Trump Gets Fact-Check to His Face as He Explains Why He Voted by Mail

President Donald Trump was humiliated in a Cabinet meeting Thursday while trying to defend voting by mail in Florida’s special election earlier this week.

When asked by a reporter why he voted by mail—a process he previously referred to as “mail-in cheating” just days earlier—Trump had no coherent response.

“Because of the fact that I’m president of the United States, I did a mail-in ballot for elections that took place in Florida because I felt I should be here, instead of being in the beautiful sunshine,” he responded, claiming he was in Washington, D.C., leading up to the election and could not have voted in person.

That’s not true. The president was at his Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month, as the reporter pointed out.

“But you were in Palm Beach, sir, the last few weekends—could you have gone in person?” she responded, swiftly dismantling any justification Trump claimed to have for voting by mail.

The president has long blasted mail-in voting as a form of mass voter fraud and a threat to democracy. Last week, he rejected his own party’s bid to end the partial government shutdown, calling on the Senate to pass the SAVE Act before making a deal. The Jim Crow–era voter suppression law would make it significantly harder to vote by mail.

According to the Palm Beach County’s Supervisor of Elections website, Trump also voted by mail in 2020.

Following the lie about his whereabouts, Trump rambled aimlessly to defend himself in trademark style.

“We have exceptions for mail-in ballots, you do know that, right?” he said, fumbling his words as he pointed to exceptions like military service, illness, disability, and “being away.” Not one of those applied to him.

Donald Trump is pretty bad at keeping secrets.

The president said on Tuesday that Iran had given the U.S. “a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” but wouldn’t say what the present (read: bribe) was at the time. Two days later, the president was unable to keep silent any longer, and excitedly revealed the gift to a crew of reporters at a Cabinet meeting.

“Steve, can I reveal the present?” Trump asked U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff.

“You can do anything you want, sir,” Witkoff replied meekly.

“[Iran] said … ‘We are going to let you have eight boats of oil.’ Eight boats. Eight big boats of oil,” Trump said.

The president described not being sure whether Iran was serious, then switching on Fox News and seeing “eight boats that are going right up the middle of Hormuz Strait.… They were Pakistani-flagged. I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re dealing with the right people.’ And actually, they then apologized for something they said, and they said, ‘We’re gonna send two more boats.’”

If this bizarre story is true—Iran previously said it hasn’t been negotiating with the U.S. at all—Pakistan, which has been trying to mediate between the two countries, might not be happy that Trump has made its tactics public.

“I hope I haven’t screwed up your negotiations,” Trump joked to Witkoff.

While eight free oil tankers are nice, the global oil market has been crashing for nearly a month due to Trump’s ridiculous decision to go to war, so it’s not like the vessels are going to reduce gas prices for regular Americans. And despite Trump’s posturing, the conflict doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon.

Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick—who is accused of stealing $5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use for her 2021 campaign—allegedly asked President Trump for a presidential pardon at the White House Christmas party last December.

The allegations against the Florida congresswoman will be the topic of a House Ethics Committee meeting on Thursday, and Republican Representative Greg Steube, also from Florida, has filed a resolution to expel her from the House of Representatives after the committee completes its investigation.

That Christmas pardon request, reported anonymously to The Hill, raises legitimate questions regarding the allegations against Cherfilus-McCormick, who has framed them as a targeted attack on her by the Trump administration. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has publicly supported her, stating that she “is entitled to the presumption of innocence like every other American.” If she is truly innocent, why would she ask Trump for a pardon?

While some Democrats are allowing the hearing to play out, others are already squeamish about the contradictions of the allegations against Cherfilus-McCormick and their own anti-corruption agenda.

“How do you maintain your integrity and objectivity—you’re sitting as a judge now—so how do you maintain that credibility if you’re going to treat Democrats better than Republicans?” Democratic Representative Stephen Lynch told The Hill. “That’s tough to explain.”

Cherfilus-McCormick, her brother, and two others were indicted last November for allegedly stealing $5 million in FEMA disaster relief funds that were paid to her family’s business and her campaign, and were used to purchase a diamond ring for herself.

“My opponent is seeking pardons from Donald Trump while our district can’t afford to pay their rent,” said Elijah Manley, Cherfilus-McCormick’s Democratic primary opponent, on X Thursday. “It’s time to resign.”

Cherfilus-McCormick pleaded not guilty in February.

“While I am limited in what I can address due to an ongoing federal matter, I have cooperated fully within those constraints,” she said in a statement this week. “I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight and challenge these inaccuracies, when I am legally able to do so.”

President Donald Trump was spotted snoozing while his Cabinet members delivered their dismal defenses of his disastrous war in Iran.

As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth discussed military operations in Iran at a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Trump appeared to fight to stay conscious. His eyes fluttered shut, and his head drooped downward.

As Hegseth launched into a rant against the media, who he believes are making Trump’s war seem worse than it actually is, the president slumped over in his seat, keeping his eyes cast downward.

Trump appeared similarly deflated while listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio deliver his own defense of the flailing military campaign in the Middle East.

“This has been an incredibly successful operation. Every day—it may not get covered because, unlike them, we’re not bombing embassies and hotels, we’re hitting military targets—but every day the Department of War lets the drummer get wicked over every portion of Iran that has these military capabilities, and the results are going to bear fruit for the world,” Rubio said.

To the contrary, Iran has rendered many of America’s military bases in the Gulf region uninhabitable, sending troops scrambling to hotels or office spaces to prosecute Trump’s war remotely.

Last week, Trump appeared to doze off while attending a task force Monday aimed at curbing crime in Memphis, Tennessee. Trump has repeatedly been spotted catching up on his sleep during major events and signings, and even admitted that he’d grabbed some shut-eye during Cabinet meetings because they were “boring as hell.”

After Democrats likely snagged a House seat in Salt Lake City County, Utah, in February thanks to court-ordered redistricting, the GOP was furious. Republicans control all four House districts in Utah, and despite about 40 percent of residents voting Democrat in 2024, they considered losing even one unacceptable.

The new maps led to GOP lawmakers launching a petition to try to put the anti-gerrymandering law that had created the Democratic district back on the ballot, where it could be overturned.

We can now safely say the petition has flopped.

But it was close! The Republican group behind the petition spent $4.35 million on “professional signature gathering,” per Deseret News, and recruited powerful allies such as Turning Point Action, Donald Trump Jr., and the president himself.

The petition required valid signatures from 8 percent of voters across the state—141,000 at minimum. The GOP cleared this mark easily, attaining roughly 170,000.

But the petition also needed at least 8 percent of signatures in 26 out of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts, to show that voters across the state wanted the issue brought to the ballot. It was here that Republicans failed. After a nonprofit backing the new maps, Better Boundaries, convinced about 7,000 voters to remove their names from the petition, it fell just short of the 26-district threshold.

The redistricting wars were kicked off by President Trump’s call last June for state leaders to gerrymander their maps to benefit Republicans. It’s crucial that Democrats battle back through their own gerrymandering if they are to regain the House and Senate in the midterms. Since 2025, Republicans have redistricted in an attempt to add seats in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri. Dems have countered through redistricting in California and now, officially, in Utah.

Trump may add an extra layer of complication to the midterms by suppressing the vote before them and attempting to overturn the results if his party loses. We can only hope the public’s general lack of support for the Trump administration will be strong enough that Democrats can pull through.