Trump’s Untethered 2 A.M. Rant Is Unlikely to Help His Gag Order Fight

Donald Trump must sense the walls closing in. At 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, the former president begged Republicans to step in and save him from his hush-money trial in a long, rambling two-post thread on Truth Social.

“This New York Cabal, run by Crooked Joe Biden’s White House, is a hit job on a Political Opponent the likes of which the USA has never seen before. For the Good of our Country, it must be stopped. The Crooked Joe Biden Witch Hunts have to be ended. REPUBLICANS IN WASHINGTON MUST TAKE ACTION!” he wrote.

Trump took aim at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as being “soft on crime,” Judge Juan Merchan for being “rigged” against him, and even the judges in his defamation case and civil fraud case, calling them “corrupt.” His complaints come just up to the threshold of acceptable commentary under his gag order, which prohibits him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Trump has complained bitterly and almost continuously about the order, even after his contempt of court hearing Tuesday for allegedly violating it.

Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts for allegedly using his former fixer Michael Cohen to cover up an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Tuesday’s proceedings did not go well for Trump, with witness David Pecker, who was publisher of the National Enquirer and CEO of its parent company in 2016, detailing how he worked with the Trump campaign to “catch and kill” negative stories about the then-presidential candidate.

If Trump is looking for Republicans to interfere in his court proceedings, there’s not much they can do besides make weird, full-throated defenses to the public. Even then, the real people Trump needs on his side are the jurors in the trial, who are understandably more worried about their own safety.

George Santos just pulled another fast one on… well, anybody who still believed in George Santos.

The disgraced former lawmaker dropped his renewed bid for Congress on Tuesday, claiming that he didn’t want his run for New York’s 1st Congressional District to be “portrayed as a reprisal” against his apparent Long Island nemesis, Representative Nick LaLota.

“Although Nick and I don’t have the same voting record and I remain critical of his abysmal record, I don’t want to split the ticket and be responsible for handing the house to Dems,” Santos wrote in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It is clear that with the rise of antisemitism in our country we cannot afford to hand the house to Dems as they have a very large issue with antisemitism in their ranks…”

But Santos’s latest FEC filing tells a different story: one in which the ousted congressman raised exactly $0 in the first quarter of his campaign.

Critics quickly picked up on the detail online, including LaLota himself, who snarkily wrote back that Santos was “taking a plea deal.”

“You wish you useless feckless RINO,” Santos barked. “Keep spreading misinformation… Show us that time sheet of yours from when you were at the BOE and Law school at the same time… We are waiting for you to refute but then again you can’t…”

The reputed hustler—who was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, being “Jew-ish,” his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things—is currently facing 23 counts related to illegally receiving unemployment benefits, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud. His next court proceeding is scheduled for August 13, with a trial expected in September.

Still, there’s always a chance that Santos might return.

“It’s only goodbye for now, I’ll be back,” he wrote on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court will hear another abortion case on Wednesday, providing the nation’s highest court with another opportunity to ban the medical procedure.

The case, United States v. Idaho, will argue whether pregnant people in the Gem State are allowed to get abortions when receiving lifesaving, critical care at hospitals, or if they and their fetus will be considered two separate people.

Idaho already has a near-total abortion ban, but the Alliance Defending Freedom, the far-right Christian legal advocacy group arguing the lawsuit on behalf of the state, is utilizing the case to advance the idea of fetal personhood. This stipulation would effectively require doctors to treat fetuses—no matter how underdeveloped—with the same medical care as the person carrying it, even if it poses a medical risk to the pregnant patient.

“Idaho’s law would make it a criminal offense for doctors to provide the emergency medical treatment that federal law requires,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in 2022.

Pro-abortion activists have argued that providing equal human rights to a fetus—especially if it’s a cluster of cells—will effectively strip pregnant people of their own rights, reported freelance journalist Susan Rinkunas. An amicus brief in the case specifies that, if the court rules for Idaho, it will “succeed in demoting pregnant women to second-class status under EMTALA,” a federal law that requires emergency rooms that run on Medicare funding to provide care to any individuals who show up.

“Only pregnant women will be forced to surrender their EMTALA rights to make healthcare decisions about their bodies, and only pregnant women will have treatment guaranteed under federal law limited to Idaho’s prohibitory terms,” the brief reads. “Pregnant women stripped of their EMTALA rights under bans like Idaho’s have already experienced devastating harms because of the denial of abortion care. They have endured severe hemorrhage, life-threatening infection, and the trauma of painful, hours-long vaginal delivery of a non-viable fetus.”

“If Idaho prevails and pregnant women’s EMTALA rights are allowed to vary State-to-State, these appalling, and completely avoidable, injuries will proliferate everywhere there are bans like Idaho’s,” it continues. “And, in lock-step, denial of emergency abortions under EMTALA will contribute to this country’s already-abysmal rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, which—like all reproductive harms—are racially disparate.”

The notion of fetal personhood has also been leveraged to restrict IVF access in states such as Alabama and limit access to forms of birth control.

After a large bill approving aid for Ukraine and Israel passed the Senate Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell stood triumphant—and directed the blame for the aid package’s holdup at former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

When asked why it took so long to pass the aid package, McConnell said, “I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin. And so, he had an enormous audience which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”

The Republican Party has been split over sending more aid to Ukraine. The far right has vehemently opposed the move, expressing sympathy for Vladimir Putin and Russia even before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Carlson was no exception, downplaying the conflict in the days before the invasion and calling it a “border dispute.” He even touted a conspiracy theory of a U.S.-led effort to supply Ukraine with chemical weapons. Carlson’s interview with Putin earlier this year was widely mocked as overly deferential to the Russian leader, even by Putin himself.

But to say Carlson was the main impediment to aiding Ukraine is misguided. It seems that McConnell is avoiding the real culprit: Donald Trump and his far-right acolytes in Congress. The former president and Putin have long enjoyed a close relationship, and Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold military aid to NATO allies, who are vulnerable to Russian actions. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported Trump’s plan for Ukraine: giving Russia control of Crimea and most of the Donbass region.

While McConnell took his time endorsing Trump’s candidacy, waiting until the former president locked up the GOP nomination in March, he is still likely afraid of provoking the Republican presidential nominee before November. Even though McConnell has always been an ardent backer of Ukraine, he knows not to poke Trump in order to stay in power.

Another conservative appeared to be sour on House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday amid what has turned out to be a major party upheaval.

Texas Representative Chip Roy said he is “beside himself” after witnessing Johnson help out another Republican colleague, Tony Gonzales, who has openly berated some caucus members as “scumbags.”

“I’m being attacked. Conservatives are being attacked,” Roy told KTSA News. “I cannot tolerate what’s happening to the people that I think are fighting for this country… the primary season matters.”

Roy’s comments come amid a growing push from members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus to penalize Gonzales after he went scorched earth on the party’s moral standards over the weekend. More caucus members have endorsed Gonzales’s primary opponent, a far-right social media influencer.

“I served 20 years in the military. It’s my absolute honor to be in Congress, but I serve with some real scumbags!” Gonzales told CNN on Sunday.

“Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime,” he continued. “Look, it didn’t surprise me that some of these folks voted against aid to Israel, but I was encouraged to see by a nearly 10-to-1 mark that Republicans supported our allies on the battlefield.”

If push came to shove, Gonzales said he didn’t believe Johnson would lose the gavel—even though the beleaguered speaker has been bleeding support in the weeks since Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to vacate in March. The fracture came after Johnson worked with Democrats and Senate Republicans to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, with the House GOP torching him for accomplishing one of the legislature’s primary annual responsibilities: funding the government.

But Johnson’s recent (successful) efforts to pass a foreign aid bill reminded others that there are adults in the room willing to push back on Greene’s intraparty drama—even if she only needs a handful of conservative defectors to actually kick Johnson out from leadership.

“For some reason, these fringe people think as if they have the high ground. They do not,” Gonzales told CNN. “I assure you, the rank and file members that normally are kind of easygoing, doing the right thing, put their head down, they vote yes or no but they’re not public about it—those days are over. The fight is here.”

“If someone pokes you in the chest, the way you take care of a bully is you bloody their nose.”

It seems Donald Trump didn’t want to leave any trace of certain conversations with a tabloid magnate just before the 2016 election.

During Trump’s hush-money trial on Tuesday, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc., revealed that Trump’s team very well knew what they were doing was shady. In fact, Pecker said, the president’s fixer and attorney in 2016, Michael Cohen, tried to steer conversations about payments off of the phone and onto an encrypted messaging app.

In conversations concerning Playboy model Karen McDougal, with whom Trump had an affair, Pecker said that Cohen sought to shift their conversations to Signal, an encrypted app with the ability to make messages disappear.

Trump faces 34 felony counts for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair before the 2016 presidential election. At the time, Pecker was using his position in a “catch-and-kill” scheme to buy off anyone, like McDougal and Daniels, with any disparaging stories about Trump, he admitted earlier in court Tuesday.

Attempting to have conversations without a record is suspect, to say the least, and seems to indicate that Trump and his people knew that their activities were suspicious, if not outright illegal. It’s another strike for Trump’s defense team, which already has to deal with the impending playback of audio evidence where Trump himself discusses making payments to McDougal with Cohen “with cash.”

Effectively, Pecker confessed he was the “eyes and ears” for the Trump campaign regarding “women selling stories,” and he promised to notify Cohen in order to have such stories “killed.”

According to Pecker, Trump directly asked him what he and his magazines could do to help Trump’s campaign. The tabloid publisher responded that he could “publish positive stories about Trump” and “negative stories about his opponents.”

Republicans have started commenting on the Columbia University protests staged in support of Gaza—and unsurprisingly, the comments have been lackluster, punitive, and completely beside the point.

Columbia University and Barnard College students have been protesting for months against the war in Gaza, including setting up an encampment on campus last week. University officials and police have responded with arrests and disciplinary action, causing the protest, which sought to persuade the institutions to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies doing business with Israel, to spread across the country.

Fox News’s Maria Baritromo called the protests “barbaric” on Tuesday, drawing a completely inaccurate comparison. “And yet, you don’t see the upset that you saw around January 6,” she said, referring to the Capitol insurrection. 

Unlike the January 6 riots, there have been no reports of buildings being stormed, or law enforcement getting attacked. And contrary to accusations that the demonstration is inherently antisemitic, the protesters held Jewish Shabbat services over the weekend followed by Muslim evening prayers. 

David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, thought that protesters should lose their student loan forgiveness. Critics were quick to point out that he was effectively saying that poorer students shouldn’t be able to peacefully protest on campuses.  

Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley demanded that the National Guard be called in to subdue the peaceful protesters. Cotton referred to the protest as “nascent pogroms.”

Such comments are not out of character for these two. Cotton has practically made a career out of calling for violence against peaceful protests, including his infamous “send in the troops” op-ed during the 2020 to Black Lives Matter protests. Hawley, meanwhile, raised his fist right before the January 6 riot—only to be seen running scared through the Capitol once the mob breached the building. 

Meanwhile, in Gaza, mass graves are being discovered, and the death toll keeps rising even as it becomes harder to count. Student protests continue to spread, not just in the U.S., but even overseas. But the discourse in the United States seems to be over offensive language and not offensive military aid, which continues to get majority votes in Congress. 

A longtime friend of Donald Trump’s admitted on the stand Tuesday that their relationship had devolved into an orchestrated scheme to influence the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.

David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc., told the court Tuesday that he and Trump had coordinated not just to publish positive coverage of his friend ahead of the 2016 election, but also to publish negative coverage of other presidential candidates. In doing so, Pecker practically admitted to the catch-and-kill media scheme that Trump has repeatedly denied.

Trump had asked “what can I do and what my magazines can do to help the campaign,” Pecker said. Pecker had responded that he could “publish positive stories about Trump” and “negative stories about his opponents.”

Stories about Hillary Clinton were already popular amongst the Enquirer’s audience, so continuing to publish those articles was a “mutual benefit,” according to Pecker. Still, Pecker knew the plan should be kept “highly, highly confidential,” describing the undocumented meeting he had with Trump and Trump’s then-fixer Michael Cohen in August 2015 as “just an agreement among friends.” Pecker would later tell the Enquirer’s former editor-in-chief, Dylan Howard, to instruct the east and west coast bureau chiefs of the publication to redirect any stories about Trump to Pecker.

“We’re gonna try to help the campaign, and to do that I want to keep this as quiet as possible,” Pecker recalled telling Howard.

That, effectively, made Pecker the “eyes and ears” for the Trump campaign regarding “women selling stories.” Pecker promised to notify Cohen in order to have such stories “killed.”

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Donald Trump claimed that a massive police presence has shut down traffic for blocks around the Manhattan courthouse where his hush-money trial is being held, preventing his supporters from showing their support and protesting on his behalf. But reality looks a little different.

NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard posted a video outside the courthouse Tuesday morning. The clip shows a pretty quiet street fully open to traffic, with only one Trump supporter there, according to Hillyard.

Either Trump has no idea what’s going outside of court, he’s deluding himself, or he’s trying to make excuses about a poor show of support. It’s not the first time, either: When the former president was initially indicted in his hush-money case in March 2023, the show of support outside of the court was abysmal, with trolls and media outnumbering supporters. When he was charged with 34 felony counts in the following month, news crews again dwarfed the MAGA faithful.

Trump clearly is hoping for January 6-level turnout at his trials, even calling for his supporters to show up in large numbers. But it seems he’s going to be repeatedly disappointed. Many Republicans, clinging to conspiracies about the Capitol riot, think that the government was behind the whole thing, and don’t want to play into a “deep state” plot.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to urge his supporters to show up—something that might not bode all that well for the presidential election in November.

An attorney for Donald Trump’s legal defense in his New York criminal trial took a serious misstep on Tuesday that resulted in a critical warning from Judge Juan Merchan.

On the second day of the trial, attorney Todd Blanche attempted to portray Trump as an individual fully aware of the limitations of the partial gag order imposed on him in the trial, which forbids him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Comments about jurors are also prohibited, as well as comments about witnesses, though comments about Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are still on the table.

Still, Trump has already managed to violate the gag order about a dozen times, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

“President Trump does in fact know what the gag order allows him to do and what it does not allow him to do,” Blanche told the court, insisting that his client had not violated the court order since Trump’s comments toward witnesses, including adult film actress Stormy Daniels and his former fixer Michael Cohen, allegedly came after they had spoken about him first.

“He’s allowed to respond to political attacks, your honor,” Blanche said, according to MSNBC’s Adam Klasfled.

But Merchan remembered the order of events, reminding Blanche that Trump’s disparaging remarks had in fact come before the others’.

“President Trump ‘Truths’ repeatedly, all day, virtually seven days a week, your honor,” Blanche replied.

The ensuing back-and-forth between Blanche and Merchan continued to a rolling boil until Blanche suddenly claimed that the violations at hand—which involve Trump “reposting an article from a news site” or a “news program”—don’t actually violate the order. Still, Blanche had no precedent or case law to support such a claim.

“I don’t have any case law,” Blanche said, instead calling it “common sense” and doubling down that Trump had been “very careful to comply” with the order.

That was, apparently, the straw that broke the camel’s back, after which Merchan dropped that the attorney had gone too far.

“Mr. Blanche, you are losing all credibility with the court,” Merchan said, according to LawFare’s Anna Bower.

“You say the posts are ambiguous, you say he didn’t know, but you’re not offering me anything to support your argument. You’re not giving me anything to hang my hat on,” Merchan continued.

“The fact that the prosecution did not come running in here as [soon] as your client posted things too close to the line is not probative of anything here,” he added before telling the court to take a break.