Old Man Trump Is So Desperate for a War, He’s Inventing Them Now

Donald Trump made up a fictional war with France Wednesday, and then claimed to have stopped it.

During a speech in Duluth, Georgia, Trump—who previously touted himself a “wartime president” but now lies about how peaceful and safe his time in office was—was bragging about his record when he falsely claimed he really had prevented an international conflict.

“You have no idea what I did in the White House. I stopped wars … with France!” Trump said.

“France, you know the France story? They were gonna charge us, think of this, 25 percent to all Ameri—I have to protect American companies, whether we like ’em or not. Some of ’em I didn’t even like. You know Google is treating us much better, did you notice that? What happened to Google? They’re treating us much better.

“They say McDonald’s was one of the most viewed things that they’ve ever had,” Trump cheered.

While there was obviously no threat of war with France, it’s possible that Trump was referring to a trade skirmish with France from his time in office. Paris passed a digital services tax on large tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, in 2019. In response, Trump threatened to place tariffs of up to 100 percent on French goods, such as champagne and luxury bags.

Undeterred, France ordered the tech companies to pay up in 2020. After Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021, he suspended Trump’s plan for retaliatory tariffs against France.

So the “war” Trump stopped wasn’t a war, it was a trade fight. And he didn’t even stop it. If anything, he escalated it.

But this might explain his incoherent weave from France to Google and back to his favorite subject: himself.

A former model is alleging that Donald Trump groped her in 1993 in a “twisted game” between him and Jeffrey Epstein, The Guardian reports.

Stacey Williams first met Trump in 1992 after being introduced to him by Epstein at a Christmas party. The model dated Epstein for a few months after that. The groping incident occurred in the winter or spring of 1993, when Williams and Epstein were on a walk and he suggested they stop by Trump Tower to visit the real estate mogul.

Shortly after they arrived, Williams said that Trump pulled her toward him and started groping her, putting his hands “all over my breasts,” her waist, and her buttocks. She said that she froze, feeling “deeply confused,” and believed she saw Epstein and Trump smiling at each other.

After the incident, she left Trump Tower with Epstein, and she felt that he was angry at her.

“Jeffrey and I left, and he didn’t look at me or speak to me, and I felt this seething rage around me, and when we got down to the sidewalk, he looked at me and just berated me, and said: ‘Why did you let him do that?’” Williams said on a “Survivors for Kamala” Zoom call Monday, which included actress Ashley Judd and law professor Anita Hill, among others. While Williams has shared the story in parts on social media before, she gave specific details on the call.

“He made me feel so disgusting, and I remember being so utterly confused,” Williams added, saying the incident appeared to be part of some “twisted game.”

“I felt shame and disgust and as we went our separate ways, I felt this sensation of revisiting it, while the hands were all over me. And I had this horrible pit in my stomach that it was somehow orchestrated. I felt like a piece of meat,” Williams told The Guardian in an interview. The two broke up shortly after that. Williams said she had no idea about Epstein’s pattern of sexual abuse and pedophilia.

Williams said that she later received, through her agent, a special postcard from Trump in 1993 showing an aerial view of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, including a handwritten note in his trademark black marker. It read “Stacey—Your home away from home. Love Donald.”

Trump’s campaign denied the allegations in a statement, with his press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying, “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”

But it fits a pattern of behavior for Trump, an associate of Epstein for many years. At least 26 other women have accused the former president and convicted felon of sexual assault or misconduct. Plus, he was found to have sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s in a civil trial last year. With the election in just a few weeks, Trump’s predatory behavior will matter to many of the voters he needs to return to the White House.

Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie has called for the United States to stop funding Israel, as it targets civilian infrastructure in Lebanon.

Massie posted a video on X Wednesday that showed an Israeli missile strike leveling an apartment building in Beirut, Lebanon.

“If Israel insists on destroying civilian targets in Lebanon, let them buy and build their own weapons. American taxpayers should not be funding this,” the Republican lawmaker wrote.

The U.S. has spent at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since it began its catastrophic military campaign in Gaza after the massacre on October 7.

Massie, a far-right Republican, has been outspoken against America’s unwavering support of Israel’s unchecked military activity in the Middle East, challenging the notion that opposing to pro-Israel policies is a position held solely by those on the far left.

Massie boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in July, calling it a “war rally.” He openly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on attack ads trying to unseat him. He also voted against censuring Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib over her comments criticizing Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

Israel carried out a series of air strikes Sunday that targeted branches of the Al Qard Al Hassan association, a financial association that Israel claims is helping Hezbollah fund its activities, according to the BBC. The strikes against nonmilitary targets hit civilian areas in Beirut, as well as south and east Lebanon.

Israel has killed at least 1,800 people in Lebanon in the past five weeks, since expanding military operations there.

In the year since launching its military campaign in Gaza, Israel has killed more than 41,000 people and injured more than 96,700, according to ABC News. This week, the Israeli government began a campaign to empty out (ethnically cleanse) northern Gaza, reportedly cutting off supplies and targeting homes, shelters, schools, and hospitals with airstrikes, displacing thousands of civilians.

In just a handful of hours, Donald Trump’s MAGA allies have gone from arguing that his recent comments about Hitler were misconstrued to just outright claiming that the whole story was completely made up.

During an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Florida Representative Mike Waltz completely rejected the evidence of his eyes and ears, claiming that the Republican presidential nominee’s comments praising Hitler and expecting undying loyalty from his top commanders were phony.

“It doesn’t make sense to me. I find the timing suspicious,” Waltz said.

“And it just completely is divorced from the man that I’ve come to know in Donald Trump, and how he’s dealt with Gold Star families, how he has been caring, how he’s been compassionate,” Waltz continued, referring to the military status given to families who have lost a loved one during their military service.

The far-right revision comes after Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, retired military General John Kelly, told The Atlantic that his ex-boss fit the description of a fascist. Kelly recalled a disturbing exchange he had with the former president while he was still in office, in which Trump expressed frustration over a perceived lack of loyalty from the military.

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two sources that spoke anonymously with The Atlantic. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

Another time, while in a frustrated discussion with Kelly, Trump reportedly asked, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” forgetting that Hitler’s top generals had themselves defied him and made several attempts toward the end of World War II to kill him. Kelly, trying to correct the president, informed him that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”

Kelly recounted that when Trump had raised the matter of “German generals,” he responded by asking, “Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?”

“I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’” Kelly told The Atlantic. “And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.”

But Trump did not know who Rommel was, either.

It’s at least the second time this month that Waltz has rejected the reality of Trump’s rhetoric. Last week, Waltz refused to acknowledge that direct quotes from Trump’s “enemy from within” comments were actually what he said.

“I don’t think that’s what he said, John,” Waltz told CNN host John Berman, before pointing to civil unrest and mass protests during 2020. “I think that’s completely appropriate, the National Guard was rolled out then.… We cannot have, nor should we have, riots in the streets, business owners threatened, and Americans feeling unsafe.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, tried to pay a Washington Post reporter a hefty $500,000 to kill a profile she was writing on the Silicon Valley billionaire.

The reporter didn’t respond to the offer, and the Post published its profile of Shanahan Wednesday morning, where the attempted bribe was revealed. Shanahan made the offer in June, texting one of her associates who was contacted by the Post that she would “pay your friend,” referring to the reporter, “half a million dollars to be a whistleblower” and name the sources for the story.

In making the offer, Shanahan claimed that the sources were spreading false information about her. Shanahan would not respond to multiple requests from the Post beginning in April to sit for an interview, and ultimately the newspaper sent her a list of questions. Shanahan answered that she didn’t agree with some of the Post’s reporting but didn’t provide answers to any of the questions. The Post’s story details Shanahan’s evolution from a Democrat to a MAGA star praised by the likes of Tucker Carlson.

“I’m so sorry you feel it is appropriate to do this for political motivations,” Shanahan told the Post. “It’s a very sad state our country is in.”

Kennedy drew headlines when he announced Shanahan as his running mate in March. Many suspected that he chose her due to her wealth and the fact that she was Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s ex-wife. Later revelations showed that she has extreme views on in vitro fertilization and that she shares Kennedy’s opposition to vaccines, using the example of her autistic daughter as proof of their danger.

In August, she and Kennedy dropped their independent presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, spearheading a “Make America Healthy Again” initiative to back the former president. Such a wealthy benefactor supporting Trump signals that she might be involved in his administration if he wins the election, and doesn’t bode well for public health in America, either. The fact that she tried to bribe a reporter means she shares the former president’s lack of ethics.