Podcast Hosts Laugh in Trump’s Face as He Struggles to Defend Rambling

Donald Trump absolutely flailed during an appearance on a podcast where the hosts openly mocked the former president for his bullshit answers.

During an hour-and-a-half-long interview on Flagrant, a comedy podcast hosted by stand-up comedians Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh, Trump spoke so incoherently that the hosts started to laugh at the Republican presidential nominee.

At one point, Singh asked Trump to speculate about who was responsible for his assassination attempt. As Trump embarked on his nonanswer, he became so blatantly incoherent he had to outright explain his own disjointed speech.

“You know, I do a thing called the weave,” Trump started to explain. “And there are those that are there fair that say, ‘This guy is so genius,’ and then others would say, ‘Oh he rambled.’ I don’t ramble.”

Trump claimed he actually needed an “extraordinary memory” to get so off topic.

“They don’t give you credit for that,” Schulz said, laughing, “that you can go all the way over here, and then get back.”

“I can go so far here, or there,” Trump said. “And I can come back to exactly where I started.”

As the interviewers cackled, it became clear that Trump—as ridiculous as his answers were—was being entirely serious about how impressive his “weaving” was.

Trump continued to explain the weave by repeating exactly what he had already said: “And some people think it’s so genius, but the bad people, what they say is, ‘You know, he was rambling.’”

“Yeah, you really weaved your way out of answering my question. Twice, ” Singh noted.

Later in the interview, Trump spoke so incoherently that the hosts started to openly laugh at the Republican presidential nominee’s “weave.”

“Dwight Eisenhower was sort of a moderate, General Eisenhower. Did you know that they had 8 percent generals president of the United States? Eight percent were generals, 92 percent were politicians, and then you had Trump,” Trump said. “You see, that’s a weave.”

As Trump tried to explain why he had even started to talk about Eisenhower, the hosts snickered, and Trump seemed to grow more and more confused.

“You gotta be sharp,” Trump said. “If you’re not sharp you’re dead.”

At another point, Schulz just couldn’t hold it together when Trump called himself “basically a truthful person.”

Trump’s disastrous appearance comes as his team launches criticism at Kamala Harris, attacking the vice president for appearing on a (far more popular) podcast in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Here’s something no one asked for: sex and dating advice from Donald Trump’s ex-adviser Stephen Miller.

While appearing on Jesse Watters’s Fox News program, Miller, who was seen as “the true driving force” behind Trump’s racist agenda during his presidency, was asked to give relationship advice to the network’s viewers.

Watters claimed that Fox was “getting a lot of texts from women about Miller,” and that his audience sees him as a “sexual matador.”

“What do you have to say for yourself?” asked Watters.

Miller responded with advice for young men. (For context, according to a recent survey, only 10 percent of young people say they watch cable news daily, while 45 percent say they never watch.)

“The best thing you can do is to wear your Trump support on your sleeve,” said Miller. “Show that you are a real man, show that you are not a beta. Be a proud and loud Trump supporter and your dating life will be fantastic.”

Unfortunately, Miller may be espousing lies per usual. According to a 2020 YouGov-Economist poll, while more than half of men say they would date a member of the opposite party, only 35 percent of women say the same. With more young women than ever identifying as left of center, being an out Trump supporter may cut off a significant part of the dating pool.

Progressive Democrats are rallying around Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan amid reports that business executives supporting Kamala Harris want her dismissed.

Billionaire Mark Cuban told Semafor on Tuesday that “if it were me, I wouldn’t” keep Khan next year, criticizing the FTC chair for taking on technology firms over artificial intelligence.

“The bigger picture is, she’s hurting more than she’s helping,” Cuban said, even while acknowledging her admirable antitrust efforts to improve pharmacy benefits.

Cuban’s comments drew a sharp reply from Senator Bernie Sanders, who posted on X Tuesday afternoon that Cuban “is wrong. Lina Khan is the best FTC Chair in modern history.

“By taking on corporate greed & illegal monopolies, Lina is doing an exceptional job preventing large corporations from ripping-off consumers & exploiting workers,” Sanders said, thanking Khan “for what you are doing.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed Sanders’s show of support in her own post Wednesday morning. 

“Let me make this clear, since billionaires have been trying to play footsie with the ticket: Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl. And that is a promise,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her post. “She proves this admin fights for working people. It would be terrible leadership to remove her.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s post alluded to Harris’s recent efforts to court business leaders and corporate executives and draw them away from Donald Trump. Several executives have pledged their financial support to the vice president, even forming a “Business Leaders for Harris” group to raise money. These include Cuban, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and Ken Chenault, the former CEO of American Express who now heads a private equity firm.

Two finance executives told the Financial Times last week that they expected Harris to make more business-friendly appointments to the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Both Khan and Gary Gensler, who heads the SEC, have directed their agencies to go after corporate consolidation and malfeasance, with Khan making pro-worker reforms and Gensler taking on the cryptocurrency industry. Hoffman has made no secret of his desire to see Khan dismissed, accusing her of “waging war on American business.”

Will Harris side with business executives and dismiss Khan, or will she listen to progressives like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and continue President Biden’s efforts to rein in corporate excess? It all depends on whose support the vice president thinks is more vital to defeating Trump.

Fox News host Sean Hannity platformed more Republican lies about the federal government’s response to this year’s hurricane season, despite the fact that the network seemingly had the truth on hand.

“You have DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying FEMA is running out of money and going bankrupt,” Hannity said Tuesday night. “Bankrupt? This has not been a busy hurricane season. This happened to FEMA—FEMA directed more than $1 billion to pay for housing and food for Harris-Biden illegal immigrants.”

“Because this story looks really bad for Democrats in charge, they are trying to just outright lie to you and pretend this is misinformation. This is a deepfake statement by conservatives. Well, it’s also on the FEMA website,” Hannity continued, providing no visual evidence of such claims. “It’s completely truthful, it’s completely real.”

But Hannity’s source doesn’t jibe with information that circulated even inside the conservative media behemoth. A fact sheet produced by conservatives on the House Appropriations Committee, obtained by Fox, revealed that FEMA “has enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton,” reported Fox News’s senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram. Pergram tweeted about the fact sheet less than 30 minutes before Hannity went on air Tuesday night.

Further, the fact sheet clarified that there is “no funding connection between” the immigration program at the U.S.-Mexico border and the Disaster Relief Fund, noting that there is “no intermingling of funding between these two programs,” and that the only correlation between them is that they are both managed by FEMA.

FEMA has fervently rejected the accusation that it is out of funds, with agency leaders telling ABC News on Sunday that the notion was “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

Republicans, encouraged by lies spewed by Donald Trump, have launched a host of disinformation throughout the 2024 hurricane season. On top of the charge that the Biden administration has diverted funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants enter the country, conservative leaders in heavily affected regions, including Florida and Georgia, have also claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and have conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.

By Tuesday, it became clear to federal officials that the lie that FEMA was out of money had stopped people from actually requesting their aid in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia.

The magnitude of the disaster caused by the bold-faced lies will only come to light after the full hurricane season has passed. On the immediate horizon swirls another massive superstorm, Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which is scheduled to slam the west side of Florida by Wednesday evening. Central Floridian leaders have repeatedly warned that Milton’s arrival at the Sunshine State’s shores will be a catastrophic event that will claim lives and demolish the region, with forecasted 10-to-15-foot storm surges that Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has described as “not survivable.”

After refusing to even do an interview with 60 Minutes, Donald Trump’s campaign is demanding that the CBS show release a full transcript of its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Trump campaign has taken issue with a truncated package that aired on Face the Nation Sunday ahead of the full interview, which showed Harris answering a question one way. But according to Fox News, when the full interview aired the next day, her answer was entirely different.

When host Bill Whitaker asked Harris about the U.S.’s relationship with international war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Face the Nation clip showed that Harris responded, “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

The 60 Minutes interview showed Harris responding quite differently. “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said simply.

The Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, released a statement Tuesday accusing 60 Minutes of “deceptively” editing Harris’s full interview. 

“Why did 60 Minutes choose not to air Kamala’s full word salad, and what else did they choose not to air? The American people deserve the full, unedited transcript from Kamala’s sit-down interview. We call upon 60 Minutes and CBS to release it. What do they, and Kamala, have to hide?” Leavitt said.

It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t even attempt to do the interview, and gave some exceedingly flimsy reasons as to why. 60 Minutes brutally roasted Trump over his baseless excuses for breaking more than 50 years of tradition by not appearing for an interview. It seems that the former president couldn’t handle being fact-checked, nor did he want to face any “tough questions” like the ones that caused him to storm off set in 2020.  

Still, his campaign seems more than willing to nitpick Harris’s performance: Trump went ballistic Wednesday in a post on Truth Social, claiming 60 Minutes had “sliced and diced” Harris’s interview and baselessly insisting she had been hyper-edited into coherency. 

“Lyin’ Kamala’s answers to questions, which were virtually incoherent, over and over again, some by as many as four times in a single sentence or thought, all in an effort, possibly illegal as part of the ‘News Division,’ which must be licensed, to make her look ‘more Presidential,’ or a least, better,” Trump wrote. 

Trump also claimed that the interview violated campaign finance laws and that he had never heard of an interview being edited. However, Trump appeared in an interview that appeared heavily edited on Fox & Friends just three months ago. 

“This is a stain on the reputation of 60 Minutes that is not recoverable—It will always remain with this once storied brand. I have never heard of such a thing being done in ‘News,’” he wrote.