73-Year-Old Republican Senator Disassociates in Middle of Interview

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy appeared to have a mental episode live on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show Tuesday, adding yet another entry to the long, bipartisan list of alarming age-related lowlights from our country’s leaders. 

“I’m sure Jesus loves him, but everybody else thinks—everybody else …” said Kennedy, 73, before trailing off. You can see it in his face—his eyes and mouth particularly—as he struggles to remember what he meant to say or where he is before ultimately giving up and freezing. 

The broadcast quickly got Kennedy off the screen while Kudlow blamed technical difficulties. 

What Kennedy meant to say was “Jesus loves him, but everyone else thinks he’s an idiot,” a phrase he’s repeated countless times over the years. Kennedy’s moment is reminiscent of Mitch McConnell freezing multiple times in 2023, and with the same dissociative look as Kennedy, simply trailing off mid-sentence, looking as if he forgot who or where he was. 

Gerontocracy has been an issue for some time now, as leaders with clear and obvious health issues often remain in office for far longer than they should, usually out of pride and denial.  Representative Gerry Connolly, Dianne Feinstein, and most famously President Joe Biden are other examples. 

The Department of Homeland Security is urging Americans to dish the dirt on their undocumented ex-lovers.

“From domestic abuser to deported loser,” the official X account for the agency posted Tuesday, sharing the contact number for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tip line.

The unsavory ploy was in response to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who recounted a recent incident in which he said his office “got a tip from someone whose abusive ex overstayed a tourism visa.”

“He is now cued up for deportation,” Uthmeier wrote.

ICE handles more than 15,000 calls per month, according to the agency’s tip line FAQ.

Federal authorities have been tasked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—but actually doing so has forced the agency to seek out immigrants that the administration did not advertise targeting, such as noncriminals and even lawful temporary residents possessing visas or green cards.

But the new urgency behind deportations under the Trump administration has not brewed a happy scenario behind the scenes for federal immigration agents. Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor Veronica Cardenas told MSNBC Sunday that many ICE agents are “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale at the moment.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic reported that ICE agents were considering quitting the agency altogether, calling the job “infuriating.”

“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” one agent told the magazine, complaining that his focus had been redirected to “arresting gardeners.”

Adam Boyd, a former ICE attorney who had resigned from the agency’s legal department, told The Atlantic that the operation had become “a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.” Miller was embroiled in another callous scandal last week when video footage of him as a teenager resurfaced in which he referred to the torture of Iraqis as a “celebration of human life and dignity.”

“We still need good attorneys at ICE,” Boyd said. “There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”

With the Jeffrey Epstein affair having now put President Trump in the rare defensive position for multiple weeks, the president is seething, per Politico’s conversations with unnamed sources within and close to the White House.

In recent days, the president has endeavored to draw national attention to anything other than his perceived bungling of the case of the late notorious sex criminal and his former friend.

But try as Trump might to bend the news cycle to his will, the public eye remains trained, for the time being, on the Epstein issue.

A source close to the White House reportedly told Politico that Trump “is clearly furious,” and it’s “the first time I’ve seen [the Trump camp] sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official reportedly said the president “feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention.” Regarding Trump’s current mindset, the official said, “When you’re working 12 to 15 hours a day to solve real problems and you turn on the TV and see people talking about Jeffrey Epstein, that’s frustrating.”

The frustration is, in part, a recognition that the Epstein issue is “a vulnerability” for the Trump administration, added another source—this one a “White House ally,” who described the controversy as an unforced error on the part of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, both notable (but far from the only) examples of Trump officials who previously stoked the Epstein flames now scorching the president.

“They’re the ones that opened the can of worms on the Epstein conversation. No one made them do this, which makes it sting even worse,” the source said. Trump’s team “would like to move on and talk about the things they think are Ws,” but remains bedeviled by this “overshadowing news cycle.”

Indeed, as congressional Democrats seize on the issue—with some Republican colleagues also joining the charge—the press is, seemingly by the minute, unearthing details about Trump’s relationship with the disgraced financier, and the president’s base is as fired up over the matter as ever. Epstein’s ghost isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Stewart Rhodes is as dyed-in-the-wool MAGA as it gets.

The Yale-educated founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group embraced Donald Trump in 2016—sharing his animus toward the supposed “deep state” cabal controlling Washington—then, naturally, took part in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. (“We should have brought rifles.… I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost,” he told fellow militia members days later.) Trump, in turn, commuted his 18-year sentence.

Now, Rhodes has joined the ranks of MAGA faithful urging the seemingly reluctant president to provide full transparency on the case of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s Justice Department and FBI earlier this month roiled his base with a memo dismissing conspiracy theories alleging that Epstein had kept a client list and did not commit suicide in prison. The president has, in recent days, taken to calling what was once a cause célèbre in Trumpworld a Democratic “hoax.”

At a meeting of the anti-government True Texas Project last week, per video obtained by The Daily Beast, Rhodes expressed his disappointment that Trump was, by his reckoning, being led astray by the deep state.

“I believe 90 percent of his own base understands that Epstein was up to something, and we know that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Rhodes said.

“It’s really disheartening to see President Trump just declare that to be a hoax. I don’t think it is. And I think it’s going to cause him trouble in his own base. It already is,” he continued, per the Beast. “Someone in his circle has convinced him that, ‘Oh this is like Hunter Biden’s laptop story.’ It’s not. This is the deep state’s dirty laundry in the deep state’s greatest Achilles’ heel.

“Their job now is to distract him, run the clock out until he’s gone without him actually going after the root of the deep state, the heart and soul of it,” Rhodes went on. “And I do believe the heart and soul of the deep state is all the dirty laundry that’s held in all those files in the FBI, CIA, NSA against all these political elites.”

Rhodes evidently maintains his faith in Trump as a noble crusader for the truth. In the comments reported by the Beast, he ignores the prospect that Trump’s foot-dragging on Epstein could, possibly, owe to the so-called Epstein files’ inclusion of embarrassing disclosures about the president—who, after all, had a storied relationship with the deceased financier that new reporting is bringing more clearly into view.

Attributing Trump’s survival of the July 2024 assassination attempt to divine intervention, Rhodes remarked, “God saved him for a purpose, and that purpose is to defeat the deep state. It’s not to make great trade deals. It’s not to have a great economy. It’s not any of that stuff. The real heart and soul of it is to defeat the deep state, because if he doesn’t do that, it’s going to be exponentially worse for all of us.”

He urged those in attendance to “keep pushing.”

Nearly three weeks of distraction and denial from President Trump have only raised more questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Epstein’s own brother Mark took to CNN to confirm what Trump wants everyone to forget: He and the pedophile financier were quite close.

“From what you know, from what you saw, how close was your brother to Donald Trump?” CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Mark Epstein on Tuesday. 

“They were very close. They were good friends,” Mark replied. “Jeffrey used to sometimes tell me things that Donald said that were funny. I know Donald was in Jeff’s office a lot back in the ’90s.… It’s documented that Jeff—Donald flew on Jeff’s plane a number of times. I don’t know if they ever checked, but I know Jeff flew in Donald’s plane also, I don’t know if they’ve ever looked at his flight logs. They were good friends.” 

This comes right as CNN released previously unseen images of Trump and Epstein from Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, a connection that was not previously public knowledge. 

Mark Epstein went on to tell Burnett that he had actually taken a flight with his brother and Trump. 

“A couple weeks or a week before that flight I was talkin’ to Jeffrey, and he told me that he was talkin’ to Donald and that he asked Donald, ‘How can you sleep with so many married women?’ And Donald’s answer was ‘because it’s so wrong.’ Now amongst guys that was a funny line, and then when we were on the plane … Jeffrey asked Donald the same question … so that I could hear Donald say it.… For Jeffrey to ask him that question, number one: He would have to know that Donald slept with a lot of married women, and he probably got that information from Donald.” 

“It implies a confidence,” Burnett interjected. 

“That’s not the kind of question you ask a casual acquaintance.… That’s a question that you ask a good friend that you can get away with asking those kinds of questions.”

Mark later said Epstein went on to say that the president is just “trying to cover his butt.”

Just two weeks ago, Trump was acting like he’d only heard of Jeffrey Epstein in passing. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey … Epstein?” he said, pausing as if the name was unfamiliar to him. Now it’s all but obvious that Trump was a confidant of the man responsible for victimizing over a thousand women and girls for years. Feigning ignorance and throwing your base unrelated bones doesn’t work as well when the evidence saying otherwise grows more damning by the day.