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“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

Those of course were the words of Republican Special Counsel Robert Mueller, May 29, 2019, in the weeks following the submission of his too-long 448-page report looking into Donald Trump’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Those should be the only words worth mentioning and remembering from the shocking findings in the Mueller Report that Donald Trump was knee-deep in Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 election that shifted the Earth’s orbit.

After all, Trump had openly asked for Putin’s help during that election — “Russia if yer listening …” — to take down the woman, Hillary Clinton, who had correctly labeled him “Putin’s puppet” on the campaign trail.

Russia was listening alright, and pulling the strings to help make all the madness and treason that has followed possible.

As we sadly know now, everything Mueller said on that spring day had long since been drowned out six week’s earlier by America’s biggest mouth, Trump, echoed by his Barney Rubble-looking toady, Attorney General Bill Barr, and a willing mainstream media that was only too happy to go along with their faulty narrative that it all was just “a hoax” and basically leave at that.

While I would have preferred that Mueller had been more direct in nailing Trump for his high crimes, he pointedly said that Barr’s coverup “did not adequately represent his findings” and that “under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited.”

Mueller was telling Congress without actually telling Congress that there was more than enough potential criminality by Trump to proceed with indictments.

But nothing happened, and it became the most galling example in American history to date of just how readily Americans and their feeble representatives will go along with anything, even if it threatens everything.

By January 6, 2021, our broken judicial system asked the world to hold its beer yet again, when it refused to punish and jail Putin’s puppet for his violent attack on America, while trying to overturn an election he lost by more than seven million votes.

This time it was a Democratic-appointed Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who cleared the stacked deck against Trump, and let him wriggle free from prosecution.

God, I curse these men …

Today, as we close in on what might be the country’s last free and fair election, the anti-American team of Trump and Putin are at it again, this time as fast friends, trying to crush America’s allies starting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy’ Ukraine, which has been fighting heroically on the frontlines defending Democracy across the world.

After telling us 53 times on the 2024 campaign trail that he could end the Russia war on Ukraine in one day if elected, to the surprise of absolutely nobody who has been paying attention, Trump has once again taken the side of Putin, and is actively threatening Ukraine’s independence.

It took a while, but we were ALWAYS going to get to this place.

Trump has never said a negative word about his Russian puppet master. In fact, he goes out of his way to keep Putin plenty appeased. When Russia went into Ukraine, Trump wasted no time defending him, and depicted Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy.”

When Trump traveled to Helsinki, Finland, armed with the knowledge Putin had most certainly attacked America’s 2016 election, he emerged from a closed-door meeting with Putin, and put on a gruesome, weak display of subserviency that made this two-ton wad of filth, and the country he was supposed to defend, seem somehow even tinier.

"President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be …”

Those words should have been the last things Trump ever said in public office. It should have been over for him right there. But once again he slithered away under cover from a morally-busted, America-hating Republican Party that has proven it believes in nothing but holding power no matter who or what gives it to them.

Republicans have proven they will pledge allegiance to any flag featuring the colors red, white and blue, especially if it’s Russian …

Trump’s latest capitulation to Russia should close the case on his treason. By lifting sanctions on the murderous Putin, disrupting crucial satellite systems used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations, and pushing for Ukraine’s surrender to Putin, Trump is no longer even bothering to hide his contempt for Democracy, and his love of Mother Russia.

Trump is actively taking the side of a country that wants to diminish us, and break us in two. A decade ago, this would have been impossible to imagine, yet here we are.

I am no longer interested in why Trump is doing this, anymore than I am interested in why he falsifies bank records, abuses women and potentially little girls, lies as he breathes, poisons our air and water, or empties taxpayers’ wallets for his gain.

I am only interested in seeing to it that this grotesque human being is jailed for his ongoing crimes against America and humanity.

It is long past time this is said as fact: Donald Trump is an enemy of the American people.

He is a serial liar, a crook, a felon, a coward, a draft-dodger and a traitor.

Trump is not guilty of treason and an assortment of other crimes because I am saying he is, my friends, he is guilty of treason and an assortment of other crimes because he is showing us he is.

Lock him up.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist, who headed newsrooms, and worked as a reporter in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.

President Donald Trump's recent decision to hand over $4 billion to Russia despite sanctions that he implemented is bringing up questions about his continued relationship with President Vladimir Putin.

In a podcast with The Bulwark's publisher, Sarah Longwell, former lawyer for Robert Mueller's special counsel team, Andrew Weissmann called Trump a "freaking moron" for continuing to support Putin over Ukraine.

"So, one: you're supporting authoritarians over democracy. A true national hero over an actual villain of the United States. For what? You've relieved that country of sanctions. They're you're giving them, you know, billions of dollars of sales, which they weren't supposed to get for a trickle of diesel that isn't going to make a difference to America, in terms of any sort of significant way. You know, would make a difference to America? End the g---amn war!" Weismann exclaimed.

Longwell agreed, saying with frustration that Putin is aiding Iran in killing Americans, but that "Trump has always been looking for a reason to work and do business with Putin."

Weissmann, who spent two years of his life researching and investigating the Trump and Russia connection. An incredulous Longwell said that Trump was "using our energy crisis as a pretense to like get in bed with Putin, which is clearly always wanted to do or been in. I mean, we've got these weird Russians paying for Don Jr.'s wedding!"

She asked whether Weissmann still wants to "get him on this."

"So, he managed to sort of politicize all of that," Weissmann said of the Muller investigation. "The thing that just to get cut through the chase is I still don't know the answer to what is the connection between the two of them, but I know that one theory, the innocent explanation is that Donald Trump just has a fascination with and emulates authoritarians."

While all of that is true, it doesn't answer the question, he added. It isn't as if there's a "Russian voter bloc in the United States."

Longwell closed by saying that she truly hopes that someday the world can get to the bottom of what was going on between Trump and Russia and whether it's an affinity or if it's simply that Putin is nice to him and pretends to like him and promote him.

"But also, this is where you have Steve Witoff and Jared [Kushner] freelancing on all of these things where they have financial interest. I don't know if you saw the story today," Longwell continued. "Again, we're really derailed here, but the a story just came out today that was tracking the ballroom donations and all of the favors that were given to those people who did that. And so, you know, I think some of this is just we live we have the most corrupt president of in American history."

From the executive branch perspective, Weissmann said that they operate exactly like Putin and Russia with the "pay-to-play" politics.

- YouTube youtu.be

Back in May, a group of 36 health professionals wrote an open letter to Congress warning that President Donald Trump is in a state of cognitive decline. Even though the medical and political communities were willing to call out President Joe Biden's apparent decline during the 2024 election, Trump has received an inexplicable and inexcusable pass for his own obvious infirmities. Individuals are willing to sound the alarm, of course, but nothing has occurred on a systematic level to alert the American people to the fact that their president is psychologically unwell.

Below is AlterNet's exclusive interview with psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham, formerly of Tufts University, who said that Trump is literally a "maniac" because he displays manic traits like posting on social media late into the night. He also broke down Trump's tendency to ramble, his grandiosity and his obsession with his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.

Proof that Trump is in decline.

ROZSA: Can you describe, as a clinician, the symptoms you've observed of Trump experiencing seeming decline?

ABRAHAM: Oh, sure. There's a bunch off the top of my head. I'm sure I can do it.

Let me start off: The real question here is, what is baseline and what is decline? Those kinds of questions, of course, are very difficult to pin down. But having observed him for a long time, and also talking to people who have also observed him professionally in the same room with him, which I've done, I can come up with a certain number — 10 or 11 — psychiatric symptoms that are, for me, red flags. And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to recognize a red flag.

I like to use the metaphor here of a man in a supermarket. He's getting in line in a supermarket, and he has a basket full of food, and he smashes it into the woman in front of him, because she has more food than he does and it's going to take a long time and he's in a rush — and what's she doing buying so much food, and get out of the way, and she's a terrible person, and I'm really in a rush and I'm far more important than she is. And he pushes it, and he really shoves her with the shopping cart. Now, if you saw that, you would say — well, you'd probably call the police, because it's really a bizarre kind of thing. But that's the whole point. It's a bizarre kind of thing. It's crazy. It's a red flag.

Now, those kinds of red flags are obvious to you because you're in the supermarket and people usually don't behave that way. And to a clinician, it's obviously a red flag. In fact, we can begin to think about various psychiatric disorders which might explain that behavior. And that's the interesting challenge here, because we really can't make a diagnosis without looking at all the facts and, of course, having the patient in some form cooperate with the examination. So we can't come away with a diagnosis, but we can come away with, "Geez, this is a symptom which is a red flag to us, and we should pursue it and we should note it and we should not forget about it."

And that's the situation that nearly all of us in the medical profession are in with respect to Donald Trump. We see red flags, we know what causes those red flags, but we don't know the specific proximate cause of the red flag. So that's the preamble.

The red flags that really jump out at me — there are a bunch. First and foremost is he falls asleep at really inopportune times. He seems to be doing it virtually every day. And yet he's up all night in a very disordered frame of mind. So how do you explain those kinds of things? Well, there are any number of explanations. We don't really have good explanations, but we do know they're red flags.

No one stays up half the night tweeting 50 or 75 or 150 times and has a normal mental status examination. If a patient comes in to me and says, "Oh, I've been up all night and I've tweeted a hundred times," I would say, "Oh, okay, that's a red flag. That's a manic behavior." There are many causes of manic behavior, and nearly all of them are treatable with proper treatment. But also manic behavior is invariably self-defeating and in many situations absolutely dangerous. So that's the first red flag: This guy is up all night, he's manic, and he's out of gas during the day and he falls asleep.

And what is the explanation for that? Well, there are a number of explanations. He could be hyped up on stimulant drugs at night. He might have a sleep disorder which prevents him from sleeping when he's pacing the halls with his laptop and says, "Oh, I can't stop thinking about Letitia James."

But actually that merges into another red flag. It's not simply that he can't sleep, or that he's awake or supercharged by some medical explanation like stimulant drugs or coffee or too much Diet Coke — I mean, any number of explanations here. But he's pathologically hyped up and manic. In fact, the noun for this is maniac. He's a maniac at night, but he's not a maniac during the day, generally. So it's a nocturnal form of mania which remains to be explained.

Let's move on, because a lot of this stuff is at night. Another red flag is his inability to control his rage. And this is pretty dangerous stuff. If he's alone at night and he's in one of these rageful states — well, he has sole access to nuclear weapons. He could, on his own, launch a nuclear attack against whatever enemy he chooses, and he has a few, but Iran comes to mind, since he's started a war with Iran. That's a very dangerous thing. In fact, that's probably the most dangerous. That probably goes at the top of my list of abnormalities of mental function which threaten literally hundreds of millions of people.

That was just number one.

ROZSA: That's number one?

ABRAHAM: That's number one. So mania, plus rage, plus access to nuclear weapons is not a healthy combination.

Other aspects that worry me, besides those worries, are that periodically he seems to be disoriented. He doesn't know where to walk. He needs to be literally led by the arm by world leaders, who have to treat him like the demented grandfather that he probably is. I mean, dementia per se has many different causes. You can say, "Oh, he has Alzheimer's disease" — probably not; at least he doesn't have a flagrant, advanced and undeniable Alzheimer's disease. If we saw his MRI, we'd say, "Oh, well, he has cortical atrophy," or he has various other radiologic evidence that he has developing dementia with organic features that actually are visible. That would be confirmatory. But we don't have that.

We also don't have the actual results of his mental state screens, the so-called MoCA examinations — the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test. It's a test which is administered in 10 minutes, and anyone can be trained to give it, and it doesn't require great expertise to give or to add up the score. It takes some skill to understand what you're looking at. Ordinarily, the MoCA is a test that we give just once — this person is coming in, how are things going? We don't do serial MoCAs, usually. If we have a need to follow someone's mental status, we don't necessarily just use a MoCA, any more than if someone came in and took their temperature and we said, "Oh, you have a fever" — we're not going to take the temperature every day. We're going to find out what the cause of the fever is.

If we're doing it on a regular basis, like once a year, well, that's a routine physical exam. If we're doing it every three months, we're looking for fever. And the same thing is true with the MoCA. If we're repeating the MoCA frequently — which we've done, I think, now four times since he's been in public office — we're obviously tracking a number. And that number could be mild cognitive impairment. It could be a significant cognitive impairment in someone who has a dementia, which is my greatest worry here.

And you can have a guy who puts a proposal together for a press conference, or reads a teleprompter and delivers a speech. But then, in the middle or at the end of his reading of the teleprompter, he has an aside or a discursive kind of discussion, and he's talking about things that just literally don't track with what he's supposed to be talking about. He's off in outer space. Or he's not in outer space, he's just in the wrong space. He's talking about Tesla, or electric vehicles, and then he's talking about electric boats, and he's talking about falling in the water, and he's talking about being attacked by sharks or maybe he'll die from electrocution — which would he prefer? And what was the topic again?

This is another red flag, and this is called tangentiality. He's tangential. He's not always tangential, but he's tangential enough to say he's tangential. He has a symptom. It's a red flag. Someone is tangential and comes into the office and exhibits that, you write it down. You don't ignore it. And you see it fits with other aspects of mental illness.

And so there he is in a press conference, and he's annoyed by someone who's questioning him, and he says, "Quiet, piggy." Now, that's really interesting. I mean, besides being offensive — we all know it's offensive — to a clinician, it's interesting, because this is someone who is in the middle of a professional kind of exchange, and he has his feelings about it, and that's fair. But he can't stop himself from the thought that pops into his head. He can't control it. In fact, he can't inhibit — the inhibitory circuits that we all walk around with, so we don't walk around telling fat people "Quiet, piggy," they're broken down.

He has another red flag here, and that red flag is disinhibition. He can't hold himself back from what he thinks is either mirthful or hurtful, or in some way it expresses a deep-seated emotion which he doesn't understand is not a socially acceptable way to engage people. It's not that he necessarily has to be like some spook from the State Department who never says anything ever until they retire. We're not talking about that. We're talking about ordinary conversation, where he loses control of an emotion that he's having.

The other day, when he was in the Oval Office — it was a home game — he was receiving the astronauts from the Artemis expedition. They were standing there, and the head of NASA was there; he was proud of his guys. And Trump was not, as far as I could tell, using a teleprompter. He was being cordial, and he was in a good mood. They're his guys. And they'd just come back from the moon, and it was a feather in everyone's cap. He was very proud. He was very pleased with what was going on. And he was doing a good job. He was being Mr. President, and he was being congratulatory, and he even was a little patronizing to one of the members of the press, when he admitted he hadn't read a certain document — which he certainly did. And I certainly knew about it, because it was a terribly important decision by the Supreme Court which had come down. And: "I don't know about it; maybe you can explain it to me." That was a little patronizing, but okay, big deal.

So he goes through the press conference and he's doing a great job. And then all of a sudden, he starts talking about the ears of the head of NASA. He says, "Oh yes, look at those ears, they're really big ears, you know?" He does have big ears, that's true. But who says such a thing? He can't keep himself from that loss of control. He can't do what other people do in ordinary circumstances.And so that's a red flag. That's disinhibition. He can't control his impulses. Pretty soon we can put it together: He's tangential, he has rage attacks, he can't control his emotions, and he has his finger on the button. These things begin to snowball in a way that's quite worrisome.

Other red flags:

ABRAHAM: One of his other red flags is that he is grandiose. Now, he's always been grandiose. And so one of the questions that I asked my friend who has been following him for some time as a journalist, a member of the White House press corps — I asked this person, who will remain anonymous: "I'm going to give you a dozen or so symptoms, and I'd like you to go through them all and tell me if any of them are the same or have gotten better or have gotten worse in the last year." And the report that I got from the person who sees him every day is that half of them have definitely gotten worse, and they're the ones that I am most interested in tracking.

One of them that has gotten particularly worse is grandiosity. He always had a grandiose side to him. He always exaggerated his sexual prowess, or talked about how intelligent he was, and he's always the smartest person in the room, and all this kind of stuff — which has very interesting psychological roots to it, which we speculate about. But regardless of the speculation — set speculation aside and see what's in front of us. And what's in front of us is the guy who dresses himself up like the Pope.

He can say, "Well, I'm just joking." I don't think so, because in another image of himself that he put on Truth Social, he was healing the sick, like Christ. And a third, which is my favorite of this whole bunch that he's put out, is Donald Trump shaking hands with God. Now, if I were to make this up, you'd say, "Well, this crazy idea — he couldn't sell this idea as a piece of fiction to my agent." That would not be a sellable concept. But it's real. He actually did this. He shook hands with God. He photographed himself shaking hands with God, and he posted it to his millions of followers.

Well, okay, what does this say? One of my colleagues, a Catholic, saw the image of him as Pope, and he was incensed by it, of course. He said, "This is blasphemous." He's not a psychiatrist, by the way. And I said to myself: blasphemy, yes, but psychopathology, yes, squared. This is more than blasphemy. This is a meaningful clinical presentation of a symptom, a red flag that we need to pay attention to. And so my friend in the press corps said to me, "The grandiosity has definitely gotten worse in the last year."

Okay, let's go back to the drawing board. Your question was, are there signs that this person is mentally deteriorating? Well, we know that the grandiosity is a pathological symptom, and now we have a report by someone who sees him every day that yes, it's gotten worse. So we tick that box in terms of progressive mental illness, and then we try to fit it in as a piece of the puzzle with other pieces of the puzzle. So he's disinhibited, he has rage, he's sometimes disoriented, so he has trouble getting around.

There are other pieces of the story. One of them is that sometimes he just doesn't make sense. It's not like he's following a tangent and going off in outer space; he's just speaking incoherently. He seems to be trying to make a point, but the points come in fragments, and you say, "Oh, this is a guy who's not able to speak logically." That's a red flag. So we put that down on the list of things, and his illogicality has been increasing as well.

So we have disinhibition, we have poor logic, we have tangential speech, we have disorientation. Now, let's talk about the 2020 election. If someone comes in and complains of a belief that they have, that they've had for a while, that doesn't change — it's fixed — and, most importantly, it's false, it's disproven by overwhelming and contradictory evidence, you have to say, at the very least, this is a fixed idea, as we say in the trade. But more likely than not, it's a delusion. And so if he truly believes that he won the 2020 election, despite overwhelming contradictory evidence, he's deluded. This may be dementia, but it can also be consistent with psychosis. So this is a big, big red flag.

Now, you could argue that, well, maybe this is an enduring political lie, the kinds of lies that most of the world's dictators and despots have told in order to build their base of power. And it's a possibility; it's consistent. But there's no evidence that he comes off the podium and says, on a hot mic, or to one of his staffers and someone else overhears, "Well, I really put one over there. I know I lost the 2020 vote." No, he doesn't say that at all.

If we take him at his word and he believes he won the election, he's deluded, and that's not a good sign. And there are many other things that he says: COVID will be gone in a week. If you just treated it with sunlight, that'll be the best treatment. There are other kinds of things which he seems to believe, but they don't necessarily rise to the occasion of anything that has the delusional power that the belief about that 2020 election does.

So his grip on reality either is stock in trade, or he's putting one over on everyone, or he's putting one over on himself, and that's the scariest possible explanation.

So what else about this guy is interesting to me? His memory is not good. He doesn't hang on to words and language the way he used to. There are people who have studied his language 40 years ago. His command of the language has become less competent over time. There was a very nice clip of speech of his, several decades old, where he could insert a dependent clause in the middle of a paragraph that he was speaking and then come back to the independent clause in a really expeditious way. He doesn't do that anymore. If he comes up with a dependent clause, he's lost. And this is not a good sign. It also is a benchmark of a deterioration in cognitive function.

Let me say that there are any number of medical explanations for the signs and symptoms of his deterioration. We don't know what they are. They could be as benign as simple aging, or they could be as serious as untreated neurosyphilis. We don't know the answer to those questions because of a lack of transparency by his caregivers. And I think that is a huge problem for the governance of the country.

Trump is intimidated by Obama.

ROZSA: When I interviewed Governor Chris Christie in 2019, he told me about Trump, "Every negotiation can't be a test of manhood. Every negotiation can't be a beat-down." Do you have a sense of why Trump treats every negotiation like a test of manhood and like a beat-down?

ABRAHAM: Well, actually, I have a slightly different take on that. I believe that much of what he's been doing as president is tearing down the legacy of Barack Obama. And I think the heart of that is because Trump is many things, but one of the things is he's a racist. And I think he has such a terrible problem with low self-esteem. He's always been the dumbest kid in the class. He's been told he's been dumb his whole life. And he's been told he's been a jerk his whole life. So what do you do when you're confronted with that kind of self-concept? Well, one very primitive way is to turn it upside down and say, "I'm not the dumbest person, because I'm the smartest. I know more about COVID than anyone. I know more about nuclear weapons than anyone. I'm a perfectly stable genius." What he's really saying is he feels the complete opposite. And we see the complete opposite, and that seems to be the problem.

But the thing with Obama — I really believe that that's the case. I think in his heart of hearts, he says, "I can't let a Black man actually do better in his job than I'm doing. And so anything that he's accomplished, I'm going to destroy one way or another." And he has been doing that, literally.

So, Republicans: what’s the plan for Tommy Tuberville?

The question may puzzle you. To use the GOP standard-bearer’s preferred metaphor, your team has what seems to be a 35-point lead with time winding down. Your quarterback can hand the ball off and manage the clock until time expires.

But that guy under center is throwing deep and getting picked off. And he’s keeping the opponents in the game.

Let’s go back to last Tuesday. Tuberville spoke with CNN, who asked him whether high gas prices — $4.09 a gallon in Alabama as of Saturday, up from $2.79 last year — hurt his constituents.

There was a simple answer to this question: Yes. Tuberville opted for a convoluted one. He said that gas prices “go up and down” and agreed with a statement that Alabamians were willing to pay higher prices at the pump because of the state’s prior support for Donald Trump.

Tuberville also took the floor on Tuesday to deliver a nearly 20-minute speech attacking transgender Americans. There was the usual nonsense of pretending that doctors providing gender-affirming care, an intensely vetted process, actually hand out hormones and surgeries like juice cups at a day care center. There were much graver threats to violate the civil rights of transgender Americans and physicians who serve them.

And then, standing next to an emoji of a pregnant man, Alabama’s senior U.S. senator delivered a discourse on furries.

“Many airline pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community,” he said. “Lord help us. It’s terrifying when you think about this. When you walk onto a commercial flight, it’s possible the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal.”

So: Empty your wallet for Trump, and our planes are full of furries. Tuberville 2026.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Doug Jones’ campaign almost instantly turned his gas price comments into a clip. Jones said little about the furry speech because he doesn’t need to. Social media is doing that.

This came after Tuberville’s weeks-long fumbling on the data center issue and his no-one-asked-for-it declaration that Social Security is a “scam.” It quickly crowded out focus on a new Tuberville ad outlining his education priorities.

“No problem,” the GOP says. “Tuberville has the money. We’ll just bury the Democrats in ads bought during college football.”

But Tuberville’s repeated stumbling could neutralize that advantage. An ad with a risky embrace of the divisive CHOOSE Act, the state’s effective voucher program, now competes with furry memes and videos mocking your candidate. At a minimum, Tuberville has made it harder to reach persuadable voters. It won’t help Republicans in tight races in the Huntsville area.

Maybe it won’t matter. Straight-ticket voting has saved many a Republican in the past, even if Tuberville seems to be running an experiment to see how far a conservative Alabamian can go without losing its protection.

But then, what’s the plan with a Gov. Tuberville?

Tuberville has ideas. At one point, he floated the abolition of the state income tax. Tuberville also says he wants to expand the CHOOSE Act. This despite the real possibility that the state’s education budget could be squeezed next year.

In Alabama’s government, the Legislature has the power. Dumping the income tax would be a disaster for public education, but it’s a decision for the Legislature, not the governor. Legislators also have the final word on the budgets. The Legislature’s two education budget chairs have tried to play down the chance that CHOOSE Act spending could increase.

But do they think they can keep Tuberville on script? If not, their lives will become rather difficult. And if so, what in Tuberville’s campaign has persuaded them of that? The man who threatened transgender people on Tuesday was on Monday awkwardly trying to downplay his earlier, vile comments about Muslims.

The senator’s ledger includes other awful statements about Black Americans, immigrants, and people in cities. Nearly all were delivered to some right-wing outlet, the only constituency he seems to care for (besides Donald Trump). Conservative media always seek a new something to rile up its audience, whatever they feared yesterday. And those who chase conservative media approval, like Tuberville, seem more interested in provocation than constancy.

This may sit well with Republican leaders if a Gov. Tuberville attacks “liberals.” It will be a lot less fun if he makes flip remarks about abolishing income taxes or expanding the CHOOSE Act, empowering people on the right edge of the Republican legislative caucus who think all budgets should be blown up. If there’s anything constant about far-right diehards, it’s their belief that they’ve been betrayed or will soon be betrayed by GOP leadership. A Gov. Tuberville could give them reasons to think that.

So, Republican leaders: Are you ready for this?

If your gubernatorial nominee doesn’t throw away the lead this fall, you may struggle to keep him in line next year. And that could upset all your plans.

In a thought-provoking guest essay published in The New York Times, veteran columnist Frank Bruni delivers a sharp, analytical critique of the public and media's persistent fixation on Donald Trump’s physical appearance.

Bruni argues that this ongoing, near-obsessive focus on cosmetics and aesthetics serves as a dangerous, counterproductive distraction from the severe institutional, legal, and democratic harm caused throughout Trump’s political career. By constantly reducing a highly consequential and deeply destructive political leader to a mere caricature—characterized by discussions of orange skin makeup, shifting hair colors, and distinct physical mannerisms—society inadvertently trivializes the profound gravity of his actions. This superficial approach ultimately lowers the bar for true political accountability, transforming serious questions of governance into a shallow cultural spectacle.

Bruni highlights how late-night television monologues, political cartoons, and viral social media commentary frequently center their primary critiques on Trump’s physical presentation rather than his policy outcomes. While these superficial jabs and aesthetic jokes offer quick entertainment and momentary emotional relief for his detractors, they construct a misleading, circus-like atmosphere around American politics. This constant focus on appearance crowds out rigorous, substance-driven journalism. Instead of deeply analyzing complex policy implications, landmark judicial appointments, international foreign relations, or the systemic erosion of foundational democratic norms, public discourse becomes saturated with shallow internet memes and playground insults. Bruni notes that this troubling dynamic plays directly into a broader, worrisome cultural shift where political entertainment increasingly supersedes civic responsibility and critical thinking.

Furthermore, the essay emphasizes that treating a prominent political figure like a cartoon villain minimizes the tangible, long-term consequences of his administration's official decisions. When the media and the public spend more collective energy debating a politician's physical signs of aging, posture, or tailoring choices than analyzing their actual legislative rollbacks, executive orders, or rhetoric, the true stakes of democratic governance are entirely lost. This aesthetic focus allows the substantive, everyday impact on citizens' lives to fade into the background.

Bruni strongly urges critics, journalists, and the electorate to move past this counterproductive fixation. He calls for a collective, disciplined refocus on the substantive realities of Trump's political record, urging a return to serious, policy-oriented critique that addresses the fundamental challenges facing the nation's democratic institutions.

Ultimately, Bruni's piece serves as an urgent warning that safeguarding democracy requires citizens to look far past the superficial spectacle, disregard the trivial aesthetic distractions, and directly confront the actual exercise of political power and its enduring institutional legacy.

President Donald Trump seemed more than pleased with the praise and attention lavished on him during the recent GOP midterm convention, but according to his one-time biographer, he seems to have no idea that he helped stage his own "political funeral" in the process.

While parties typically reserve conventions for presidential election years, at Trump's insistence, the GOP held an unprecedented midterm convention in Dallas this past week, aiming to help bolster their chances as polls continue to show a Democratic wave coming to wipe out their congressional majorities. Many observers, however, argued that the event might make things worse for Republicans, given how much of it was dominated by Trump at a time when voters hold an increasingly toxic view of his leadership.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he suggested that the convention actually served as a preview for Trump's potential successors within the Republican Party, with appearances from the likes of Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Vance, in particular, was at one point met with cheers of "JD 48," in reference to him potentially becoming the next president.

Wolff further suggested that Trump might not have been aware of the extent to which the event turned into a funeral of sorts for his time in politics.

“It suddenly gave a platform to the people who are going to be running to replace him,” Wolff explained. “And I wonder if he actually realized that. As we go past the midterms into the final two years of this presidency, the one thing that is going to most bedevil him is the idea that someone in his party would actually want to and believe they can replace him.”

Wolff also noted that "the JD machine is now gearing up” and “getting into position now" to launch his own 2028 campaign, even as polls often show him with historic unpopularity for a vice president. He argued that this dynamic going forward is not going to sit easily with Trump and reiterated his past point that Trump will not go quietly to make things easier for his successor.

“Let me repeat my position because I really think it’s the only context in which you can see this,” Wolff said. “The idea that a Republican might become president and overshadow Donald Trump would be the tragedy of his life. Therefore, it’s not going to happen.”

He added: “The Donald Trump presidency is going to continue, if not in the White House—because I don’t think he’s figured out how to pull that one off—but therefore it will continue in Mar-a-Lago. He will be the president in exile with billions of dollars at his disposal to finance this administration in exile.”

President Donald Trump's numbers are so bad that a recent report suggests that his staff are trying to shield him by feeding him positive information about Iran. Meanwhile, a new Fox News poll shows just how much of a drag Trump is on Republicans running for office.

The New Republic's Greg Sargent spoke with Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki on Friday about some of the U.S. Senate races and where they stand as the midterm election nears.

New Fox News polls show damaging numbers for Republican candidates in several states, Legacki said. One of the things that the survey also examined is where Trump stands in states where Senate candidates are struggling to keep their heads above water.

"In Maine, it’s 39 to 60. That’s 21 points underwater. In Texas, it’s 45 to 54, nine points underwater in Texas. In North Carolina, it’s 40 to 59, 19 points underwater in North Carolina. And in Iowa, it’s 42 to 55, which is 13 points underwater. Trump won three of those states, two by double digits. I don’t know what to make of numbers like this," said Sargent.

Legacki explained that Trump's broken promises are weighing heavily on the minds of voters who may have cast ballots against Democrats in 2024. Sargent wondered if it was Iran or tariffs that were impacting the numbers, but Legacki said it's everything.

"Almost every single thing he’s done has actually increased costs — whether it’s unnecessary tariffs on allies like Canada, or, you know, needlessly bombing Iran and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused some of the highest gas prices we’ve seen in decades," she said.

She noted that Iran is probably the most "glaring" issue.

Earlier this week,The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire reported that Trump is angry, "furiously" telling his staff that Iran is acting in "bad faith." So, his staff has responded by feeding Trump data that supposedly shows that if he waits things out, they're certain to surrender.

Sargent joked, "Sir, sir, absolutely, you’re doing the right thing by doing nothing!"

"So they’re basically telling him right now that doing nothing is a very smart plan, really shrewd on his part. And you can kind of see that manifesting itself in Trump constantly saying things like, 'I’ve got nothing but time.' And it’s like, behind the scenes, Republican Senate strategists must be tearing their hair out," he added.

Legacki agreed and noted that it's a key problem for leaders who surround themselves with "yes-men" unwilling to deliver hard truths. The first Trump administration was filled with advisers who were willing to quit their jobs and make a public statement if Trump went forward with some of his worst instincts.

"In the second administration, it’s all sycophants. And what that means is, like, we know he’s being given bad data," said Legacki. "We know people are using that to push their personal political agendas. And the people that are suffering most are American families, and then the families that are being bombed in Iran and elsewhere, simply because, you know, we kind of have a sucker for a president right now."

It has become a problem for Senators, she said, as Trump is dragging Republican lawmakers down with him.

One example is Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). A key argument she must make for reelection is that she's somehow been a "check" on Trump's presidency. But she hasn't been. During Trump's first term, she voted with him 90 percent of the time, Politifact reported. In Trump's second term, it has only increased. As of February, Collins was voting with Trump 96 percent of the time. As of June, that voting record dropped to 95 percent with Trump. The Portland Press Herald reported this week that the new Fox poll shows voters find this problematic.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin said on Friday that President Donald Trump's new move is taking a war directly to the U.S. Supreme Court after they already decided the issue.

This week, standing next to advisor Stephen Miller, Trump announced that two new executive orders would make a second attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled at the end of June that Trump's previous order violated the Constitution.

After spending a month attacking the high court and bashing them for the ruling, Trump is trying again. According to MS NOW host Ali Vitali, it's as if the administration is "trying to force the courts to decide on things, even if they know they're going to lose it. They want to be caught trying. They want to be caught trying to test the limitations of the office."

Former litigator and MS NOW legal correspondent Lisa Rubin agreed, saying that the Trump administration's attitude has always "been act first and ask for permission later."

The second executive order "seeks to curb what Trump called ‘birth tourism’ by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country."

While that provision will be easily challenged, she urged folks not to "sleep on some of the other things."

"One of the exceptions to birthright citizenship is that we don't confer citizenship on the children of foreign sovereigns," Rubin said. "Technically, that means like kings and queens and heads of state. What they've done through this executive order is enlarge it to any child born of a foreign government employee or a foreign governmental organization."

She explained that the U.S. doesn't give citizenship to the children of enemies of the country who might be here in an effort to occupy the U.S.

Trump "will stretch that to mean anyone born to a parent who, supposedly, is a member of a foreign terrorist organization like Tren de Aragua," Rubin said. "That is an attack on immigrants, particularly from Latino countries in South America. And I don't think that will stand either.

Brown University Prof. Corey Brettschneider said that sometimes courts will leave room to rewrite a policy to make it legal, but he doesn't think that's what the Supreme Court did in its June ruling.

"What's going on here is that they lost because they tried essentially to revoke the 14th Amendment to do something that they knew was contrary to the meaning of the Constitution," said Brettschneider. "And so they're trying to do it again. And I think actually with this administration, what really makes it different than previous administrations is that they head on with challenge, not just the courts, but the Constitution itself."

He doesn't believe that Trump's administration even believes in the American Constitution.

"They believe in something that is more aligned to a populist, soil-based idea that, you know, our nation is based in the ground or in place. But our nation is based in an idea," said Brettschneider. "And that's what the idea of everyone being equal, born in the United States. You are a citizen. That's what our Constitution says."

Donald Trump took a massive risk, according to a new breakdown from The i Paper, when he "gambled everything" in his presidency on one thing, and now, it is a bet that he continues to lose.

In a piece published Sunday, veteran Washington reporter Simon Marks wrote that, like clockwork, Trump has once again "backed down at the last minute" from his threats to carry out enormous strikes against Iran if a peace deal was not reached, this time just days after making the threats in the first place. This time around, Trump claimed, again, that a new deal is coming together, something that most observers might have a harder time believing, given how often he has made such claims.

Marks noted that Trump has seemed to revel in his ability to move markets with his pronouncements about the Iran war, but this time, he argued, his claim is "unlikely to elicit more than a collective shrug by oil traders, let alone any drop in prices for struggling Americans."

"Traders realized weeks ago that the President’s declarations are not worth the space on Truth Social that they are afforded," Marks observed.

He further noted the reports suggested that, in fact, Trump's latest "TACO" was the result of being strong-armed into diplomacy by another country, exposing just how weak he has become.

"In fact, there is no indication that any breakthrough is at hand, or that a deal could emerge 'rapidly,' as the President suggested," Marks continued. "Instead, in a statement issued in Riyadh, the government of Saudi Arabia revealed that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had strong-armed the President earlier on Saturday. In what is reported to have been an unusually candid call with Trump, the Crown Prince, known as MBS, 'stressed the need for the predominance of the language of dialogue to reduce escalation' – diplomatic-speak for 'we told the President to knock it off.'"

“Saudi Arabia’s message to Washington is becoming increasingly clear,” Middle East security expert and analyst Danny Citrinowicz wrote in a post to X, highlighted by Marks. “If the United States launches major strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states will likely bear the immediate consequences.”

Marks argued further that the decision to carry out a war against Iran has caused "only misery" for Trump, and continues to engulf his presidency and tank his approval ratings. A CNN poll recently found that just 28 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the conflict, while 21 percent approve of his handling of the ensuing gas price spikes.

"It has been 17 months since Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, accusing him of lacking the ability to win his country’s war with Russia," Marks concluded. "This weekend, Saudi Arabia’s leader delivered exactly the same message to Trump about Iran, with the added potency of it being true."

The group known as “non-voters’ are a furtive, cryptic bunch that only come out to vote on special occasions — but when they do they rock those special occasion elections down to the ground. Now, apparently, they have it in for President Donald Trump.

“The vibe has shifted back to the left,” reports data analyst G. Elliot Morris, the figure behind several polling research organizations.

Pew Research Center on July 14 released their 2026 vintage of the NPORS, revealing that a particularly large rebound in party ID among young people, “who are heading back to their pre-2024 levels of Democratic Party loyalty.”

This by itself a big story, considering party elites and strategists in Washington, DC, have been assuming young Americans are the dominant pro-Republican force that landed Trump in the White House in 2024. But Morris said the nation now looks more like it did in 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden by nearly 5 points in the national popular vote, and Democrats won 50 seats in the U.S. Senate.

But that’s not the big news Morris said. Pew’s microdata reveals non-voters, specifically, have moved back toward Democrats in a big way. Pew and others found in 2024-2025 that people who didn’t vote in that election likely would have supported Trump if they had turned out, which was a big shift since 2020 and 2016, when non-voters leaned toward Democrats.

The belief was that “low-propensity” voters had become much more conservative and open to Trumpism, especially on immigration policy. But Morris and others predicted — correctly it turns out — that the group was just moving by anti-incumbency bias. They shifted against Biden because of inflation and COVID trauma, much like the rest of the population.

But while non-voters leaned Republican by party ID by 4 points in 2024, they now lean Democratic by an incredible +12.

“The Democratic lead in party ID now rivals what it was in 2020-2021, both overall and among low-turnout voters,” said Morris, which means an unexpected wave of unhappy people are suddenly looking up from their phones, jobs and lives and looking at polling places with an eye toward revolution.

They swung hard for Trump in 2024 and surprised many strategists with a second Trump win —but they’re swinging even harder away from him this year, and this could be the final pin nailing incumbent Republicans to the ground in November.

In addition to that, Pew found that 47 percent of adults now call themselves Democrats, 43 percent Republicans, and 10 percent Independents.

Every year, the Pew Research Center conducts a large, national poll of U.S. adults to measure important partisan attitudes and population characteristics that are valuable to researchers. The National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), for example, is fielded mainly by mailed invites and nabs a commendable 30 percent response rate — making the results very reliable and less subject to partisan non-response bias.

Canadian lawyer and author Omer Aziz is warning Americans that fascism has not only arrived, but it's also been alive and well in the U.S. for some time. The real chore is in ending it before it goes too far.

In his book Shadow of the Republic, Aziz explains that it appears the pro-fascist group “is using the machinery of constitutional government in a partisan way to make it subservient to the political party and then to turn it against ordinary citizens, dissidents, free thinkers, journalists."

It's something that horror writer and anti-fascist activist Stephen King explained, "should be an alarm bell announcing that the American house is on fire."

Speaking to Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan, Aziz walked through America's long flirtation with fascism that is too often glossed over in a history that prizes American exceptionalism above reality.

“By the time the fascists are building the camps, it’s already too late and we have lost," Hasan read from the book. It prompted him to ask just how close the U.S. is.

Aziz said that currently, Trump likes to "cosplay as a fascist," using things like his "weaponization fund" and "the prosecution of political enemies" as examples. Republicans dismiss such claims as hyperbolic and symptoms of the imagined "Trump derangement syndrome" or "paranoid liberals."

But Aziz said there is "substance" to the claim.

"I think when you look at Trump's rhetoric around poisoning the blood of immigrants and some of the language he has used and his team has used, they're clearly drawing from this common wellspring of influence and inspiration. At the same time, I would say, he is an opportunist. I think he likes the idea of himself thinking of himself as a Mussolini or someone of a strongman character. But in terms of the rabid ideology, I don't think he has that."

He explained that it's important to understand that the emergence of Fascism is different from every society. Germany, for example, was very different from Italian fascists and American fascists are also different. For Trump, his fascism is "particularly American."

Hasan noted the administration declaring "antifa" a terrorist group while conservative states throw the book at peaceful protesters.

Aziz said that these kinds of arrests, even of non-violent protesters, will continue as Trump and his ilk continue to lose their political battles.

"They will use the state and politicize it to destroy and dismantle their political opponents who are exercising their free speech rights right and we're seeing this across the board: the weaponization the prosecution of political enemies," he said. "This is clearly part of the fascist playbook and we need to be clear here because there is a cultural side of this. There's a far-right influencer far-right protester side of this. The Jan. 6 folks, for example."

The more dangerous part of fascism, he said, isn't the obvious ones waving Nazi flags in the street. Aziz called the "fascists in suits" far more of a threat to American ideals, because they are the ones using that machinery of government to subvert the citizenry, just as Italy and Germany did with journalists and dissidents.

One group he talks about in the book that Hasan said he found particularly interesting is the younger spectrum of voters who are growing more attracted to fascism, Nazism and white supremacy.

Aziz said it's even starting to pop up with young men of color, whether South Asian or Latino.

"I think the reason why that's happening is because neoliberal economic policy has failed young people, in particular," he said. "Whether that's the financial crisis, whether that is the enormous amounts of greed, outsourcing of industries. And then, of course, the wars on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan."

He said that it makes it easy to drift further right.

"There's an analogy here to young men who would join ISIS, for example, 10 years ago," Aziz continued. "Again when you don't have something within your community within your body politic that supports and uplifts you, it becomes a lot more tempting."