Trump Hits Back at Liz Cheney by… Admitting He Eats Too Much?

Donald Trump tried Monday to set the record straight with former Representative Liz Cheney, insisting that he wasn’t depressed after his 2020 election loss. He was just hangry.

In Cheney’s book Oath and Honor, which comes out Tuesday, she says that her former colleague Kevin McCarthy told her he’d visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago because Trump was so “depressed” after January 6 that he wasn’t eating. Trump hit back Monday.

“Crazy Liz Cheney, who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome at a level rarely seen before, writes in her boring new book that Kevin McCarthy said he came to Mar-a-Lago after the RIGGED election because, ‘the former president was depressed and not eating.’ That statement is not true,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I was not depressed, I WAS ANGRY, and it was not that I was not eating, it was that I was eating too much.”

Trump’s Truth Social rant refers to a scene in Cheney’s book where she has a conversation with McCarthy, who said he had just visited Trump in Florida.

“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?” Cheney asked.

“They’re really worried,” McCarthy reportedly replied. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”

“What? You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump’s not eating?” Cheney said.

“Yeah, he’s really depressed,” McCarthy answered.

Cheney was one of just a few Republicans to reject Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election had been rigged against him. The party turned on her as a result, and she ended up losing her 2022 reelection campaign during the primaries.

Before she left office, Cheney worked as vice chair of the House January 6 investigative committee. Since leaving Capitol Hill, Cheney has remained vocal in her opposition to Trump. Her upcoming book describes him as “the most dangerous man to ever inhabit the Oval Office.” The book also slams her former colleagues for their “cowardice” and willingness to “violate their oath to the Constitution” out of loyalty to Trump.

Donald Trump’s former sycophants at Fox News appeared somewhat reformed on Saturday, interrupting the GOP presidential candidate’s unhinged campaign speech to fact-check his election lies.

During a couple of back-to-back campaign stops in Iowa, Trump reiterated claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and even went so far as to claim he wanted to “redo the election” and encourage his followers in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta to “watch those votes when they come in” in 2024.

Fox News took note.

“Well, the former president finally got around to some campaign promises amid lots of cheering, as you heard,” said Fox host Arthel Neville. “Many untruths; the 2020 election was not rigged, it was not stolen.”

The live react could be part of a turning tide for Fox, which earlier this year settled a historic lawsuit for failing to dispute similar election lies, paying a whopping $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems. The network is still in the throes of another, $2.7 billion lawsuit by Smartmatic, another voting machine company allegedly defamed by Fox’s conduct.

Still, it’s not the first time Trump and Neville have clashed—in 2019, the former president tweeted that Neville and fellow hosts Leland Vittert and Shepard Smith should quit Fox in favor of CNN.

That wasn’t the only headline Trump was after on Saturday. In the same tour, Trump claimed that he invented the term “caravan” and unironically claimed that he was God-chosen in the 2020 election.

“I think if you had a real election and Jesus came down and God came down and said, ‘I’m gonna be the scorekeeper here,’ I think we’d win [in California], I think we’d win in Illinois, and I think we’d win in New York,” Trump said.

Leaders of the Texas Republican Party rejected a resolution to ban party members from associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers, just two months after a prominent state conservative activist was seen meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

The Texas GOP executive committee voted 32–29 on Saturday to remove a clause that would have banned meeting with neo-Nazis from a pro-Israel resolution. About half of the board also tried to prevent a record of the vote being kept, which floored some members, The Texas Tribune reported.

The rejected clause stated, “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Republican Party of Texas have no association whatsoever with any individual or organization that is known to espouse anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sympathies, or Holocaust denial.”

Some committee members felt the language was too vague, with one member, Dan Tully, insisting such a ban could “put you on a slippery slope.”

But members who supported the ban were livid with their colleagues, pointing out that many regularly accuse political opponents of “antisemitism.” “I just don’t understand how people who routinely refer to others as leftists, liberals, communists, socialists, and RINOs don’t have the discernment to define what a Nazi is,” committee member Morgan Cisneros Graham told the Tribune.

The vote comes two months after neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, was seen meeting for seven hours at the offices of Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for far-right candidates.

Pale Horse is owned by Jonathan Stickland, who founded the PAC Defend Texas Liberty, which has donated to multiple Texas politicians on the right, including the lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Defend Texas Liberty quietly ousted Stickland as its president following the meeting with Fuentes. But multiple members of the PAC’s leadership team have made viciously antisemitic posts on social media, praised Fuentes, and donated to an anti-immigration organization connected to Fuentes.

Texas GOP Chairman Matt Rinaldi was seen entering the Pale Horse office building while Fuentes was there. He denied meeting with Fuentes.

On Saturday, Rinaldi abstained from the vote, but he argued that antisemitism is not a serious problem among Republicans. “I don’t see any antisemitic, pro-Nazi, or Holocaust denial movement on the right that has any significant traction whatsoever,” he said.

Rinaldi couldn’t be more wrong. Fuentes has met with Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner in the Republican presidential primary by a massive margin. That meeting was also attended by Kanye West, who has said he identifies with Hitler.

The House Judiciary Committee Republicans had a tweet up for months expressing support for Trump, West, and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk. All three men have made openly antisemitic statements. The committee only deleted the tweet after West made his pro-Hitler comments.

So it’s safe to say that antisemitism has a pretty strong foothold on the right.

Happy weekend to everyone! Billionaire Mark Cuban has spared the nation from another massive headache, announcing that he has “no plans” to run for president. Things looked touch and go all week after the presidential rumor mill started spinning in earnest after Cuban dropped some bombshells into the news cycle, first by announcing he would be leaving the start-up investment reality television show Shark Tank, and then by disclosing his plans to sell one of his biggest assets, the Dallas Mavericks, to casino billionaire Miriam Adelson.

This week marked the second time Cuban has fomented speculation about a potential presidential run—and the second time he’s let the country off the hook. In July, the investor told NBC News that “my family would disown me” if he considered running as a third-party candidate.

“I just want to have a couple summers with my teens before they go off on their own,” Cuban told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about his decision to leave the ABC hit. “Nothing to do with the show. I love it. I love being on it. I love what [it] represents and how it motivates entrepreneurs around the world.”

On Friday morning, Cuban squelched the speculation again, telling Axios’s Dan Primack that he “never plans to run for any elective office.”

It was easy to imagine that Cuban might throw his hat into the already crowded race between President Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Green Party front-runner Jill Stein, a possible No Labels candidate, and whoever emails us after this is published, angry that we left them off this list—even with less than a year on the clock until the 2024 election.

Cuban had hinted at making presidential bids in the previous two elections, though in terms of ratings he’s always fared better in venues other than presidential politics—compared to 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and the 2020 heated matchup between Biden and Trump, Cuban never marshaled the sort of polling numbers worth taking seriously—not that poor showings in the polls consistently dissuade everybody.

Still, the billionaire hasn’t avoided politics. At an Axios event in 2022, Cuban criticized America’s two-party system, arguing that it encourages candidates to bend to the most extreme voices in their parties. In 2015, Cuban said that he would identify as a Republican if he didn’t disagree with their stances on social issues, according to USA Today.

Buckingham Palace may take legal action after the translation of a book about the royal family accidentally disclosed that King Charles and Princess Kate discussed the skin color of Meghan and Harry’s unborn son. This is, at the very least, the current state of play that’s resulted from a comedy of errors involving the Dutch translation of a tell-all book and the United Kingdom’s unofficial bad penny, Piers Morgan.

Here’s the backstory: During an explosive 2021 interview with Oprah, Meghan and Harry alleged that at least one royal relative had spoken to them about how dark-skinned their son might be, the implication being that it would be something verging on scandalous. Both Meghan and Harry declined to say who had made those comments.

Longtime British royal reporter Omid Scobie also knew about those conversations. In his book Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival, which was published in August, Scobie made note of this matter amid a larger discussion of the royal family’s approach to race. But he did not specify in his book which royals had mentioned the skin tone of Meghan and Harry’s child.

However, in the Dutch translation of the book, those two people were identified—somehow or another—as Charles and Kate. Copies of the book that included this disclosure were quickly pulled from the market, but not before British television host Piers Morgan had shared the information on air.

“I’m going to tell you the names of the two senior royals who are named in that Dutch version of the book because, frankly, if Dutch people wandering into a bookshop can pick it up and see these names, then you, British people, here—who actually pay for the British royal family—you’re entitled to know too,” Morgan said Wednesday night.

Scobie says he does not know how the Dutch version ended up with the names in it. When asked by the BBC about reports that the palace was considering legal proceedings, a spokesperson said Friday, “We’re exploring all options.” They did not specify against whom they would take legal action.

Every aspect of this story is a perfect nightmare for the British royal family. It truly is the sum of all fears: It involves the public airing of dirty laundry, Piers Morgan, and coming second in something to the Dutch.

It is ironic that Charles is one of the people involved in that discussion, considering his coronation was supposed to mark a modernization of the royal family. But it is also not all that surprising that he or any of the royals had this conversation.

This is, after all, a family that exists purely because of a race- and class-based institution—an institution that colonized swathes of the nonwhite world. A family where one member casually wore blackamoor jewelry, which glorifies slavery. A family that refused to defend its one member of color when she was subjected to an onslaught of vicious and often racist tabloid coverage. A family that ignored that same woman’s distress until she became suicidal.

For more, there are six seasons of The Crown currently streaming on Netflix.