federal sequester

Former Army major Harrison Mann says President Donald Trump tosses off lies and untruths, but his latest this week isn’t doing anything to help the party catching splash damage from his Iran conflagration.

Trump claimed this week that his self-declared war on Iran is officially over, but Iran gets its own say and is maintaining its block on global oil tankers filing through the narrow Strait of Hormuz. This is walloping U.S. and global oil and fertilizer prices and delivering considerable damage to Trump and his party.

“Frustrated Republicans like Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) have seized on the (1973 War Powers Resolution) 60-day deadline in the hope of prodding the administration to wrap up a war that Trump increasingly appears emotionally and intellectually incapable of ending,” said Mann, who resigned in protest of his office’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza under the Biden administration. “Other Republicans have also pointed to a provision of the WPR that allows the president to extend a war for 30 days, to claim that Trump still has a month of slack, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested on Thursday that the current ceasefire means a pause in the 60-day countdown.”

But then Collins, whose seat is in jeopardy in a tough year, “fired a warning shot on Thursday” when she joined Democrats in a vote attempting to end the war, the first Republican to do so other than Senator Rand Paul.

“Congressional Republicans and the White House know the war is unpopular and that they’re going to take the blame for cost-of-living-exploding Iranflation if they don’t end the war ASAP – though it’s possible ASAP may not be fast enough to repair the US economy by the time of the midterms,” said Mann.

The Daily Beast reports President Donald Trump bragged about his ability to correctly identify common animals while touting his mental prowess on Friday, and he even suggested his fans could not pass such a test.

Trump, who is now 79, said at a rally in Central Florida that he is proud that he managed to ‘ace’ three cognitive tests identifying animals like giraffes, bears and sharks.

“You know I’m the only president to take a cognitive test, because I don’t think Obama could pass it. Didn’t he get into Harvard with a C-Average? I don’t think he could pass it. Biden? Give me a break,” Trump told the crowd at The Villages Charter School in Sumterville.

But then Trump told his crowd of supporters that many of them had no hope to pass a test designed to identify mental deterioration.

“The first question is very easy. I lion, a giraffe a bear and a shark. They say which one is the bear. Everybody says it’s a very standard test but it gets pretty tough around those last 10 questions. Not too many people – even in this very room … But I’m in a room of brilliant people but a lot of you wouldn’t have been able to answer those ten questions.”

Observers claim Trump is showing signs of mental deterioration, hence the cognitive tests the president has had to endure.

Trump's recent handshaking gaffe during the recent visit from U.K. royals was interpreted by some as an example of rude, self-absorbed behavior — but one medical expert opined that the movement looked more like a warning sign for his dementia.

Former U.S. solicitor general and conservative attorney Paul Clement says the Trump administration’s lawsuit against an entire federal court in Maryland must die, and die quickly, before the spirit of the infection spreads to other courts and dismantles the U.S. justice system.

Last June, President Donald Trump’s politicized Department of Justice targeted the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in a lawsuit after the chief U.S. district judge for Maryland granted automatic stays against the government in response to a flood of petitions for writs of habeas corpus, reports Law & Crime.

The court granted the stays automatically as a matter of judicial economy because of the flood of immigrant habeas petitions, Law & Crime reports. But Trump and his helpers were furious, and launched a first-of-its-kind suit to undermine the court.

Judges on the court hired Clement to argue their case, and Clement did not hold back in the withering response brief he filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

In Clement’s view, Trump’s attack is a devastating power grab by the executive designed to pulls courts to pieces.

“If this case were to go forward, the next step would be discovery, with Article III judges and principal Executive Branch officers ‘prob[ing]’ each others' ‘mental processes,’ producing documents, and litigating privilege disputes of epic proportions,” said Clement. “Then comes final judgment and the potential for a permanent injunction, the effect of which could be to place the United States District Court for the District of Maryland in indefinite judicial receivership of an out-of-district colleague. And the virus would only spread.”

Clement said if Trump’s “misguided lawsuit were allowed to proceed, tensions between the branches would only escalate,” with Executive depositions of Judicial officers and cross-examinations in open court exploring Judicial motivations and Executive necessities.”

The attack Trump lobbed in Maryland would certainly not be the last, said Clement: “The next one could be against this Court (or the Supreme Court) and cause greater disruption still.”

That being the case, Clement says Trump would have managed to “permanently elevate” himself over his coordinate branches, with the loser being “not just or even principally the Judiciary, but the Constitution and the People it protects."

After almost 30 years of broadcasts and MAGA-style conspiracy theories, MS NOW reports the lights are off at Infowars on Friday. And the new company owner couldn’t be more pleased to see founder Alex Jones bump the door on the way out.

“Good riddance to the world’s worst rubbish,” The Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, wrote in a text to MS NOW. “The second this man is disallowed from abusing these courts, from paying out the $1.4 billion he owes to these families, we are ready to take over with something that will make you forget about what was ever there before.”

MS NOW reports the legal dismantling of one of President Donald Trump’s most reliable propaganda networks — at least until recently — is far from over, but it began with a group of defamation lawsuits filed in Connecticut and Texas by family members of Sandy Hook victims, who argued Jones had damaged them with years of claims that the school shooting was a hoax.

With Jones’ conspiracy claims plastered across the internet, there was no place to deny it, so the judge slapped him with a historic billion-dollar judgement. MS NOW reports Jones has “made good on his promise not to pay the families,” having filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and in 2024. But a judge ordered the liquidation of his assets, which opened the door to comedy site The Onion gathering the pieces under ownership.

“The Onion, helmed by Collins, a former NBC News reporter on the disinformation beat, came forward with a bid, supported by many of the Sandy Hook families,” reports MS NOW. “The Onion initially won, but a judge granted Jones’ request to block the sale, arguing that another offer by a company that happened to operate Jones’ online supplements store had been higher. But in April, there seemed to be a workaround — Jones’ estate had run out of money and instead of buying it in an auction, The Onion could just pay rent in a licensing deal. On Wednesday, a Texas appeals court stopped the transfer again, temporarily blocking the asset handover.”

But unable to afford rent, Jones closed up shop.

“The hell we’ve been through has only made us stronger,” Jones told his staff during his last appearance on Thursday.

But Collins has his own plan for Jones’ “hell.”

“We have a deal with both the Sandy Hook families and the court-appointed receiver, and we look forward to taking over this hellhole imminently,” Collins told MS NOW.

Former Republican speechwriter Tim Miller, MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace, and civil rights activist Al Sharpton did not hide their confusion after U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) tried to claim the economy was “firing on all cylinders” and feeling great.

“The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking. It is good news. You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting,” Scott told Fox Business Thursday. “Gas prices continue to come down, which means that your groceries will come down a little bit as well. We've got a lot of good signs in the economy.”

It was a response that Wallace called “detached from reality” with gas prices spiraling up $1 just in the last week.

Sharpton appeared stunned into silence, while Miller kept demanding the date of Scott’s interview.

“When was that crap from, Nicole? When was that clip from?” sputtered Miller.

“That's from yesterday,” Wallace answered.

“Yesterday?”

“If it's enough for Republicans, for Tim Scott to lie to their faces, then I don't know what to tell them. But the problem politically for Republicans is that over and over and over again … Republicans know they've been suckered,” said Wallace. “Trump's voters know they've been lied to. The jig is up and there is finally, after nine years, a cumulative impact of lying to your base about releasing the Epstein files, lying to your base about the client list Pam Bondi talked about on Fox News, lying to your base about not getting America into forever wars in the Middle East, and lying to your base about the price of things, when the gas prices are literally in glowing lights on every corner.”

Miller agreed.

“It's one thing to be lied to about the election being stolen, right? Because the, the voters, the MAGA voters … lives [weren’t] really affected by it. This is different when people are paying,” said Miller, a podcaster at The Bulwark. “The upper Midwest got particularly hit particularly hard. I think in Indiana, the gas prices increased a buck just over the last week. If you're a MAGA voter in Indiana and you're turning on Fox Business … and Tim Scott is on there and he's saying ‘gas prices are coming down,’ that is a lot. That line doesn't work because you're like, ‘no, I just was there, I just paid for it.’”

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump is on course to make things "even uglier" for the country, according to his one-time biographer, as he begins to once again absorb just how much the walls are closing in on him.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for books that used insider sources to chronicle the chaos inside the White House during Trump's first term. During the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he revealed that the president is feeling good about things this week, coming off the recent visit from the U.K. royals, but also noted that those good vibes are doomed to sour.

“I think he is probably feeling good about the King’s visit,” Wolff said. “I wonder if he knows how badly things are going for him, and I think that ... he is beginning to get an inkling of that. So then the question is: how does he respond? What does... he do?”

He continued: “We know he doesn’t course correct, so he doubles down,” Wolff added. “So, I think that things are about to get—if possible—even uglier.”

Wolff's comments come on the heels of reports that Trump's approval rating has hit historic lows, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll from Tuesday finding his rating at a dismal 34 percent. This represented a two-point fall from where the rating was earlier in April, with the ongoing war with Iran growing ever more unpopular and driving up the price of gasoline to thoroughly uncomfortable levels. As prices soar, he has also dug in on his massively unpopular vanity ballroom project, demanding that Congress allocate $400 million for it as more and more voters struggle to afford groceries and doctors' appointments.

During the same episode, Wolff noted that it is still looking very likely that FBI director Kash Patel will be fired soon, despite the temporary distraction of the WHCD shooting, as the heat is on for him to fire people while they can still be easily replaced.

"There's enormous pressure now within the White House and coming from the Congress to fire as many people now as possible because of the fear that the Senate might actually flip to the Democrats, which would mean that it would be very, very hard to get Cabinet-level positions confirmed," he explained.