’ decision to choose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over him as a running mate.

“I can tell you that antisemitism had no impact on the dialogue between the vice president and me, period,” Shapiro said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

Shapiro’s comments come after Republican VP candidate JD Vance said Harris acquiesced “to the most radical elements of her party” in her decision to choose Walz over Shapiro, pointing to antisemitism as the cause, during his Tuesday visit to South Philly.

It turns out, sometimes you still feel a pull to roll your eyes abour your mom — even on national television.

While hosting on Jesse Watters Primetime on Fox News Thursday night, Watters, a Philly native, discussed the new wave of excitement Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is drawing.

“You should see my mom,” Watters said. “Suddenly she’s a Kamala fanatic – keeps talking about joy.” He proceeded to dramatically roll his eyes.

In a definite campaign first, a tweet from the viral X (formerly Twitter) account run by a Philadelphia man has made its way into presidential election campaign materials.

The Harris-Walz office slammed opponent Donald Trump’s Thursday news conference in a voicey release that evening titled: “Donald Trump’s Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference” and likened Trump’s remarks to a “public meltdown.”

The news release also included this tweet from Dril, known as “the king of weird Twitter” for his persona as a cranky old guy and the internet’s “best sentence writer.” 

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, continue their battleground state tour Friday with a rally in Arizona.

The event will take place later this evening at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz., according to the Arizona Republic. Harris is expected to speak around 8 p.m. Eastern Time.

Mesa Mayor John Giles, a Republican who is supporting Harris, was among those who greeted the vice president at the airport Thursday. 

Following a campaign event with autoworkers in Michigan, Vice President Kamala Harris said she’s “glad” Donald Trump agreed to debate and said she would schedule her first major interview as the party's nominee before September.

Harris took questions from the traveling pool after Trump held a long-winded and falsehood-filled press conference earlier in the day, accusing her of dodging reporters’ questions.

Harris has not held a sit-down interview or official news conference since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

A Democratic-aligned political action committee has mounted a legal challenge that could block Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate for president, from appearing on Pennsylvania’s ballot in November.

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and longtime vaccine skeptic, has been working to secure ballot access in all 50 states. He filed paperwork for the Pennsylvania ballot in June.

Clear Choice Action challenged Kennedy’s petition in Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court on Thursday. The group, which is focused on targeting independent and third-party presidential candidates, has challenged Kennedy’s candidacy in other states, including New York and Illinois.

Of course, ice cream was involved.

President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, hosted a thank you event on Thursday for hundreds of staffers who worked on the reelection campaign that he chose to exit nearly three weeks ago.

Judging by the security tents, the location offered a dose of political nostalgia: The staffers met with Biden at The Queen, a music venue that played a critical role in his successful race for presidency in 2020, when he often spoke to the public from the theater’s stage.

Fatim Byrd didn’t know much about Tim Walz until Vice President Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate Tuesday.

Once Byrd read up on the two-term Minnesota governor, he quickly got excited: Walz spent two decades as a social studies teacher in public high schools from the 1990s through 2006. He coached football and he was the first faculty adviser to the Mankato West High School Gay Straight Alliance, a position he took after one of the first openly gay students at the school approached Walz and asked for help.

“He wasn’t three years in teaching, then gone; he taught for 20 years,” said Byrd, a Spanish teacher at Strawberry Mansion High School. “He knows how hard the job is, and hopefully, he can get us what we need.”