Sinéad O’Connor Estate Orders Trump to Quit Using Her Music “Immediately”

Sinéad O’Connor has a posthumous message: Fuck Donald Trump.

On Monday, the Irish musician’s estate issued a missive to the GOP front-runner, demanding that Trump never again use her music after he featured her breakout hit, a cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” during rallies in Maryland and North Carolina over the weekend.

“Throughout her life, it is well known that Sinéad O’Connor lived by a fierce moral code defined by honesty, kindness, fairness, and decency towards her fellow human beings,” read a joint statement issued by O’Connor’s estate and her longtime label, Chrysalis Records. “It was with outrage therefore that we learned that Donald Trump has been using her iconic performance of Nothing Compares 2 U at his political rallies.”

“It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil,’” they continued.

“As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately.”

O’Connor rose to superstardom for her dynamic, imposing voice, which she wielded to attack oppressive systems like sexism, racism, and war. But the former Christian singer threw all of her commercial success away in order to draw attention to circulating rumors of rampant child abuse within the Catholic Church (which, years later, would prove to be true). During a Saturday Night Live performance in October 1992, O’Connor tore a picture of Pope John Paul II after singing a rendition of Bob Marley’s song “War.” Two weeks later, she was booed off the stage during a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, after which she retreated from public life.

O’Connor passed away on July 26 from natural causes, according to a coroner’s report. She had spent the last year and a half of her life grief-stricken after her 17-year-old son Shane committed suicide, canceling the release of her next album and her scheduled performances.

She’s not the only musician to want to keep their work far and away from the GOP front-runner. In fact, there’s a long list of artists who have peeled their rights away from Trump, including The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Donald Trump does not seem OK. The GOP front-runner was alarmingly loose-lipped during back-to-back campaign rallies in Richmond, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday, during which he admitted to hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, framed President Joe Biden as a national enemy, threw around the nuclear word, and confused the man currently in the White House for his old nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

“Shortly after we win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I know them both very well, and we will restore peace through strength. Get that war settled. It’s a bad war. And Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word. You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today,” Trump said in Virginia, drawing stunned silence from his typically uproarious crowd.

It wasn’t the first time Trump has confused the two on the campaign trail, transparently attempting to cover up the blatant memory lapses by claiming that “Obama is running the show.” But if that wasn’t enough, Trump went on to try to take credit for Veterans Choice, which was passed in 2014 under Obama.

Trump also mistook Argentina for a person, calling MAGA the “greatest movement … maybe in the history of any country, even Argentina.”

“You know, Argentina, great guy. He’s a big Trump guy. He loves Trump. I love him because he loves Trump. Anybody that loves me. I like them,” Trump said.

As Trump became increasingly flustered and overwhelmed, he couldn’t figure out how to say “Venezuela” and repeatedly short-circuited.

And while in North Carolina, Trump aligned himself with the January 6 rioters, hailing them as “hostages,” while pegging himself as “a proud political dissident” and “a public enemy of a rogue regime.”

And, despite awaiting trial in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, Trump condemned President Joe Biden as “the real threat to democracy.”

“Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” he said in Greensboro. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters, and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”

Other glitches included mistaking a poll for a legislative bill, calling the country the “United Stage” and a “nation that’s no longer respectered,” and just generally making an uncanny assortment of noises for a candidate for the most powerful office in the world: “Diiiiing, boom. This is me, [unintelligible] bing!”

Ahead of the weekend, Trump’s campaign signaled that it had no intention of reeling in the GOP front-runner’s alarming rhetoric.

“Donald Trump is Donald Trump. That’s not going to change. Our job is not to remake Donald Trump,” senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the Associated Press.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung added that Americans “deserve a president who will not sugarcoat what’s happening in the world.”

And Biden’s campaign appears ready to rely on that.

“Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—the same extreme, dangerous candidate voters rejected in 2020, and they’ll reject him again this November regardless of the team he has around him,” said Biden spokesman Kevin Munoz.

Trump has worked to distance himself from the issue of age, slamming Biden for similar verbal gaffes despite joining the 81-year-old as one of the oldest presidential candidates in U.S. history.

Over the last few months, Trump has repeatedly prided himself on “acing” a dementia test, insisted that immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border “don’t speak languages,” claimed that he would stop banks from “debanking” Americans, mixed up former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his only remaining rival in the GOP race, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and described his plan for America’s missile defense system by going, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.… Boom. OK. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom.”

He also appeared with mysterious, unexplained red sores on his hands that political commentators couldn’t help but notice looked an awful lot like syphilis.

House Oversight Chair James Comer has a new explanation for why the main witness in his rapidly crumbling impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden was indicted for lying to the FBI: It’s all a deep state conspiracy.

Comer made his latest claims about Alexander Smirnov during an interview on Newsmax, which the Kentucky representative shared on social media Sunday. Smirnov, an ex-FBI informant, claimed that Biden and his son Hunter accepted bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch. But the Justice Department has since charged Smirnov with making false statements and revealed he admitted that Russian intelligence operatives fed him the accusation. Smirnov was arrested, released on bail, and then arrested again for fear of being a flight risk.

During the Newsmax interview, host Greg Kelly said he feared that Smirnov’s life “could be in danger.”

“You’re exactly accurate,” Comer said. “This stinks to high heaven. It wasn’t an important part of our case. It was a tip that we got from Charles Grassley. We investigate every tip, but at the end of the day, the more they do to this Smirnov guy, and the more that they use it in their media narrative, the fishier it sounds to me.”

In reality, Smirnov’s claims—which the FBI repeatedly warned were never confirmed—served as the entire basis for the Republicans’ investigation into the president and his family. But since Smirnov’s indictment, Republicans have rushed to rewrite their inquiry, deleting references to him from witness request letters and even the Oversight Committee website. Comer has accused the FBI of being “suspicious” and undermining Smirnov’s supposedly rock-solid credibility.

Comer’s behavior directly contradicts a promise he made last May, toward the start of the Biden investigation. “The Committee will assess the form it has subpoenaed from the FBI,” he said at the time, referring to the FD-1023 form outlining Smirnov’s claims. Those forms are only used to document unverified tips to the FBI.

“[As] has been my practice, we will report to you only facts when they are verified and indisputable,” Comer continued. “This committee will not pursue witch hunts or string the American people along for years with false promises of evidence that is beyond circumstantial evidence.”

And yet, despite Comer saying just last week that he was “ready to try to begin to close this investigation,” he and the other committee chairs spearheading the Biden probe have continued to levy accusations against the president and even summon more witnesses to testify.

Earlier in the Newsmax interview, Comer claimed that Hunter Biden lied while testifying to the Oversight Committee, because investigators had found proof and heard witness testimony confirming that the father-son duo were involved in criminal business practices overseas.

Every single witness Republicans have called has refuted these accusations. And ironically, Comer left toward the beginning of Hunter’s testimony, so he missed most of what the embattled first son said.

A loyal former lieutenant of Donald Trump who served as a key witness in the former president’s New York fraud trial pleaded guilty to perjury on Monday morning.

Allen Weisselberg, a former top executive of the Trump Organization, was a key witness out of the 40-odd people who took the stand during the fraud trial, in which Trump was ultimately penalized more than $450 million for massively overinflating his net worth in order to broker better (and fraudulent) deals with banks and insurance companies.

Weisselberg faces five months in jail after admitting he lied to investigators from the New York attorney general’s office in Trump’s civil fraud trial. The sentencing hearing is expected to take place April 10, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a press release.

The 76-year-old bookkeeper has been a faithful ally and confidant of Trump’s, reaping under-the-table luxuries like expensive apartments and cars as rewards for helping to camouflage a sprawling tax fraud scheme.

Weisselberg’s plea agreement comes at a critical juncture in Trump’s legal journey, just weeks before Trump will stand trial on unrelated charges pertaining to hush-money payments made by another one of his fixers, attorney Michael Cohen, to cover up his affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels shy of the 2016 presidential election.

Last month, prosecutors were taking a particular interest in claims that Weisselberg had made on October 10 about Trump’s penthouse at Trump Tower, which had been overvalued on his financial statements, being inaccurately reported as three times its actual size.

But Trump’s ability to navigate his upcoming criminal trials is still unclear, given that the self-purported billionaire can’t seem to scrape together the funds to put his civil penalties behind him.

On Wednesday, a New York appeals court judge rejected Trump’s last-ditch effort to postpone paying the full amount in lieu of a $100 million bond. The judge did, however, grant some relief after Trump’s legal team argued in an 1,800-page court filing that it would be “impossible” to secure a bond covering the full amount of the multimillion-dollar ruling. The granted request will allow Trump to continue borrowing money, though the ruling is temporary until a full panel of judges deliberates on the order.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg—Trump owes an additional $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexually assaulting her and then defaming her twice in his rabid denials. He owes $400,000 to The New York Times and has racked up thousands more over gag orders he’s violated amid all these trials. And in the realm of non–court ordered debts, Trump’s former right-hand man, America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, claimed he still hasn’t been paid for the legal services he provided to the former president and is reportedly waiting on a sum of about $2 million.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Monday that Donald Trump can appear on the Colorado state primary ballot, shutting down dozens of similar efforts to ban him from the election for his role in the January 6 insurrection.

The nation’s highest court heard arguments in early February about whether Colorado could disqualify Trump from its ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The majority of the justices had seemed skeptical at the time, and apparently remained so by the time they issued their ruling.

Trump is now eligible to receive votes in Colorado’s Republican primary on Tuesday. The justices’ decision means that Maine and Illinois, which have also disqualified Trump from their presidential primary ballots, must reinstate him.

“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” the justices wrote in their ruling.

Although the ruling was unanimous, the justices were divided in their reasoning behind it. Five conservative justices determined that the Fourteenth Amendment can only be enforced through a law passed by Congress.

The three liberal justices agreed that Colorado couldn’t make such a massive decision on its own, but strongly disputed that the amendment can only be applied through legislation. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the majority for overstepping the bounds of the lawsuit at hand, and in doing so, “ruling out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”

“By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” the three justices wrote in their dissenting opinion.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not rule on the dispute on congressional enforcement, but still, the ruling notes, “All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

The Colorado state Supreme Court ruled in December that Trump had engaged in insurrection during the January 6 attack and was therefore ineligible to appear on the primary ballot. Little more than a week later, Maine’s secretary of state also barred him from the state’s ballot.

Multiple other states either are currently weighing or have decided whether Trump can appear on their ballot. The range in decisions prompted many to urge the Supreme Court to weigh in quickly, to avoid confusion ahead of the election.

Trump’s lawyers had said repeatedly they expected the Supreme Court to rule in their favor, even hinting it would be because some of the justices owed Trump some form of allegiance. Trump appointed three of the current justices.

Monday’s decision will provide a single rule for all states for the rest of the election cycle. But it will also likely shape how the Fourteenth Amendment’s language will be interpreted going forward.

This story has been updated.

Congratulations to Nikki Haley on winning her first primary. She should probably thank Donald Trump, who definitely let her win on purpose—at least, according to him.

Haley dominated on Sunday in Washington, D.C.’s Republican primary, notching about 63 percent support. She won all 19 of the city’s Republican delegates, putting an unceremonious halt to Trump’s otherwise unobstructed cruise to the GOP nomination.

Trump, who has far outstripped Haley until now, won just 33 percent support. But that’s OK, because he totally planned it that way.

“I purposely stayed away from the D.C. Vote because it is the ‘Swamp,’ with very few delegates, and no upside. Birdbrain spent all of her time, money and effort there,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Over the weekend we won Missouri, Idaho, and Michigan—BIG NUMBERS—Complete destruction of a very weak opponent.”

Trump called Haley “Birdbrain” again in another post and slammed her for saying Sunday morning that she no longer felt bound to support the former president if he is the GOP nominee, despite signing a pledge to the Republican National Committee to support whoever wins the nomination.

“Birdbrain is a loser, record low performance in virtually every State,” Trump posted. “I enjoy watching the Bird disavow her PLEDGE to the RNC and her statement that she would NEVER run against President Trump (‘A great President’). Well, she ran, she lied, and she LOST BIG!”

Trump’s campaign released a statement Sunday night branding Haley the “Queen of the Swamp” and promising Trump would drain said swamp if he is reelected—despite the fact that Trump actually left Washington “swampier” than when he first arrived.

Despite the D.C. hiccup, Trump is still by far the front-runner in the Republican primary. He has won nearly six times as many delegates as Haley, although he still needs to win another 1,215 before officially claiming the nomination.

The University of Florida nixed its entire diversity, equity, and inclusion staff on Friday, thanks to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s wingman in the GOP’s war on education, Ben Sasse.

Sasse, the former Republican senator from Nebraska turned university president, terminated 13 full-time positions and 15 administrative appointments for faculty members, a university spokesperson told Axios.

According to an administrative memo obtained by the the campus’s student paper, The Alligator, DEI staff would be fired effective immediately, with severances tantamount to 12 weeks of pay. Additionally, $5 million would be redirected from DEI programs and placed in a “faculty recruitment fund” to be administered by the university’s Office of the Provost however it deems fit.

“These colleagues are allowed and encouraged to apply, between now and Friday, April 19, for expedited consideration for different positions currently posted within the university,” the memo read.

“Florida is where DEI goes to die …” DeSantis coldly wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, shortly after the decision became public.

The employees are the latest victims of DeSantis’s all-out war on what he describes as “woke culture” on college campuses—which Sasse has been gleefully helping him lead. Last May, the conservative politician signed a bill that effectively defunded diversity programs, prohibiting state schools from spending state or federal funds on DEI initiatives.

“If you look at the way this has actually been implemented across the country, DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination,” DeSantis said during a press conference at the time. “And that has no place in our public institutions. This bill says the whole experiment with DEI is coming to an end in the state of Florida.”

Amid an ongoing spar over when Donald Trump’s classified documents case will begin, the Justice Department has clarified once and for all that he cannot continue to delay his legal trials by claiming that he has to focus on the election.

On Friday, Judge Eileen Cannon asked about the DOJ’s “60-day rule” against taking actions that might affect an upcoming election.

But the DOJ said that the “60-day rule” does not apply to Trump’s actual trials, on the basis that he was indicted before he started campaigning, and that his trials are already being litigated.

“We are in full compliance with the justice manual,” announced Jay Bratt, a senior counterintelligence supervisor at the Justice Department, during the hearing—which Trump attended in person.

To that end, Trump could be smack dab in the middle of a criminal trial during the election itself.

Over the course of Friday’s hearing, Trump’s legal team argued for an August 12 start date for the trial, even while claiming that going to trial before the presidential election would be “unfair” and tenuous because of the other cases stacked against him. They claimed that federal prosecutors’ proposed start date of July 8—which would see the trial deliberated over the course of the summer—would be “completely unworkable” and an “impossibility for the defendant,” reported NBC News.

Truly, Trump’s legal team does seem stretched a little thin. They are currently dancing between four criminal trials and contending with 91 criminal charges against the former president. Meanwhile, Trump seems to have already run out of money. On Wednesday, the self-proclaimed billionaire was forced to admit that he didn’t have the cash to pay off the $454 million disgorgement stemming from his New York civil fraud trial. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg—Trump owes an additional $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexually assaulting her and then defaming her twice in his rabid denials. He owes $400,000 to The New York Times and has racked up thousands more over gag orders he’s violated amid all these trials. And, in the realm of non-court-ordered debts, Trump’s former right-hand man, America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, claimed he still hasn’t been paid for the legal services he provided to the former president, reportedly waiting on a sum of about $2 million.

So far, Trump has stooped to crafting a sneaker campaign and a fan-funded GoFundMe to cover his bills. We’ll see how far that gets.

The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents trial appeared poised Friday to hand the former president another big victory in his strategy of delaying his legal battles as long as possible.

Trump’s trial for mishandling classified documents was initially set to begin on May 20, but Judge Aileen Cannon was expected to move the date back during a Friday hearing. Special counsel Jack Smith had urged Cannon to only postpone the trial until July, while Trump’s lawyers suggested an August start date.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, did not set a new date during the hearing, but she did express skepticism over Smith’s proposed date. “A lot of work needs to be done in the pretrial phase of this case,” she said. “To try to do 13 motions in a day or even two days seems unrealistic.”

If Cannon agrees to Trump’s proposed trial dates, she will have given the former president a massive win. Trump’s team had originally asked for the trial to start after the election, and then suggested the August 12 start date. The reason, most likely, is so that he could use an August classified documents trial to avoid facing justice in the biggest case against him: the federal election interference trial.

Trump’s whole strategy in his myriad legal struggles has been to delay them as long as possible. If he is reelected in November, then he could instruct the Department of Justice to drop the two federal cases against him, or even try to pardon himself and avoid ever facing accountability for his actions.

The Supreme Court already handed Trump another massive favor on Wednesday by agreeing to hear arguments about whether he has “presidential” immunity from prosecution. This could delay Trump’s trial over interfering in the 2020 election for months.

This is far from the first time Cannon has tipped proceedings toward Trump. She received nationwide scrutiny at the start of the investigation after she appeared favorably inclined to the former president. Trump filed a motion requesting a “special master” to review all of the material the FBI found at Mar-a-Lago before the investigation could proceed, and Cannon agreed—a victory for Team Trump.

The Justice Department appealed the decision, and the Eleventh Circuit Court ultimately ruled that neither Cannon nor Trump had had any legal right for their actions. The appeals court threw Cannon’s decision out entirely.

Donald Trump says he is “absolutely” considering plucking Texas Governor Greg Abbott out of the Lone Star state to plop him into the West Wing.

“Certainly, he would be somebody that I would very much consider,” Trump said in a joint appearance with Abbott on Fox News’s Hannity Thursday, describing the Texan as a “spectacular man.”

So far, Abbott has played a key (if informal) role in Trump’s campaign, bolstering the GOP front-runner’s fearmongering on border security by prolonging a standoff between Texas law enforcement and the federal government over a length of concertina wire along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border. That showdown radically escalated in January when 25 Republican governors threw their hat behind Abbott, warning they would send their state’s National Guard troops down to defend Texas’s cause if President Joe Biden attempted to enforce a Supreme Court ruling declaring that the state had stepped outside of its jurisdiction by preventing federal agents from doing their jobs.

On the other side of things, Trump has been urging Republican lawmakers to kill any deals on border security in an effort to artificially inflame the issue with U.S. voters and hurt Biden’s chances at reelection. And it’s worked: Immigration is now the central topic of the 2024 presidential election, with 28 percent of Americans claiming it is their top concern—8 percent more than reported in January, according to a February Gallup poll.

Abbott’s name joins a fairly long short list that Trump confirmed last week during a Fox News town hall. Those options include onetime Democratic presidential primary candidate Tulsi Gabbard, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, Florida Representative Byron Donalds, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—the last of whom has already, adamantly, announced that he is “not doing that.”