Trump Stooge’s Attempt to Troll Democrats Hilariously Backfires

Representative Byron Donalds attempted to skewer Democrats, but his tirade dipped into the uncanny valley and ended up looking a lot more like his own party.

During an interview Tuesday on Newsmax, Donalds lamented Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony earlier this week in front of a GOP-led subcommittee on the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the hearing quickly go off the rails, but Fauci made it through without validating any of the bonkers Republican claims about him. Donalds seemed incensed, but his argument sounded all too familiar.

“We have people in this government, Tony Fauci is a part of that ilk, that truly believe that they are omnipotent, that they are never wrong,” the Florida Republican said. “And when you catch them in their lies, then they try to gaslight you, gaslight the American people, and say, ‘No, no, no, we agreed with you the entire time,’ or, ‘There simply is no evidence to support your conspiratorial claims.’

“These people are gone, they have lost it, so there is no reasoning with them, they simply have to be defeated,” said Donalds, who is reportedly on Donald Trump’s short list of vice presidential contenders.

The inconsistent but dogmatic attitude to which Donalds alluded sounds all too akin to his Republican counterparts, who break their backs daily to stay in Trump’s good graces as he flits between different stances on a number of issues, including immigration, abortion, and of course, criminal justice.

Increasingly, it appears that Republicans are disappointed with the outcome of Fauci’s hearing, as they were pitifully unable to pin their grievances on one man. In front of Congress, Fauci has called the GOP conspiracies about his leadership of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases “seriously distorted.”

Protest votes have continued to dog Biden and Trump, both presumptive nominees, eating a chunk of their leads in New Mexico in Tuesday night’s primary results.

Trump saw yuge losses in the New Mexico Republican primary, with nearly 12 percent of votes going to anyone but him. Nikki Haley’s zombie campaign pulled 8.6 percent of Republican primary voters, and uncommitted votes took another 3.3 percent. In total, he pulled just 78,716 votes in the state—84.5 percent.

In 2016, Trump faced off in a much more crowded field of dead campaigns in New Mexico, collecting just over 70 percent of the vote against five other zombie candidates. Trump lost the battleground state in that year’s general election to Hillary Clinton and again to Joe Biden in 2020. Tuesday night’s showing suggests Trump may lose the state’s general election again, as Biden picked up over 31,000 votes more than Trump.

Turnout was sluggish overall in the land of enchantment for the newly convicted Trump: New Mexico’s Republican primary on Tuesday turned out nearly half as many votes for Trump as he received in the 2020 primary—78,716 down from 144,067.

Meanwhile, an ongoing primary protest against Biden’s support of Israel and handling of Israel’s unconstrained devastation of Gaza continues to sink its teeth into Biden’s primary numbers.

In New Mexico, the uncommitted campaign pulled over 12,000 votes—taking nearly a tenth of the vote from Biden. The protest vote was aided by another 6.7 percent of voters choosing Marianne Williamson, for a whopping 16.4 percent of votes yanked from Biden.

In New Jersey, uncommitted protest votes pulled an astonishing 41,415 votes from Biden, or 8.7 percent. The gimmick campaign of an anti-abortion extremist also took votes away from Biden, bringing in just 2.8 percent but pulling Biden’s overall vote tally down to 88.5 percent. In 2020, protest votes for Bernie Sanders’s dead campaign stole 14.6 percent from Biden who, in total, collected 814,188 votes. This year’s New Jersey primary, Biden collected half that—just 419,020 votes in total.

Upset over being convicted on 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial, Donald Trump is floating the idea of imprisoning his enemies if he’s elected to the White House.

The Republican presidential nominee brought up the idea during a rambling phone interview with Newsmax on Tuesday. Host Greg Kelly asked whether the trial and guilty verdict were a net positive for Trump, who didn’t even answer the question.

“Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question,” Trump replied. He went off on a tangent, discussing the “Lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and how terrible it would be to put her in jail.

“I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country,” Trump said about locking up Clinton. “And now, whoever it may be, you’re gonna have to view it very much differently. This is a bad, bad road that they’re leading us down to as a country.

“And it’s very possible that it’s gonna have to happen to them,” Trump added.

The former president’s allies have regularly mentioned jailing their opponents. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, recently told Axios that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who led the prosecution of Trump’s hush-money trial, “should be—and will be—jailed.”

Bannon added that he wants “investigations to include [Democrats’] media allies.”

If elected president, Trump will have the full force of the Justice Department to use at his disposal, and could put a more dangerous attorney general than the likes of Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr in power, who acts on Trump’s election conspiracies and prosecutes his enemies. Trump could also have the federal cases against him dismissed, whether they’re about his mishandling of classified documents or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With these cases currently stalled, the only way to keep Trump from carrying out his plans may be to defeat him in November.

President Joe Biden just made it a little easier to deport migrants from custody—and he’s proud of it.

The president’s new immigration policy changed critical language that was introduced during the Trump administration, swapping the “reasonable possibility” standard for deportation to an even higher “reasonable probability” standard, according to a Department of Homeland Security asylum fact sheet released Tuesday.

It also changed other processing standards in Title 8 immigration procedures, including making those who illegally crossed the border no longer eligible for asylum (except in the event of “exceptionally compelling” circumstances) and further tightening the eligibility guidelines for deportees who fear returning to their home countries.

The reasoning behind the timing of the change is a little transparent. Although poll predictions so far away from Election Day have proven to be historically unreliable, Biden has trailed behind Trump, despite the presumptive GOP presidential nominee being a convicted felon. On top of that, voters have resoundingly picked immigration as the number one issue fueling their decisions this election cycle.

“I would have preferred to address our issues at the border through bipartisan legislation because that’s the only way to actually fix our broken system,” Biden wrote in a statement. “But Republicans in Congress have left me no choice. So today, I’m announcing actions that bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum—unless they seek it after entering through established lawful processes.”

As shocking as Biden’s change is, Donald Trump could make things even worse if he is elected in November. Trump has promised to bring back President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” which used military tactics to conduct massive roundups of some 1.3 million immigrants, legal or otherwise, across the country, packing them into trucks and shipping them to locations without food or water, resulting in tragic and unnecessary deaths.

Trump is also expected to bring his former adviser Stephen Miller back to the West Wing as the leading expert on “America First” immigration policy. Miller has been vocal about a forthcoming reality of “large-scale raids” and “throughput facilities.”

Behind the scenes, Trump has played a big part in why immigration has become a focal point in the first place. He strong-armed Republican lawmakers into refusing bipartisan border deals to avoid giving Biden a win on the issue. He also stoked the flames of a standoff between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the federal government over lengths of concertina wire erected by the state that have prevented federal border agents from doing their jobs along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have grasped the obvious: The Republican Party is going nowhere.

The far-right congresswoman complained to Steve Bannon on Real America’s Voice that her colleagues wouldn’t support her quest to impeach Joe Biden.

“Republicans continually have their head up their ass and can’t figure out how to actually use the power that the people gave us,” Greene ranted.

“People are sick and tired of a feckless and useless Republican Party that never does a damn thing to stop any of this,” the far-right congresswoman added, referring to mass immigration from the southern U.S. border.

While Democrats would agree with the wording of her criticisms of the GOP, if not the substance, Greene still doesn’t realize that she is as much responsible for her party’s dysfunction as anyone. She tried and failed to oust Speaker Mike Johnson over Ukraine aid funding, earning her several enemies among her fellow Republicans in Congress. She hijacked a hearing about the Justice Department to insult Representative Jasmine Crockett, only to be turned into a trademarked meme for her efforts.

Instead of proposing any meaningful legislation herself, she is now working to defund the state of New York after Donald Trump’s felony conviction in his hush-money trial.

Green also tried to grandstand by attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci in a subcommittee hearing on Monday, only to be reprimanded by the Republican chair and thoroughly discredited by Fauci. Even her criticisms of Biden’s immigration policy may be unfounded: His latest executive order restricting asylum has been criticized as a Trump-like policy by Democrats.

Maybe one day it will dawn on Greene that she contributes to the many problems with the Republican Party. Or she’ll face electoral consequences from her fed-up constituents. But, in a district as red as the Georgia 14th, that’s not likely this November.