Trump’s Untethered 2 A.M. Rant Is Unlikely to Help His Gag Order Fight

Donald Trump must sense the walls closing in. At 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, the former president begged Republicans to step in and save him from his hush-money trial in a long, rambling two-post thread on Truth Social.

“This New York Cabal, run by Crooked Joe Biden’s White House, is a hit job on a Political Opponent the likes of which the USA has never seen before. For the Good of our Country, it must be stopped. The Crooked Joe Biden Witch Hunts have to be ended. REPUBLICANS IN WASHINGTON MUST TAKE ACTION!” he wrote.

Trump took aim at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as being “soft on crime,” Judge Juan Merchan for being “rigged” against him, and even the judges in his defamation case and civil fraud case, calling them “corrupt.” His complaints come just up to the threshold of acceptable commentary under his gag order, which prohibits him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Trump has complained bitterly and almost continuously about the order, even after his contempt of court hearing Tuesday for allegedly violating it.

Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts for allegedly using his former fixer Michael Cohen to cover up an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Tuesday’s proceedings did not go well for Trump, with witness David Pecker, who was publisher of the National Enquirer and CEO of its parent company in 2016, detailing how he worked with the Trump campaign to “catch and kill” negative stories about the then-presidential candidate.

If Trump is looking for Republicans to interfere in his court proceedings, there’s not much they can do besides make weird, full-throated defenses to the public. Even then, the real people Trump needs on his side are the jurors in the trial, who are understandably more worried about their own safety.

George Santos just pulled another fast one on… well, anybody who still believed in George Santos.

The disgraced former lawmaker dropped his renewed bid for Congress on Tuesday, claiming that he didn’t want his run for New York’s 1st Congressional District to be “portrayed as a reprisal” against his apparent Long Island nemesis, Representative Nick LaLota.

“Although Nick and I don’t have the same voting record and I remain critical of his abysmal record, I don’t want to split the ticket and be responsible for handing the house to Dems,” Santos wrote in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It is clear that with the rise of antisemitism in our country we cannot afford to hand the house to Dems as they have a very large issue with antisemitism in their ranks…”

But Santos’s latest FEC filing tells a different story: one in which the ousted congressman raised exactly $0 in the first quarter of his campaign.

Critics quickly picked up on the detail online, including LaLota himself, who snarkily wrote back that Santos was “taking a plea deal.”

“You wish you useless feckless RINO,” Santos barked. “Keep spreading misinformation… Show us that time sheet of yours from when you were at the BOE and Law school at the same time… We are waiting for you to refute but then again you can’t…”

The reputed hustler—who was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, being “Jew-ish,” his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things—is currently facing 23 counts related to illegally receiving unemployment benefits, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud. His next court proceeding is scheduled for August 13, with a trial expected in September.

Still, there’s always a chance that Santos might return.

“It’s only goodbye for now, I’ll be back,” he wrote on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court will hear another abortion case on Wednesday, providing the nation’s highest court with another opportunity to ban the medical procedure.

The case, United States v. Idaho, will argue whether pregnant people in the Gem State are allowed to get abortions when receiving lifesaving, critical care at hospitals, or if they and their fetus will be considered two separate people.

Idaho already has a near-total abortion ban, but the Alliance Defending Freedom, the far-right Christian legal advocacy group arguing the lawsuit on behalf of the state, is utilizing the case to advance the idea of fetal personhood. This stipulation would effectively require doctors to treat fetuses—no matter how underdeveloped—with the same medical care as the person carrying it, even if it poses a medical risk to the pregnant patient.

“Idaho’s law would make it a criminal offense for doctors to provide the emergency medical treatment that federal law requires,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in 2022.

Pro-abortion activists have argued that providing equal human rights to a fetus—especially if it’s a cluster of cells—will effectively strip pregnant people of their own rights, reported freelance journalist Susan Rinkunas. An amicus brief in the case specifies that, if the court rules for Idaho, it will “succeed in demoting pregnant women to second-class status under EMTALA,” a federal law that requires emergency rooms that run on Medicare funding to provide care to any individuals who show up.

“Only pregnant women will be forced to surrender their EMTALA rights to make healthcare decisions about their bodies, and only pregnant women will have treatment guaranteed under federal law limited to Idaho’s prohibitory terms,” the brief reads. “Pregnant women stripped of their EMTALA rights under bans like Idaho’s have already experienced devastating harms because of the denial of abortion care. They have endured severe hemorrhage, life-threatening infection, and the trauma of painful, hours-long vaginal delivery of a non-viable fetus.”

“If Idaho prevails and pregnant women’s EMTALA rights are allowed to vary State-to-State, these appalling, and completely avoidable, injuries will proliferate everywhere there are bans like Idaho’s,” it continues. “And, in lock-step, denial of emergency abortions under EMTALA will contribute to this country’s already-abysmal rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, which—like all reproductive harms—are racially disparate.”

The notion of fetal personhood has also been leveraged to restrict IVF access in states such as Alabama and limit access to forms of birth control.

After a large bill approving aid for Ukraine and Israel passed the Senate Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell stood triumphant—and directed the blame for the aid package’s holdup at former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

When asked why it took so long to pass the aid package, McConnell said, “I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin. And so, he had an enormous audience which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”

The Republican Party has been split over sending more aid to Ukraine. The far right has vehemently opposed the move, expressing sympathy for Vladimir Putin and Russia even before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Carlson was no exception, downplaying the conflict in the days before the invasion and calling it a “border dispute.” He even touted a conspiracy theory of a U.S.-led effort to supply Ukraine with chemical weapons. Carlson’s interview with Putin earlier this year was widely mocked as overly deferential to the Russian leader, even by Putin himself.

But to say Carlson was the main impediment to aiding Ukraine is misguided. It seems that McConnell is avoiding the real culprit: Donald Trump and his far-right acolytes in Congress. The former president and Putin have long enjoyed a close relationship, and Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold military aid to NATO allies, who are vulnerable to Russian actions. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported Trump’s plan for Ukraine: giving Russia control of Crimea and most of the Donbass region.

While McConnell took his time endorsing Trump’s candidacy, waiting until the former president locked up the GOP nomination in March, he is still likely afraid of provoking the Republican presidential nominee before November. Even though McConnell has always been an ardent backer of Ukraine, he knows not to poke Trump in order to stay in power.

Another conservative appeared to be sour on House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday amid what has turned out to be a major party upheaval.

Texas Representative Chip Roy said he is “beside himself” after witnessing Johnson help out another Republican colleague, Tony Gonzales, who has openly berated some caucus members as “scumbags.”

“I’m being attacked. Conservatives are being attacked,” Roy told KTSA News. “I cannot tolerate what’s happening to the people that I think are fighting for this country… the primary season matters.”

Roy’s comments come amid a growing push from members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus to penalize Gonzales after he went scorched earth on the party’s moral standards over the weekend. More caucus members have endorsed Gonzales’s primary opponent, a far-right social media influencer.

“I served 20 years in the military. It’s my absolute honor to be in Congress, but I serve with some real scumbags!” Gonzales told CNN on Sunday.

“Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime,” he continued. “Look, it didn’t surprise me that some of these folks voted against aid to Israel, but I was encouraged to see by a nearly 10-to-1 mark that Republicans supported our allies on the battlefield.”

If push came to shove, Gonzales said he didn’t believe Johnson would lose the gavel—even though the beleaguered speaker has been bleeding support in the weeks since Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to vacate in March. The fracture came after Johnson worked with Democrats and Senate Republicans to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, with the House GOP torching him for accomplishing one of the legislature’s primary annual responsibilities: funding the government.

But Johnson’s recent (successful) efforts to pass a foreign aid bill reminded others that there are adults in the room willing to push back on Greene’s intraparty drama—even if she only needs a handful of conservative defectors to actually kick Johnson out from leadership.

“For some reason, these fringe people think as if they have the high ground. They do not,” Gonzales told CNN. “I assure you, the rank and file members that normally are kind of easygoing, doing the right thing, put their head down, they vote yes or no but they’re not public about it—those days are over. The fight is here.”

“If someone pokes you in the chest, the way you take care of a bully is you bloody their nose.”