“He Didn’t Look Good”: NATO Officials Are Concerned About Joe Biden

It isn’t just Democrats and the rest of the American public: Diplomats and leaders attending the NATO summit are also worried about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness and the increasing likelihood of Trump winning in November.

“It’s a very weird feeling to be in Europe listening to the president of the United States, and you’re more stressed about whether he will go off script than being excited to listen to the leader of the free world,” one senior European diplomat told Politico.  “You’re worried if he knows which direction he’s going or whether he’s going to fall or what he’s going to forget or if he’ll say ‘North Korea’ when he meant ‘South Korea.’ It’s just a weird experience.”

The diplomats that Politico spoke to expressed concern about Trump returning to the White House and overhauling or even ending the alliance, which the former president and convicted felon has repeatedly promised he will do.

“Everyone’s focusing on Biden’s appearance and less on Trump’s statements about NATO,” a senior European diplomat said, also expressing concern about Trump’s age. “He’s not that much younger.”

Another diplomat was more frank.

“He didn’t look good,” the diplomat said about Biden, speaking on the condition of anonymity along with the rest of Politico’s sources within the visiting delegations.

As heads of state arrived on Wednesday for the summit, many faced questions from the media about their thoughts on whether Biden was in a weaker state following his widely panned debate performance from two weeks ago. None gave any clear praise or defense of Biden, instead dodging questions about the president and saying that they would respect America’s political process.

“I’m not going to comment on this topic,” said Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who walked off after speaking for just a few minutes.

While it’s not a campaign event, the summit has been critical for Biden to demonstrate that he can handle himself on the world stage with international leaders, and can thus reassure the public that he is up to another four years as president. But the visiting members of NATO have other, arguably more important concerns.

“All the Americans are looking for at this summit is the photo op of Biden with allies,” one official said. “We’re really concerned that the world will essentially be leaderless for the next several months, and then we don’t know what comes after that.”

President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are equally embarrassing, a new poll has found.

Both candidates were found cringeworthy by 63 percent of respondents, according to the Pew Research Center poll published Thursday. And respondents weren’t just mortified by the other party’s candidate: They seem to have gotten the ick from the candidate they supported, as well.

Thirty-seven percent of responding Biden supporters said that the president was embarrassing, while 33 percent of responding Trump supporters said that the former president was embarrassing. Egg on both their faces, then.

This newest poll comes just two weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and amid a surge of dissent among the Democratic Party, which has grown desperate for the president to prove his mental fitness and ability to triumph over Trump in November.

While Biden wasn’t polling particularly strongly before, none of this has helped his numbers, which continue to trail behind Trump’s.

According to Pew’s poll, in a matchup between Trump and Biden, Trump was favored at 50 percent, while 47 percent supported Biden.

The Biden campaign is surveying voters about a head-to-head matchup between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, The New York Times reports.

Ever since Biden’s disastrous debate performance two weeks ago, a growing number of Democrats have raised questions about the president’s mental fitness and ability to win November’s election against Trump. This move signals that these questions are even being discussed within the campaign itself.

The Times report doesn’t reveal the results of that poll, but a flurry of outside polling reveals that Harris has a slight advantage over Biden in beating Trump in November.

“In addition to what we believe is a clear pathway ahead for us, there is also no indication that anyone else would outperform the president vs. Trump,” a Thursday memo to Biden campaign staff read. “Hypothetical polling of alternative nominees will always be unreliable, and surveys do not take into account the negative media environment that any Democratic nominee will encounter.”

Biden says that he has no intention of stepping down, and is trying to tamp down calls for his replacement. He is holding a news conference on Thursday evening where he hopes to allay concerns about his age and cognitive state. But this news from his campaign suggests that even in his inner circle, those concerns still exist.

In recent days, several Democrats in Congress have called on Biden to drop out of the race, and Democratic leaders aren’t giving Biden their unconditional support, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Timothy Kaine, and even former President Barack Obama. Celebrities who have campaigned and fundraised for Democrats, like George Clooney, have also called on him to drop out from the race. 

In contrast, Trump and those in his orbit, such as his imprisoned former adviser Steve Bannon, want Biden to stay in the race because they think he is an easier opponent. Some conservative activists are even preparing legal strategies to keep Biden on the ballot in battleground states. At the same time, the Trump team has also put together a playbook in the event Harris does become the Democratic nominee for president.

The poll from the Biden-Harris campaign could be the first step in Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. Some Democrats have already suggested who could be Harris’s running mate. In the end, though, nothing will happen without Biden’s agreement, even as the calls for him to step down grow louder and louder.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin announced Thursday that the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to conduct a review of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, arguing that “Congress cannot turn a blind eye to it.” But the meeting won’t happen until September.

“During this upcoming hearing, we will examine the breadth of future misconduct that may be immunized from prosecution, consider the unprecedented nature of this immunity in American history, and discuss legislative solutions to the dangers of this decision,” Durbin, the committee chairman, said in a statement obtained by HuffPost.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee will not tolerate these justices cherry-picking their way through text and history to impose their own extreme vision of presidential power on the American people,” he said.

Details on the event are scant. The hearing does not yet have a specific date, and names of potential witnesses have not been revealed. It’s unclear what—if any—influence the September hearing will have on the judicial ruling, or if it will even happen in time to have any effect.

The announcement follows a groundswell of calls for increased checks and balances for the nation’s highest court, which has a history of ethics violations and has most recently made several dangerous rulings, stripping executive agencies of their authority and expanding the definition of presidential immunity. That new definition has effectively killed any criminal charges against Donald Trump related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and for his involvement in stoking the January 6 attack his supporters led on the U.S. Capitol.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday introduced impeachment articles against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both of whom have a recorded affinity for accepting lavish gifts from Republican billionaires. The articles include counts for failing to disclose financial income and gifts, as well counts for refusing to recuse themselves from cases that concerned either their spouse’s legal or financial benefits or their own.

In an incredibly literal interpretation of “fake it till you make it,” several fake electors will serve as delegates at the Republican National Convention next week, CNN reported Thursday. The fake electors—some of whom currently face criminal charges for their efforts to upend the 2020 presidential election results in support of Donald Trump—will serve as delegates for their state as part of the formal nomination process to confirm Trump as the Republican nominee.

Arizona’s delegation includes three people charged for their participation in a fake elector scheme, including state Senator Jake Hoffman, who pleaded not guilty last month to several felony charges alleging his participation in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results. Hoffman will serve on the Republican National Committee, which oversees the convention, alongside Georgia’s Amy Kremer, who helped organize the election-denialist rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, ahead of the Capitol riot.

Michigan’s delegation includes four people facing charges, including fake electors Matthew DePerno and former Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock. DePerno is facing charges for breaching a voting machine in 2020, and Maddock pleaded not guilty in April to eight felony charges stemming from her alleged participation in a fake elector scheme. Pennsylvania is also sending three fake electors as delegates, according to documents reviewed by CNN.

CNN notes that prior to charges being dismissed against fake electors in Nevada, five of the state’s six fake electors were chosen by the Republican Party to attend the RNC. Pam Travis, a fake elector in Wisconsin, is also a delegate for the state, with fellow fake elector Robert Spindell serving as an alternate. Travis and Spindell are both prohibited from serving as electors in future elections as part of a settlement agreement brought against fake electors in Wisconsin.

“Election denialism is like the price of entry now,” former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger said. “These people that were in the fake elector scheme, or got a mugshot, they’re now the heroes of the movement, and they’ve taken over the party.”

RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly dismissed concerns, telling CNN, “State delegations are made up of delegates elected by their peers at the state party level.”

“This kind of far-right MAGA extremism on full display in today’s GOP is exactly why voters will reject Trump this November,” DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd told CNN.

An estimated 2,429 delegates will be attending the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next week, where they are expected to formally confirm Trump’s nomination as the Republican candidate for president. Trump needs 1,215 delegates to clinch the Republican Party’s nomination, and received 2,243 in the primaries. Nikki Haley, who received 97 delegates before dropping out, released her delegates this week, directing them to choose Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was one of 204 Republicans who voted for a (failed) resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to release audio tapes of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden—when just days earlier, he’d tried to stop the vote from happening altogether.

Johnson’s spinelessness was ultimately for nothing, as MAGA Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna’s “inherent contempt” resolution failed 204–210, with 19 members not voting.

If the resolution had passed, Garland would’ve been fined $10,000 for every day he did not comply with Republicans’ demands to turn over the audio recording, an attempt by the House GOP to turn up the heat on the attorney general, whom they voted to hold in contempt last month. When Biden asserted executive privilege over the recording to block Garland from releasing it, Republicans sued Garland to force his hand.

A total of four Republicans split with the rest of their party. Among them was Representative David Joyce, who also broke the party line in Garland’s contempt vote last month. This time, he was joined by Representatives Tom McClintock, John Duarte, and Mike Turner.

Despite the fact that House Republicans have already received transcripts of the interview, they have continued to demand its full audio. In reality, it appears that Republicans have been ceaselessly targeting Garland as part of their political retribution against the Department of Justice on behalf of Donald Trump.

Earlier this week, Johnson reportedly urged Luna to hold off on calling for a vote on her resolution. While Johnson said he was also concerned about Garland, he believed the House’s lawsuit to enforce their congressional subpoena was enough.

Obviously, Luna didn’t see things that way.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Luna claimed that the vote had failed due to Republican absences and said she had already refiled and planned to call a vote again when Congress returns to session.

While President Joe Biden meets with NATO members in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Donald Trump is having a foreign tête-à-tête of his own—albeit with a member of a starkly different crowd.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is scheduled to meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at his Florida home, just days after the autocratic leader held private meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

The agenda of Trump and Orbán’s meeting is not entirely clear, though the war in Ukraine will likely be a topic of discussion, according to three sources that spoke with Reuters.

The visit will add fuel to growing concerns that Orbán is serving as a proxy between Trump and Putin, reported Bloomberg, and will likely upset a cohort of NATO allies who fear that Orbán’s meeting with the Russian ruler legitimized the country’s claim to the land it has invaded in Ukraine since the war began in 2022.

Foreign policy and national security analyst David Rothkopf slammed Trump’s meeting with Orbán. “Trump meeting Orban opposite NATO Summit immediately following Orban mtg w Putin and Xi is the sort of betrayal of the US that would’ve led to Congressional investigations or worse in the past,” Rothkopf wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Orbán, who was found earlier this year by the European Court of Justice to have violated the Geneva Conventions regarding the rights of refugees*, was described by the late Senator John McCain as a “neofascist dictator.” He’s also curried a certain level of idolatry from the contemporary American right, and has become one of Trump’s strongest international allies.

*This article has been amended to clarify the Geneva Conventions that Orban violated.

Donald Trump claims that he has nothing to do with Project 2025 and has never heard of it, but a shocking number of his administration staffers and Cabinet secretaries played a part in putting together the political manifesto, CNN reports. 

At least 140 people who worked for Trump while he was president were involved in putting together the 900-page playbook, including six members of his Cabinet and four of his ambassadors. The first 20 pages of the document were written by his first deputy chief of staff.

More than half of the authors, editors, and contributors to the project’s manifesto on overhauling the executive branch titled “Mandate for Leadership” were Trump administration staffers, according to CNN’s investigation. Plus, several of the groups advising Project 2025 employ former Trump officials and staffers, including Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

CNN combed through the online biographies, LinkedIn profiles, and news articles for over 1,000 people listed in the directories for the 110 organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, in addition to the more than 200 names attached to the “Mandate for Leadership.” In total, almost 240 people have ties to both Trump and Project 2025.

The Project 2025 planning document outlines a dramatic overhaul of the federal government in line with Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, opening the floodgates for extreme policies to be enacted. The former president and convicted felon keeps trying to distance himself from the effort despite his many connections to it, giving Democrats easy lines of attack to point out his lies.

Trump seems to see associating with Project 2025 as bad for his presidential campaign even though it overlaps with his campaign promises. This could backfire on him because his repeated denials are alienating some of his most ardent supporters. The objective truth is that Project 2025 is not just a conservative wish list but also Trump’s, and he isn’t fooling anyone.

Self-described “gay furry hackers” behind a group dubbed SiegedSec on Wednesday released text exchanges between Heritage Foundation executive Mike Howell and a member of the hacker group. The texts followed a leak of nearly two gigabytes of data from The Daily Signal, the Heritage Foundation’s blog site.

In the texts, Howell appears apoplectically humorless, oscillating between threats to expose the hackers and hopes for violence against them. Howell is a columnist for The Daily Signal, the site whose subscriber data SiegedSec leaked amid a spree of other leaks. The hacked data included the “full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames” of people associating with the Heritage Foundation, one spokesperson of the gay furry hacktivists said, in order to shed “transparency to the public regarding who exactly is supporting” the conservative think tank.

“Are you aware that you won’t be able to wear a furry tiger costume when you’re getting pounded in the ass in the federal prison I put you in next year?” Howell asked a member of SiegedSec who identified themselves as “vio.”

“Please share widely,” Howell told the hacker group after they asked if they could release their text exchanges with Howell. “I hope the word spreads as fast as the STDs do in your degenerate furry community.”

“meow :3” vio responded.

“Bestiality is a weird sin. It shows you’ve gone a “few clicks” too far in trying to satiate your deviant appetite,” Howell continued.

Vio cheekily replied, “whats ur opinion on vore.” Howell elevated the text exchange, which he confirmed to the DailyDot as authentic, by posting lyrics to Eminem’s “The Way I Am.”

During their conversation, Howell promised to reveal the identity of the hackers, declaring, “Closeted Furries will be presented to the world for the degenerate perverts they are.” This proved unintimidating, as vio reassured him none of their members would be identified and that their hack is small potatoes compared to the Heritage Foundation’s aspirations. “the rights your org violates will be 10x worse than any crime ive committed,” vio told Howell. “you do not follow god if you use religion as a crutch to hate people. while i hide behind a screen to fight for my rights, you hide behind religion to attack the rights of others.”

Following the release of the text exchanges, Howell took to X (formerly Twitter) to falsely accuse someone reviewing the leak of being involved. Howell also declared “complete and total victory” that he “forced the Gay Furry Hackers to DISBAND” after the group posted that their Heritage hack would be their last. SiegedSec has claimed credit for over two years of hacktivism against far-right sites, as well as hacking NATO, twice, and a nuclear lab to demand it create catgirls.

SiegedSec stated they hacked the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal in rejection of Project 2025, which they describe as “an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to reform the United States government.” The hack is part of the group’s campaign against anti-trans organizations and websites dubbed #OpTransRights. While claiming the Heritage hack would be their last, SiegedSec also stated that in addition to releasing their texts with Howell, they “have an extra surprise for him coming soon~.”

Even from behind bars, Steve Bannon’s message is clear: Republicans want Joe Biden to stay in the presidential race. Why? Because they know it will be better for Donald Trump.

In an email interview with Matthew Boyle from far-right Breitbart News, the former Trump adviser was asked what he made of the Democrats sticking with Biden amid widespread criticism of the president’s performance in last month’s debate and the calls for him to drop out of the presidential race.

“So we got the candidate we want … and the country is stuck with a nonperforming cadaver,” Bannon replied.

Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, and directed the site to publish his patently pugnacious rhetoric and conspiracy theories cooked up by far-right activists and white supremacists. In 2016, Bannon stepped down to join Trump’s presidential campaign as its CEO and went on to mastermind the authoritarian MAGA movement.

Earlier this month, Bannon chaotically reported to Danbury federal prison in Connecticut after being found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress. The former Trump strategist had made several desperate attempts to avoid jail time, all of which were clearly unsuccessful.

In his interview with the propaganda machine he helped build, Bannon laid out his own plan for how Republicans can use all of the discourse around Biden’s health to launch Trump back into the White House.

First, he urged the GOP-led House to force Biden’s fitness as an issue of urgent “national security.”

“This is not about whether Biden can serve four more years but can he get the country safely to January 2025?” he said. “The House should move immediately to investigate and get to the bottom of who knew this when—the cover-up is all-important.”

He also advised right-wing media to work to tarnish any attempt to switch candidates.

“The political goal here for MAGA is to ‘toxify’ the process of the Democratic bait and switch as much as possible,” he said. “This is all process, and the American voter should be armed with minute-by-minute information on what is actually going on.… I’m sure they will be repulsed.”

Bannon has a point: If MAGA Republicans are given the airtime and column inches to successfully poison the well, it could prove difficult for Democrats, the media, or voters to get fully on board with another Democratic candidate.

Still, it’s revealing that a political strategist, and one of Trump’s biggest backers, is hoping that Biden sticks around until November. If Biden doesn’t listen to Democrats asking him to exit the race, maybe he should be scared by Republicans who ask him to stay?