JD Vance Tries to Be Funny and Comes Across Weird

Vice President JD Vance just asked Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton out for drinks.

Vance’s strange invitation came during a Friday rally in his home state of Ohio for embattled Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“[Vivek] Ramaswamy is running against a crazy person,” Vance said. “Amy Acton, I have to be honest with you, I don’t know that much about her, other than she was the woman who wanted to mask all of our two-year-olds and keep them from going to school.” Acton served as the head of the Ohio state Health Department from 2019-2020.

“Now I did promise Amy that I would meet her at a bar later,” Vance continued. “I understand that she’s into that sort of thing. So I’m gonna try to get to know her a little bit better.”

This is yet another shot in a cheap GOP smear campaign to convince Ohio voters that Acton is some raging alcoholic and drug addict. The Ohio Republican Party has run ads calling Acton “unstable” and violent based on a 911 call from 2019 in which her daughter said she was “drinking and throwing things” while on medication, arguing with her stepfather in their home. Police arrived, made a report, and nothing came of it. Seven years later, and it’s the Ohio GOP’s primary dirt on Acton, with Vance even sampling the low-hanging fruit.

Acton denies that she has ever had a drug or alcohol problem. She and Ramaswamy, the hedge-fund billionaire and failed pharmaceutical startup founder, are locked in a fairly close midterm race for the governorship.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the U.S. would lift sanctions on the sale of Russian diesel—a move that will help Russian President Vladimir Putin far more than it’ll help Americans.

The Treasury Department announced that the U.S. would waive sanctions on Russian diesel sold to the global market until April 2027. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that Russia would “immediately” supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace. Russia agreed to supply another 500,000 tons in November and then “1,000,000 tons thereafter,” Trump added.

Javier Blas, the energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg, observed that these commitments to the United States were too small to make a “meaningful impact” on the nationwide surge of diesel prices.

In reality, 300,000 tons is equivalent to only 2.2 million barrels, Blas wrote in a post on X. To give you an idea of just how little that really is, before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 3.6 million barrels of refined petroleum products traveled through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Now only 677,000 barrels of refined products are moved through the essential trade passageway every day.

Meanwhile, Russia will get the right to sell its oil globally. Congress last month passed a sweeping sanctions bill, which Trump signed, punishing countries that purchase Russian oil. Now it seems the United States is one of them.

If Trump thinks his latest move cozying up to Putin will potentially help in the upcoming midterm elections, he has another think coming.

Turning Point USA’s AmeriFest returns this December, and the speaker lineup is once again a proper who’s who of the MAGA-verse.

The event, which takes place in Phoenix, Arizona, from December 17 to 20, will again be headlined by Vice President JD Vance. Former press secretary Karoline Leavitt, former White House adviser and far-right activist Steve Bannon, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, former presidential candidate Ben Carson, right-wing provocateur Nick Shirley, former Representative Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump Jr., Erika Kirk, and a host of other prominent voices on the right will also be speaking.

Notably absent from the list of esteemed speakers is Tucker Carlson, as he was a large part of the reason last year’s AmeriFest—the first since TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination—was largely unsuccessful. Carlson got into a back-and-forth with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in 2025 after Shapiro called him and Candace Owens “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Carlson responded by attacking Shapiro’s fealty to Israel, and the entire event became a stark representation of the serious rifts within the conservative movement. This year will follow what will likely be an unsuccessful midterm election performance by the Republican Party, which may in turn impact the nature of the event.

The United States issued sanctions on the International Criminal Court Friday, just hours after President Donald Trump lost the Nobel Peace Prize to one of the institution’s former judges. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions cutting the court off from any U.S.-based financial services, technology companies, and U.S. currency. The Trump administration set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies to wind down their business with the war crimes tribunal. 

“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video statement on social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”

Rubio has previously argued the court has become “radical and extreme,” though Trump has outright admitted Rubio’s campaign against the ICC is meant to protect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  

U.S. officials maintained that these sanctions had been in the works for months, and the timing so close to the Nobel Prize award ceremony was merely coincidental, according to the Associated Press. But these sanctions are exactly the kind of petty behavior we’ve come to expect from a president who’s spent years begging for the prestigious award.

Instead, the award went to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer with a decades-long career. Last year, Pillay led a United Nations commission that found the Israeli government had committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Nobel committee said Thursday that Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

Pillay took an immediate shot at Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday. “Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said, causing the room to erupt into laughter. 

Trump attacked the ICC after it issued arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders, including Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Since then, the U.S. has sanctioned court officials and prosecutors, as well as other international leaders who document and speak out about Israel’s crimes, including U.N. Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

The White House has chosen its new press secretary: MAGA communications adviser Katie Zacharia.

The 42-year-old was previously the senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social; a frequent commentator on Fox News, Newsmax, and CNN; and a former employee of Fix California, a nonprofit founded by former acting director of national intelligence and longtime Trump ally Ric Grenell.

The news of Zacharia’s ascension to the White House inner ring was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by CBS News.

As a media commentator, Zacharia has shared her most extreme takes, including that the abortion pill mifepristone came straight from Nazi Germany.

“The abortion pill, Mifepristone … is connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps,” she wrote on X last fall. “Zyklon-B was originally used as a pesticide and marketed by the German Corporation for Pest Control, now known as Detia Degesch GmbH. Degesch, in which German chemical company I.G. Farben had a 42.5% interest and on whose board of 11 it had five seats, was the sole producer of the gas. According to the New York Times, ‘I.G. Farben played so important a role in Hitler’s war machine and in the Holocaust that it came to be called “the devil’s chemist.”’ It manufactured Zyklon B, the gas-chamber poison, among many other products, and its factories exploited more than 35,000 slave labourers, many from Auschwitz. It even built a concentration camp of its own to improve efficiency.”

It’s not clear where she came up with this deranged conspiracy, as mifepristone was actually developed by a French scientist and not approved for sale in France until the 1980s. The corporate history Zacharia hinted at is much more complicated: The company that developed Zyklon B was eventually, after decades of mergers and spin-offs, taken over by the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Sanofi also acquired the company that manufactured mifepristone, Roussel Uclaf, in the late 1990s.

Aside from her paid media gigs, Zacharia also had a brief stint working under ex–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, working as a spokesperson for the agency between February and March, according to her LinkedIn.

In that time, Zacharia attacked Senator Richard Blumenthal on social media, accusing the Connecticut Democrat of spreading “fear-mongering lies” about ICE’s takeover at airports. In the same post, she lauded the agency’s arrest record, claiming that it was “heroic” for removing “violent criminal illegal alien predators.”

But she wasn’t always so opposed to immigrants. From August 2012 to June 2013—shortly after she obtained her J.D. from Pepperdine Caruso Law—Zacharia worked as the manager of fundraising and communications at Compassion for Migrant Children, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the children of immigrant workers.

Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who exited the role in August to join Fox News as an on-air contributor.

The comms expert certainly has her work cut out for her. Zacharia will walk into a Trump administration that is already drowning in an ocean of scandals, battered by recent tidal waves that include reports of Trump officials assisting pro-Russia governments, the president’s repeat invitations for Iran to strike American cities, taxpayer-funded propaganda, and the White House’s decision to cancel $810 million in congressionally appropriated funds, which critics have argued violates federal law.

Only time will tell if she is capable of straightening up the mess.

This story has been updated.