Watch: Mike Johnson Freaks Out as RNC Teleprompter Breaks Down

An apparent teleprompter malfunction, which sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scurrying off-stage at the Republican National Convention Monday afternoon, launched the high-stakes political event into a welcome new phase: cover band concert.

“It is now my honor to introduce the attorney general,” Johnson began haltingly. “And there goes the teleprompter.”

Johnson awkwardly made his exit. Meanwhile, Sixwire, a country-rock band based out of Nashville, Tennessee, performed a rendition of Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In the Years.” A livestream of the main room showed clumps of blonde women dressed in bright red and waving their Trump signs, and white guys nodding their heads to the beat.

After the song ended, the band just kept going, and going, and going, riffing on the song’s iconic guitar melody.… Some say they’re still vamping to this day.

What could’ve transformed into a rocking evening was tragically cut short, as Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird appeared onstage to welcome vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance. He walked around the floor to Merle Haggard’s “America First.” Not nearly as fun of a song, but it was also repeated over and over again as Vance glad-handed delegates.

Days after getting shot at a political rally, Donald Trump claimed he wanted a “unity” convention. But his pick for vice president—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—immediately used the moment to deride liberals and President Joe Biden.

Despite having privately described the former president as “America’s Hitler,” Vance has become a “genuine convert” to the MAGA cause, according to Trump. And on Monday, Trump positioned the Ohio lawmaker as an heir apparent for his brand of far-right politics.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pennsylvania shooting that clipped Trump’s ear and killed two people, Vance took to X (formerly Twitter) to accuse Democrats—as opposed to Republicans—of stoking the violent rhetoric that led a registered Republican to attack the GOP leader.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote on Friday. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Vance has also been more than sympathetic toward convicted January 6 rioters: In 2022, he spread misinformation by falsely claiming that dozens of jailed Capitol protesters hadn’t yet been charged with crimes. He’s jumped onto the Trumpian bandwagon of calling for the Department of Justice to criminally investigate critics of the MAGA regime, and, perhaps most importantly for Trump, Vance has sworn complete loyalty, even if doing so flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution.

During an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos in February, Vance promised that had he been vice president in place of Mike Pence in 2020, he would have continued to carry out the fake elector scheme to overturn the election results.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said at the time. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”

Biden’s campaign, meanwhile, is reportedly poised to label the Trump-Vance ticket as “extreme” and a doubling down on Trump’s aggressive far-right positioning, according to NBC News.

“Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement obtained by the news outlet.

The leader of the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025 reportedly couldn’t be happier that Donald Trump picked Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate Monday.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which penned the lengthy blueprint for a potential far-right Trump takeover and draconian dismantling of the administrative state, was speaking to reporters when the announcement was made.

New York Times reporter Nick Corasaniti described Roberts’s live reaction to hearing that Vance had been tapped. “He reacted to the news ‘with a broad smile on my face’ and said that ‘privately, we were really rooting for him,’” Corasaniti wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

In his own post on X, Roberts congratulated Vance and called him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future.”

“When Americans get to know him, they will appreciate his values and vision as I do,” he wrote.

Roberts recently received widespread backlash for issuing a chilling warning to liberals. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” said Roberts, during an appearance on Real America’s Voice earlier this month.

Trump has since attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, even though at least 140 people he worked with were involved in making the plan, according to CNN. Vance, on the other hand, appears to have embraced the policy plan, saying last week there are “some good ideas in there.”

When Senator Mitch McConnell walked out on stage Monday at the Republican National Convention to nominate Donald Trump for president, he instantly got showered with a host of boos.

The jeers inside the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee were clearly audible as McConnell read out Kentucky’s delegate vote in favor of Donald Trump with a very small smile.

Did McConnell expect a more favorable response? He has always been disliked by MAGA Republicans for being part of the old Republican orthodoxy, even as he pushed through Republican priorities and helped Trump appoint a record number of judges to the federal courts On a personal level, Trump and McConnell don’t have the best relationship, of which the MAGA faithful are well aware.

While Trump appointed McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as secretary of transportation, he would later regularly make racist attacks against her, accusing the Senate minority leader of being compromised by China. Trump has also called McConnell a “dumb son of a b----.” McConnell only endorsed Trump for president earlier this year after all other Republican candidates dropped out of the primaries.

While McConnell lately criticized Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, reiterating his support for NATO and Ukraine, it’s doubtful the RNC crowd booed him for that reason. But McConnell probably doesn’t even care. Not only will he be stepping down from his Senate leadership position after November, but he also doesn’t need public support to accomplish what he wants: keeping the GOP in power.

Representative Matt Gaetz has exposed what may be Judge Aileen Cannon’s real motive in every pro-Trump ruling she makes.

After the Trump-appointed judge on Monday dismissed the former president’s classified document’s case, Gaetz posted a headshot of her on his personal account, captioning the photo “Future Supreme Court Justice Cannon.”

On his professional X account, Gaetz wrote, “I applaud Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision dismissing the Trump documents case in federal court in the free State of Florida.”

It’s not the wildest notion. The former president nominated Cannon to the bench at the tail end of his term. Since then, the inexperienced judge has handed him win after win in his classified documents case—some of which were such flimsy rulings that she was repeatedly shut down by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

If Trump does retake the White House, it’s incredibly possible he could have the chance to appoint a fourth Supreme Court justice—and perhaps he’d like to reward the judge who helped save him from what was the strongest case against him.

Other Republicans, including failed V.P. picks, made celebratory posts after Cannon’s ruling as well. “Dismissed!” Senator Marco Rubio chimed in, and Senator Rick Scott called it a “big win.” Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene celebrated the “major blow” to the Justice Department while warning about future attacks from the Democrats, writing “they are going to keep going after every single one of us who opposes their agenda.”