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A Republican panelist’s attempt to square President Donald Trump’s crusade for “election integrity” flopped hard against Trump’s own attempts to undermine it during a CNN Saturday morning discussion.

Seattle Red Radio host and author Jason Rantz’ found himself siding with Trump’s Thursday night indictment of mail-in voting — despite Trump himself voting by mail on numerous occasions.

“Republicans have been more concerned about voting because they believe that elections are stolen. And I come from a state, Washington state, where it's 100 percent mail in voting. And I hear from people who say they're not going to vote because they don't trust the system. That kills me,” said Rantz. “… [Trump is] going to make sure that if people are registered illegally, they're not actually voting.”

“I think that that's a good thing,” added Rantz. “That should actually give [everyone] a little bit more trust in the system. What gives people a lack of trust is that you had a couple hundred thousand that we know of, potentially who have been registered to vote, and they're ineligible to vote. That should not happen. And it should be apolitical to look at that and simply say, ‘we should come up with some bipartisan solutions to ensure it's working.”

But Vox host and editorial director Astead Herndon could not hide his laughter.

“It’s Just wild to pretend that this isn't the same president who got on the phone with Brad Raffensperger and said ‘find people to help me win.’ Like, it's literally the same guy. It's too wild to see those things, because that’s two totally disconnected events. And that’s not going to be something I take seriously because of that.”

“Is it fair, though?” insisted Rantz. “I don't care about that. But my point is, do you not see that there's a problem if someone is getting registered to vote illegally? You don't think that's a problem?”

“I'm going to just watch you because I'm not going to play that game because I’m talking about Donald Trump’s actions from the White House, which were not an equivalent action,” said Herndon, staring at him.

“Because you don't think that's a problem. I know you don't want to talk about that because you don't want to talk about the actual issue. And it is a fair question that you don't take seriously,” said Rantz.

“I think Democrats would come to the table and work with Donald Trump if he had credibility when it came to voting, but he doesn't,” said former DNC spokesperson Xochitl Hinjosa. “The problem is that he only cares about the elections that he loses or his party loses, and one of those is coming up. And all of a sudden, just a few months before the election, he wants to implement rules that would end up decreasing the number of people that can vote.”

“… If Donald Trump had never tried to stop the certification of elections and committed crimes — as a grand jury believe that he did — if that stuff had have never happened and he was about election security and wanted to work with Democrats with it, I think they would be willing to do that,” Hinjosa said.

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Late-night host Seth Meyers called for the president to do another cognitive exam as Donald Trump spirals into another rant calling "affordability" a made-up work by Democrats.

This week, Trump spoke at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he went off on a tangent about “affordability,” saying it is “a fake word that they use.”

Trump frequently refers to things he doesn't like as "fake," such as "fake news," the fake 2020 election, fake scandals that are "hoaxes" and "witch hunts," or even "fake polls."

According to Trump, “They caused the affordability problem. It’s called high prices. They came up with this word. They’re good at coming up with words." They, in this case, were Democrats. He then explained his new invention of changing the word "Democrat" to "Dumocrat," outlining how it's spelled to the crowd, and neglecting that the word "dumb" is spelled with a "b."

“When your doctors heard that, did they say, ‘Hey buddy, you wanna come take a fifth cognitive test? We think you’ll ace it!” Meyers questioned Trump.

“I get you think it’s cool that you’re four for four in dementia tests; it’s not a good sign that they keep making you take them,” Meyers said.

Trump has had four of what he calls cognitive exams, which are actually tests to examine the degree to which his brain might be changing over time. He bragged that he got a "perfect score" on the test he claimed was difficult.

Meyers played through some of the older Trump clips where he made lofty campaign promises like, "We will end inflation and make America affordable again. Prices will come down, you just watch. They'll come down and they'll come down fast. I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make America affordable again. We're gonna get your energy prices down by 50 percent. Groceries, cars, hou-- everything. We're going to get the prices down. We will end inflation and make America affordable again. A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper. Getting gasoline below $2 a gallon, bring down the price of everything from electricity rates to groceries, airfares, and housing costs. They call it groceries. Bacon, lettuce, tomato, all the everything is so much higher than it ever was, and we're going to bring that down."

Meyers commented, "Looking back, this might have been a bad sign."

He then replayed the clip of Trump explaining what "groceries" were.

"We should have known he wasn't gonna be able to bring down the price of groceries because it seemed like he just found out about groceries," Meyers said. "He's talking about it like he's doing an exposé for 'Dateline.'"

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Former LA congressman Garrett Graves got himself bushwhacked by a panel that included a Republican strategist after he refused to admit that Democratic Georgia Senators were legitimately elected to their seats.

“I mean, congressman, do you think that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were duly elected?” demanded CNN anchor Kasie Hunt after confronting the possibility that Trump may publicly call both senators illegitimate due to bogus claims of election tampering.

But, like the vast majority of the modern Republican Party, Graves was leery of stating what countless judges have already declared, that the elections were legit.

“Um, I haven't gone in and studied the elections, but I haven't. Let me be clear on this: I have not seen—”

At that point the panel attacked.

“That should be an easy answer,” muttered panelist Charles M. Blow.

“There were three — there were paper ballots that were counted three separate times. How can you not say that they didn’t win there?” demanded Democratic strategist Meghan Hays.

“Because I haven't studied the Georgia elections,” Graves blurted.

“You don’t have to study the elections to know,” said Blow, publisher of the Blowstack Newsletter.

“But hang on. Let me let me answer the question that I was asked,” Graves insisted. “I was asked the question if I believed that they were elected. I haven't seen anything to the contrary. So, I've never, ever said that there was anything in question about those folks being elected.”

“When did we get to this point? And do you think it's good for America — so, have your opponents conceded to you? They called you and said, ‘hey, you know, like, thanks for a good race. Congratulations. You won.’ Like, when did it get to be so hard, right? Like sporting events are won and lost. So are elections.”

“Hey, I'm going to I'm going to agree with you,” said Graves. “I think that politics … is a blood sport. I think it's gotten out of hand. I'll be the first one to say that. I think closed primaries have absolutely made it worse, including in our home state. But, but I don't think that, um, the president coming in and presenting … new evidence is something that we should all be afraid of. Let us look at the evidence, let us judge it, and then decide if it's something that's actually, uh, that we need to take seriously and find safeguards to protect or prevent from happening.”

“Where is this evidence in the 43 lawsuits that he litigated and lost?” said Hays. “So why are we doing it now? I just don't understand.”

Graves then made an appeal to new evidence that may have “popped up.”

“If we found a way that a foreign government was influencing our elections and caused outcomes to be distorted, that's something every American, regardless of if you’re liberal or conservative, should be concerned about. Integrity in elections is critical,” he said”

“Just saying that somebody caused an outcome to be distorted is something an influencer can do. That's very different. Changing any part of the electoral system, changing votes, changing tallying. That is the question, and that is what Donald Trump has been suggesting. And that has never, ever been found,” said Blow. “And I find it personally upsetting about Georgia because I voted in that election where Warnock and Ossoff won. There was no influence that was making me say, oh, I'm going to just these just these two lines are cheating. But the rest of the votes are legitimate. That's insane.”

Former Trump White House Communications Director Republican strategist Alyssa Farah Griffin, who was advising the Georgia Republican Party in 2020, said she was hoping the incumbents’ GOP opponents would win, but they did not.

“They lost fair and square to Warnock and Ossoff,” said Griffin. “But I'd also note this: Donald Trump was legitimately elected in 2016. The Obama administration was overseeing the federal government in 2020. The Trump administration was overseeing the federal government in 2024 when it was the Biden administration [that won]. So he's basically saying that the failure to administer, at least at the federal level, the elections, the failure to stop these interferences only happened under his watch.”

“I don't think it's the flex for the Trump administration that he thinks it is, that the one election that was stolen in 2020 was when he was in power as president,” said Griffin.

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President Donald Trump’s former attorney compared Trump to a toddler whining for a lost doll when he stands before America tonight and attacks the nation’s fair elections.

Ty Cobb, who worked for Trump during his first term, described Trump in this way to MS NOW anchors during an analysis of the likely material of Trump’s Thursday night address.

MS NOW reporters have been told by White House sources as well as administration officials that the president is going to zero in on allegations of foreign interference, specifically in the 2020 election, and specifically when it comes to China. Additionally, Trump is expected to declassify intel documents on China and sell the argument that Beijing had the ability and intent to interfere in the 2020 election.

Ultimately, Trump is focusing on Chinese interference, over Russian interference in the 2020 election because China favored Biden in that election, while the Kremlin did its tampering for Trump.

But Cobb said Trump is trying to stack every deck on the way to midterms because he’s still furious that he lost the 2020 election.

“He's tried to eliminate mail in ballot voting. He's issued an executive order, which fortunately the courts have rejected. He's tried to have the Post Office refuse to send out ballots in red states who don't give over the voter rolls that 13 courts have said he's not entitled to under the Constitution,” ranted Cobb. “[Trump apparatchik] Steve Bannon and others have made plain [AG leader] Todd Blanche have tried to season the electorate to expect to see troops on the street, and ICE at the polls.”

“As they look at the podium surrounding the president, they should really look at it as a crib,” said Cobb. “This is a two-year-old who lost his toy. The most grievous thing that ever happened to him was he lost an election. As a malignant narcissist, he just can't abide that. And he's going to fight it with every lie that he can to try to prevent millions of people t[from having a say].

It does not appear to matter, said Cobb that 98 percent of the ballots in America cast in presidential elections are paper ballots and soon it will be 100 percent once Louisiana falls into line.”

“These are the safest elections ever,” said Cobb.

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Longtime MS NOW anchor Rachael Maddow said President Donald Trump is not the president he was in his last administration, after the onslaught of age and illness.

“I think that he is I know this I don't say this in a way that's meant to be cheap, but I feel like he's devolved in his own ability to communicate,” Maddow told MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace.

“The Islamic Republic of Japan doesn't do it for you,” Wallace quipped.

“It's shockingly bad,” Maddow continued. “But I mean, not only can he not find the words that are supposed to go together to make the nouns, he can't form a political concept. Just as an example, this housing bill, right? Republicans want one concrete policy-related thing to run on that's not taking away everybody's health insurance, right? They want something else to run on and they've got it and they get it together. And Trump realizes, ‘wait a second, that's not about me.’ And so therefore, he has to get rid of it.”

“Even if you didn't agree with him, he could be a little strategic before,” Maddow argued, speaking of Trump’s first administration. “But he's become so, I think, emotionally incontinent that he can't control his own feelings enough to make politically savvy decisions. And so, Republicans are having to try to make politics around him rather than through him like they used to be able to do.”

This, said Maddow, makes Trump the biggest obstacle standing between Republicans and potential electoral success in November, which Maddow said leaves his party in “a mess right now.”

Wallace asked Maddow how Trump’s “emotional incontinence” is weighing in on international disasters like Trump’s unilateral war in Iran, and Maddow said the outcome is obvious.

“Yeah. I mean, what do you think it was like at the Pentagon when Trump announced the new policy of closing the Strait of Hormuz, and we, the United States of America Pirate Corps will be charging 20 percent of cargo to every ship.”

“What are you going to do? Go like take inventory and then write a bill?” Wallace demanded.

“But he's the commander in chief and he's saying that's our new policy. What do you do, sitting there at the Pentagon, whether you’re the Fox News guy who's like in charge [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth], or whether you're an operational commander? Do you just wait till that obvious idiocy is negated by his next blurt, or do you try to operationalize that in the meantime until you hear that it's not happening?”

Maddow added that operational jobs in a place like the Pentagon are some of the hardest in the world with some of the highest stakes on earth, and employees are entrusted with incredible power.

“And for them to have to contend with that clownish nonsense from somebody who purports to be in charge — I don't think most of the time he's even in charge of his own faculties — it’s just not fair to them. It's asking them to do a job that's impossible to do,” said Maddow.

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Sen. Mitch McConnell's recent proof of life photo seems to have created more questions than it answered, and now, a forensic expert has broken down all of its "biggest red flags."

McConnell, best known for his many years as the highly obstructionist GOP Senate Majority Leader, was rushed to the hospital last month after being found unresponsive at his home. Despite claims from his office that he was recovering well, his disappearance from the public eye for weeks led to an avalanche of conspiracy theories, claiming that he was actually in much worse health than his staff let on, or dead outright.

Over the weekend, McConnell's office attempted to squash these rumors by releasing a new photo of the senator, appearing in a hospital room chair alongside his wife, Elaine Chao, smiling and seemingly in good spirits. He also released a statement in which he claimed that he had fallen at his home and been rendered unconscious, and was then kept hospitalized after developing pneumonia. For a variety of reasons, this effort left many people unconvinced, including McConnell's own Senate GOP colleagues, with Sen. Ron Johnson echoing claims that his office had tried to pass off an older photo as more recent.

Dr. John Paul Garrison, a clinical and forensic psychologist, released a new YouTube video in the wake of the situation, offering professional insights into several concerning aspects of the McConnell photo.

For starters, Garrison dismissed the common theory that the photo was AI-generated, claiming that several AI-detecting programs he used concluded that it was legitimate. While stressing that the photo could still have been manipulated in some way, he concluded that it was not fabricated entirely, and added that it did not resemble any AI images he had seen before.

"Now, the first thing I notice is that typically when politicians have been injured, they've been sick, they want to show strength," Garrison said. "'Hey, I'm coming back and I'm coming back strong.' He can't even stand in this picture. He's sitting in a hospital bed. So that tells you a lot about what you need to know about the status of where he is right now. What this picture projects more than anything else is extreme frailty and weakness."

Garrison further highlighted the newspaper included in the photo, a common tactic in proof-of-life photos to prove what date the picture was taken on. While this would typically be done by having the subject hold up the paper for the camera, in McConnell's photo, the paper is off to the side, seemingly being held down on a surface with minimal effort from the senator. Garrison argued that this was, in fact, the best that McConnell could do in his condition.

McConnell is also not wearing his wedding ring in the photo, which Garrison said is common in a hospital setting when there are concerns about jewelry getting stuck due to swelling. This, he argued, suggests that the senator is still hospitalized, despite claiming to have been released, and further proves how "frail he is in this situation."

McConnell and Chao also appear to be looking in different directions, suggesting to Garrison that it was the best they could do to get a photo with them looking in nearly the same direction. He also argued that there does not appear to be any warmth or connection between the two, which can be seen in other recent photos, and added that Chao might be trying to help prop her husband up.

"This does not seem like a natural photo where they're together," Garrison said. "This seems like a one where they are trying to get a picture and this is the best they could possibly do."

An expert in infectious diseases this week tossed cold water on the hype and panic surrounding the recent parasitic outbreak, arguing that certain reports about Trump administration cuts have been a "red herring" masking the real issue and making things worse.

As of Tuesday, NBC News reported that around an estimated 7,000 cases of cyclosporiasis had spread across the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with a little over 3,300 being from Michigan. A parasitic foodborne illness, cyclosporiasis can cause days or weeks of severe explosive diarrhea, and is most often spread by contaminated fresh produce, including leafy greens, berries and herbs.

Since the outbreak began to emerge, reports have indicated that the sweeping cuts to the national health and disease tracking apparatuses under President Donald Trump have made the situation worse, with many reports honing in on a change made to FoodNet last year. Introduced in 1995, FoodNet is a program run in collaboration between the CDC, the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and state health departments, which aims to track the spread of foodborne diseases. In 2025, under the Trump administration, the tracking of cyclosporiasis was made optional.

In a Wednesday appearance on CNN, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told host Audie Cornish that the attention put on that FoodNet change was a "red herring," as far as this current outbreak was concerned. He also said that, by his estimation, the outbreak was most likely done, for the time being.

"There's a lot of misinformation going around about this right now," Osterholm said. "Let me tell you, I'm not afraid to be critical of the federal government or even state governments with regard to response. But let's be really clear: the changes that occurred at CDC were eliminating certain diseases from what would be considered community laboratories, the FoodNet system. These are ten sites where they do much more extensive study. The way cases get reported to local and state health departments, and the CDC, through the national notifiable disease system, that has not changed. So this idea that somehow what changes occurred at CDC basically caused this outbreak not to be well investigated, just simply [isn't] true."

He also noted: "I can say right now, I think the outbreak is over. And what I mean by that is the perishable items that came through the food system 4 to 6 weeks ago are gone. It's not there anymore. People are still sick. We're still going to hear about new cases because they're just now getting diagnosed. And as you heard on the lead-in on the social media commentary, we just heard, there are people who are still very sick. The good news is they can be treated. The really also good news is that leafy greens generally are very safe to eat."

While dismissive of the focus put on the FoodNet changes as a contributor to this outbreak, Osterholm was still critical of the CDC's response time, as well as

"I think this outbreak is one that really needs to be reexamined when it's all done, because I think, frankly, we should have had these answers weeks ago and didn't," Osterholm explained. "And I can't attribute that to any one thing other than a lack of overall leadership in responding to this. Yesterday, the CDC put out what was called a 'health alert network' alert, and at that point, that's something that should have been sent out four weeks ago, not at the end of this."

He added later: "The problem we have is that in the first instance, like politics, all of foodborne disease investigations start at the state and local level. And today, 94 percent of all the budgets for all 50 state health departments depend on this federal support to achieve that level of protection. And right now, we're having challenges at the state and local health department where, in fact, these investigations begin. So that is a problem. But it's not what has been made.The problem with this FoodNet system, that's just a red herring."

Mary L. Trump, the niece of President Donald Trump, claimed in a new interview that her uncle's deterioration is being hastened by "decades" of living with untreated "psychiatric disorders," which has created a "perfect storm," per The Daily Beast.

The younger Trump is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., the president's late older brother, and a clinical psychologist. Over the last several years, she has emerged as the only real critic of her uncle's political agenda from within his own family, calling out his policies in numerous books and interviews, while also warning of the family histories and conditions that have created his warped psyche.

On Monday, she spoke with former CNN White House correspondent Jessica Yellin for a discussion facilitated by Big Tent USA. As The Daily Beast reported, she was pressed about "how she would assess the president’s current mental and physical state as someone who knows him personally," and surmised that he is currently dealing with a "perfect storm" of circumstances, worsened by leaving serious psychiatric disorders untreated for "decades."

“He’s somebody who has lived for decades with longstanding, undiagnosed, and untreated psychiatric disorders," she said. "As with many illnesses, including psychiatric illnesses, when they’re left untreated, they worsen over time.”

She touched on several other factors indicating that his physical health is in serious decline, including his swollen ankles, bruised hands and apparent difficulty with walking or standing for extended periods. She also noted the much-discussed issues he appears to have with staying awake, even when he is on-camera during important events.

"He simply cannot stay awake during the day unless people are talking about him," she added. "That appears to be the only thing capable of keeping him alert."

She continued: "There is so much happening simultaneously that it shouldn’t surprise us he’s becoming increasingly erratic, belligerent, and violent. Just listen to his rhetoric about Iran. It’s completely unhinged."

Yellin agreed with Trump's summation and added, "There’s a bloodlust to it that’s deeply unnerving."

The Daily Beast report further highlighted comments that the president's niece made during a January appearance on CNN, in which she suggested that his condition was "getting rapidly worse."

“Given his advancing age, clearly there seems to be some indications that he has some cognitive issues, hence all of the cognitive tests he’s taking and the MRIs we’ve heard about but have no specific information about, and just his behavior, the way he speaks, his inability to rein himself in, his inability to stay on topic,” she said. “Oftentimes, it seems that he’s not exactly aware of where he is or the audience he’s speaking to.”

The surprise passing of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham sent shockwaves through Washington D.C., but according to political analyst Rick Wilson, there are some unexpected reasons that the situation could become a nightmare for the GOP.

Graham, an outspoken ally of President Donald Trump after his rise to power and an advocate for his Iran war, passed away suddenly on Saturday evening, with reports later emerging that he had suffered an aortic rupture, which might have been worsened by his recent trip to Ukraine and a family history of heart disease. His seat has since been filled temporarily by his sister, Darlene Graham Nordone, with a primary to replace him on the midterm ballot now set to take place at a breakneck speed.

Though his seat may now be filled, his departure from the Senate is likely to quietly have severe consequences for the GOP. Willson, a former Republican political consultant turned vocal Trump critic, explained during a recent interview with Molly Jong-Fast that Graham was a key figure in helping Republicans muster the votes needed to pass legislation. Without him around now, he predicted that there would be new difficulties for certain votes.

"The thing to think about here is, without Lindsey Graham, who was on [the Senate Judiciary Committee], kind of the glue that held a lot of that stuff together," Wilson said. "Lindsey was the one who would go to the Susan Collinses and the Lisa Murkowskis of the world and say, come on, just help me out on this and I'll make sure you get something good out of voting [to confirm Brett Kavanaugh] or voting for Amy Coney Barrett... Help me help you, all that bulls——. That's gone."

Wilson suggested that now, without Graham around to muster votes, Trump might not have the support in the Senate to get Todd Blanche confirmed as attorney general.

"Lindsey had good relationships, let's be real, with Democrats and Republicans," Wilson added. "Even though he was a Trump ass-kisser from 2017 on, he had good bipartisan relationships. He could pull Democrats on some big things."

Graham was also notable for his willingness to speak with the press, often taking on the role of a messenger for Trump, translating and spinning his agenda into something more coherent and palatable.

Furthermore, while South Carolina is a staunchly Republican state, Wilson also suggested that Graham's death and the coming battle to replace him as the GOP's nominee could offer Democrats their one real shot at winning the seat, given that the likely candidates lack much of Graham's name ID in the state and will most likely lack the ability to get voters to give them a pass on certain shortcoming. He suggested that if the coming primary is ugly enough, it could turn voters against the Republican side of the ticket and give Democrats some unexpected momentum.

Prominent conservative journalist and author Mona Charen says President Donald Trump invited the high risk of assassination and violence that dogs him today.

“Look, when you incite violence and, and normalize violence, you can't be surprised if there's blowback on you too,” Charen told a panel including MS NOW anchor Katy Tur. “I mean, that is the culture that has been created. And, you know, I think back to the 2015 2016 era where a lot of conservatives consoled themselves, choosing Trump by saying, well, we're not electing a pastor. You know, I don't approve of his personal morality, but, you know, we need a fighter and all of that sort of language. And the fact is that his character did matter.”

Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in particular, delivered a personal plea for additional security funding for the Supreme Court on Tuesday, with Barrett using a hearing before Congress to address personal threats directed against herself and her family.

Tur asked Charen to square that moment with Trump being the target of people “who have tried to kill him now multiple times.”

In the wake of new reporting showing that Iran was plotting another assassination attempt against Trump, Charen brought up incidents of Trump and his family encouraging the kind of violence that Trump now fears.

“One of the most horrific moments in recent American politics was when (former speaker) Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant, and Trump's sons made fun of him online,” said Charen. “I mean, any sense of decency, any sense of — ‘you know our hearts go out to the Pelosi family. None of that. I mean, it was the most grotesque kind of celebration of violence. And, and, and it's true that when it comes from the top, when it comes from Trump, it definitely has a more corrosive effect on the culture.”

Charen also referenced the death of a pharmaceutical company leader allegedly by Luigi Mangione.

“There was a lot of cheering also for him and people saying, ‘well, the guy had it coming,” said Charen. “That, too, is an example of how we're defining deviancy down in our society and saying that if the if the right victim is chosen, then you can applaud political violence.”

She said Trump has changed American and made it more brutal since the time of John McCain.

“Look at the contrast between the clip you played of John McCain, who you can have your disagreements with him, with the man, but he was a decent person who upheld certain standards,” Charen insisted. “He was a leader. Okay? He grabbed the microphone away from that woman when she started expressing racist ideas (About Barack Obama) and contradicted her. Now, in the Republican Party, she'd be a speaker at the RNC.”

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President Donald Trump is reportedly planning on claiming that the 2020 Georgia Senate elections were stolen and that the two Democratic incumbents, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are not legitimate lawmakers.

One prominent conservative commentator is arguing that if Trump does indeed act in this way, it will benefit Ossoff, who is up for reelection in a competitive race this November.

“Jon Ossoff is running for re-election this year in Georgia and the President is rumored to be making an in-kind contribution to Ossoff's campaign,” wrote right-wing podcaster Erick Erickson on X on Monday.

Erickson is not alone in criticizing Trump for reviving his 2020 Big Lie, which holds that he won the election even though he was proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have been defeated by then-former Vice President Joe Biden.

“Things are about to get very, very, very bad,” podcaster Chris Mowrey stated on X. Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez offered a more detailed take.

“If this is true it just shows that Trump is becoming more and more authoritarian, but the stupid kind of authoritarian who can’t even mask regime lies in a convincing way and so it’s obvious to everyone that he is terrified of his opponents (Ossof [sic] is a viable presidential candidate for Dems, one with more appeal than Vance) and also the average voter, which is why he keeps shamelessly pushing the SAVE America Act,” Gonzalez posted.

Policy consultant Adam Cochran pointed out that Trump’s attempt to dislodge Ossoff and Warnock from power misunderstands how the Senate operates.

“Doesn’t work like that,” Cochran pointed out. “First off, there was no fraud, but you seized the ballots and the paper back ups to make sure no one could question it.”

He continued, “Second, the Constitution has no way to nullify a swearing in. Only peer expulsion. Third, this sudden ‘announcement’ is when Trump is down by two senators and desperate to pass a bill. Lastly, Trump had 64 court cases to try and litigate the election, including in Georgia. No case turned up any evidence, including after an audit of these ballots.”

He completed his thought by writing, “Trump’s own lawyers and advocates then admitted to making up the conspiracy about this county, and were charged for it. Part of the court evidence included their own email records of coming up with the plot.”

In addition to falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump is employing a number of tactics to try to make sure he does not lose control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections. He has threatened to use ICE and radical groups at polling places to intimidate voters, potentially purged voters from the rolls, attempted to impose restrictions on mail-in voting and pushed for strict voter ID laws, most notably the SAVE Act.

Writing for The Washington Post in February, conservative columnist George F. Will broke down how Trump’s claims about the 2020 election have been decisively debunked.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will concluded, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”

President Donald Trump is traveling considerably less in his second term than he did in his previous one between 2017 and 2021. It was assumed the 80-year-old was slowing down or couldn't hack it with the rigorous schedule he once kept. But it appears there might be another reason, Maggie Haberman teased on Friday.

Speaking to CNN's Audie Cornish, Haberman, co-author of the new book Regime Change, explained that the administration is scared.

Reports are unfolding about the shocking revelations that the reason Trump swapped planes in Turkey to fly part of the way back to the U.S. is there were credible threats of a possible attack on Trump's plane.

"This is a president who has survived assassination attempts," Cornish noted. "Does this kind of concern loom large for him?"

Haberman said that those attempts "really radicalized" him and his team.

"The assassination attempts that he faced, in particular Butler, happened around the time that someone had been charged with being part of a murder for hire plot involving or set up by Iranian officials. Allegedly," she said. "And in his mind and in the campaign's mind at the time, it all became one thing."

It's for that reason, Haberman said, Trump and his team saw the new threats from Iran as serious and concerning. These kinds of threats are part of why Trump isn't seen out and about as much.

"You are already seeing a president who does not travel outside the White House that much. Part of it is that, you know, he would tell aides at the beginning of the of the term, 'I'm done campaigning,' but part of it is legitimate security concerns," said Haberman.

Haberman noted that another challenge she sees for Trump is that he is not surrounded by top experts and experienced professionals. For example, she added, those negotiating with Iran aren't well-schooled in nuclear weapons, much less in diplomatic negotiation. It's Trump's son-in-law and his catch-all "envoy for everything," Steve Witkoff.

The group of influencers is also kept extremely small, meaning if someone like Witkoff isn't in the room, they have no clue what is going on. One of the more significant things that happened as a result of that is that Witkoff felt he was close to a deal with Iran, but Trump decided to bomb them out of the blue. The lack of expertise meant that Trump wasn't properly prepared for what he'd face and never crafted an exit strategy.

"It became very clear that foreign policy — as someone said, and we quote them anonymously in the book, is 'whatever Trump says at any given moment,'" said Haberman.

During his first administration, Trump was rushed to the presidential bunker out of fear as a crowd grew near the White House protesting the police death of George Floyd. In his second term, a major project for Trump has been rebuilding the same bunker beneath a giant ballroom.

President Donald Trump is more and more beholden to a "dangerous addiction," according to his one-time biographer, and it is one that has both defined his entire political career and could endanger his future.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's personal and political dealings, including a series of books about the inner workings of his first administration. In the latest edition of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he touched on Trump's appearance at the latest NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, and argued that his conduct there reveals the addiction that most defines him: attention.

"He’s not about policy. He’s not about accomplishments. He’s not about ‘America first,’ he’s certainly not about cooperation, which is the nature... of NATO,” Wolff explained. “It’s just about attention... He arrives there, and it’s, ‘What do I do to claim all of the attention? Then coming back to Greenland, then coming back to dismissing everyone, dissing Europe. So essentially, how could he not but become the center of attention here?”

Wolff even suggested that Trump might have allowed his recent ceasefire deal with Iran to disintegrate in order to better steal the spotlight at the summit. His visit was marked by attacks against a parade of long-established U.S. allies, including. Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the U.K., taking aim at them for refusing to participate in his war, for allegedly not spending enough on NATO and for opposing his calls to annex Greenland.

"You have to understand that there is no meaning beyond that. It’s not about anything else," Wolff continued. "What has this 10 years of the Trump era been about? It has just been about what gets him attention."

"I mean, it is strange when you hear earnest and utterly sincere journalists trying to make sense out of what he does," Joanna Coles, Wolff's co-host, said, further suggesting that his attention-obsessed nature must stem from a lack of it in his childhood.

In response, Wolff countered: "He has always gotten too much of it, and that has created an addiction which obviously has to be... satisfied with ever more attention."

He added: "Our foreign policy is not to cooperate with our allies because... our allies are irrelevant, we are the focus, we must be the focus, and by we Trump means ‘I’ must be the focus. That then becomes... the profile of America’s place in the world... No other interests matter, no other nations matter, no other leaders matter."

Brigadier General John Teichert handed Fox News a harsh reality that President Donald Trump's new Air Force One plane from Qatar isn't equipped to handle the president's high security needs.

Returning from the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump was forced to use the old presidential plane due to a credible Iranian assassination threat revealed by Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

MS NOW reporter Carol Leonnig likewise revealed Thursday that one former national security official believes the new Air Force One isn't fully secure.

“This plane was built for aesthetics, not mission,” they said. “We know about its paint, its leather seats. But we don’t know its capabilities.”

Speaking to Fox, Teichert made it clear: "No matter what you do to retrofit a Qatari jet, it's never going to have the defensive capabilities of a tailor-made Air Force One built from scratch."

"So, it's clear to me that the Secret Service gave some pretty good advice to the president that there is a very real specific and credible threat and he needs to have the most robust and defended capability as possible, especially when leaving Turkey yesterday," he added.

"It goes back to you're never going to retrofit a plan to be as robust as if you make it. You need censors built into the plane. You need active defenses. You need hardening. And all of that really can come from a tailor-made, built-from-scratch plane," Teichert said.

He added that a new Air Force One system built from scratch will have those things, but a new Qatari "built on" won't.

Indeed, Leonnig's reporting cited national security officials who explained that it typically takes years, as well as billions of dollars, to build an aircraft like Air Force One and guarantee its safety and security. In Trump's case, the time and the money were not there.

Trump was given the plane last May and bragged in June that the U.S. “couldn’t build a plane like this.” The plane was built by the American company Boeing. The interior was designed by Alberto Pinto Interior Design. Pinto was also in Jeffrey Epstein's black book, and Epstein was known to visit his studio when in Paris.

There are currently two Boeing jets under construction to become the new Air Force One planes, but they won't be ready for another two years. So, instead of continuing to use the old Air Force One, Trump accepted the Qatari one and said he intends to keep it for his presidential library after leaving office.

Leonnig revealed Thursday afternoon that the president was embarrassed by his need to swap out the new fancy plane. The spicier Air Force One features a new glossy interior, but it lacks key things like the ability to refuel mid-air and defend itself using its own missile-defense systems.

Trump also can't do command-and-control functions that the other Air Force One could protect from. In the case of the older plane, it was built as a kind of “flying situation room." Any president could receive a secure and highly classified briefing while flying on the plane.

President Donald Trump is allegedly benefiting from a double standard in which his health issues are not scrutinized as much as those of his Democratic predecessor — at least, according to a child of that same former president.

“I’m never gonna convince Jake Tapper that my father was perfectly capable of executing his charge as president of the United States the entire time he was president of The United States,” Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, told journalist Tommy Christopher for a Substack interview for Jim Acosta in an interview published on Thursday. The younger Biden was referring to Trump’s repeated gaffes and alleged signs of dementia, which became particularly prominent during his recent trip to Turkey.

“What I don’t understand is, I think ... that it really does have these cult dynamics that are part of it,” Biden told Christopher. “Which is that when people are presented with the evidence, ... like the lunar eclipse didn’t occur and the spaceship didn’t arrive and we weren’t all teleported to Venus. Like, when that doesn’t happen with the cult leader ... they just double down. They double down because they’re so invested into the entirety of the narrative that they bought into and made it part of their identity.”

He added that Trump recently appeared to fall asleep while his cabinet stood behind him, closing his eyes and yet, as Acosta put it, being defended by his supporters as supposedly “just blinking.”

“There were moments in time where people said, ‘Oh look at Joe Biden!’ when he would sit down like that and I thought that that was unfair,” the younger Biden told Acosta. “And so what they do is they play the whole tape though. And he literally is sleeping! He’s sleeping. There’s no like a way around it. It is not once, it is not twice. It’s over and over and again now.”

The younger Biden said he suspects Trump's drowsiness has to do with his heart, noting the bruises on his hands and neck, his lengthy absences and a recent period when he had “drooping of the right side of his face.”

“It’s clearly he has a pulmonary issue,” Biden said. “... or something else. I’m not a doctor, but he’s clearly got something. And by the way, that’s okay, too but they’re never gonna tell us the reality of what’s going on because we don’t deserve it. We don’t deserve that.”

Speaking to AlterNet for this article, former Tufts University psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — who recently lead a letter to Congress expressing alarm over what he claimed were signs of Trump’s cognitive decline — agreed with the younger Biden’s analysis.

“First of all, I think Biden's performance during that one debate was pretty emblematic of a probable dementing process; unfortunately, or fortunately, that was the only real window we had onto his infirmities of old age,” Abraham told AlterNet. “That's not the case with Trump — Trump has given us a huge data set of red flags. It's hard to imagine any reasonable psychiatrist seeing those in any patient and not recognizing them for what they are. So the data set on one side is very small; the data set on the other is the largest we've ever had for any sitting president.”

Abraham added, “More data is better than less data — that's the best I can say. So — is it a double standard? Sounds like a double standard, or — I'd call it a quadruple standard.”

MAGA is getting more and more weird, says the Bulwark crew of Tim Miller, Sam Stein and Will Sommer. But MAGA’s talent for blaming others for their personal depravities remains unchanged.

MAGA social media influencer Gian Rachtelli, 54, was charged with lewd, indecent and obscene acts on the National Mall, allegedly while dressed as Uncle Sam during an acrobatic performance at President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, according to police documents.

Three separate witnesses reported seeing Rachtelli, known to his thousands of followers as “Manny,” engage in lewd acts, according to U.S. Park Police documents. But earlier this week Rachtelli said in an interview that Antifa was probably behind it.

At the time, of course, he was talking to a puppet.

“Is it just a misunderstanding, or were you set up?” asked Puppet Edgar on his YouTube show earlier this week.

“I've seen Antifa do crazier things than that. So, I’m not saying I was set up, but I would not say that maybe a phone call was made to somebody,” Rachtelli told Edgar.

“This is actually a pretty important job for [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio and [Attorney General] Todd Blanche and [FBI head] Kash Patel,” announced Miller, between laughter. “They've been very concerned about Antifa and cracking down. And to think that they might have someone on the inside [of the park police].”

“I think it goes further than that,” said Stein. “These are the performers that he was watching on stage when he was [committing lewd acts] from a distance. And I think what he's saying is they infiltrated the [stage act] and they were just too tempting.”

“This is a guy named Edgar the Puppet,” said Sommer, who makes a career of monitoring MAGA shows and intra-party battles. “It truly alarms me to learn that this guy has a big audience. I mean he has like 190,000 followers. He's like a conservative puppet.”

“Like a Newsmax Triumph the Insult Comedy Dog,” said Miller.

“You might think this kind of comes off like a Triumph routine, but he's on Manny's side,” said Sommer. “He supports him. And so, Manny says ‘I'm out of jail. I've avoided violating my release conditions by not quite getting back on the mall. And now I'm giving an exclusive interview to a puppet. I'm not a sicko.’”

“I don't know why he didn't come to the Bulwark podcast. I was available,” quipped Miller, praising his talent for laundering flawed personalities in a public forum.

Throughout the show, Rachtelli insisted on his innocence to his lilac-colored host.

“I just went past my pockets to get something out of them,” Rachtelli told Edgar, while calling witness accounts of his behavior “shoddy at best” and “total hearsay.”

“What is up with that tongue,” complained Stein, watching the video and referring to Rachtelli’s disturbing habit of punctuating statements with a flicking tongue.

“Okay, everybody. It's a weird world out there,” concluded Miller.

CNN anchor Kasie Hunt appeared staggered by her own Thursday supercut that the network assembled of President Donald Trump’s countless claims of Iranian surrender.

Hunt played the massive clip after Trump’s latest claim on Wednesday that Iran’s leaders were yet again slavering for an end to the war that Trump began — despite the regime’s apparent acceptance of more U.S. air strikes and the closing of the pivotal Strait of Hormuz.

Trump claimed Wednesday that Iranian leaders had “called a little while ago,” and they wanted “to make a deal so badly.” But this boast was nothing new. And network videographers had plenty of material to choose from to prove it.

“We went back and took a look, of course, at what … Trump himself has said over the period of days. I want to play for you what that has sounded like over the course of the last several months,” said Hunt in a tone of warning.

And then it came.

“They want to make a deal.” — Trump, March 23

“… and they want to make a deal so badly.” — Trump, March 24

“They want to make a deal so badly.” — Trump, March 25

“I do see a deal in Iran.” — Trump, March 29

“It's looking very good that we're going to make a deal.” — Trump, April 16

“This process should go very quickly.” — Trump, April 17

“We're going to end that war very quickly.” — Trump, May 19

“We're in the final throes of what will be a very, very good deal.” — Trump, June 9

“And they want to make the deal a lot more than I do.” — Trump, June 11

“We have our deal done with Iran, and it should be successful.” — Trump, June 16

“We're, uh, making an amazing deal with Iran.” — Trump, June 23

“They want to make a deal with us very badly.” — Trump, June 25

“They're dying to make a deal. They're giving us a lot.” — Trump, June 26

“They want to make a deal so badly.” — Trump, July 8

With a short laugh, Hunt then turned to National Review Online founder and conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg.

“Uh, Jonah Goldberg, on that note. I mean, what kind of deal has the U.S. gotten out of this?”

“There's no deal,” Goldberg said flatly. “Even the MOU wasn't a deal. It was a deal to talk about coming up with a deal that was going to last 60 days, that was never going to be extended.”

Trump, meanwhile is catching mounting rage from American voters, legislators and the international community over the war he started, which is driving up global and U.S. energy prices. And as gas prices again creep up due to Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and the Republican Party’s chances of surviving the November mid-terms appears increasingly dicey.

- YouTube youtu.be

A Republican lawmaker noted for his support and defense of President Donald Trump was not feeling any love from his constituents at a recent town hall, with The Daily Beast reporting that he was mercilessly heckled and booed by the "hostile" crowd as he attempted to tout Trump's agenda.

Rep. Mike Flood is a Republican who has represented Nebraska's 1st District since 2022. On Tuesday evening, he held a town hall for voters in the city of Bellevue, where he attempted to win them over on the supposed accomplishments of Trump and the GOP-led Congress. While the district swung for the president by 12 points in 2024, nearly two years later, they were not having what Flood tried to sell them.

"When asked about benefits for people with disabilities, Flood was promptly booed after mentioning the Trump administration’s signature legislation—the Big Beautiful Bill—that the president signed into law a year ago," the Daily Beast's report detailed.

“Well, under the One Big Beautiful Bill, we protected—we protected a system that, if it had gone unchecked, it would not have been long-term available for the very people that are the most vulnerable: the developmentally disabled, the persistent mentally ill, people that are of advanced age," Flood said amidst the hail of boos. “We protected Medicaid in a bipartisan, common-sense way. That was the result.”

Flood was booed further when he attempted to tout the partnership between the U.S. and Israel while discussing Trump's conflicts in the Middle East, issues that have become increasingly toxic within the GOP base. In its report, The Daily Beast noted that the congressman "has received over $48,000 from pro-Israel political action committees [like AIPAC] as of April."

"Flood also faced vocal resistance when he praised the SAVE America Act, the legislation that requires proof of citizenship for voter registration but largely does away with mail-in ballots," the report added. "At another point in the town hall, a participant asked Flood, 'When are you going to call up President Trump before he bankrupts this country?'”

Hostile town halls have become a consistent trend for Republican lawmakers during Trump's second term, with Flood himself suffering through several already. Most recently, he held a May town hall where he was ruthlessly "jeered" by voters, according to a NOTUS report, over Trump's Iran war and threats to Medicaid. This also followed on from another heated town hall from last summer, which NOTUS described as having "a contentious environment by booing, jeering and even interrupting him at times."

Flood is seeking reelection in the forthcoming 2026 midterms, and despite the heat he has gotten from constituents at these events, he remains heavily tipped to win again in his ruby-red district.

Far-right economics expert and ally of President Donald Trump Stephen Moore, was momentarily stumped when he went up against CNN host Jim Sciutto on Monday.

As Sciutto reporter, a bombshell report published Monday revealed that investors of Trump's cryptocurrency lost $3.8 billion while Trump raked in profits. It's a 98 percent drop in the value.

Moore acknowledged that losing that much value is certainly not a good thing, but that he knows "people" who have "gotten really, really rich off of crypto." Trump, in particular, made approximately $1.1 billion off of crypto ventures, according to his financial disclosure.

But Sciutto asked about the ethics and allegations of corruption as well. "But what's different about it?" Sciutto asked. "He's not just any other person. He's the president of the United States with an enormous political following. People bought it because of him, right? And if you or I started a meme coin, we wouldn't get that many people to invest and be able to walk away with $500 million in fees. Is that not taking advantage of the office?"

Moore dismissed it, saying that people "wanted to believe in these coins" and that Trump was acting "in good faith." Trump, he claimed, truly believed it would be a "good investment." For him, it was.

That's when Sciutto asked about all of the other ventures that Trump has profited from in the past year.

"Here's the thing, though. If this [were] isolated, you could say it was one bad investment. But you have the president and his sons investing in companies that have government business before them. You have a lot of questions about President Trump making trades prior to or connected to decisions he made that benefit those companies," the host said. "It's not just one bad crypto bet for for the majority of people, it's a question of profiting from the office."

Moore demanded an example, but Sciutto called his bluff. He cited the billion-dollar mining deal in Kazakhstan. The project was being pushed by Trump's administration while his sons were pressing the same project, with the family poised to profit.

It created a glaring conflict of interest as public power was being used to help along a deal that ultimately enriched the president's businesses. The timeline also looks bad, as Trump's sons got involved as it was starting to advance, making it appear that access and influence were being used to help the family profit. Ethics rules and anti-corruption laws are supposed to bar this kind of self-dealing, a TIME analysis explained.

But Moore claimed that Trump had nothing to do with his sons' businesses because he's too busy being president and their companies are a "big industry."

"It's a multibillion-dollar industry. I would separate out what the Trump industries are doing versus what President Trump is doing in the Oval Office," Moore said.

Moore asserted Trump isn't benefiting at all from his presidency.

"He's not he's not using his position to get rich off of these investments these investments, in my opinion," Moore said.

"In your opinion," Sciutto repeated.

The nearly 1,000-page financial disclosure shows that he has increased his wealth by at least $2 billion since taking office.

One of President Donald Trump’s most prominent defenders in the mainstream media, British broadcaster Piers Morgan, got into a tense exchange with an American conservative commentator on Tuesday after he was accused of sucking up to Trump.

“You have decided you know better than me what you think is important, and I would say that is not necessarily true,” Morgan told The Bulwark’s Tim Miller in a podcast that appeared on Tuesday. Morgan, who met Trump when in 2008 he appeared on the future president’s reality TV show “The Celebrity Apprentice” (Morgan ultimately won), went on to say that “a lot of the woke issues actually are things of legitimate mass concern. I'll give you an example: the ongoing furor around trans athletes in women's sports.”

When Miller asked “Who cares?” to Morgan’s concern, the broadcaster replied that “if you actually go out in the street and ask a thousand people what they think about that, (a) they would care, and (b) they think it's complete nonsense. And what my liberal friends do — the terrible mistake you make, I'm afraid, when you try to say nobody cares — is you're missing the fact that they do care. And, you know, it was people like Joe Biden — when he made it clear he thought it was fine for trans women to compete in women's sport, Americans actually went, ‘This is nonsense,’ which is why he lost.”

Miller responded by saying, “My point is not that nobody cares. My point is that, in the grand scheme of things, you're covering a news show, having so many segments about the fifth-place performer in a women's high school swim match.” To illustrate his point, Miller accused Morgan of creating “false balance” between Trump’s policies and Biden’s policies.

“On one hand, Trump got us into a stupid war,” Miller said. “On the other hand, oh my goodness, there was a lacrosse match that had a girl in it, in West Virginia.” When Morgan tried to change the subject, Miller accused him of “walking past my criticism” of how Morgan focused on “crazy liberal s——” while ignoring “crazy, random conservative s——” such as that happening in Miller’s state of Louisiana. Then the two men pivoted to discussing Trump.

Miller pointed out that in November, Morgan wrote a New York Post editorial in which he claimed Trump is “ready to be one of America's great presidents,” asking if Morgan still believes that. While qualifying his defense by saying that Trump “unfortunately has reverted to type” and compromised his legacy by breaking his promise to not start new wars, he then insisted that Trump could still be remembered as a great president. He also repeatedly insinuated throughout the interview that those who harshly criticize the president have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Miller eventually admitted he was “frustrated” with the conversation.

“My counterpoint to that is: okay, what do you want me to do, be a liar?” Miller asked Morgan. “Shine his turds? Pretend like he's something that he's not? I mean, look — the honest truth is, everybody who goes to work for Trump and then has a falling out with him and leaves sounds like me in the end. I mean, [former chief of staff] John Kelly — thought he's a fascist. [Former Secretary of Defense Jim] Mattis. [Former communicators director Anthony] Scaramucci. We go down the list, they all sound like me, because I'm saying the truth about him.”

After initially citing the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and a variety of Muslim-majority countries (including Bahrain, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco) but failed to address the Israel-Palestine conflict, Morgan replaced that policy with praising Trump for shutting down the US southern border.

“You said the thing you wanted to say, Piers,” Miller told Morgan. “The numbers are so great because at the border they came in and got turned around, and that counts as one. What Trump is doing is not only shutting down the border, but also menacing people in cities, in the interior of the country.”

Ultimately Morgan declared that Trump should not be judged until the end of his second term.

“If you had a referendum aspect to your presidential system, fine,” Morgan said. “You don't, you elect a president for four years, and I think presidents should be judged at the end of four years.”

This is not Morgan’s first flirtation with controversy over his opinionated takes on American politics. For instance in February he defended Trump’s suppression of the Epstein files, which include details about his longtime friendship with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, by saying Trump has not been proved to have done anything criminal and that “a lot of stuff in those files that are clearly fantastic and malicious.”