Trump Plans to Upstage Republican Debate With Tucker Carlson

Donald Trump has officially decided he will not attend the Republican presidential debate. Instead, he’ll do an interview with Tucker Carlson, who has privately said he hates Trump “passionately.”

Trump made the decision within the last 24 hours, The New York Times reported Friday, citing anonymous sources briefed on his plan. A date has not been set for the interview yet, but if he goes through with it, then all of the buzz and attention is expected to be on him instead of his opponents.

The former president has been toying for months with passing on the debate. His decision-making process involved talking to aides and asking crowds at rallies whether he should participate or not. Trump’s logic is that he is the frontrunner, so there’s no need for him to debate. (Trump should, of course, have to participate in the debate and explain his policy ideas to voters.) He also said he won’t sign the Republican loyalty pledge required to participate.

“Why would I Debate? I’M YOUR MAN,” he wrote on Truth Social Thursday night.

Agreeing to an interview with Carlson is an extra poke in the eye for Fox News, which is broadcasting the debate. Trump has called Fox a “hostile network” and criticized his former favorite network for not covering his campaign events.

Carlson was the network’s star anchor, but he was unceremoniously fired earlier this year. He has since begun streaming a terrible show on Twitter, while Fox’s viewer numbers tanked. They have since bounced back somewhat, but nowhere close to the ratings that Carlson drew.

Fox never revealed why it fired Carlson, but it was likely due to private messages Carlson sent that were revealed during the network’s lawsuit with Dominion Voting.

Just two days before the January 6 attack, Carlson texted someone about Trump’s time in office. “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” he said. “But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” Carlson texted, adding, “I hate him passionately.”

A judge on Friday rejected Donald Trump’s fourth attempt to delay E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against him, slamming the former president’s arguments as “frivolous” and “without merit.”

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her about $5 million in damages. She has a second defamation lawsuit against him that is set to go to trial in January.

Trump has repeatedly tried to halt the second defamation suit. In December, he first began to argue that he has total presidential immunity against any lawsuits. The presiding judge rejected Trump’s three previous attempts to make this argument, and Friday was no different.

“Mr. Trump’s motion for a stay pending appeal…is denied. This Court certifies that the appeal itself is frivolous,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in the ruling.

Kaplan pointed out that Trump simply recycled arguments, sometimes verbatim, from his three previous unsuccessful appeals. Trump insists that the lawsuit should be delayed because he is likely to successfully appeal for presidential immunity and that he would be subjected to “irreparable harm” without a stay.

“Mr. Trump has not provided a single reason for the Court to find that there is any likelihood that he will succeed on appeal,” Kaplan said.

The judge also noted that Trump’s argument of irreparable harm is “entirely…without merit in the unusual circumstances of this case.” Trump waited three years before bringing up his presidential immunity defense, and then another seven months before he actually moved to use that defense. His actions prove that Trump is just fine continuing to litigate the case, Kaplan said, and he only began to argue about immunity when it became clear he would have to stand trial.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her first case was the first to make it to a courtroom.

Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall. She amended her second lawsuit, which is still pending, to include those comments.

Trump’s case for presidential immunity also recently lost a major argument in his favor: The Justice Department no longer considers him immune.

The lawyer who came up with the idea of using fake electors to overthrow the 2020 election was at the Capitol on January 6, a revelation that experts say could add fuel to the federal indictment against Donald Trump.

Kenneth Chesebro, the original architect of the fake elector scheme, attended the rally on January 6 that eventually turned into the insurrection, CNN reported Friday. It is unclear if he entered the Capitol, but video footage shows Chesebro following conspiracy theorist and “Infowars” host Alex Jones into sections of the restricted area around the building.

Chesebro has been identified as one of the co-conspirators listed in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment against Trump for trying to overthrow the 2020 election. He is also named as a co-defendant in the fourth indictment against Trump, on efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results.

Chesebro is the only unindicted co-conspirator in the federal case and the only member of Trump’s legal team now known to have been at the Capitol on January 6.

“Even if Chesebro is simply a diehard Infowars fan, I think that would further illustrate how thin the line was between the serious, credentialed people who sought to undermine election results and the extremist figures who sought to unleash havoc was in that period, to the extent it meaningfully existed at all,” Jared Holt, an expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which investigates extremism, hate and disinformation, told CNN.

Chesebro first gained national attention when it was revealed he had come up with the plan to use fake electors to swing the election for Trump. As it turns out, he never actually thought that plan would succeed. Chesebro acknowledged in an internal memo that he was suggesting a “bold, controversial strategy” that the Supreme Court would “likely” ultimately reject.

The point of Chesebro’s plan was not to actually pass legal and judicial scrutiny. Instead, Chesebro’s goals were to increase the spotlight on the baseless claims of voter fraud and to give Trump’s campaign more time to win its multiple lawsuits challenging the vote results. (Judges threw out every single one of those lawsuits because they had no basis.)

The new discovery that Chesebro was at the Capitol on January 6 could add another weapon to Smith’s arsenal. Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel, suggested that prosecutors could threaten to charge Chesebro for unlawfully entering the Capitol grounds in an attempt to get him to flip on Trump.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has a reckless plan for achieving U.S. global dominance: giving away other countries’ territory.

Ramaswamy is already under fire for his objectively terrible plan to let China invade Taiwan after 2028 if he were elected. Now, the presidential hopeful thinks that Russia should be allowed to keep the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies.

“Our goal should not be for Putin to lose. Our goal should be for America to win,” Ramaswamy told CNN Thursday night.

Ramaswamy said that U.S. involvement in Ukraine is strengthening the Russia–China military alliance—and the only way to break that alliance and bring Russia around to the American side is to give Vladimir Putin what he wants.

“I would freeze the current lines of control, and that would leave parts of the Donbas region with Russia,” Ramaswamy explained. “I would also further make a commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO. But there are even greater wins that I will get for the United States.”

Ramaswamy seems to be under multiple false impressions with this diplomatic plan, the first being that the United States has the authority to simply give away parts of another sovereign nation. He also appears to believe that if he visits Moscow, he can single-handedly buddy up to Putin enough to convince the Russian leader to drop a highly advantageous military alliance.

And as anchor Jim Acosta rightly pointed out, Putin is unlikely to stop with Ukraine. He wasn’t satisfied with annexing Crimea in 2014 and now wants all of Ukraine. If he is allowed to keep parts of Ukraine, it’s possible that he’ll try to invade somewhere else such as Poland, a NATO member—which would require military intervention from the rest of the members.

This plan is just as bad as Ramaswamy’s strategy for Taiwan. Earlier this week, Ramaswamy proposed letting China take over Taiwan after 2028, which he believes is when the U.S. would build up its own supply of semiconductors. Taiwan produces about 60 percent of the global supply of semiconductors, which are microchips crucial to making all electronic devices.

Ramaswamy said he intends to dramatically up the firepower around Taiwan during his first term, to make clear to Beijing that they should “not mess” with the island until the U.S. has semiconductor independence. After that, China can do whatever it wants. It did not seem to occur to him that China would likely interpret these moves as acts of aggression and respond in kind. Nor does he seem to realize that it’s highly unlikely China would listen to his proposed arrangement.

But despite his only campaign points being battling “wokeness,” taking away rights, and, apparently, allowing authoritarian governments to do whatever they want, Ramaswamy is somehow rising in the polls.

A Republican Georgia state senator is so mad that Donald Trump was indicted that he is moving to impeach the investigating district attorney—even though his plan has no chance of working.

Trump was indicted for a historic fourth time late Monday, and charged with racketeering for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. District Attorney Fani Willis spent more than two years investigating the former president and building her case against him and 18 co-defendants.

“As a Georgia State Senator, I am officially calling for an emergency session to review the actions of Fani Willis,” Senator Colton Moore tweeted Thursday. “America is under attack. I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors politically TARGET political opponents.”

Moore called to strip funding from Willis’s office and impeach her. He shared a letter to Governor Brian Kemp, stating that the “undersigned” members of Congress, “comprising ⅗ of each respective house pursuant to Article IV, Section Il, Paragraph VI(b)” urged him to call a special session.

Here’s where Moore’s plan falls apart. In order to call a special session, either the governor or three-fifths of both the state House and Senate have to call one. This is clearly laid out in Article V of the Georgia state constitution. (Moore cites Article IV, which deals with the venue for a civil lawsuit.)

Moore also is the only member of the state legislature who has signed the letter. While Republicans have the majority in the state assembly, they only make up three-fifths of the Senate. House Democrats are unlikely to agree to Moore’s proposal.

Kemp is also unlikely to call a special session. He has been one of the most vocal Republicans to rejecte Trump’s claims that the Georgia election was fraudulent.

And even if a special session were somehow convened, the budget for Willis’s office is set by the Fulton County Commission, not the state assembly. So Moore’s plan holds absolutely no water. Instead, he and other Republicans are simply having a tantrum over Trump being held accountable.