Fox News’s Attempt to Prove J.D. Vance Isn’t “Weird” Fails Miserably

J.D. Vance is not beating the weird allegations, even from his allies.

In a Monday night segment on Fox News, host Jesse Watters highlighted how Democrats such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and others are aligning in a “coordinated attack” that Trump’s vice presidential candidate is just plain weird.

In doing so, however, Watters just made a supercut that did nothing to push back on the talking point.

As Rolling Stone points out, the host’s attempt to dispel the controversy by playing the compilation is the perfect example of the Streisand effect, or when you try to hide something but end up only drawing more attention to it. By highlighting the couch controversy and politicians calling the vice presidential candidate weird, Watters is only making the situation worse for Vance.

To be clear, Vance did not have sex with a couch. But his off-putting nature may be a liability for the Trump campaign.

It looks like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had his mind made up on presidential immunity from the start, and made no effort to negotiate with the court’s liberal justices.

According to a stunning new report from CNN citing unnamed sources, Roberts looked past any chance of coming to a compromise outside of the conservative majority on the court, as was typical in past cases on presidential power. He instead thought that he could persuade the court’s liberals to look beyond Donald Trump.

The oral arguments for the case on April 25 didn’t indicate such a clear-cut breakdown, as justices seemed ready to vindicate Trump in only some of his legal team’s arguments, while also accepting some of special counsel Jack Smith’s points.

But the justices’ private session the next day did not reflect any of that, with votes quickly breaking down on ideological lines and Roberts ready to rule that presidents have near-absolute immunity for all “official acts.” He tried to steer the conversation away from Trump, writing in his opinion that ​​“unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.”

Roberts’s actions flew in the face of his previous rulings, such as the court’s 2022 decision Jackson v. Women’s Health Organization. While Roberts sided with the conservative majority in that case in ruling against the organization, he dissented on overturning the abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. And a decade earlier, he cast the deciding vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act, breaking with his fellow conservatives in a 5–4 decision.

But this time, Roberts did not seem amenable to compromise, and in fact one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was the lone conservative on the court who sought any kind of compromise with the liberal justices. In her opinion on the immunity case, she said the Trump plan to use alternative slates of electors should be considered a “private” and not an official act, and thus subject to criminal prosecution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, led by Roberts, has upended precedent and put all of Trump’s legal cases in jeopardy. The one criminal case that was decided prior to the court’s ruling has had sentencing delayed. Of the two federal cases that are still being decided, one was dismissed pending appeal by a judge seemingly on Trump’s side, and the other is in limbo. In short, Roberts may have presented himself as moderate before, but his decision on immunity shows that his conservative beliefs come first.

Elon Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist,” has been accused of suspending the account of a group organizing voters to support Vice President Kamala Harris.

Leaders of the newly formed Democratic outreach group “White Dudes for Harris” hit back at technocrat Musk after the group’s X (formerly Twitter) account was temporarily suspended Monday night, following a wildly successful fundraiser earlier that evening.

More than 190,000 people tuned into a massive virtual call, reportedly raising more than $4 million for Harris’s campaign. The group had originally hoped for a turnout of 10,000 people, and to raise $50,000, a milestone they passed before the call even began, according to the organizers.

There were appearances from a few white guys who are reportedly in contention to be Harris’s vice presidential nominee, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Shortly after the call ended, the group’s organizers said they had received notice that their account on X, which Musk owns, had been suspended for supposedly “violating our rules against evading suspension.”

“Seems like @elonmusk might be a little scared,” wrote Ross Morales Rocketto, one of the group’s organizers in a post on X, adding a screenshot of the email.

Mike Nellis, another organizer, also posted a screenshot of the email. “We scared @elonmusk and @DonaldJTrumpJr so much tonight they suspended our account and won’t let us back in,” he wrote. “These guys are running scared of the success we’ve had tonight, but we’re not going to quit. More coming tomorrow (unless they shut down my account too!)”

The group’s account was restored by Tuesday morning.

It’s not clear that Musk was involved in the account’s suspension, but Rocketto and Nellis aren’t all that crazy to think that the X CEO might be behind it.

Musk endorsed Trump earlier this month and has since been increasingly outspoken about the presidential race online, repeatedly claiming that President Joe Biden has been “importing” immigrants into the country to illegally vote for Harris. Last week, Musk posted a parody ad for Harris, which used an A.I.-generated version of her voice to call Harris the “ultimate diversity hire,” raising concerns about the use of A.I. in political campaigns.

While Musk boosted the conspiracy theory that Google was suppressing answers about Donald Trump, many have accused him of making it difficult to follow Harris’s campaign’s X account in the days after she became the presumptive nominee.

Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees Tuesday, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate revealed new details on a social media account believed to belong to Trump’s attempted assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.

In his opening remarks, Abbate said that the FBI has not yet determined Crooks’s motive, but investigators have discovered a social media account “believed to be associated with the shooter in about the 2019–2020 timeframe,” when Crooks would have been roughly 15–17 years old.

The activity of the account, which posted over 700 comments, Abbate said, “appear[s] to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and [is] described as extreme in nature.”

While stressing that investigators are still working to confirm that the account belonged to Crooks, Abbate said, “We believe it important to share and note it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter’s potential motive and mindset.”

If verified, the indications of Crooks’s political extremism would shed light on the would-be assassin’s yet obscure politics; Crooks made a $15 donation to a progressive organization in 2021 but was a registered Republican.

Donald Trump couldn’t come up with a single coherent explanation for why his supporters should also back J.D. Vance.

During an interview on Fox News Monday, host Laura Ingraham pushed Trump to explain his decision to tap Vance despite widespread criticism from Republicans, whom she readily dismissed as longing for “the days of open borders and perpetual war.”

“How do you expect to use him in this campaign, and what can you say to our viewers tonight to reassure them that this was an excellent pick?” Ingraham asked.

“Well, first of all, he’s got tremendous support, and he really does among a certain group of people—people that like families. He made a statement having to do with families,” Trump said. “He’s not against anything, but he loves family. It’s very important to him. He grew up in a very interesting family situation, and he feels family is good.”

So, that’s Trump’s main selling point to the public on Vance: He was an “excellent pick” because he “feels family is good.”

Setting aside the fact that it’s a canned answer, Trump purposefully presented a gross mischaracterization of Vance’s incendiary comments.

While pronatalism is at the core of many of Vance’s outlandish policy ideas, the Ohio senator is currently facing the most backlash for his claim that Democrats are all “childless cat ladies,” which is presumably the statement Trump was referring to in his answer.

Vance later doubled down on this comment, saying that Democrats had become “anti-family,” and “anti-children.”

CNN reported Monday that Vance has made multiple disparaging remarks about childless Americans in the past, calling Democrats without kids “childless sociopaths.” On a podcast in 2020, Vance said that America’s “leadership class” was “more sociopathic” than those with children, resulting in a “less mentally stable” country.

The reason Trump actually picked Vance has nothing to do with families at all: According to Trump’s advisers, Vance was picked to appeal to white men.