Trump

President Donald Trump's recent speech for America's 250th birthday celebration was riddled with "significant" signs of possible "neurological decline," according to one licensed pathologist, particularly his numerous slurred mispronunciations of certain words and phrases.

On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., as part of the "Great American State Fair" event that has been plagued with controversy in recent weeks. The online discourse after the event was dominated by videos that appeared to show crowds leaving midway through his speech, leading to more speculation about the event's lackluster crowd sizes, but according to one medical professional's observations, Trump's own words indicated that something could be seriously wrong with his cognitive health.

Hilary Shae is a licensed speech-language pathologist specializing in concussion recovery, and she has also emerged as a political content creator who offers professional insights into the signs that Trump may be suffering from notable physical and neurological decline. In her latest video from Saturday, she highlighted some of the things that Trump struggled to pronounce throughout the speech, including things like "250th anniversary," "magnificent," "ancient ruins," "Los Angeles" and "horizon."

In some cases, Trump's attempt to pronounce these words trailed off near the end, and in others, he mispronounced the word entirely, often not bothering to double back and try again. As Shae explained, these speech difficulties were "consistent" with certain conditions that can be caused by things like dementia or suffering a stroke, two things that she has previously suggested that Trump might be struggling with, based on his observable symptoms. These flubbed lines, she added, are often referred to as "phonemic paraphasias."

"Phonemic paraphasias are when the motor speech required to coordinate words and syllables together are not coordinated appropriately," she explained. "For example, if I wanted to say 'telephone,' but I accidentally said 'tephelone,' that would be a phonemic paraphasia, because my sounds got mixed up.

She continued: "And that is what's happening a lot of the time with Donald Trump's speech. The coordination for the syllables and order... the more syllables that you have, the higher level motor coordination is required to maintain appropriate speech-sound coordination."

Shae also suggested that this issue could be the result of dysarthria, a condition in which the weakening of muscles required for speech can cause patients to struggle speaking, causing them to sound slurred or slowed down. She argued that this is one of the more recent symptoms that Trump has shown, as is noticeable when he trails off at the ends of certain words, especially ones that are three or more syllables long.

"The fact that there are so many examples of these speech difficulties in one 30-minute speech means that Donald Trump is getting worse," Shae argued. "Whatever is going on, whether it's dementia, whether it's a stroke, whether it's a combination, whether it's congestive heart failure, whether it's whatever it might be, his neurological abilities are declining significantly."

A prominent biographer of President Donald Trump has exposed new details about the reaction within his administration to his unusually sycophantic young aide, claiming that some in his inner circle have been "appalled" by the situation.

Natalie Harp, 34, is an executive assistant to the president, having previously worked at the right-wing One America News Network prior to becoming his full-time aide during his years away from the White House. She has become known to those close to Trump or familiar with his close associates as a "human printer," carrying around a portable printer that allows her to share hard copies of positive news coverage or social media posts about him, no matter where he goes. This, many have observed, has given her an inordinate amount of sway over the information that Trump receives.

Her oddly close relationship to the president has been documented since the start of his second term, with reports emerging that her "obsession" with him had raised alarms in the Secret Service, but she returned to the news spotlight in recent weeks after new revelations about her, including her adoring letters to Trump, were exposed in a new book from reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

Michael Wolff is a longtime journalist and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's personal and political lives, and in the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he provided his own details about Harp, her conduct concerning the president and the alarm that it has caused within his administration.

"Everything that he reads is funneled through Natalie Harp because she’s the human printer," Wolff explained. "The stuff that she prints out is this laudatory stuff. Anything laudatory, she’s searching for at all times and then giving to the president. Other things that will cause him ire—actually, that would be her agenda. So things that cause her ire—that will also cause the president's ire—that goes to him.”

Haberman and Swan's book generated significant headlines about Harp's letters to Trump, specifically one in which she proclaims that, "You are all that matters to me." Speaking further about her role, Wolff revealed more of the things that Harp has written in these messages.

“In this pile of papers, she also frequently includes personal notes to him, and notes that, you know, [say] ‘You’re the alpha and the omega,’ ‘The be all and end all,’ ‘What would I be without you?’” Wolff added.

He continued later: “Natalie Harp’s story is a piece of work. Everybody was in a major kerfuffle over this, including the Secret Service warning the president of the United States, or warning aides to the president whose job it was then to bring to the president whether they did or not, that they saw her as a danger to herself and to him... Those notes, the Natalie Harp notes, were passed to me by other aides of the president who were equally as appalled by this. And that’s one of the things that exists, currently, in the Trump White House, this tension that this is a person who the president has allowed to become really his closest confidant.”

President Donald Trump's administration has become mired in embarrassment over his latest botched remodeling project, but according to a new analysis from MS NOW, the threats he has made in response to the affair reveal him as both "comical" and "ominous."

As part of his ongoing campaign to remodel iconic fixtures of Washington, D.C., to his own liking, Trump made a big deal out of his plan to have the Lincoln Memorial's Reflecting Pool painted a color he called "American Flag Blue." Once the project — handed off to a GOP donor through a swift no-bid contract — was completed, it promptly blew up in his face, as the pool became overrun with green algae, which numerous experts have said was actively made worse by the change in color.

Despite the administration's efforts, the algae have remained, threatening to stick around as a highly visible embarrassment for Trump during the country's 250th birthday celebrations. In response to this predicament, Trump has tried to save face by claiming that the algae bloom was caused by vandals, with a former Olympian getting arrested and charged by the U.S. Park Police after touching a piece of peeling paint in the Reflecting Pool. Multiple other people near the pool, whom Trump accused of being "vandals," have also been arrested, though there have been no charges leveled against them.

Writing for MS NOW on Saturday, political strategist Symone Sanders-Townsend argued that "the ongoing debacle of the Reflecting Pool has been a helpful distillation of [Trump's] approach" to governance: "Make a big promise, use it to reward your allies, blame setbacks on your opponents, criminalize dissent and then attack the press."

"The first three steps are fairly common in politics, especially among populists with little experience in government," she explained. "But it’s the last two that turn Trump into something more than just a run-of-the-mill incompetent politician. Authoritarianism often begins with the habit of treating ordinary problems as criminal conspiracies. A court strikes down his policy, and he calls the judge 'crooked' or 'corrupt.' A protest escalates, and he calls the protesters 'paid agitators.'”

She added: "If an authoritarian government cannot accept criticism, then it has to label critics enemies. If it cannot admit a mistake, then it has to blame sabotage. And if it cannot accept failure, then it has to find someone to punish."

Sanders-Townsend further argued that while it may be "comical" to see Trump deploy this predictable authoritarian playbook over something like the Reflecting Pool debacle, it is also "ominous" and must be taken seriously. This sort of impulse, she explained, is exactly why the nation's founders "built a system designed to restrain power rather than indulge it."

"The Reflecting Pool is simply the latest reminder that, in Trump’s Washington, the line between politics and criminality is growing dangerously thin," she continued. "That’s because the common thread is not just inflammatory rhetoric. It is the growing weaponization of government against ordinary political activity and the ordinary people who engage in it. When a president begins treating ordinary politics as criminality, it does not stay rhetorical for long. Eventually, someone gets investigated. Someone gets detained. Someone gets arrested."

President Donald Trump's latest vanity project unveiling drew withering criticism online, with the likes of George Conway and Mehdi Hasan ripping him to shreds for his "dumb" presidency.

On Friday, Trump officially unveiled a new design for U.S. passports, meant to commemorate the country's 250th birthday. In keeping with his second-term obsession with plastering his name and face on as much as he can get away with, these passports feature a likeness of Trump, standing over the Oval Office's Resolute Desk, in front of text from the Declaration of Independence. In a Truth Social post about the design, Trump claimed that it also included the message, "Welcome, but be good!", though this was not visible in any of the images he shared.

While the design itself has received its own avalanche of mockery, others have honed in on the odd message that Trump claimed the passports would include, suggesting that it indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what passports actually are, prompting Mother Jones to ask in a headline, "Does Trump Know How Passports Work?"

In a post to X, Josh Orton, president of the Demand Justice political action committee, posed a similar question about the passports.

"'Welcome, but be good?' What?" Orton posted. "Does Trump think visiting citizens of other countries get US passports?"

Mehdi Hasan, the founder of Zeteo and former MS NOW anchor, responded to Orton's post with a searing indictment of Trump's intelligence, lambasting him as "the dumbest man" to attain higher elected office across a broad swath of the world.

"Donald Trump may be the dumbest man ever to be elected to high office in the West and I’m including Tommy Tuberville here, too," Hasan posted.

George Conway, the anti-Trump conservative lawyer, then responded to Hasan's post with his own dig at the president's lacking intelligence.

"Yep. He's dum-with-a-B dumb," Conway posted, referencing Trump's much-mocked recent claim that many people did not know that "dumb" is spelled with a B at the end.

According to the administration, the passports featuring Trump's likeness will soon become the default design issued at the passport agency in Washington D.C., with other designs remaining available online and in other states and territories. When the idea was initially put forward, there was widespread concern that it would become the only option available to anyone looking to obtain or renew their passport.

National Intelligence acting director Bill Pulte has installed as his chief of staff a woman who worked on election-related schemes for the Republican National Committee, according to former U.S. officials.

“Christina Norton, the former R.N.C. official, has also served as Bill Pulte’s chief of staff at the federal housing agency he leads. But much of her recent work for the G.O.P. has centered on election issues, including efforts to monitor voting sites during the 2024 presidential election,” reports the New York Times.

While at the R.N.C., the Times reports Norton oversaw a poll watcher program that included conservative conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who helped spread the “Pizzagate” stories about child abuse at a restaurant in Washington.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said the mission of Pulte’s office was supposed to be countering foreign threats, not importing “election denialism into the intelligence community.”

“If reports are true that Bill Pulte, whose installation as acting D.N.I. already raises serious legal questions, is bringing a former senior R.N.C. official who cavorted with election deniers and conspiracy theories into O.D.N.I. as his chief of staff, Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections,” The Times reports Warner saying in a statement.

Rep Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee had his own issues with the appointment, saying Pulte’s office is supposed to ensure “they report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not [President]Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”

“Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind,” Himes said in a statement.

CNN reported Pulte came into his appointed post ready to fire people, and began "asking for a list of every employee in the office so he could assess whether to fire them.”

Juliette Kayyem, CNN's senior national security analyst and ex-assistant secretary of Homeland Security said Pulte was “there for one reason, and that is to satisfy the president's agenda of politicizing the intelligence community.”

“It's not [just] a personal opinion,” Kayyem added. “By statute, Bill Pulte is not qualified for this position. The Director of National Intelligence is supposed to come from the intelligence community. Bill Pulte is a businessman with strong ties to MAGA and to Trump."

President Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" initiative has been exposed as a plot to grant its member states "sweeping immunity," per a report from The Guardian, protecting them from "any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in the courts," among other things, as a result of its most contentious goal.

The Board of Peace initially began as part of Trump's plan to carry out a peace deal in Gaza and to facilitate the rebuilding of the region. By the time it was formally established, it had expanded into a more generalized international peacekeeping organization, with critics expressing concern that Trump, who would remain chairman even after leaving the White House, was using the group to try and replace the United Nations. Among the nations that accepted the invitation to join the board, many are considered to be authoritarian states or dictatorships, with prominent democratic U.S. allies declining to join.

On Saturday, The Guardian obtained a "sensitive but unclassified" four-page resolution, in which the Board of Peace plotted a "sweeping grant of legal immunity for itself," specifically for its actions in Gaza. The resolution would also permit the board to obtain property in the region "free of charge."

As the report noted, it remains unclear how broad the scale of this proposed immunity is planned to be.

"The four-page resolution, labeled 'sensitive but unclassified', extends broad protections to every member of the Board of Peace and its administrative affiliate, the office of the high representative (OHR), as well as to the Palestinian technocrats, international military forces and nonresident contractors lined up to perform work in Gaza," The Guardian explained. "It defines legal processes from which they would have immunity as 'any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in the courts or other entities in Gaza.'"

The report added later: "It is unclear if the document is attempting to relieve the Board of Peace and its affiliates from prosecution in international courts, in addition to potential claims in Gaza."

As the chairman, Trump would retain the ability to override this immunity, "pending majority support from his peace board." A representative for the board dismissed concerns about the intentions of the resolution.

"There is no operative resolution or immunity framework of the kind described in your questions," the representative told The Guardian. "Any suggestion that this process is designed to create lawlessness or impunity is wrong, misleading and gets the issue entirely backwards."

"Six lawyers specializing in US contracting law and international armed conflict reviewed the draft resolution for the Guardian," the report added. "If the resolution goes into force, they said, it is unclear how Board of Peace officials, soldiers, and contractors would be held accountable if there are shootings or accidents that affect Gaza residents, or even how the group might resolve routine disputes over business or land use there."

Daily Beast reports a Trump endorsement could be a problem for more and more voters in the general election, according to information taken from Reuters.

“President Donald Trump’s deal with Iran has done little to boost his standing among his own voters,” said Daily Beast reporter Wiktoria Gucia. “Interviews conducted by Reuters with Americans who voted for the 80-year-old president suggest many remain skeptical of the agreement he struck this month to end the war that sent gas prices soaring above $5 a gallon.”

Trump voters went so far as to say they would reconsider backing candidates endorsed by the president in the upcoming midterm elections.

"A lot of people say: 'Why should I vote when the president's not doing what he promised?'" said Juan Rivera, 26, while canvassing Latino neighborhoods.

Hispanic voters were central to Trump’s 2024 victory, with the president winning 48 percent of the Latino vote — a 12-point improvement from four years earlier, according to the Pew Research Center. However, he is now bleeding support among this key voter bloc.

Steve Egan, 65, from Tampa, Florida, voted for Trump but became disillusioned as the president’s 2025 tariffs hit his business. Egan told Reuters that when deciding who to vote for in the upcoming midterm elections, any candidate endorsed by Trump would be “the kiss of death.”

A number of Trump voters speaking with Reuters said they were disappointed with the president’s handling of the war with Iran, arguing that he failed to deliver on what he set out to achieve. Others said that entering the conflict ran counter to his earlier promise to avoid foreign entanglements.

“We need to truly weaken the Iranian regime instead of this, ‘beat them up a little bit and then step back and let them rebuild,’” Terry Alberta, 65, told Reuters.

Rivera, similarly, told the outlet that the Trump “criticized his predecessors about negotiating with terrorists, and he’s basically done the same exact thing.”

One Trump voter speaking with Reuters complained that the Iran attack appeared to benefit oil companies at the expensive of increased pump prices. Another argued Trump’s war had “triggered greater international hostility toward the United States.”

And while Trump’s memorandum of understanding he signed on June 17 originally appeared to have broad support among Republican voters, the Beast reports prominent Republicans have grown to question the fine print and whether it delivers on the president’s claimed objectives of disarming Iran and freeing the Iranian people from their onerous government.

“I hate to say this in this deal. The biggest loser is the United States and India,” proclaimed “Bolling” host Eric Bolling.

“I will say that the early returns do not look wildly promising at this point,” lamented MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro. “… Let's be very clear. This is the vice president's deal. It does not have support.”

Former Republican Steve Schmidt says House Speaker Mike Johnson is not so clueless that he can’t see the future, and that future involves a Democratic majority in the House, and lots of scrutiny.

“Mike Johnson seems like he needs to be reminded about an important reality,” said Schmidt on his “Warning” substack. “Most people drown because they panic, not because they can’t swim. Mike Johnson is panicking.”

Johnson’s overly frank claims about a future without a Republican majority in the House were quite the admission.

“If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats… impeachment’s not even the big concern,” Johnson said before a live audience. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends … half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. We’re going to win the midterms.”

It was “an astonishing statement,” said Schmidt, comparing it to dialogue written for Burgess Meredith playing the Penguin in the old ‘Batman’ TV series: “I run the protection program.”

“Mike Johnson isn’t panicked because he believes innocent people will be persecuted,” said Schmidt. “He’s panicked because he understands that accountability may finally be coming to Washington. He knows there will be subpoenas. He knows there will be hearings. He knows there will be oversight. He knows investigators will begin asking questions that should have been asked years ago — and he knows the answers may be devastating.”

Johnson isn’t afraid of unfair investigations, Schmid added. He’s afraid of fair ones.

“He’s afraid of evidence. He’s afraid of witnesses. He’s afraid of documents. He’s afraid that Americans will finally see the greatest spasm of political corruption in our nation’s history in all of its staggering breadth,” Schmidt said.

President Donald Trump did not commit corruption in a vacuum, he explained. He did it with the help of a MAGA Congress — the worst Congress in American history. House Republicans abandoned their constitutional responsibilities while Trump likely engaged in cryptocurrency schemes and sold presidential pardons. They also stood by while Trump politicized the DOJ and other state agencies for the benefit of party over country.

“They protected power instead of checking it. They chose personal loyalty over constitutional duty. They became accomplices through silence, indifference, and submission,” said Schmidt, adding that the American people deserve scrutiny of every corrupt act, investigation of every abuse of public office, and accountability for every official who violated the public trust.

“Every investigation should follow the evidence. Every criminal referral should be based on facts. Every prosecution should meet the highest standards of fairness and constitutional due process. That’s what separates the rule of law from authoritarianism,” said Schmidt. “Mike Johnson understands this perfectly. That’s why he sounds panicked.”

A former MAGA darling lashed out against the Trump administration this week, accusing it of manipulating the stock market as it tried to strategically hide signs that its Iran ceasefire is failing.

On Friday evening, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had carried out new military strikes against Iran, claiming that they were in retaliation for an attack the Middle Eastern nation carried out on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump called a "foolish violation" of the recent "memorandum of understanding" it recently signed. Iran claimed that the ship was targeted because it was using an unauthorized pathway through the Strait.

In a post to X on Saturday, the Kobeissi Letter, which tracks news about "global capital markets," highlighted something notable about the timing of the announcement.

"BREAKING" The US Pentagon delayed publicly announcing US strikes on Iran until after the US stock market had closed at 4 PM ET on Friday, per NBC News," the account posted. "The timing of the announcement was reportedly intended to 'reduce the immediate impact on financial markets.'"

This sort of effort has become commonplace during the second Trump term. Given that the president is famously known to be the most concerned about television ratings and stock market performance, his administration has frequently tried to manage the release of information that might cause markets to tumble, making sure that the news breaks after they close for the day, and preferably heading into the weekend as well.

This became especially evident during the Iran peace talks, when Trump would often hype up an impending deal as the weekend approached, only to then begin issuing threats again during the weekend, when markets would not be able to react to renewed hostilities.

Responding to the Kobeissi Letter's post, ex-congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a stalwart Trump supporter and darling of the MAGA movement, made the accusations clear.

"Two things here: 1. The ceasefire is not holding," Greene wrote in a post to X. "2. They are manipulating the markets for insider trading."

Salon reports right wing media is freaking out over a slew of Democratic victories this year and preemptively pleading to the Supreme Court to save them from the results of democracy.

This tactic involves demonizing the electorate that votes Democrat and excluding them from the electoral process as much as constitutionally possible.

“This is what happens when you import the third world,” Fox News talking head Jesse Watters recently growled about New York’s primary results, wile describing it as “a third world takeover.” Laura Ingraham, said Salon, also labored to connect progressive politics with foreignness rather than domestic political preferences.

“The entire lead-up to July 4, I consider it one big trigger warning to the Mamdani minions,” Ingraham said. “They’re happiest when foreign flags are flying. Because to them, red, white and blue ... is like sunshine to a vampire.”

Steve Bannon was no better on his “War Room” podcast, said Salon writer Sophia Tesfaye, calling New York a “foreign city.”

“Go look at Mamdani’s base,” Bannon told his audience. “It’s foreign. These sanctuary cities — this is all by design.” Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh was even less subtle, saying “Third world communists are the enemy,” on X. “They’ve taken over our greatest American city. They’re taking over one of our two major political parties. They hate this country. They hate white people. They hate our heritage and traditions.”

“The danger of this commentary lies in its explicit de-legitimization of the democratic process itself,” said Tesfaye. “When a citizen votes for a candidate who happens to hold democratic socialist views, conservative media treat the voter as an illegal interloper whose very participation in the franchise is a form of national contamination. And they’ve turned to the nation’s highest court as a counter-majoritarian shield, framing an ordinary shift in municipal politics as an existential emergency that justifies the legal dismantling of a century of constitutional consensus.”

Tesfaye referred to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who claimed in a series of his own posts following Tuesday’s New York results that Democrats had “imported a new electorate.”

“Appearing later on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Miller told viewers that ‘a vote for any Democrat anywhere for any office is empowering a party that wants to strip this country to the bone,’" said Tesfaye. “This is the kind of overheated language that has become so normalized on right-wing television that it barely registers as remarkable.”

“Within the same news cycle as these election results, conservatives turned their attention to a series of favorable Supreme Court rulings for the Trump administration on immigration policy,” Tesfaye added. “A 6–3 decision allowing the continuation of certain border restrictions was celebrated not simply as a legal victory, but also as a cultural one. The right’s reaction to these rulings exposed the raw ethno-nationalist impulses driving the judicial pivot.”

On a recent podcast, Megyn Kelly revealed her personal delight at the court decision.

“Look, this has been going on for over a dozen years,” Kelly said of the migrant populations. “Go home, get out! We know our country is better than yours! That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values! You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it!”

“The Trump administration’s effort to reinterpret that guarantee — excluding children of undocumented immigrants — has long been considered a legal long shot. But in the current climate, it has taken on outsized symbolic importance. For many on the right, it represents a way to redraw the boundaries of national belonging through judicial power rather than electoral competition,” said Tesfaye. “This is why the reaction to the New York primaries so quickly converged on the courts. If cities are ‘lost,’ if the electorate is ‘changed,’ then the judiciary becomes the arena where outcomes can still be controlled.”

The right-wing media ecosystem, said Tesfaye, is making a real-time argument that the solution to democratic elections producing outcomes conservatives hate is to ensure that fewer of the people who voted in them are legally recognized as citizens.

A biographer of President Donald Trump is sounding the alarm about plans for a 2028 "auto-coup" being in progress, citing the widely criticized recent moves of his defense secretary, which have even caused his past colleagues at Fox News to turn against him.

On Friday, foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen took to X to react to a story from the U.S. military publication, Stars & Stripes, about the concern emerging in the Pentagon over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's leadership in light of the shocking early retirement of the well-regarded Gen. Christopher Donahue. Rozen noted that even Fox host Brian Kilmeade had spoken out in shock about the move. Hegseth famously worked as a co-host on Fox & Friends Weekend before his appointment by Trump.

"Huge loss for our country," Kilmeade wrote in a post cited by Rozen. "Like losing Tom Brady in prime of career."

"In January, Kilmeade visited USAREUR-AF (U.S. Army Europe and Africa) headquarters in Wiesbaden, where he did a segment on Donahue’s command and its efforts to develop new combat tactics that better use drones and artificial intelligence," Rozen wrote further in her post. "USAREUR-AF has been at the forefront of those efforts, with Donahue’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Line concept for NATO serving as a blueprint for how to manage networks, data and drones to get an edge. At one point during the visit, Kilmeade called President Donald Trump and introduced Donahue as his soldiers gathered around. ‘You’re doing a fantastic job. Your reputation is great,’ Trump said."

Difficulty responding to modern drone technologies and tactics has been cited as one of the U.S. military's major failings in the war with Iran, making Donahue's departure in this light all the more concerning.

In his own post to X, Seth Abramson, an attorney and outspoken critic of Trump, who has written several books about his life and career in politics, warned that something much darker was underway with Hegseth's recent trend of blocking promotions for certain military officers.

"Pete Hegseth is removing or blocking the promotions of all military officers who he has determined would not participate in an illegal pro-Trump self-coup (auto-coup) in 2028," Abramson argued. "You can believe me now or believe me in 2028. Either way, stop seeing what Hegseth is doing as random."

An "auto-coup" refers to a coup that is orchestrated by an existing official in order to stay in power against the will of outside forces, such as a president remaining in office despite losing reelection or being term-limited.

Unaffordable home prices are not the kind of thing billionaire President Donald Trump has had to worry about his whole life, but his voters are having a hard time with it in his economy. Locally elected Republicans are feeling more heat over the economic situation than Trump in his gold-plated Oval Office, however, and this is pressing Columbia, SC. Mayor Daniel Rickenmann to plead Trump for mercy.

“I think it's terrible for the Republican Party, to be quite honest,” said Rickenmann, speaking to an MS NOW “Weekend” panel Saturday morning about the possibility of Trump vetoing a popular housing bill to force Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE Act. “… When you have Senator (Rick) Scott and Senator (Elizabeth) Warren working together, this is what this country is based on, so we're really excited. You know, look, in 10 days this bill will be law. And I don't think the President would be wise to even think about vetoing something like this. This is monumental. This is the beginning. First housing bill in 30-plus years.”

Trump is facing a likely disastrous midterm election threatening to remove his protective Republican buffer in the House and Senate — which is the only thing protecting him from numerous investigations into claims of fraud and various tampering. Knowing this, Trump is determined to pass the SAVE Act, an election bill that critics say will make it harder to vote.

But passing the SAVE Act means also means nuking the Senate filibuster and removing the Senate parliamentarian, which Senate GOP leaders are loathe to do. For this reason, Trump is holding all bills hostage until the Republican majority commits to passing the SAVE Act to the White House for a signature.

But Trump may have other reasons behind his indifference to the Housing Bill, said MS NOW Eugene Daniels, who played footage of Trump dismissing the need for lower housing prices.

“I made billions of dollars with housing. I know housing better than anybody. Maybe anywhere. It is all about the interest rate. Lower the interest rate. You can have all the housing you want. But you have to understand: I don't want to … hurt people that own houses too. These people, for the first time in their lives, they have valuable houses, they become rich. I don't want to hurt them either.”

“What's interesting is several weeks ago, a month ago, he talked about how this is important,” responded Rickenmann. “This is the number one issue across America in every city. … If you're a Democratic city, Republican city, whatever, there's three and a half million units needed across this country. … We had over 1,800 [building permits issued] in our city. We're pushing everything we can. But to say that it's just interest rates is not true. And to say this isn’t monumental as also very disappointing, in my point of view.”

“It is very important for us to protect the integrity of elections,” Rickenmann insisted. “But at the same time, we can't hold one bill for other. We've got to work on thousands of things together, and I don't like the impression that one bill is being held up for another. That's just not the way things need to work.”

Friday night’s final season edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher delivered a patronizing interview with Vice President JD Vance, but not before Maher first hammered President Donald Trump over his plummeting approval ratings and his Reflecting Pool debacle.

“Fourth of July coming up, and you know what? Today it opened, Supergirl, perfect for the Fourth of the July. Yeah, big superhero, another superhero movie opened this week, but what’s going on in Washington? Deadpool,” said Maher, according to reporting by Mediaite.

“Oh, we’ve killed the reflecting pool. I’m tired of hearing about the god—— reflecting pool,” Maher added. “I’ve got to say. I don’t really give a s—— about the reflecting pool. And I love America, but I’ve gotta admit, we’re the only place you could make a pool improve by p—— in it.

“But you know, the problem is now, there are dead ducks in the pool, or possibly murdered by Antifa. I don’t know,” Maher then continued. “But you know the pool is dragging down the president’s approval ratings. It’s like a little in the low 30s now in the country and among independents, 25 percent—and 0 percent with ducks.”

Trump is clearly growing sensitive over the state of the pool, which he forced taxpayer to pay $14 million in a no-bod contract to one of his connected flunkies.

A Colorado-based storm chaser even got a visit by the FBI after cracking a joke about introducing algae spores into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

"I am the leftist who put algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This plan was months in the making. I introduced spores into the paint used by the contractors who repainted the pool. It was me the whole time," said Patrick Pineda, in a since-deleted BlueSky post.

Pineda said his joke was so scientifically absurd, he assumed his audience would be intelligent enough to know it was a joke. But this is Trump’s FBI.

Meanwhile, Trump’s polling is still woefully cratered, and tearing down his party’s chances in November as well.

“Democrats have led the generic ballot in every single Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll since we began fielding in May 2025,” said pollster G. Elliot Morris. “Across 13 monthly polls (we skipped December 2025), Democrats have never trailed, with margins ranging from +5 to +10 points among registered voters.”

Just 25 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling prices, while 71 percent disapprove and 54 percent disapprove strongly, Morris added, creating a tough spot for Trump and the party.

“He is underwater on 11 of the 12 issues we tested,” Morris added.

A New York Times panel of columnists say America is heading toward its 250th anniversary, but many of its citizens and residents are not feeling celebratory, especially with billionaire President Donald Trump working to make it a celebration for only one certain class of people.

Columnists Michelle Cottle, David French and Jamelle Bouie took turns decimating the failure.

“The weird special event for our birthday boy, Mr. President, two weeks ago, with the U.F.C. fight and all of that — … that [was] not meant for the broad public. Like, you had to have a Paramount+ subscription to even watch it, first of all. It was meant for just a subset of even his own supporters,” said Bouie. “It wasn’t any kind of attempt to bring the country together under common civic rituals. And to me, that’s an intentional thing. They’re thinking of the 250th as an attempt to kind of glorify — and I use that in a religious way — Donald Trump, and not as an opportunity to, despite our many divisions and fractious nature and all that, think about our common origins and our common purpose.”

The White House doesn’t “conceive of all Americans as being American in the same way,” said Bouie, with the dividing line being whether or not you support Trump’s political project.

“It’s this constant stratification,” said French, referring to the celebrations very limited appeal of UFC wrestling and one or two acts of hard rock country singers. “It’s this constant sense of a pecking order, and then this constant sense there is always, always in the back of their mind something that goes like this: ‘How can we do this in a way that will make other people mad, that will make our enemies mad? How can we make our enemies mad today?’ As opposed to, ‘How can we bring the country together today?’ It really does seem to be an absolute communications priority of this administration to just go ahead and decide to tick people off on purpose, as long as it’s the right people.”

“That strikes me as at the root of the president’s movement all along,” said Cottle. “Whatever you think of his politics, it’s all about ticking off the elites, which is hilarious because he is an elite of sorts. He’s just an elite who’s always had a chip on his shoulder and has never really fit in.”

“Right, and elites here are defined in a purely cultural, nonmaterial way,” said Bouie. “For these people — if you are, like, a barista with an English degree, making $15 an hour, you’re an elite because Netflix producers like to make shows for you sometimes. Whereas if you are a billionaire buying pardons for your buddies, you’re not an elite, because the cultural tastemakers supposedly look down on you.”

“What Jamelle said was exactly right about elites,” said French. “You can be an underemployed Brown English or art major grad, and that’s an elite. And if you own five car dealerships in, say, Hattiesburg, Miss., you’re just a working man. … Somebody who might be on the elder board of a church, the head of the local Kiwanis Club, or, you know, has their name on a building in a local college, right? And they will view themselves as the scrappy underdog because, you know, the gender studies department in Oberlin looks down on them.

“Oh, my God, boo-hoo-hoo,” erupted Cottle. “That’s all I’ve got to say to the president, just boo-hoo-hoo. Get over it, OK? Get over yourself.”

Dispatch writer David M. Drucker dropped some truth on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” show on Saturday, explaining exactly why Republican leaders in the Senate are finally defying President Donald Trump by refusing to pass the SAVE Act.

Passing the act, which critics say will severely constrict voter access, will require unprecedented moves in the Senate, including the dismantling of the Senate filibuster and the removal of the Senate parliamentarian. Neither of that’s going to happen, however, because Republicans in the Senate can see the future whereas Trump — who is pushing 80 — sees very little future at all.

“What I find silly about this, but it kind of shows you where the President's head is at — which is the same place it's always at —,” he said suggestively, “is that what Republicans do unto you today, Democrats can do unto you tomorrow.”

“So go ahead and fire the parliamentarian, go ahead and scrap the filibuster. Democrats are going to be in power again sometime soon. Look at the past 25 years. This goes back and forth. And they will trash this bill. They'll [install] universal mail-in balloting. They'll do all these things that will force Texas and Florida and Idaho and all these red states to govern elections the way they want. We just played ping-pong doing this. So, the whole thing is just ridiculous,” Drucker said.

Drucker added that Trump’s time would be much better spent helping his party focus on economic issues to smooth Republicans' slide into the midterms — only that’s not going to happen, he said.

Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kent.), who Trump had removed in the Republican primaries for daring to release the Epstein files, said on Thursday that Republicans can expect “an absolute shellacking” in November because “we’re wasting the opportunity that voters gave us.”

Drucker agreed on Tuesday, writing that Republicans hoping for Trump to pivot to the economy would be better off spending their time hunting “proof” of the “tooth fairy.” The very next day, Trump stomped a Congressional effort to pass a housing bill that would make home ownership for affordable.

“I am prescient, man,” Drucker told the MS NOW panel. “[Trump] is … a complicated political figure, but not a complicated man. He is singularly focused on his things that interest him and his grievances.”

“[H]e is approaching this presidency doing everything that he ever dreamed he might want to do from the very beginning,” Drucker added. “He never had any use for Congress from the very beginning. He never took well to criticism from voters, and so this is how he has been, and this is how he will be to finish out his last two and a half years.”

- YouTube youtu.be

Salon reports the specter of Jeffrey Epstein appears to be looming over the Republican Party as the GOP struggles to maintain it’s delicate House and Senate majorities.

Republicans have seized on Epstein’s ties to Democratic figures like former President Bill Clinton, but it appears that Epstein lingers most heavily over the party with a president whose name peppers the Epstein files, and who worked so obviously to keep the files under wraps. Trump also labored to remove Republicans who favored exposing the Epstein files in Republican primaries.

This is giving Democrats an additional edge in a race that is already swinging heavily away from Republicans who have failed to reign in President Donald Trump’s various power grabs and his monetizing of the White House.

“The revelations from the files further fueled the widespread, bipartisan exasperation among voters with the wealthiest elites,” reports Salon. “The Epstein issue, two Democratic pollsters told The 19th, is rare for its high salience and far reach even among less politically engaged voters — and for the high levels of bipartisan agreement on the need for more action.”

Surveys from Navigator Research and progressive pollster Data for Progress buttress that argument, with both polls showing majorities of voters — including a majority of Republicans — believe “there hasn’t been enough accountability connected to Epstein’s crimes” and they want to see more arrests and prosecutions. The March Navigator poll, in particular, revealed the share of Americans who said they believed Trump administration officials should resign over the Epstein matter increased when they were informed about officials in other countries being arrested, fired or forced to resign over their Epstein connections.

“What has happened with the Epstein files is such a clear distillation of the frustration that Americans across different partisan ideologies, even Republicans, even MAGA Republicans, and certainly independents, feel that there’s a different set of rules — or that really no rules at all — for the elite who just seem to get ahead,” said Melissa Toufanian, managing director at Navigator.

The Navigator survey, revealed that half of Americans, including two-thirds of Democrats and nearly 60 percent of independents, said they believed the government was “definitely” covering up additional wrongdoing by Epstein. And 72 percent of Americans, including 70 percent of independents, 67 percent of non-MAGA Republicans and 57 percent of respondents identified as MAGA Republicans, demanded more arrests and prosecutions related to Epstein.

Sixty-four percent of surveyed adults, including two-thirds of independents and half of Republicans, said they believed Epstein’s crimes were “unsurprising and the result of a broader problem.”

This is giving Democrats a definite edge in the midterms after the party battled the White House and it’s foot-dragging Republican defense team in the House to release the files last year.

“It really cuts across every political divide in a way that we almost never see on other issues,” Toufanian said.

The number of red state candidates running on Epstein and the “Epstein class” demonstrates this, reports Salon. Texas Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico and Ohio Democratic senatorial candidate Sherrod Brown appear to be getting good mileage out of their Republican opponents by campaigning against the Epstein class, as is Noah Taylor, an Army veteran running as a Democrat for the Senate in Kansas, and Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska.

“Osborn, who is challenging Sen. Pete Ricketts, issued a news release pointing to a campaign rally in which Ricketts and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas appeared together, calling them ‘birds of a feather who are content to carry out the agenda of the billionaire Epstein class,’” reports Salon.

And it definitely does not help that voters were not only highly aware of the Epstein files issue but were able to name specific figures connected to it, including Trump, who they believed to be part of the Epstein class, according to Data for Progress research.

The Boston Globe reports Two Republican candidates for statewide office, including the state party’s de facto nominee for attorney general, won’t appear on the September primary ballot after the commission that oversees ballots took issue with hundreds of nomination signatures they submitted.

The result comes as a shock considering President Donald Trump and his Republican Party’s purported war on voter fraud in what critics say is actually a ploy to remove Democratic voters from rolls.

Despite the party’s crusade, however, Anne Manning Martin, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, and Michael Walsh, the party’s endorsed candidate for attorney general, were both knocked off after the commission found problems with enough of the signatures they had collected.

“In accordance with the Ballot Law Commission’s decisions, the names of Anne Manning Martin for Lieutenant Governor and Michael C. Walsh for Attorney General will not be printed on the September 1, 2026, state primary ballots,” said Deb O’Malley, a spokesperson for Secretary of State William Galvin’s office.

The commission invalidated 1,021 signatures of the 10,677 Walsh turned in to the secretary of state’s office, leaving him hundreds of signatures short of the 10,000 required to make the ballot.

For Manning Martin, the commission invalidated 1,279 signatures her campaign submitted, leaving her with only 9,413 “valid signatures.”

“A general review of the certified signatures on the nomination papers also demonstrates they are likely fraudulent,” the commission wrote in the decision.

The Globe reports this decision is “the latest development in the signature fraud controversy that has now decimated the Republican ticket, knocking off two candidates for lieutenant governor and eliminating the party’s sole challenger to Attorney General Andrea Campbell.”

“The state Republican party, already struggling to field candidates down-ballot, is now only officially challenging for three of the six statewide constitutional offices, all of which are currently held by Democrats,” The Globe reports.

MAGA influencer and podcaster Tucker Carlson was happy to laud the hard feelings between President Donald Trump’s digital media manager Alex Bruesewitz and ultra conservative columnist and Fox News pundit Mark Levin on his Friday podcast.

In addition to discussions topics about how hard the nation appears to “discriminate” against white people and foreign influences on social media, Bruesewitz and Carlson eventually got around to the topic of Levin, who has criticized Trump’s disastrous invasion of Iran as well as a few other Trump policy disagreements.

“Mark Levin hates Trump. He's always hated Trump, has worked against Trump openly for a decade. And then Trump does something that he agrees with and he's [suddenly] the gatekeeper and Trump's best friend,” said Carlson. “Now he hates Trump again and he's attacking Trump. How long does Trump continue to be friends with this guy?”

Carlson himself has roundly criticized Trump’s invasion of Iran and warned that the invasion could escalate into a major world war if Trump followed through on his threat to annihilate Iranian civilization. But this discussion was about Levine.

Bruesewitz pointed out that Levin is “trying to get me fired, by the way,” before claiming Trump is “unique” in that he can handle when people criticize him,” in blatant contradiction to facts.

“Oh, he can? … He doesn't think they’re ‘low IQ crazy people’? Carlson demanded incredulously, referring to Trump’s insult of Carlson’s own criticism a matter of weeks ago over Iran.

“Only some,” Bruesewitz admitted, before going on to describe Levin as “part of the Republican Party that has been left in the past.”

“They are desperately trying to remain relevant and they use conflicts, whether it's in the Middle East … for example or the conflict in Ukraine. They use these issues to have a little relevance to maintain their presences on Fox News. But the people aren’t with him and you see that in polling. You see 60-something percent of Americans support [Trump’s] MOU [ending the Iran war]. You look at Mark Levin's twitter feed he acts like everybody's against it. Nobody’s against it except for Mark and his friends, who are probably coordinating in their messaging and talking points.”

“I always try to remind myself Mark Levin is not a player in any affairs, global or local,” Carlson said in agreement. “He's irrelevant and his job is, like, to make me mad and suck me into his fantasy world and I should just ignore this and you clearly already figured that out.”

“Don't take the bait,” Bruesewitz advised.

Former Republican and current Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller showed no mercy to MAGA podcaster Megyn Kelly after her attack on Haitians this week.

“I think you're kind of nice to Megyn Kelly there because what Megyn Kelly is doing is she's being a rancid b——,” Miller said on his Friday afternoon Bulwark podcast with guest host Jane Coaston. “That's what she's doing. I'm sorry but, like, that is all she's doing.”

The former NBC daytime talk host took to her SiriusXM “Megyn Kelly Show” and denigrated Haitian immigrants living in the U.S.

“And half of you people, more than half, you won't assimilate. We don't want you,” Kelly said. “We don't care if you're offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to f—— Haiti. Sorry. I'm just I'm thinking about our friends in Ohio who've been dealing with these … Haitians for years now. Drunk driving all over their towns and killing people.”

“This is the whole cats and dogs thing,” Kelly then added, citing a soundly debunked claim by President Donald Trump that immigrants were eating cats and dogs prior to his 2024 re-election. “They don't want to live like Americans live.”

Coaston called Kelly’s rage insincere because she was merely doing it for money.

“It's a performance for an audience. It's fake. This is what [they] want,” said Coaston. “This is what [they] want to hear from you … and we want this from you and it will benefit you financially to do this. If it didn't, she wouldn't be doing it.”

“We have evidence of all of this because do you remember when she was working for NBC?” Coaston asked Miller.

“Yeah, it was a totally different character,” said Miller. “She was like a totally different character. She was loving trans children, having them on the show. There's like a soft morning mom after school drop off [kind of vibe]. She did the wine dancing.”

Kelly’s tenure on NBC was short-lived, however. In 2018, she was criticized for on-air remarks she made on Megyn Kelly Today related to the appropriateness of blackface as a Halloween costumes, saying “that was okay as long as you were dressing up like a character." She also defended Luann de Lesseps's use of blackface to wear a Diana Ross Halloween costume.

Kelly issued an email apologizing for the remarks after catching backlash. But three days later, NBC canceled Megyn Kelly Today. She had only been with the network for about a year.

Kelly is just an actor, said Miller, who contributes nothing to the nation, unlike the immigrants who actually arrive and work hard.

“She is perpetrating a lie. That is what is underscoring the tragedy that's happening to these people that are being sent back to Haiti for no reason. They're being menaced by our government for no reason. They're in the country working hard, going to church. raising their families,” said Miller. “… Megan Kelly, you didn't build s——. She has not built any lasting cultural touchstone. She's added nothing to the culture. All she's trying to do is rip the country apart, undermine what made America special.”

MS NOW analyst Steve Benen says House Speaker Mike Johnson dropped an unexpectedly corruption-friendly reason for protecting the House’s GOP majority against its near inevitable collapse in the November midterms.

“If we lose the midterms, these Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they'll go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted,” Johnson said — and then added out loud that “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you.”

In the final two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, there was a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, said Benen, and Republicans “put aside any legislative ambitions and spent 2023 and 2024 … investigating all sorts of perceived controversies related to the Democratic administration.”

But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the GOP-led Congress completely switched gears and clanked the Congressional vehicle into protection mode.

“This time, lawmakers also abandoned their oversight responsibilities to an almost cartoonish degree, pretending not to notice any of the incumbent president’s many abuses and scandals,” said Benen.

In fact, Congressional Republicans have done so little oversight, The Washington Post reported last month, that the White House Counsel’s Office, expecting Democrats to reclaim a majority in at least one chamber, recently began “giving private briefings to the administration’s political appointees on how to best prepare for congressional oversight,” said Benen.

That same article added that the roughly 30-minute briefings have included “a PowerPoint presentation about how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it.”

Regarding his statement, Benen notes the GOP leader did not appear to be reading from a prepared text. He was just shocking shooting GOP intent from the hip before a live audience.

“What was on his mind was a near future in which a possible House Republican majority spends 2027 and 2028 shielding the president, his team and their allies from the kind of scrutiny that Congress has a responsibility to do as a matter of course,” said Benen.

“This isn’t altogether surprising,” he added, “given everything we’ve seen from Capitol Hill over the past year and a half, but it was nevertheless remarkable to hear a sitting House speaker declare, out loud and in public, that he wants and expects to run a ‘protection program’ — a phrase more commonly associated with organized crime — on behalf of the White House.”

Republicans have already been using their majority to shield the president from the fallout of the Epstein files, with Kentucky Republican and House Oversight Chair James Comer being accused of using "a new strategy" to "contain" the ability of lawmakers to issue subpoenas against "high-profile figures in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation."

Before that, Republicans used their majority to stall the passage of a new law making the Trump administration’s release of the files legally mandatory. And after failing in that effort, Trump himself targeted Republicans who favored the release for ousting in GOP primaries.

The GOP’s labor to protect Trump from incrimination is well noted, but Benen said “usually, GOP leaders are a bit more subtle about their anti-oversight posturing.”

Johnson’s protective oath sounds odd considering how hard Trump appears to be working to get the Republican majority removed from Congress, however. Trump’s polling is at historic lows, and his recent effort to blowup a hugely popular housing bill in the Senate is souring voters to both the administration and his party.