High Ranking GOP Representative Goes on Anti-Somali Rant

A Republican congressman went on a racist tirade Thursday at a conservative town hall on Capitol Hill.

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the U.S. House Majority Whip, went on an anti-immigrant rant, complaining that “Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re gonna call us a racist, you’re gonna call us an Islamophobe.”

“I am done being careful, even the least bit. And I don’t really care where you come from, but if you come to this great country, you have to understand you’re coming here to be an American,” Emmer said to applause from the audience at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s event.

“We celebrate everyone’s culture. We’re happy with that—as long as you are an American. Celebrate your culture, I don’t care, Italian, Polish—you know, Somali, OK? But they don’t assimilate. And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from,” Emmer continued, to more applause from the right-wing crowd.

Emmer’s jab at the Somali community carries weight, considering he’s third in the party’s House leadership. He’s definitely not telling Italian and Polish immigrants who don’t assimilate to “go the hell back to where they came from.” Somali-Americans in Minnesota number about 108,000, and almost half of them were born outside of the U.S. The majority of them have citizenship or legal residency.

President Trump has targeted the community in the past year, accusing them of committing fraud when receiving government assistance and amplifying false smears from a right-wing influencer. Emmer seems to be following his lead. The House whip’s comments came the same day as the Supreme Court ruled that the president could end temporary protected status for Syrian and Haitian refugees. Trump’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the U.S. have taken over the Republican Party.

Former White House national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he unlawfully kept and transmitted classified national security information. The case is a big win for President Donald Trump, who went after Bolton after he exposed embarrassing details about Trump’s first term.

Bolton admitted to sharing classified details with his wife and daughter, which amounts to one felony count. He was accused of 18 violations, but only pleaded guilty to one. Bolton has agreed to pay a fine of over $2 million, and could face up to five years in prison.

The case centered around notes Bolton took for his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, and the information he shared with his family as part of the editing process. During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department tried to prevent the book from coming out, claiming it contained classified information.

The memoir revealed damning details about the first Trump presidency, including Trump’s corrupt foreign policy dealings, his general incompetence, and confirmation that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine until they agreed to investigate Joe Biden, which Trump was impeached for in 2019.

Trump has called his former national security adviser a “lowlife” and a “sleazebag,” and claimed that if he had listened to Bolton’s advice while in office, the U.S. would be in “World War Six” by now.

Though Bolton is just one of many Trump enemies that have been prosecuted at the president’s fancy, CNN reports that the case against him was more sound than the others.

Somehow President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair keeps getting worse.

As temperatures topped 80 degrees Thursday, the festival’s food hall lost power, causing all the ice cream to melt, according to Fox 5 DC reporter Homa Bash.

The food hall wasn’t the only attraction affected by power outages. The much-hyped Ferris Wheel temporarily stopped running Thursday due to generator issues.

In order to cool off, attendees crowded under one of the only sources of shade on the National Mall—Trump’s Temu Arc de Triomphe.

The Great American State Fair was already off to a rocky start Wednesday evening when dozens of attendees were seen flocking toward the exits in the middle of Trump’s address, which was meant to kick-start the two-week event.

The line for admission appeared to dwindle on the festival’s second day.

Also on Thursday, Pennsylvania joined nine other states to pull out of the Freedom 250 gala on the National Mall, including Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Vermont.

A stall celebrating Maine remained empty Thursday, as the state did not send a delegation to Trump’s festival. Connecticut, too, was just “chairs,” according to Bash.

All in all, it seems like Trump’s festival isn’t a resounding success, but who can be surprised when the president has shrunk the meaning of patriotism to be more about him than about the country he leads?

Watergate wasn’t even that bad, according to JD Vance.

The vice president spoke at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California Thursday, and expressed his admiration for Nixon.

“I joked … backstage if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” Vance said. “The idea that it would’ve taken down a presidency is crazy.”

The 1972 Watergate scandal began when operatives associated with Nixon’s reelection campaign were caught attempting to bug the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate Hotel. It was then uncovered that Nixon knew about the break-in, and had secretly diverted payments in order to cover it up. The two-year scandal ended with Nixon resigning during his impeachment proceedings.

The galling conduct by a president—lying to the American people, sending hush money to burglars to conceal their connection to his campaign, using executive privilege to try and withhold evidence—shocked the nation, and resulted in a series of government reforms to create more oversight for the president, including more independence for inspectors general.

The idea that Watergate would have taken down a presidency is not at all crazy. But Vance’s assertion shows that the Overton window for acceptable conduct has shifted. And not by accident: Americans have to wade through a constant barrage of offenses, from Trump being convicted on 34 felony counts for hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, to normalizing political prosecution of enemies, to creating a slush fund for all the January 6 insurrectionists he pardoned after encouraging them to attack the Capitol. That’s to say nothing of his White House ballroom, his gifts to his political donors, and his turning the presidency into a crypto crash grab for himself and his family.

Nixon knew that if the country heard the things he said in private in the Oval Office, his presidency would be over. Trump regularly says far worse out loud.

Vance went on to say that he sees himself in Nixon: “Young senator, vice president, writes some best selling books, is hated by the media — it kind of sounds like JD Vance,” he joked to the crowd on Thursday.

Hopefully America is smart enough to see Nixon in him too.

Earlier this week, the Senate and then the House passed the biggest housing bill in decades by veto-proof margins, and it was set to be signed by President Trump on Wednesday before he abruptly cancelled the ceremony and demanded Congress first pass his voter-suppressing SAVE America Act. But where, literally, is the bill right now? There seems to be some confusion about that—and it has major implications for the bill’s fate.

Michigan Congresswoman Lisa McClain, who chairs the House Republican Conference, said Thursday the bill was on Trump’s desk. If so, that means he has 10 days to sign or uselessly veto it, and if he does neither it could either automatically become law or die by the “pocket veto,” depending on whether Congress is in session on day 10. (I know, it’s confusing.)

“It’s been sent to the president’s desk, [and] it’ll pass in ten days if he doesn’t sign it, is that your understanding?” Leah Vredenbregt of Gray Media asked McClain.

“Yep,” she replied.

But multiple outlets report that the House has not, in fact, sent the bill to Trump.

“House GOP leaders *still* have not sent the housing bill to the White House, I’m told—so the 10-day clock still has not started,” Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller wrote Thursday morning. “Trump and [House Speaker Mike] Johnson are expected to discuss when to send the bill—and start the clock—at their meeting this afternoon, I’m told.”

The same remained true hours later.

“This is not correct,” Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman wrote in reference to McClain’s comments. “The House Republican leadership has not sent the president this bill yet. It is not ‘on his desk.’”

This confusion is as strange as it sounds. Why would McClain claim that it’s on the president’s desk if it isn’t? And if it’s not on his desk, which means the ten-day countdown has not begun, then when is Johnson planning to send it to him? Is he waiting to do so until he knows Congress will be in session on that tenth day, rather than on July 4th recess?

Someone must have the answers, but McClain certainly does not.