Kid Rock Offers Bizarre Defense for His Sad TPUSA Performance

Country music rapper Kid Rock is still trying to convince the public that his bad lip-sync job was a great performance.

The MAGA musician went on Fox News Monday in a fruitless attempt to salvage the national reception of his set from the night before, when he headlined Turning Point USA’s version of the Super Bowl halftime show. During the prerecorded performance, Kid Rock’s mouth regularly did not match the booming voice coming from the speakers.

“There were a lot of questions about what happened during your first song onstage. People were talking about it. It seemed to be a little bit out of whack. What was going on there?” asked host Laura Ingraham.

“Yeah, so it was out of sync,” Rock said, apparently blaming Turning Point’s events production team for delaying his allegedly live vocals.

He then announced that, in order to prove the “haters” wrong, he was planning to do another set in his Nashville living room with a DJ not only to prove he can he sing but to showcase how a delay can happen live.

“Because number one, if it would have been a lip sync like people are trying—like the left is trying to throw me under the bus again, the mainstream media, the social media trying to amplify it—it would have been super easy to sync it up if it was prerecorded,” Rock continued. “It was very difficult for the Turning Point production crew—who, by the way, I can’t say enough good things about.

“It was just a syncing issue that they have, and I know they tried to get it right, it was very difficult,” Rock insisted. “But I’ll answer all the haters tomorrow, and we’ll put ’em back in the ‘shut up and go back trying to report the fake news.’”

Droves of viewers caught on to Rock’s bad lip sync Sunday, likening his vocal talent to famed fakers Ashlee Simpson and Millie Vanilli. Others claimed that Rock’s set was “worse” than one of Frankie Valli’s cashed-out 2024 performances, in which the “Sherry” singer hardly moved his mouth at all.

Just a fraction of the country actually watched the conservative-funded alternative to international phenomenon Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, however. Early estimates reported that while 128 million Americans tuned in to watch Bad Bunny rap in Spanish, just 6.1 million people streamed Turning Point’s option on YouTube.

Sorry, Canadians, it’s time to pack up your skates—Donald Trump says China is going to take away your ice hockey.

In a scattered tirade on Truth Social Monday evening, Trump claimed that Canada’s national pastime was coming to an end while threatening to block the opening of a newly constructed 1.5 mile-long bridge connecting Ontario to Michigan.

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote.

Trump seemed particularly pissed that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had distanced himself from the United States, and “wants to make a deal with China—which will eat Canada alive.”

“The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup,” Trump wrote, implying that a new trade deal with China could have extreme—and inexplicable—cultural consequences. This kind of racist nonsense is to be expected from a president who’s built his career on taking slap shots at immigrants.

While Carney had attempted to thaw economic relations with China last month, he has also been very clear that Canada has “no intention” of pursuing a free trade deal with China, acknowledging that it would completely rupture his country’s relationship to the United States. That doesn’t mean he held back from criticizing Trump on the world stage, though.

Trump whined that Canada would no longer stock American booze, even though that decision was in retaliation for his sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, and that it still had steep tariffs on U.S. dairy products—even though those tariffs only apply after the U.S. makes a Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada.

On the subject of the new bridge, the president falsely claimed that Canada owned both sides of the new bridge and “built it with virtually no US content.”

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s spokesperson, Stacey LaRouche, pointed out that while Canada had completely financed the $4 billion bridge, it was “built by union construction workers from both sides of the border—and it will be operated under a joint ownership agreement between Michigan and Canada.”

On the other side of the bridge, Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens expressed disbelief at Trump’s rant. “It’s just insane,” he said. “I really can’t believe what I’m reading.”

Nor should he—because it’s all complete nonsense.

Representative Thomas Massie got the Justice Department to unredact billionaire and former Victoria Secret CEO Les Wexner’s name in the Epstein files, all while exposing the DOJ’s complicity—or incompetence—in the process. 

Massie was one of a few members of Congress who were able to view the Justice Department’s unredacted files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Monday. 

After viewing the files, Massie asked why the name of a “well known retired CEO” was redacted.  

In response, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that Wexner’s name was redacted because it was on the same page as the names of victims. “We have just unredacted Les Wexner’s name from this document, but his name already appears in the files thousands of times,” Blanche announced. “DOJ is hiding nothing.”

Massie responded quickly. 

“This is significant because Kash Patel testified to Congress that FBI had no evidence of other sex traffickers. This is FBI’s own 2019 document listing Wexner as coconspirator in child sex trafficking. It wasn’t unredacted until tonight,” he said, suggesting that FBI Director Patel may have very well committed perjury when he testified to Congress. “Here DOJ acts as if they were justified in redacting the men’s names simply because the document contains victims’ names. Tonight they learned you can redact victim names while still publishing the other names, per our law.”

It’s clear at this point that the DOJ is not prioritizing transparency, it’s prioritizing status and reputation. The FBI considered Wexner as a potential co-conspirator in child sex trafficking seven years ago, and for the last seven years, Wexner has walked the earth as a free—and very rich—man. And if the FBI was sitting on Wexner’s name for that long, who else is hiding under those black bars?

Donald Trump spoke to Palm Beach police back in 2006 about Jeffrey Epstein’s inappropriate activities with teenage girls, newly released government files show.

The Miami Herald reports that In July of that year, as Epstein’s criminal sex charge became known to the public, Trump spoke to Michael Reiter, Palm Beach, Florida’s chief of police at the time, about what Epstein was up to.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told the police chief, according to a recently released October 2019 FBI interview with Reiter.

The information contradicts what Trump has publicly said about Epstein’s crimes and when he knew about them. In July 2019, during his first presidential term, Trump was asked by reporters if he knew that Epstein sexually assaulted girls. Trump replied, “No, I had no idea. I had no idea.”

Trump’s interview with Reiter tells a different story, according to the FBI file. He called Ghislanie Maxwell Epstein’s “operative,” saying that “she is evil and to focus on her.” Trump also said that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there,’” and that he threw Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago country club.

Reiter retired as police chief in 2009, and confirmed to the newspaper that he was interviewed by the FBI in 2019 and that he spoke to Trump in 2006. An FBI official denied that Trump spoke to the police chief, however.

“We are not aware of any corroborating evidence that the President contacted law enforcement 20 years ago,” the official told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Maxwell refused to answer any questions during her deposition with the House Oversight Committee Monday, saying through her attorney that she would only speak if given clemency by President Trump from her 20-year prison sentence related to her assistance to Epstein’s sex crimes. One wonders how much more Maxwell and the president know about all of Epstein’s misdeeds that they aren’t talking about, and what they are hiding about themselves.

It seems even giant oil companies have more scruples than the Trump administration and its allies.

Exxon swiftly dropped a couple of its longtime lawyers earlier this month after the attorneys’ names were revealed in the Epstein files, the sprawling investigation into prodigious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Exxon and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison notified courts in Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, and Washington state that the white-shoe law firm would no longer represent the company in several cases attempting to hold the oil behemoth accountable for climate change, reported Politico’s climate newswire E&E News.

Attorneys with Paul Weiss will continue to represent Exxon in a case in Massachusetts. No other law firms withdrew their staff from the aforementioned cases.

The legal filings did not provide a specific reason for the firm’s departure, but they came amid growing public scrutiny related to Paul Weiss’s longtime chairman, Brad Karp, who was recently revealed to have had email exchanges with Epstein. One such exchange drew particular ire from the firm’s partners, documenting an instance in which Karp offered his pro bono legal opinion on a plea deal related to Epstein’s solicitation of a minor for prostitution.

Karp spent his entire 40-year career at Paul Weiss and led the firm as chair for 18 years. As such, he helped build the careers of many of the attorneys at Paul Weiss. Under his stewardship, the firm became Exxon’s chief legal defense, representing the company in more than a dozen consequential cases. He was stripped of his leadership position at the company last week, citing recent “distractions,” though he will stay on as partner.

Yet Republicans in Congress—and presiding officials in the Trump administration—have so far failed to hold anyone named in the Epstein files accountable. Perhaps most notable of the scot-free bunch is the president himself, who was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files.

All in all, Donald Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache. But last week, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer and did not find credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.