Lauren Boebert’s Election Prospects Suddenly Look Extra Grim

Representative Lauren Boebert’s chances of being reelected are not looking good, according to a poll commissioned by one of her Democratic opponents, Ike McCorkle.

Boebert chose not to run in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, the seat she currently occupies, to get more favorable odds in a more conservative district after a very narrow win in 2022. The district she chose, Colorado’s 4th, is supposed to be the most reliably Republican one in the state and was recently vacated by the retiring Ken Buck.

But McCorkle, one of three Democrats vying for the seat and a former Marine, leads Boebert 41 percent to 27 percent in the poll, with 33 percent undecided. In contrast, Donald Trump leads Joe Biden 45 to 35 percent in the 4th district, with independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting 6 percent and 14 percent undecided.

It hasn’t been a great term in office for Boebert since being barely reelected. She missed crucial votes, feuded with fellow far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, was called out by President Biden for celebrating a bill she opposed, and then there’s her inappropriate behavior at a theatrical performance of Beetlejuice, captured on video. Her reelection campaign hasn’t gone well, either, as she bombed in a debate with other candidates and is struggling to win over her district’s Republican voters. She’s lost support from her existing supporters, including volunteers. Everywhere she goes, the Beetlejuice heckling follows.

She’s been trying to demonstrate her Trump bona fides, showing up to support him at his hush-money trial, but if polling is accurate, it doesn’t appear to be helping her chances to stay in office. Not only does she have to win over Republicans and escape the June 25 primary, but it appears that even Democrats have a shot at defeating her.

Donald Trump and his supporters are upset over the instructions given to the jury in his hush-money trial.

Judge Juan Merchan issued instructions to the 12-person jury that they had to reach a unanimous verdict on each of the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Overall, they must agree that Trump used some unlawful means to interfere in the 2020 election, according to Merchan, but they don’t need to agree on which means it was.

“Although you must conclude unanimously that the defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means, you need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were,” Merchan instructed.

This was either misunderstood, or too much to handle for Trump and his supporters.

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump complained, “IT IS RIDICULOUS, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, AND UNAMERICAN that the highly Conflicted, Radical Left Judge is not requiring a unanimous decision on the fake charges against me brought by Soros backed D.A. Alvin Bragg. A THIRD WORLD ELECTION INTERFERENCE HOAX!”

Trump’s political allies also echoed his sentiments.

Trump is on trial for allegedly paying off Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election, and is awaiting a verdict from the jury after closing arguments concluded Wednesday.

Having some of the nation’s strictest abortion laws isn’t enough for the Texas GOP. Instead, Republicans in the Lone Star State are actually considering the death penalty as punishment for people who undergo the medical procedure.

A new platform proposed at the state’s GOP convention on Saturday included calls for legislation that would transform the fetal personhood ideology into law, which would effectively categorize any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a murderer.

The 50-page document claims that “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide” and calls for lawmakers to extend “equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.”

Not everyone in attendance was in support of the endeavor, however. Harris County Precinct 178 Chair Gilda Bayegan volunteered to speak at the event, calling on her party to drop its anti-abortion platforms on the basis that the state’s draconian restrictions to the medical procedure were alienating its base.

“I’m up here begging you not to make it one of our priorities,” Bayegan said.

Her party clearly did not listen. The GOP wish list is a revealing glimpse into which direction they are headed, but it wasn’t the first clue. In January, Hood County Republican Party officials were spotted attending an Abolish Abortion Texas function in which the death penalty was discussed as a possible repercussion for women and minors who seek out not just abortion but also in vitro fertilization treatments.

“There’s no difference in the value of born people and preborn people,” Paul Brown, the group’s director, said in leaked video footage, revealing the philosophy behind the extreme measures. “In short, abortion is murder. And that’s starting at the moment of fertilization even prior to implantation. So that Plan B pill, or what’s known as the morning-after pill, which is used to terminate or kill a baby prior to implantation, that is an abortion.”

(Plan B does not “kill” an embryo, as Brown claims. Instead, it prevents fertilization from occurring in the first place.)

Texas isn’t the only state to consider classifying the lifesaving medical procedure as homicide or even sentencing people to death for seeking the treatment. Republican lawmakers in Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina introduced similar legislation last year. All of those bills were defeated, with even some state Republicans deeming them too extreme.

As if any more proof was needed, a former producer for The Apprentice just revealed the depths of Donald Trump’s racism.

Recently freed from a 20-year nondisclosure agreement, Bill Pruitt, who worked on the television show that christened Trump as America’s Boss and arguably shaped the savvy businessman persona that he rode to the presidency in 2016, told the story of The Apprentice’s early days for the first time for Slate. Most notably, he recounted a 2004 incident in which Trump refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the series’s first season. His reason, according to Pruitt?

“I mean, would America buy a n— winning?” Trump reportedly told the show’s producers.

The comment was reportedly caught on tape, though Pruitt said he’s sure the evidence will never be found.

It’s the most incendiary, if not exactly surprising, moment in a story full of characteristic details of the former president’s deceptive and crooked behavior: requiring NBC to rent out Trump Tower space for the set at a premium because his actual office was “cramped” and with “chipped or peeling” wood furniture; stiffing the architect of Trump National Golf Club, who realized legal fees to sue Trump would exceed the financial reward; and rambling incoherence retouched into slick boardroom operating in NBC’s editing room.

It also comes in the wake of Trump’s rally in the South Bronx last week, held in an effort to “woo” Black and Latino voters.

That Trump is an anti-Black racist is hardly revelatory: a lifetime of discriminatory housing practices, advocacy for the execution of the exonerated Central Park Five, attacks on kneeling NFL players, and many refusals to condemn white supremacists indicate as much.

Still, the remark, stripped of the gloss of plausible deniability his public dog whistles often possess, is alarming.

As his hush-money trial wraps up, Donald Trump thinks key witnesses were not called in his defense.

“A lot of key witnesses were not called. Look at your list. Look at the players, and you know who I’m talking about. You can take five or six of them. Why didn’t they call those witnesses? They didn’t call them because they would have been on our side, and it’s a shame,” Trump told reporters outside of court after the trial wrapped up for the day Wednesday.

“And in particular, one witness, who’s now suffering greatly because of what’s happened, because of the viciousness of these thugs. They’re vicious people, what they’ve done to that person, and you know who I’m talking about,” Trump added.

Who Trump is talking about is unknown. If it’s Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, he’s serving a prison sentence for lying under oath during Trump’s fraud trial, and thus wouldn’t be a credible witness for either side.

What is known is that Trump’s defense team had every opportunity to call any of their own witnesses in his hush-money trial, and they only called two: a paralegal who entered phone records into evidence, and Robert Costello, an attorney who spoke to Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen in 2018 after the FBI raided his home and office. Trump can hardly expect the prosecution to call witnesses to aid in his defense, unless he has a profound misunderstanding about how a trial proceeding works. If the Republican presidential nominee has complaints, he should be making them to his own lawyers. (Or maybe he could have testified himself.)

Trump is on trial for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election with Cohen’s help, and is awaiting a verdict from the jury after closing arguments concluded Wednesday. He faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime.