Jesse Watters Appears to Suffer Amnesia on End of Donald Trump’s Term

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, will he leave office gracefully at the end of his second term? Fox News host Jesse Watters seems to think so, despite Trump’s track record.

“Everybody knows Trump’s going to leave office just like he did the last time,” Watters said on the network Monday night, comparing the attitudes of Democrats who worry about Trump’s autocratic tendencies to people who get scared about the sun disappearing permanently after an eclipse.

Does Watters remember what happened after the 2020 election? If Trump will leave office “just like he did the last time,” does that mean he’ll refuse to concede his time is up, threaten violence, and then foment an insurrection? Does Watters realize that from now on, transitions of power in the United States carry a fear of violence, something that was once unthinkable?

And that’s not even getting into the election denialism that has now become pervasive in the Republican Party, which began with the “Stop the Steal” movement. All of this has led to the very credible fear of bad things happening after the election this November and in future years, no matter how the results go.

We got a hint of what would happen in 2020 when, in 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results “if I win.” And now, Watters and the rest of Fox News are trying to have the public forget about who Trump is and how he handles elections, perhaps because they plan to help him as November draws closer. And of course, if reality clashes with Watters and Fox News, they will blame the left, just like last time.

Ken Buck took a red pen to a flattering characterization of his former colleague Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, refusing to yield that the Georgia Republican was anything but a headache in Congress.

In an interview Monday night on CNN’s OutFront, the former Colorado representative strongly disagreed with a warm review of Greene by ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who likened the MAGA lawmaker to a policy hawk.

“Well, I think Kevin is much more experienced talking to Marjorie about policy than I do, first of all,” Buck told host Erin Burnett.

“Secondly, my experience with Marjorie is, people have talked to her about not filing articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office, on not filing articles of impeachment that were groundless made on other individuals in the Biden administration,” he continued. “And she was never moved by that. She was always focused on her social media account.”

But, from where Buck stands, Greene doesn’t just suffer from a distracting social media addiction—she’s also blindly following the will of the Kremlin.

“Moscow Marjorie is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure that she is popular and she is getting a lot of coverage,” he said, echoing two other Republican lawmakers who have warned that many in the GOP are pushing Russian propaganda.

Buck left his post in the House last month amid another bout of seemingly endless Republican-fueled chaos, torching the lower chamber as “dysfunctional” and one of the worst legislative bodies in the “nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress.”

“Instead of having decorum, instead of operating in a professional manner, this place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people,” Buck said shortly after handing in his less-than-two-weeks notice to House leadership.

Meanwhile, Greene has filed a motion to vacate House Speaker Mike Johnson after he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, finalizing one of the legislature’s primary responsibilities: funding the government.

With all the recent departures, House Republicans need almost complete unity to pass legislation on their policy agenda. At the moment, the caucus can spare just one seat on any vote—one of the slimmest majorities in U.S. history.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is warning that Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 people, could legally be considered a genocide.

Warren made the comments during an event last week at a Boston-area mosque. Video of her speech began circulating on social media on Monday. The death toll in Gaza, which includes at least 13,000 children, is considered a low estimate due to the difficulty in counting the dead.

“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” Warren said, speaking at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts. She was responding to an audience question about the International Court of Justice ruling that it was “plausible” Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza.

Warren noted that, for her, “it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong.”

“It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will. It is wrong to drop 2,000-pound bombs, in densely populated civilian areas,” she said.

Warren faced criticism for her stance on the war when she backed Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attacks. As Israel’s war ramped up, along with international criticism of its actions, protesters have shown up outside of Warren’s offices, as well as her home. One Palestinian American even confronted Warren at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November. Warren also voted to send more military aid to Israel in February, part of a bill that defunded the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

Warren’s new stance is the latest example of Democrats criticizing Israel’s actions. On March 22, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez warned that the United States was complicit in the humanitarian crisis in the territory, and on March 15, Senator Chuck Schumer gave a speech criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza.

Warren was also among eight Democratic senators who called on President Joe Biden in an open letter in March to suspend military aid to Israel while it blocked U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza.

More recently, the White House had to cancel its annual iftar banquet with American Muslim leaders last week after invitations were rejected in protest of America’s Israel military campaign. On Monday, the Foreign Press Association issued a statement urging international journalists to be allowed unfettered access into Gaza, which Israel’s government continues to block.

Former associates of Donald Trump, look out—the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is lining up witnesses as his hush-money trial is set to begin.

Rhona Graff, Trump’s former assistant, and Madeleine Westerhout, his former director of Oval Office operations, are expected to testify in the trial, ABC News reported Monday, citing anonymous sources. They will join Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director and onetime aide to Trump, who has already testified before a grand jury investigating Trump’s interference in the 2020 election.

In addition, Deborah Tarasoff, a former employee in the Trump Organization’s accounting department, as well Jeffrey McConney, the organization’s onetime controller, will likely be called to testify. They all join the most well-known name on this list: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney.

The list extends beyond Trump’s ex-employees. David Pecker, a former executive with American Media Inc., will likely testify, as well as National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard. American Media Inc. used to own the tabloid newspaper, and prosecutors say both Howard and Pecker were involved in “catch and kill” methods to keep negative stories about Trump from spreading during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The trial has already gotten off to a rough start from Trump’s perspective. He’s facing an expanded gag order after he repeatedly attacked the daughter of presiding Judge Juan Merchan on Truth Social. Trump has tried to delay the trial numerous times, including by making the claim that there’s too much “pretrial publicity” and by suing Merchan.

The former president faces 34 felony charges for falsifying business records regarding a payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election to hide a 2006 affair they had. It’s his first criminal trial, and jury selection is set to begin on April 15.

Despite threats by Representatives James Comer and Jim Jordan to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, the Department of Justice said Monday it will not turn over the audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur regarding his storage of classified documents, bringing bad-faith Republican impeachment efforts (or whatever was left of them) to a screeching halt.

In a letter to Jordan and Comer obtained by The New Republic, Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte effectively thwarted Republicans’ meritless effort to impeach Biden. “Neither branch [of Congress] has any constitutionally-based authority to seek conflict for conflict’s sake,” Uriarte wrote, identifying the politically motivated nature of the disastrous impeachment inquiry, which yielded more indictments of the GOP’s own star witnesses than actual evidence of the president’s wrongdoing.

“The Department is concerned that the Committees’ particular focus on continuing to demand information that is cumulative of information we already gave you—what the President and Mr. Hur’s team said in the interview—indicates that the Committees’ interests may not be in receiving information in service of legitimate oversight or investigatory functions, but to serve political purposes that should have no role in the treatment of law enforcement files,” continued Uriarte.

In a February 12 letter to Attorney General Garland, Comer and Jordan requested the audio of Biden’s interview with Hur, which made news when Hur, who did not recommend charges for the president, editorialized in his report, including “gratuitous” details about Biden’s poor memory and inability to recall details about his life. Critics have called the report a “partisan hit job.”

It’s become clear that, in demanding the audio, Comer and Jordan were scrambling at potential ammunition against Biden, who has faced questions about his age since his 2020 victory, to use in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Comer himself has already begun to back away from impeachment in the absence of evidence. Having all but admitted defeat, audio of Biden’s interview might have represented the last chance to squeeze some value out of a smear campaign that never even had enough Republican support to bring to a vote. For once, however, Garland’s Department of Justice did not cave.