RFK Jr. Goes on Authoritarian Rant Over Not Qualifying for Debate

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t qualify for CNN’s upcoming presidential debate, and he is not taking it well.

The debate, which will take place on June 27, is set to be a showdown between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the presumptive nominees from each major party. Unfortunately for Kennedy, CNN said he does not qualify to join them onstage.

“Presidents Biden and Trump do not want me on the debate stage and CNN illegally agreed to their demand,” insisted Kennedy, in a statement released Thursday by his campaign. “My exclusion by Presidents Biden and Trump from the debate is undemocratic, un-American, and cowardly.”

CNN gave Kennedy’s campaign until 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, June 19, to demonstrate that the independent candidate is on enough statewide ballots to potentially earn the 270 electoral votes needed to actually win the election. Kennedy fell woefully short: His name is confirmed on the ballot in just five states, tallying up to only 42 electoral votes, according to The Washington Post.

CNN generously also counted California and Hawaii, where Kennedy is the presumptive nominee of minor parties but the states have not either confirmed him on the ballot or received ballot paperwork yet. But even including those states, that would only bring him to 100 electoral votes. The anti-vaxxer’s name was reportedly not on the ballot in some of the 13 states where he’d previously claimed to have successfully petitioned.

Meanwhile, as the presumptive nominees, both Biden and Trump should be allowed onto the ballot in every state without having to petition once they are formally nominated. The fact that this hasn’t actually happened yet seems to be what’s infuriating Kennedy.

In the statement, Kennedy’s team went on to accuse CNN of using a double standard against the widely unpopular candidate.

“CNN’s published debate criteria require that ‘a candidate’s name must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold.’ CNN is holding Kennedy to this requirement but is not requiring Presidents Biden and Trump to meet this requirement by claiming they are each the ‘presumptive nominee’ of a political party,” the statement said.

The statement also threatened legal action against CNN for supposedly violating Federal Election Commission guidelines.

“This means CNN, and every member of CNN who is participating in planning, executing, and holding this debate, is at risk of prosecution, as happened to Michael Cohen, for violating campaign finance laws. This risk is now acute given that any further violation would be knowing and willful, and thus could carry with it serious jail time,” the statement said.

The brain worm–haver has continued to delusionally insist that CNN, Biden, and Trump are locking him out of the debate because they are “afraid” he will win.

Kennedy’s statement included a quote from former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, who ran a long-shot presidential campaign in 2020 as a libertarian candidate.

“If the American people could hear what all three candidates had to say about the critical issues facing our country, the choice between these three men would be clear,” Chafee is quoted as saying in the statement. “Kennedy would become the 47th President of the United States.”

The reality that Chafee describes looks less and less likely every day.

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when U.S. health officials were trying to get the public to adopt safety measures, White House staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin tried to appeal to Donald Trump’s vanity in order to get him to wear a mask.

The co-host of ABC’s The View was catching up with Dr. Anthony Fauci Thursday, who was on the show to promote his new book, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service. Griffin mentioned what she told Trump to try to convince the then president.

“I remember telling him he looked cool in the mask,” Griffin said, drawing laughs from the studio audience.

“I remember, yeah!” Fauci replied.

“I thought he might be like, ‘OK, fine, I’ll wear it.’ It didn’t work,” Griffin said.

“Nice try, Alyssa,” Fauci said.

In an April 2020 press conference, Trump gave a conflicting message by announcing federal guidelines recommending people wear masks, but saying he was choosing not to do so. Fauci referenced that event, telling the show’s hosts that the now convicted felon and presumptive Republican presidential nominee could’ve gotten his many supporters to wear masks early in the pandemic, possibly saving more lives.

“He has millions and millions of followers who are very loyal to him. All he had to do was say, ‘The CDC is recommending masks, we know it’s going to save lives, do it,’” Fauci said. In the end, Trump’s refusal to wear a mask was due to it smearing his makeup, his aide Cassidy Hutchinson would later reveal.

Trump and his administration would go on to give a lot of mixed messages and ultimately handle the virus poorly, from Trump voicing outrageous recommendations like injecting bleach and using bright lights to fight the virus, as well as championing the unproven anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. In the end, Trump would contract Covid-19 himself.

Watch the segment here:

Loose Cannon alert: Judge Aileen Cannon was reportedly urged by senior federal judges to hand off Trump’s classified documents case when it was handed to her last year, according to sources who spoke to The New York Times. The new details add to what’s already a lengthy series of suspicious choices by Cannon that have benefited Trump.

According to The New York Times, two senior federal judges reached out to Cannon. The first unnamed judge contacted Cannon and argued she should hand the case off by citing the lack of a secure storage facility at the Fort Pierce courthouse where Cannon sits, a necessity for storing the classified documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Cannon refused, requiring the city (and taxpayers) to shell out to build a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility at the courthouse.

After Cannon’s refusal, Chief Justice Cecilia Altonaga got on the horn and told Cannon taking the case would be “bad optics,” according to The New York Times, due to Cannon’s intervention after Trump sued the government for seizing the classified documents, which Trump argued were his personal property. Cannon took over and decided the case in Trump’s favor. Prosecutors appealed her decision, and an appeals panel—including two Trump-appointed judges—overturned her order, ruling that she had no authority to intervene. Cannon rejected Altonaga’s assessment.

Since those calls, Cannon has routinely issued decisions in Trump’s favor: She’s slow-walked pretrial motions, thrown out portions of the case against Trump, and indefinitely postponed the trial. Cannon has shown a steep lack of aptitude and unusual willingness to cater to Trump’s most absurd lies.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s authoritarian deeds have resulted in a lawsuit from a former top employee in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, who says he was forced to resign for whistleblowing.

Shane Desguin, the agency’s former chief of staff, said in his filing that he was forced to retire in November after he wouldn’t carry out illegal or inappropriate orders, such as violating the state’s public records laws, arresting protesters without probable cause, and obtaining the photos and personal information of migrants who were transported to Florida without legal justification.

Desguin “was subjected to disparate treatment, different terms and conditions of employment, and held to a different standard because he reported Defendants’ malfeasance, gross misconduct and unlawful employment activities and was subject to retaliation thereafter,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed against DeSantis and the FDLE.

Not long after Desguin’s retirement, his deputy, Patricia Carpenter, was also fired. The lawsuit claims that Desguin and Carpenter faced an internal investigation that was a “thinly veiled attempt at character assassination” because of their whistleblowing.

A spokesperson for DeSantis didn’t comment on the lawsuit, according to ABC News, but cited that investigation as well as comments from the FDLE’s communications director, Gretl Plessinger: “Shane Desguin and Patricia Carpenter created workplace chaos, endangered the safety of other employees, and acted dishonestly and unprofessionally.”

The lawsuit says in late 2021, Desguin had to deal with the arrival of migrants being flown by the federal government to Florida in his position with the FDLE’s Office of Statewide Intelligence.

In his lawsuit, Desguin says that he was ordered by DeSantis, through another official, to get “photographs, biometric data, and any other pertinent information by engaging with migrants at the airport. As these requests escalated, (Desguin) objected, and emphasized, on multiple occasions … FDLE could not legally conduct name checks, capture photographs, or compile intelligence files without a criminal predicate or reasonable suspicion, as those actions would be unlawful.”

Later, when Florida officials suggested that migrants should be transported by bus out of the state (which was later attempted), Desguin said he told his superiors that this could constitute “false imprisonment or kidnapping,” the lawsuit said.

Once, in September 2023, Desguin said he was told by a DeSantis aide to arrest neo-Nazi demonstrators at an Orlando event to benefit the governor politically. He said that he couldn’t arrest protesters simply for their views, to which the aide told him, “I don’t think you understand. If you look hard enough, you can find a way. The governor wants someone arrested today. He will stand by you in any arrest.”

DeSantis has recently been experiencing long-overdue pushback for his hard-line actions, whether it’s having his signature anti-trans law being struck down in court, a failed attempt to invoke executive privilege, or having to back away from his infamous book bans. His culture-war laws have cost Florida millions of dollars and made him unpopular in the state, and unsurprisingly, he’s now working with the more popular, if not more authoritarian, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene went ballistic Thursday over a new poll from Fox News that saw President Joe Biden take the lead from Donald Trump, even if by only a couple points.

Clearly confusing the poll’s agreeableness with its accuracy, the Georgia Republican found herself in lock-goose-step with the meme-loving fascist Charlie Kirk, who also took issue with the results.

“Okay, I’ve been studying this new FOX NEWS poll, and I have concluded it’s a complete outlier,” Kirk wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “They have Joe Biden winning rural voters 50-48% over Trump. There is no way that’s possible. Zero.”

Kirk recently announced that his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, would be partnering with the Trump campaign, and invited Trump to speak at its convention in Milwaukee last weekend.

Kirk didn’t provide any evidence for this claim, but Greene, who is no stranger to pushing conspiracy theories, reposted his so-called analysis in total agreement.

“100% correct!! This Fox News poll is WRONG!” she wrote. “My district is in rural northwest Georgia and it is SOLIDLY supporting Trump! Same with most of rural America! Smart people!”

Greene’s factless freak-out comes just hours after a tantrum from Trump himself, who went off about the poll on Truth Social, claiming that Fox News is regularly unreliable, even though the outlet pretty consistently backs the former president in its coverage.

Losing it over one poll is certainly not normal but goes to show the fealty Trump imagines conservative news networks should have for him. And wherever Trump goes, Greene is always sure to follow.

The U.S. Supreme Court just shot down a case that conservative lawyers hoped would kill any future proposals of a wealth tax. 

The court ruled Thursday on Moore v. United States, a case that challenged an obscure section of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed into law by former President Donald Trump. 

The law massively overhauled the federal tax code, but this particular case was about a one-time tax called the Mandatory Repatriation Tax, or MRT, which targeted people who owned more than 10 percent of a foreign company. The MRT made a lot of rich people mad because companies will often avoid actually paying out dividends to their shareholders, in an attempt to shield them from being taxed.

Before the court, the plaintiffs, Charles and Kathleen Moore, were portrayed as some of the few investors unfairly affected by the one-time tax. As investors in the Indian farm equipment manufacturer KisanKraft, the couple paid up a $15,000 tax and then promptly sued to get their money back, arguing that the tax violated the Sixteenth Amendment, which forbids Congress from taxing “unrealized income” (income that has not passed directly into a taxpayer’s hands).

In reality, their lawyers completely misrepresented the extent of the couple’s financial involvement in KisanKraft, in a blatant attempt to devise a case that, if things went their way, could prevent a similar tax from being levied against the wealthy in the future. It wouldn’t be the first time a case heard before the Supreme Court was crafted on lies. 

Either way, the justices didn’t buy it, and overwhelmingly rejected the bid 7–2. 

“The precise and narrow question that the Court addresses today is whether Congress may attribute an entity’s realized and undistributed income to the entity’s shareholders or partners, and then tax the shareholders or partners on their portions of that income,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority ruling. “This Court’s longstanding precedents, reflected in and reinforced by Congress’s longstanding practice, establish that the answer is yes.”

Kavanaugh stated that “the MRT does tax realized income—namely, income realized by the corporation, KisanKraft. The MRT attributes the income of the corporation to the shareholders, and then taxes the shareholders (including the Moores) on their share of that undistributed corporate income.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented, which shouldn’t be too surprising given Thomas’s questionable financial ethics and close ties to rich and powerful conservatives. 

Kavanaugh insisted that the ruling did not resolve questions surrounding a tax based on holdings, wealth, or net worth. “Those are potential issues for another day, and we do not address or resolve any of those issues here,” he wrote. 

With this ruling, the court has left a door open for congressional Democrats to install a tax on the nation’s highest earners, a plan that stands in stark contrast to Trump’s efforts to grant tax cuts to the rich and install trickle-down economic policy. Ironically (and shortsightedly), his platform has sent billionaires flocking to support the former president, a decision that may ultimately doom them.  

After a Fox News poll showed Joe Biden polling better than him, Donald Trump lost it on Truth Social Thursday morning.

“FoxNews Polls are always the worst for me. They have been from the beginning, and always will be!” Trump posted.

The poll shows Biden ahead of Trump by two points, 50–48 percent. It’s a change from last month’s Fox News poll, which had Trump ahead by one point.

The convicted felon and presumptive Republican presidential nominee has not been happy with Fox News in the last few days. On Wednesday, Trump bashed the network and called for Paul Ryan to be removed from its board of directors.

“Nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I am one of them, with the weak and ineffective RINO, Paul Ryan, on its Board of Directors,” Trump posted on Truth Social, clearly still smarting over the former House speaker calling him “unfit for office” on the network last week. 

Trump doesn’t seem to be able to handle any criticism from the right-wing outlet, and it’s puzzling because it’s so rare. The network has been caught airing poorly edited interviews to make him look better, helped push his lie about an FBI assassination plot, and regularly covers up stories that make him look bad. That doesn’t even include its long history of Republican partisanship in favor of Trump, particularly in this coming election.  

Maybe Trump was actually rattled by the poll. It’s not the only recent one with bad news from him: A Politico poll came out earlier this week showing that his felony conviction actually matters to Americans and makes it less likely that they would vote for him. If that is the case, bashing the network that has tirelessly been working to get him back in office won’t help him.

An expert political commentator provided a rare window into what Donald Trump’s debate strategy might be, and it looks like it’s going to get nasty.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night to discuss her predictions for Trump’s talking points during the network’s upcoming presidential debate next week.

Haberman noted that Trump has been visited by a “rotating cast of characters,” including Senators Bill Hagerty and Marco Rubio, in an effort to prepare him for the big day.

“It is interesting that he’s, you know, having all these people come and talk policy, because policy is obviously not something that’s front and center when you think of Donald Trump, or even in his long rambling rallies,” said Cooper.

During Trump’s rallies, the former president usually breathlessly rattles off lies at a breakneck pace. He very rarely puts forward any actual ideas, except to seal the southern border and, recently, to eliminate taxes on tips. But two bad ideas do not a policy platform make.

Haberman explained that Trump “has a series of agenda items that he can point to from when he was president, and that’s what they’re trying to focus his mind on.”

“A lot of what he has talked about over the last two years has been grievances, his court cases. I think he has been so singular and was during the Manhattan trial so singularly focused on what was taking place there that they’re trying to get his mind back to what he can talk about, about what he did,” she continued.

Haberman said that while Trump may have some policy points he will be able to talk about, he has several obvious obstacles as well, including answering questions about his role in the January 6 insurrection, presidential pardons, and his numerous threats of retribution against his enemies.

“And I anticipate President Biden will reference his criminal conviction,” she said. “Now, I’m quite confident, based on my reporting, that Donald Trump will then point to Hunter Biden’s criminal conviction. And this could be an uglier debate than we have seen in a very long time.”

Should Biden bring up the presumptive Republican nominee’s guilty verdict, he can expect to have his son’s new criminal record thrown back in his face.

When Donald Trump traveled to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, he remarked to then-Governor Ricardo Rosselló that the United States “won’t be second” in using nuclear weapons.

The startling admission was revealed in Rosselló’s upcoming book, The Reformer’s Dilemma, due to be released on Tuesday. The Hill received an excerpt from the book, that described how Rosselló and Trump were in a helicopter surveying damage from the hurricane.

“‘Nature has a way of coming back,’ said the president. ‘Well, it does until it does not. Who knows with nuclear warfare what will happen …,’” Rosselló wrote in the book.

“And then, he said the one thing that made me more concerned than anything else in the entire visit. ‘But I tell you what …’ He paused for effect. ‘If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.’ This statement floored me. I could not believe what I was hearing. It was surreal. Was he really talking about total annihilation as we flew over the ravaged sights of the island?” Rosselló wrote.

Rosselló also discussed the infamous paper towel incident, where Trump threw paper towels to victims of the hurricane like he was shooting hoops.

“The image plastered in history was one that demonstrates disdain and repulsion for the people,” he wrote. “Was it dumb and incredibly thoughtless? Yes. The president should have known better. But that does not detract from the true story: The media narrative got carried away, which is happening more often than not in our political culture.”

The nuclear war story is not surprising, as Trump has said a lot of other worrying things about nuclear weapons. During his 2016 campaign, he reportedly asked one of his foreign policy advisers, “Why have them if we can’t use them?” In December 2016, he said, “Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” In the summer of 2017, he also told military leaders he wanted to increase the nuclear stockpile tenfold, back to the peak levels of the Cold War. He even discussed using nukes against North Korea in 2017. And who can forget his idea to nuke hurricanes to stop them from hitting the United States?

Trump has also shared nuclear secrets with random people, including an Australian billionaire visiting his Mar-a-Lago club in April 2021, and bragged to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward about “a weapon system that nobody’s ever had in this country before.”

“We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before,” Trump said to Woodward.

With Trump showing signs of cognitive decline, a return to the White House is liable to result in more disturbing ideas about nukes at best, and, at worst, him disastrously even carrying out a nuclear threat.

Trump has apparently chosen to “Streisand effect” his cognitive lapses into the public eye by mocking Biden while getting tripped up by his own pesky deteriorating brain. Over the weekend, Trump challenged Biden to take a cognitive test and promptly forgot the name of the doctor who administered his in 2020. On Tuesday, Trump mocked Biden, claiming he wandered off during a G7 Summit meeting, referring to a doctored video as a “clean fake,” perhaps meaning to say “cheap fake,” which isn’t the correct term to begin with.

Trump’s cognitive decline has been notable for years, as he frequently rambles incoherently in a word-association whirlwind of nonsense about sharks, slurring his words, freezing—even forgetting his own son’s name.

A new supercut from MeidasTouch delves further into Trump’s gabbing gaffes where he confuses Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and calls Republican representative Matt Gaetz “Rick Gates.” The video is three minutes long but manages to touch just the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s growing cognitive issues. It caps off with a beauty of a kicker, leaving all of us to stare into the void wondering how this man will once again be appearing on our ballots in November. Watch the supercut here: