Trump White House Was Awash in Drugs Because No One Wanted to Be There

Under Donald Trump’s leadership, the West Wing operated more like a pill mill than the White House, at least according to a January report by the Department of Defense inspector general, which capped a six-year investigation into the administration’s medical practices.

But sources knowledgeable on the matter paint an even more dramatic image than that, describing the nation’s highest office as “awash in speed,” reported Rolling Stone.

Common pills included modafinil, Adderall, fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine, according to the Pentagon report. But other, unlisted drugs—like Xanax—were equally easy to come by from the White House Medical Unit, according to sources that spoke to the magazine.

At least two senior staffers would regularly mix the depressant with alcohol, a potentially life-threatening combo, to deal with the stress of working with a highly erratic boss.

“You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol,” one source told Rolling Stone.

While other presidents were known to take a mix of drug cocktails to fight off back pain (like JFK) or bad moods (like Nixon), no previous administrations matched the level of debauchery of Trump’s, whose in-office pharmacists unquestioningly handed out highly addictive substances to staffers who needed pick-me-ups or energy boosts—no doctor’s exam, referral, or prescription required.

“It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” another source said.

Ultimately, the unmitigated access to controlled substances fostered an environment that would have been considered highly illegal and problematic anywhere else in the nation—if it weren’t inside the very office that helps craft those regulations.

“Is it being done appropriately or legally all the time? No. But are they going to get to that end result that the bosses want? Yeah,” said another, referring to the high demands of the office.

Meanwhile, pharmacists described an atmosphere of fear within the West Wing, claiming they would be “fired” if they spoke out or would receive negative work assignments if they didn’t hand pills over to staffers.

Representative Jamie Raskin has a message for the Supreme Court: challenge accepted.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Monday that Colorado can’t kick Donald Trump off its 2024 state primary ballot—and by extension, neither can any other state. Although the bench was united in its decision, it was sharply divided in reasoning. Five of the six conservative justices determined that the Fourteenth Amendment can only be enforced through a law passed by Congress, which the three liberal justices strongly opposed.

“I disagree with that interpretation, just because the other parts of the Fourteenth Amendment are self-executing,” Raskin said on CNN.

“In any event, the Supreme Court punted and said it’s up to Congress to act,” the Maryland representative continued. “And so I am working with a number of my colleagues, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell, to revive legislation that we had to set up a process by which we could determine that someone who committed insurrection is disqualified by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Raskin noted that the House had voted in 2021 to impeach Trump for inciting insurrection. The Senate ultimately acquitted Trump, but only by a vote of 57–43.

The Colorado state Supreme Court ruled in December that Trump had engaged in insurrection during the January 6 attack and was therefore ineligible to appear on the primary ballot. Little more than a week later, Maine’s secretary of state also barred him from the state’s ballot. He was booted from the Illinois state ballot just last week.

The Supreme Court ruling mandates his return to all three ballots and ends dozens of lawsuits weighing whether Trump was eligible to appear on other states’ ballots.

The three liberal justices agreed that Colorado couldn’t make such a massive decision on its own but strongly disputed that the amendment can only be applied through legislation. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the majority for overstepping the bounds of the lawsuit at hand and, in doing so, “ruling out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”

“By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” the three justices wrote in their dissenting opinion.

Representative Lauren Boebert hasn’t alienated just potential voters. She has also pushed away her former campaign volunteers, who feel the congresswoman used them just to get power.

Things haven’t been going well for the Colorado Republican lately, whose public image has taken a major hit since she and a date were caught on security footage groping each other during a performance of Beetlejuice. The scandal is a major reason why Boebert is struggling to gain popularity in her new district.

But trouble began to brew long before Beetlejuice, a former Boebert volunteer told The Washington Post.

“She has a bad reputation with her volunteers at this point,” Savannah Wolfson said in a story published Monday. “She just kind of uses you and then leaves.”

Wolfson said that she and some of her friends had noticed last year that Boebert was sharing many “weird” photos on Facebook. It looked like the representative, who filed for divorce from her ex-husband in May, was “constantly at frat parties.”

One of Wolfson’s friends texted Boebert to warn her to be careful about her choices and her posts. Boebert “just responded with a kissy face emoji,” Wolfson said—but it felt more like a kiss off.

It seemed as if Boebert was saying “Bye, bitch” to the people who had helped get her elected, Wolfson said.

Boebert, who currently represents Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, announced in December that she was moving and would run for election in the 4th district. She billed the move as a necessary fresh start for herself and her sons following her divorce.

While the 4th is a GOP stronghold and will likely send a Republican to Congress, there’s no guarantee that that Republican will be Boebert. As of late February, only a third of Republican primary voters said they backed the MAGA lawmaker.

Boebert’s fellow candidates have repeatedly slammed her for carpetbagging, and many voters expressed serious skepticism over her ability to represent their district well and over her personal character—something brought further into doubt by her former volunteers’ revelations.

“I don’t appreciate, as a Christian, people saying they’re Christian to get your vote and then turning out to be a lowlife, and now I just kind of think of her as a lowlife,” Judy Scofield, a retired university employee, said in February.

Sinéad O’Connor has a posthumous message: Fuck Donald Trump.

On Monday, the Irish musician’s estate issued a missive to the GOP front-runner, demanding that Trump never again use her music after he featured her breakout hit, a cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” during rallies in Maryland and North Carolina over the weekend.

“Throughout her life, it is well known that Sinéad O’Connor lived by a fierce moral code defined by honesty, kindness, fairness, and decency towards her fellow human beings,” read a joint statement issued by O’Connor’s estate and her longtime label, Chrysalis Records. “It was with outrage therefore that we learned that Donald Trump has been using her iconic performance of Nothing Compares 2 U at his political rallies.”

“It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil,’” they continued.

“As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately.”

O’Connor rose to superstardom for her dynamic, imposing voice, which she wielded to attack oppressive systems like sexism, racism, and war. But the former Christian singer threw all of her commercial success away in order to draw attention to circulating rumors of rampant child abuse within the Catholic Church (which, years later, would prove to be true). During a Saturday Night Live performance in October 1992, O’Connor tore a picture of Pope John Paul II after singing a rendition of Bob Marley’s song “War.” Two weeks later, she was booed off the stage during a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, after which she retreated from public life.

O’Connor passed away on July 26 from natural causes, according to a coroner’s report. She had spent the last year and a half of her life grief-stricken after her 17-year-old son Shane committed suicide, canceling the release of her next album and her scheduled performances.

She’s not the only musician to want to keep their work far and away from the GOP front-runner. In fact, there’s a long list of artists who have peeled their rights away from Trump, including The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Donald Trump does not seem OK. The GOP front-runner was alarmingly loose-lipped during back-to-back campaign rallies in Richmond, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday, during which he admitted to hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, framed President Joe Biden as a national enemy, threw around the nuclear word, and confused the man currently in the White House for his old nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

“Shortly after we win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I know them both very well, and we will restore peace through strength. Get that war settled. It’s a bad war. And Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word. You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today,” Trump said in Virginia, drawing stunned silence from his typically uproarious crowd.

It wasn’t the first time Trump has confused the two on the campaign trail, transparently attempting to cover up the blatant memory lapses by claiming that “Obama is running the show.” But if that wasn’t enough, Trump went on to try to take credit for Veterans Choice, which was passed in 2014 under Obama.

Trump also mistook Argentina for a person, calling MAGA the “greatest movement … maybe in the history of any country, even Argentina.”

“You know, Argentina, great guy. He’s a big Trump guy. He loves Trump. I love him because he loves Trump. Anybody that loves me. I like them,” Trump said.

As Trump became increasingly flustered and overwhelmed, he couldn’t figure out how to say “Venezuela” and repeatedly short-circuited.

And while in North Carolina, Trump aligned himself with the January 6 rioters, hailing them as “hostages,” while pegging himself as “a proud political dissident” and “a public enemy of a rogue regime.”

And, despite awaiting trial in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, Trump condemned President Joe Biden as “the real threat to democracy.”

“Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” he said in Greensboro. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters, and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”

Other glitches included mistaking a poll for a legislative bill, calling the country the “United Stage” and a “nation that’s no longer respectered,” and just generally making an uncanny assortment of noises for a candidate for the most powerful office in the world: “Diiiiing, boom. This is me, [unintelligible] bing!”

Ahead of the weekend, Trump’s campaign signaled that it had no intention of reeling in the GOP front-runner’s alarming rhetoric.

“Donald Trump is Donald Trump. That’s not going to change. Our job is not to remake Donald Trump,” senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the Associated Press.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung added that Americans “deserve a president who will not sugarcoat what’s happening in the world.”

And Biden’s campaign appears ready to rely on that.

“Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—the same extreme, dangerous candidate voters rejected in 2020, and they’ll reject him again this November regardless of the team he has around him,” said Biden spokesman Kevin Munoz.

Trump has worked to distance himself from the issue of age, slamming Biden for similar verbal gaffes despite joining the 81-year-old as one of the oldest presidential candidates in U.S. history.

Over the last few months, Trump has repeatedly prided himself on “acing” a dementia test, insisted that immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border “don’t speak languages,” claimed that he would stop banks from “debanking” Americans, mixed up former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his only remaining rival in the GOP race, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and described his plan for America’s missile defense system by going, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.… Boom. OK. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom.”

He also appeared with mysterious, unexplained red sores on his hands that political commentators couldn’t help but notice looked an awful lot like syphilis.