Dems Have Hilarious Response to GOP Plan to Name Airport After Trump

A group of House Democrats came up with the perfect response on Friday to a Republican-backed measure to rename the Washington, D.C.-area Dulles International Airport after Donald Trump.

Whether it was an act of sycophancy or just plain trolling, House Republicans introduced a bill last week to rename the airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport. House Democrats weren’t happy with the measure, the airport’s inducement of misery notwithstanding.

Among them was Representative Gerry Connolly, who said, “Donald Trump is facing 91 felony charges. If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they find a federal prison.”

On Friday, Connolly, whose Virginia district neighbors Dulles, decided to put his words into action, co-sponsoring a bill with Representatives Jared Moskowitz and John Garamendi to rename Miami Federal Correctional Institution in Florida to Donald J. Trump Federal Correctional Institution.

“When our Republican colleagues introduced their bill to rename Dulles after Donald Trump, I said the more fitting option would be to rename a federal prison,” Connolly said in a statement. “It is only right that the closest federal prison to Mar-a-Lago should bear his name. I hope our Republican friends will join us in bestowing upon Donald J. Trump the only honor he truly deserves.”

The name change would be fitting, considering Trump’s numerous criminal charges. He is on trial in New York for hush money payments, in Florida for mishandling classified documents, and in Fulton County, Georgia, as well as Washington, D.C., for attempting to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. In February, he was ordered to pay the state of New York more than $350 million for bank fraud.

“Everyone knows President Trump loves to write his name in gold letters on all his buildings,” Moskowitz said. “But he’s never had his name on a federal building before, and as a public servant, I just want to help the former president. Help us make that dream a reality.”

Trump’s Florida and Washington, D.C. cases happen to be in federal court, making a federal prison all the more appropriate to bear his name. At the state level, Trump only has a run down, poor excuse for a state park in New York named after him.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy said Friday that a fundraising email issued earlier in the week that described January 6 rioters as “activists” was an error—but he still believes the events didn’t amount to a “true insurrection.”

“It is quite clear that many of the January 6 protestors broke the law in what may have started as a protest but turned into a riot. Because it happened with the encouragement of President Trump, and in the context of his delusion that the election was stolen from him, many people see it not as a riot but as an insurrection,” Kennedy wrote in a statement. “I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection. They observe that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully.’”

But that’s not true, even from a cursory review of footage from the day. The rioters who ransacked their way through the halls of Congress did indeed wield weapons, including baseball bats, hockey sticks, fence rebar, flagpoles, pepper spray, and bear spray, U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell told CNN in 2021. The rioters also used more deadly force, by way of firearms, knives, stolen police shields, stun guns, fire extinguishers, and even hand-to-hand combat, which sent more than a dozen Capitol Police officers to the hospital.

And despite Kennedy’s insistence that Trump “urged” peace, the former president also ignored pleas from his children and aides to call off the mob, even as thousands of his supporters chanted “Kill them all” while hunting down former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence.

But those details are, apparently, inconsequential to Kennedy, who suggested that prosecuting those who broke the law was tantamount to “harsh treatment” that he would be willing to investigate by way of special counsel if elected president.

“Both establishment parties are using J6 to pour fuel on the fire of America’s divisions,” Kennedy wrote. “Each side claims that a victory by their opponents means the end of democracy. Then, anything is justified to stop them. We run the risk of destroying democracy in order to save it.”

But conservative strategists say this kind of rhetoric is exactly where Democrats should double down. On Thursday, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush attacked Trump’s own language on the issue, suggesting that the GOP presidential nominee’s staunch defense of the “sons a bitches” should disqualify him from the presidency.

“If [Democrats] were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it,” Karl Rove told MSNBC. “And they would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.”

The Department of Labor released its first-quarter report for jobs in the United States on Friday, and the results were much higher than expected, with nearly 303,000 jobs created. Good news for the country, right? Well, not according to the Fox Business Channel.

In a panel discussion about the report, host Maria Bartiromo wondered aloud if the numbers were too good for cutting interest rates.

And then other members of the panel, such as economist Joseph A. LaVorgna and Steve Moore, a former Trump economic adviser, tried to downplay the numbers by mentioning the growth in government jobs, as well as government spending.

To top it all off, the panel even found a way to credit Donald Trump in a roundabout way, wondering “if maybe the market is pricing in a little bit, and employers too, the idea that maybe we’re going to get a new president in November,” Moore said.

For much of Joe Biden’s presidency, his administration has been fighting an uphill battle trying to win over voters on the status of the economy, which conservative outlets like the Fox Business Channel certainly haven’t helped. These latest jobs numbers are further proof that Biden has been better for the economy than Trump, no matter how many conservative media talking heads try to pretend otherwise.

At around 10:23 a.m. Friday morning, a magnitude-4.8 earthquake rattled the Northeastern United States from Maine to Virginia, including wide swaths of New Jersey and New York City.

But perhaps more surprising than the earthquake was the precise location of the epicenter: Tewskbury, New Jersey, less than six miles from Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

And soon, the internet was all shaken up. Some commenters pointed out that Donald Trump’s late first wife, Ivana, was buried at the club in July 2022.

It gets weirder: One poster even discovered that Chubb Insurance, which backed Trump’s bond in his defamation case, has an executive office in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, also within a six-mile radius of the epicenter and the golf club. Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys, also has offices nearby.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene saw religious and political significance behind the earthquake.

There’s no word on what she thinks of Trump being so closely tied to the epicenter.

Representative Jamie Raskin’s office slammed House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer on Friday, demanding that he explain why the leaders of the impeachment probe are failing to share evidence with other members of the committee.

Two weeks ago, Comer and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan accused the CIA of obstructing a criminal investigation by “intervening” in an interview with Hunter Biden’s attorney, Kevin Morris, conducted by the Department of Justice—but according to Raskin, the two lawmakers are refusing to share details.

“Your March 21 letter looks like yet another episode in the Committee’s gullible campaign to amplify the vacuous claims of shadowy Trump World figures and foreign disinformation and propaganda operators,” Raskin wrote in a letter obtained by The New Republic.

What’s more, “you have completely ignored my staff’s requests to be allowed to review the information that you say prompted your letter and upon which your letter is putatively and entirely based. This refusal to share Committee material with the Minority creates the unavoidable implication that this information—like so many self-collapsing precursor tips in this Sisyphean quest for a scandal—cannot withstand even the most cursory scrutiny by the Committee’s Democratic Members,” Raskin said, arguing that the claims “directly collide” with the testimony of an Internal Revenue Service special agent and Morris himself, both of whom said the attorney cooperated with authorities.

But Comer’s troublingly opaque accusation earned more suspicion when Russian state media scooped up the claim—the second such instance of Russian intelligence involving itself with the GOP’s impeachment inquiry.

Raskin noted that the “perfectly punctual and unquestioning” article published in Sputnik, a Russian-owned outlet, included statements supporting the dying impeachment inquiry from “two discredited Trump World figures”—Rudy Giuliani associate Bradley Birkenfeld and former psychiatrist and Fox News contributor Keith Ablow.

“One can only regard with amazement how quickly Sputnik identified these Trump World commentators to support this new story!” Raskin said.

Comer, meanwhile, has already admitted that the impeachment was a dud. Last week, the Oversight chair confessed that criminal referrals were the most accountability that the meritless, wayward probe was going to achieve. That is, of course, a far cry from its original goal, which was to remove Joe Biden from office.

“It’s clear that Democrats will choose their party over their country and the truth at every turn. They should be ashamed of themselves,” Comer wrote in a fundraising email in March. “That’s why I am preparing criminal referrals as the culmination of my investigation.”

So far, Republicans have failed to provide any witnesses or concrete evidence that prove criminal wrongdoing by the president. The committee’s former star witness, Alexander Smirnov, served as the singular source for claims that Biden had profited millions off of his son’s connection to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. But that angle, which House Republicans had believed was their best bet at nabbing Biden, completely blew up in their face in February when Smirnov was indicted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI. Since then, Smirnov has reportedly admitted to law enforcement that top Russian intelligence officials were involved in the smear campaign against the sitting president.

Meanwhile, all of the other witnesses that Republicans have called, claiming that their testimony will blow the case wide open, have instead debunked every single accusation against the Biden family.