Trump Wakes Up From His Nap to Say He’s Calling Putin for His Birthday

President Trump had trouble fighting to stay awake Wednesday while surrounded by members of his administration and the press in the Oval Office.

While his “Trump Accounts” for American children were receiving praise from venture capitalist Brad Gerstner, the president struggled to keep his head from drooping, waking up when he was told “thank you.”

Trump later perked up when a reporter asked him if had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding a plague outbreak in Siberia, and the president happily pointed out that Wednesday is Putin’s birthday.

“I have a call set up. Today is his birthday. Today is Vladimir Putin’s birthday, I’m sure you’re gonna celebrate it. Are you gonna celebrate his birthday? No, I have a call set up,” Trump smirked, his voice sounding hoarse.

The octogenarian Trump has fallen asleep in public dozens of times during his second term as president. Only last week, he fell asleep after announcing a new steel plant in Iowa, and his moments of senility keep adding up. Despite all of that, he remembered Putin’s birthday and thought it was important to mention. Is Trump’s planned phone call really about the plague, or will he congratulate the Russian dictator on many happy returns? Judging by Trump’s mental and physical condition, as well as his past deference to Russia, it could very well be either.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a hypernationalistic speech at the Acropolis in Athens Wednesday in which he lauded the supposed superiority of Western civilization while stoking more fears about immigration.

“The heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so,” Rubio waxed. “We take the West’s conception of these things—heroism, honor, duty—we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here—and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. The civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

“Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world,” Rubio continued. “Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word nationalism became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process we opened our borders, and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay. And with every passing year, we seem to outsource more of our sovereignty.”

Rubio went on to warn against immigration, amplifying the xenophobia that is a central tenet of both the MAGA movement and the larger international far-right.

“We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece. In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration,” he said.

Those on the far-right, including Elon Musk, praised the speech—while others pointed to it as a possible sign of Rubio’s long-suspected intentions to run for president in 2028. Either way, the incendiary address reaffirmed the aesthetic importance of ancient Greece to right-wingers.

“This is the classical understanding of politics—and of statecraft—that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim. Reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization,” Rubio continued. “We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.”

A Democratic congressional candidate in Arizona says she was sexually assaulted while trying to repair one of her campaign signs.

The Phoenix New Times reports that Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic nominee in Arizona’s 8th congressional district challenging incumbent Republican Representative Abe Hamadeh, reported being hit over the head this summer in a dark parking lot in Sun City, Arizona, just after 2 a.m. on a Friday as she walked to the damaged sign. She awoke to her rapist pulling his penis out of her, she told the publication.

He said, “—ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” Greene-Placentia said to the New Times, which she filled in her head as “Democratic bitch.” She’s not clear on what exactly he said.

One leg was out of her jeans, and she remembers swinging her leg after another man approached. She heard him say, “Not even worth it,” before he left the scene. She was left face-down in the parking lot, her SUV still running with the trunk open. Greene-Placentia doesn’t remember putting her jeans back on, closing the SUV’s trunk, or leaving the scene to return home.

“It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” she said to the newspaper. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”

Greene-Placentia said she had stopped to fix her campaign signs late at night numerous times previously, sometimes with her husband, Alex Placentia, or a campaign staffer. She hasn’t done so since she was raped. She thinks she suffered a concussion, and reported being covered in bruises after the attack.

Initially, Greene-Placentia tried to forget about being attacked, but said she decided to report her assault because she campaigns on fighting for the people of Arizona, “and I didn’t feel like I could keep saying that if I weren’t also fighting for women that are victims of sexual assault.” She told her campaign staff about it the following Sunday, and her husband on Monday. Two weeks later, she reported the rape to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, according to a police report.

For two days after the assault, Greene-Placentia was “missing in action,” her campaign manager Isaiah Lopez and her husband told the New Times. She vaginally bled for three days after the rape, according to the police report. She said she was a “very angry person” for days and weeks afterward.

“I want a fucking rematch. I want to call them out. I want to like, go on TV and say ‘Let’s go again and don’t come at me from behind,’” she told Lopez and her husband. Her campaign held a staff meeting at a gun range because she felt so angry.

Hamadeh has yet to comment on the alleged rape, but in July, he defended right-wing influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are accused of strangling women unconscious and raping them and face charges of sexual assault, sexual exploitation, and child pornography in Europe.

Greene-Placentia is vowing to press ahead with her campaign.

“I need to let women know that it’s okay to talk about it,” Greene-Placentia told the New Times. “We’re asking people to stand up and donate or volunteer. We’re asking those folks to be uncomfortable, as [Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes] says; then I have to be willing to be uncomfortable too.”

Colorado minister and Republican gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx has declared that he shoved his wife in the past—and he’d do it again.

The admission came by way of a campaign video call with his supporters Tuesday evening, during which Marx shamelessly confessed that he pushed his wife against a door supposedly to teach her a lesson about self-defense.

“Show the before and after; they don’t want the full truth—that my wife was fake-crying, suckered me in,” Marx told his donors. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh are you OK?’ and she does a spinning back kick into my [groin].

“I was like, ‘OK, you actually can protect yourself,’” Marx recalled.

Marx’s wife, Eileen, then appeared on camera, placing her arms around his neck while claiming that she did a “rear choke” defense.

Both Marx and his wife have black belts in karate.

“People have called us the real Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” Marx claimed, referring to the 2005 blockbuster starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “How many wives actually grab a backpack and put a tomahawk, night vision, put a grenade in their coat pocket—we’re not normal.”

“I’d do it again,” he proclaimed. “I’d do everything again except get close to her to let her kick me, because she’s sneaky.”

Marx similarly admitted to the allegations during a local radio interview on Friday, claiming that he had shoved his wife “just to startle her” and reiterated that she was “fake-crying.” In the same interview, Eileen Marx said she did not believe the rough encounters with her husband constituted domestic abuse but that they had instead reminded her that she does “need to train.”

“What he did—eight years after that, I got my first-degree black belt,” Eileen Marx said, noting in other portions of the interview that she grew up in an abusive home, and that the incident with her own husband had inspired her to start teaching women’s self-defense classes.

“This was nothing like domestic abuse. This was a karate lesson in our house,” Eileen Marx told the radio show.

Marx has repeatedly claimed that the media has unfairly pegged him as a domestic abuser—but in truth, Marx has been telling variations of this story for years, some much more disturbing than the latest iteration. In 2021, the former Marine turned priest laughed while recalling “grabbing her and slamming” his wife after she suggested that he could protect her.

“It was a decent push,” he said at the time, beaming. “She hit that and started crying, bent over, facing the opposite way.”

Still, that’s not the only abuse allegation facing the Republican gubernatorial hopeful: Marx has also been accused of throwing his toddler across a room and pulling a knife on a psychiatrist attempting to treat him.

On the radio, Marx said both stories were true.

Recalling the incident with his small son, Marx said he “grabbed” his son because the child was “hurting his sister.”

“I picked him up, launched him, onto his bed,” Marx said. “That’s when he started crying.”

Marx said he initially shared the story as a warning for young fathers who are struggling to parent and do things “they don’t want to do,” urging people to get psychiatric help.

“I did not hurt my son,” Marx insisted.

The couple are the co-founders of All Things Possible ministry, an entity that critics have derided as a “potentially dangerous” operation, according to a September report by The Guardian. In the last year, the group has funded out-of-state surveillance projects and hired private security contractors. It is also connected to a “network of other self-appointed sex-trafficking rescue groups whose leading figures have attracted significant controversy,” according to The Guardian.

Marx was the chair and president of All Things Possible until his bid to become Colorado’s next governor commenced last October.

In June, Marx claimed during a local TV interview that he was forced to kill someone when he was seven years old. When pressed if he had killed more people, Marx responded: “Does it matter?”

The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is combing the bottom of the barrel to fill prosecutor vacancies.

The New York Times reports that the office has resorted to hiring lawyers with criminal records, misconduct allegations, and a love of conspiracy theories to fill the void left by the departure of nearly 300 career, nonpartisan employees following the start of President Trump’s second term and his hiring of conservative activist Harmeet Dhillon to lead the bureau.

Among the new hires is David Michael Levin, a conservative lawyer who was convicted of hacking into the Lee County, Florida, election system in 2015 and 2016 as a political stunt. Levin later served a 20-day jail sentence with two years of probation. DOJ policy allows for people with misdemeanor convictions to be hired after a seven-year gap, but apparently interfering with elections was still not a red flag.

Last month, another court ordered Levin to pay more than $200,000 in damages after finding he had engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation and civil conspiracy in a case involving insurance fraud.

Another prosecutor hired by the office, David Vandenberg, had a history of complaints of volatile and angry behavior toward his colleagues as an assistant district attorney in El Paso, Texas. A local judge even barred him from a courtroom for dressing down a court official. He is now facing animal neglect charges.

Former gambling executive James Breslo, who used to host the podcast Hidden Truth, also joined the DOJ under Dhillon’s leadership. His podcast attacked Alcoholics Anonymous in an episode titled “AA Kills,” examined UFOs, and hosted bigot Laura Loomer, who pushed unproven claims that the 2017 Las Vegas strip mass shooting was a plot by the government or religious terrorists.

Another hire, Daniel Flickinger, lost his job at a Birmingham, Alabama, law firm in 2020 for saying in a Facebook post that it was good that George Floyd died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”

Dhillon has defended these people and the other 130 new hires during her tenure, saying in a statement, “For years, the civil rights division recruited from a narrow pipeline of progressive activists and called it excellence.”

“We are hiring trial lawyers,” Dhillon said. “The attorneys The Times singled out have collectively tried hundreds of cases, prosecuted those who prey on trafficked children, won at the Supreme Court and practiced law for decades. That is the experience this division needs to enforce civil rights laws for every American.”

Meanwhile, Dhillon has willingly joined the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, even dropping multiple school desegregation cases.