A Slurring Donald Trump Gives Unbelievable Excuse for Constant Mix-Ups

Donald Trump’s recent memory failures sure do look like some kind of cognitive decline. In the last few months, Trump has mixed up President Joe Biden with former President Barack Obama, slurred his words, bragged about his favorite type of violent death and that he calls corn “non-liquid gold,” insisted you need voter ID to buy bread, and confused his GOP competitor Nikki Haley for California Representative Nancy Pelosi, claiming that the former failed to act during January 6.

But during a campaign rally on Wednesday, Trump had a new excuse for all that, claiming all of his short circuits are actually just sarcastic jokes.

“But when I say that Obama is the president of our country bah bah bah, they go, ‘He doesn’t know that Spiden [sic], he doesn’t know.’ So it’s very hard to be sarcastic,” Trump said.

“When I interpose—cause I’m not a Nikki fan, and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names, they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki. From Tricky Nikki. Tricky Nikki. He didn’t know.’ I interposed,” he added, seemingly forgetting the definition of the word “interpose,” which per Merriam-Webster means to put oneself between or intrude.

“And they make a big deal out of it. I said, ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common. They both stink.’ And remember this: When I make a statement like that about Nikki, that means she will never be running for vice president. She will never be running [unintelligible] vice president,” he added.

Since a special counsel investigation accused 81-year-old President Joe Biden of having a feeble mind, Trump—who is just four years younger—has desperately been trying to reframe the narrative, accusing Biden of being “too incompetent” but “not too old.”

Even Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t impressed by Tucker Carlson’s pathetic attempts to interview him.

The ousted Fox News host was in Moscow last week, when he sat down with Putin for what he claimed would be a hard-hitting, unbiased interview. In reality, it was anything but.

Speaking to Russian state television on Wednesday, Putin said that prior to the interview, he believed that Carlson would be an aggressive interviewer, a dangerous person who would “ask so-called sharp questions.”

“And I wasn’t just ready for that, I wanted it, because it would have given me the opportunity to respond sharply in kind,” Putin added. “But he chose a different tactic.”

“He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview.”

Indeed, as Putin claimed, the interview seemed more like a propagandistic history lesson than anything else.

The interview lasted over a grueling two hours, during which Carlson avoided topics like Russian war crimes in Ukraine, political prisoners, or even Russia’s upcoming presidential election. “Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation?” Putin asked.

Before the interview even hit the halfway mark, Putin was interviewing Carlson and mocking Carlson’s CIA dreams.

The whole thing was longer than Carlson’s previous self-published interviews with Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The only person Tucker Carlson’s interviewed for longer? Alleged rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate.

Carlson claimed the goal of the interview is to enable Americans to understand Russia’s view of the war. “He fulfilled his plan,” said Putin, “but how meaningful it was in the end is not for me to judge.”

GOP front-runner Donald Trump is officially headed to court next month, the first of his four upcoming criminal trials expected sometime this year.

On Thursday, Trump headed to New York for a court hearing on his hush-money case. Judge Juan Manuel Merchan ignored his requests for a delay and determined the trial would start on March 25, when jury selection will begin, and last approximately six weeks.

Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He’s facing 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.

Trump’s legal team tried to protest the decision to go to trial, citing the legal load attached to so many disparate criminal trials for one individual.

“We have been faced with compressed and expedited schedules in every one of those trials,” Todd Blanche, an attorney also representing Trump in his classified documents case, told the judge. “We—meaning myself, the firm and President Trump—have been put into an impossible position.”

Blanche also attempted to make a political argument against heading to trial, bemoaning the fact that Trump is “in primary season” and that “it is a different landscape” than it was during the last hearing.

But Judge Merchan wasn’t having any of it, quickly sidestepping Team Trump’s further attempts to delay the trial.

“You don’t have a trial date in Georgia. You don’t have a trial date in Florida,” he retorted.

Trump has already started his habitual mudslinging against the court and the trial itself, claiming over the last year that Merchan, who has acknowledged a $15 donation to President Joe Biden, is a Trump-hating judge appointed by a Democrat—even though all the judges in his trials have been randomly selected. Meanwhile, Trump has whined on TruthSocial that going to court for his alleged misdeeds counts as “election interference.”

“There was no crime here at all. This is just a way of hurting me in the election because I’m leading by a lot,” he told a crowd of reporters shortly before entering the courthouse. “They want to rush it because they want to get it desperately before the election.… They wouldn’t have brought this—no way—except for the fact that I’m running for president and doing well.”

Cohen, who is anticipated to be a star witness in this trial, has no doubts that the former president will be found guilty.

“I can tell you from everything I know about it, he’s going to be found guilty,” Cohen, the former Trump lawyer, said during The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit in October.

“This is the Al Capone theory,” he added. “They didn’t get him on murder, extortion, racketeering, prostitution, etc., they got him on tax evasion. I truly believe the Alvin Bragg case is the easiest case to prove of all of the criminal cases.”

The dates for Trump’s three other indictments are not yet on the books. His January 6 election interference trial, which was originally slated for March 4, was postponed while the Supreme Court reviews appeals on Trump’s presidential immunity claim.

This article has been updated.

Frank Luntz foresees disaster for Republicans if they don’t course-correct following the brutal New York special election that cost them a House seat.

“Tonight is the final wakeup call for the @HouseGOP. If they ignore or attempt to explain away why they lost, they will lose in November as well,” the Republican pollster tweeted. “The issue agenda is on their side. Their congressional behavior is not.”

Democrat Tom Suozzi on Tuesday handily defeated Republican Nassau County legislator Mazi Pilip to reclaim his House seat after it was vacated by George Santos.

While it’s fair to question Luntz’s analysis that Republicans have winning issues, it’s hard to disagree with his comment on their recent actions in Congress.

On the campaign trail, Suozzi hit at Pilip for opposing the border deal brokered in the Senate, a position Pilip shared with House Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Trump. In doing so, some say, Suozzi outflanked Pilip on the issue of immigration, even as House Republicans have attempted to portray Democrats as overly soft on the border. The GOP Congressional Leadership Fund’s $1.5 million ad buy aimed to tar Suozzi as dismissive of the “migrant crisis,” but those attacks didn’t seem to stick.

This isn’t the first election postmortem to forecast doom for Republicans after disappointing results. In the aftermath of Democrats’ surprising fending-off of a predicted Republican bloodbath in the 2022 midterms, analysts blamed the GOP’s extremist slate of candidates and their doubling down on a cruel anti-abortion and anti-trans platform for their historic underperformance. Then Republican candidates did the same in 2023 and lost again.

Now, though, with Luntz, the call is coming from inside the house, and it’s not anti-trans hysteria but recalcitrance on passing bipartisan legislation that threatens to hurt Republicans in 2024.

The smart money is on House Republicans continuing to fearmonger about immigration, but will these attacks land now that their vote against a harsh border bill is on the record? Will House Republicans get their act together before November? Whatever the answer is, they won’t be able to say Luntz didn’t warn them.

After spending years attacking what he calls the “fake news media,” former President Donald Trump is now literally sharing fake news. In at least two instances, he has shared edited versions of Newsweek articles, quietly snipping away tidbits that he deems unnecessary.

On Wednesday, the former president shared a screenshot of a Newsweek story—though something was undeniably off about its contents.

Trump’s version, shared on his Truth Social account, omits a lede reference to the outcome of the 2020 election (which Joe Biden won), and cuts a line about the “81-year-old” Biden being seen as too old to run for president. Trump is 77 years old.

And on Tuesday, MeidasTouch caught him altering another piece by the weekly news magazine, posting screenshots of an article titled “Donald Trump Poised to Be First Republican to Win Popular Vote in 20 Years,” removing several sections from the original story that referenced Biden’s strengths as a candidate, Biden’s predicted wins, and Trump’s failures. The only indication that he heavily edited the piece was some ellipses.

Among Trump’s myriad revisions included the exclusion of a line stating that Newsweek had reached out to Trump representatives for a comment. He also conflated two paragraphs from the original into one. In the process, he removed a detail that he “notably failed to secure” the popular vote against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election; removed another line on how George W. Bush was the last Republican president to secure the popular vote; and snipped comments from several academics, including one by University of Surrey professor Dr. Mark Shanahan dubbing Trump’s goal of winning the popular vote a “pipe dream.”

Further into the article, Trump removed an NBC poll reference that found Biden will be seen as “competent and effective” and lead with two points if Trump is convicted of a felony.

In recent months, Trump has increasingly shared content onto his social media platform from far-right outlets like Newsmax and Right Side Broadcasting Network. Considering his 91 criminal charges, recent major trial losses, and rickety political platform, perhaps media manipulation is the only way the GOP front-runner can get the kind of press he desires in well-regarded outlets.