Trump’s State Fair Celebrates America With Pancakes, Gagging

The chief attraction at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair made people sick on Monday.

One of the events at the country’s semiquincentennial was a pancake-eating competition that had its four participants gagging and heaving after they’d stuffed themselves with the batter-rich flapjacks. An intern at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Douglas Ford, won the competition, though footage of his success didn’t make it look easy.

Fox News noted that the eating contest was made more difficult by a heat wave that has gripped Washington. The conservative network also ironically referred to the all-you-can-eat competition as a celebration of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement in a chyron.

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive celebration has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae, a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be canceled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program, and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The state fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the festivities, yet even it is more of a Potemkin village than a sincere reverence. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his “Triumphal Arc” proposal sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “The president is bringing down the mood.”

MAGA world is incensed after Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Comey Barrett sided with the liberal justices—and even wrote the majority opinion—rejecting the Trump administration’s attempt to gut mail-in voting.

The court on Monday ruled to uphold a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after the election, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day. The decision effectively saves similar grace periods around the country, especially in big Democratic states. That was enough to set off Republicans.

“A shockingly wrong opinion,” wrote Republican Senator Eric Schmitt. “Justice Barrett joins with the liberal justices to hold that federal election law does not preempt states who allow late mail-in ballots to be counted. This is terrible for election integrity. Another reason we must pass the full SAVE American [sic] Act.”

“Remember Election Day?” said GOP Representative Abe Hamadeh. “This disastrous SCOTUS decision, authored by Justice Barrett, guarantees we’ll keep drifting away from it—as our sacred elections get bogged down by endless mail-in ballots and never-ending counts.”

Trump supporters outside of Congress made their discontent clear, as well.

“Barrett. AGAIN. WTF,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote.

“Amy Coney Barrett was a gigantic fucking disaster of a Supreme Court appointment. Absolutely horrible in the long run. She totally forgot who appointed her to the Court,” right-wing influencer Joey Mannarino said. “Scum of the earth.”

“Barrett is the biggest conservative judicial disaster since Souter,” conservative writer Hans Mahnke commented. “The difference is that few conservatives expected much from Souter whereas Barrett was supposed to be the future of the Court. The worst part is that she’ll be there pushing leftist policies for another 40 years.”

This isn’t the first time the Trump appointee has seemingly backstabbed the movement that put her in position to be nominated for the Supreme Court. Conservatives also raged against Barrett last year after she joined the court’s liberal justices in dissenting against a decision granting Trump emergency relief to use the “Alien Enemies Act” to deport immigrants at whim.

President Donald Trump crashed out Monday after the Supreme Court wouldn’t let him off the hook for the $5 million he owes E. Jean Carroll.

In a tirade on Truth Social Monday, Trump lamented the Supreme Court’s decision to reject Trump’s appeal of a verdict finding him guilty of sexually abusing and then defaming Carroll.

“Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!),” Trump wrote.

“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump continued.

Of course, the case has nothing to do with America, but about Trump’s specific actions. Carroll, a former writer, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1996. When she spoke out publicly against him, he claimed the case was “a complete con job” and a “hoax and a lie.” In 2022, she sued him for both sexual abuse and defamation, seeking damages, and the jury agreed with Carroll that Trump was liable.

Trump had appealed the decision, claiming the case was tainted by the inclusion of “highly inflammatory” evidence—including testimony from two other women who claimed Trump assaulted them, and the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

Trump also railed against the state of New York for creating a temporary law that allowed adult sexual assault survivors in New York to file a civil case against an abuser, no matter when the assault took place, “in order to wrongfully ‘nab’” him.

“It was tailormade, and this Injustice cannot be allowed to stand!” he wrote on Monday.

A new poll has revealed that Americans’ favorite politicians are also the ones that conservatives bellyache about the most.

A Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll published Monday asked Americans to rate a dozen contemporary political figures on a scale of zero through 100, with the bottom of the scale representing “coldness” and the top of the scale representing “warmth.” The winners, by and large, were Democrats.

Leading the popularity contest was former President Barack Obama, with an average rating of 54 on the reputation thermometer. Behind the forty-fourth president was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party at large, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in that order.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also polled high, earning a 42 and 41 rating, respectively.

Two Democrats fell towards the bottom of the poll: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who received a 36 rating, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who came in last in his party with a 30 rating.

Republicans generally fared worse than Democrats. Among them, State Secretary Marco Rubio came in first with a rating of 41. Behind him was Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump, who each received an average rating of 38.

Elon Musk, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and ex-Fox News star Tucker Carlson fared even worse than the team in the White House, scoring less than 36 across the board.

The poll follows a pivotal moment for the burgeoning Democratic Socialists of America, which saw two of its New York–area candidates win big in state primaries last week: Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez. Both of them, as well as the Mamdani-endorsed Brad Lander, beat out candidates endorsed by traditional Democratic leaders in Jeffries and Schumer. Their success underscored a new chapter in left-wing politics in the U.S., and illustrates that candidates tied to Democratic leadership have lost some of their sway with blue voters.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s right to privacy when it comes to their phone location data.

The justices ruled 6–3 to send a Virginia bank robbery case back to the lower courts for review in light of its decision. In 2019, Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing a credit union after police saw him using his phone in the security camera footage of the bank. They then used a “geofence warrant,” which compels tech companies to provide law enforcement with data from all devices at a specific place and time, to identify Chatrie.

Geofence warrants are regularly used, and let the government demand location data and records from anyone near a crime scene without needing to identify an individual target.

Government lawyers argued that Chatrie did not have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, since he had willingly shared his location with Google.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for the majority, with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s liberals.

“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred, writing, “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s physical movements can provide “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

The ruling is a win for data privacy, and will make it harder for the federal government to access personal information stored in the cloud without getting a specific warrant.