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Fans of Donald Trump did not react well on Friday morning when Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can proceed with prosecuting the former president and his co-defendants on RICO charges related to attempted tampering with the 2020 presidential election vote totals.

The ruling, which put the trials on hold, did demand she cut ties with lead prosecutor Nathan Wade or step aside.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump vowed not to cut Social Security if he won the election. But during a recent interview, the 2024 GOP presidential nominee told CNBC, "There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting."

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is campaigning on protecting Social Security and Medicare.

Tall tales about China influencing the 2020 presidential election with nefarious bamboo-filled ballots were ridiculed by most elections experts -- but not by Cochise County Recorder David Stevens.

CNN's Donie O'Sullivan reported on Friday that Stevens has invested $200,000 in purported "fraud-proof" paper to use for ballots in elections, only to see the returns on that investment go up in smoke.

Donald Trump has fully captured the Republican National Committee and stacked its leadership with allies and family members, much to the disappointment of some longtime GOP activists.

Al Cárdenas has twice led Florida's Republican Party, served on the RNC's executive committee, and chaired the American Conservative Union, which hosts the annual CPAC event, but he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he barely recognizes the national GOP organization after the MAGA takeover.

Donald Trump's former attorney claims the obstruction charge in his classified documents is weak because the former president left behind "dozens" of banker boxes filled with papers.

Jim Trusty, who served as the former president's counsel to defend against accusations that he hoarded classified documents from the White House at his Mar-a-Lago estate but quit in June, cast doubt on the strength of the case on CNN's "The Source" with Kaitlan Collins.

Setting aside for the moment his contempt for Donald Trump, former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele claimed the former president will come to regret his "hostile takeover" of the RNC because it will lead to his loss in the 2024 presidential election.

In a column for MSNBC, the co-host of the network's "The Weekend" suggested sticking the RNC with loyalists will lead to a bevy of yes-men giving a thumbs up to anything he wants whether it makes sense or not.

Noting that Trump put in place daughter-in-law Lara Trump to lead the way as co-chairman, he wrote, "An army of Trump-installed loyalists are replacing senior staffers to run the Republican National Committee. With the general election just eight months away, don’t expect this to look anything like a typical operation focused on getting out the vote, reaching out to undecided voters, standardizing messaging across campaigns, and doing other normal tasks. Instead, this will be a group solely devoted to the glorification of Trump."

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And that, he suggested, will be their — and the party's — downfall because it will lead to "groupthink."

"Staffers [will] make bad strategic moves because they can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t think like they do. It will lead to self-censoring, as staffers who have ideas that might rub Trump the wrong way will keep their heads down. And it will set the party up for another string of defeats, all the way up the ballot to Trump himself," he predicted.

Citing what he called the "decapitation of the RNC," Steele explained the dismantling of much-needed voter outreach programs are already underway that will cripple the party in November, particularly when it comes to roping in so-called swing voters.

"The RNC's extreme makeover undermines this goal of attracting swing voters," he writes. "This slice of the electorate has repeatedly rejected candidates who talk like Trump, act like Trump, and back Trump’s 'Big Lie.' Yet far-right election deniers now have their hands on the organization’s levers of power," he explained before pointing the finger at Lara Trump over her lack of qualifications for her new job.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been given a choice by Judge Scott McAfee — she can remain on the case against Donald Trump, if she chooses to remove lead prosecutor Nathan Wade.

The judge handed down a 23-page decision Friday morning that found no conflict of interest had been proven by Trump and his co-defendants. But McAfee found significant appearance of impropriety that infects the prosecution team, and asked Willis to remedy that situation.

White House counsel Edward Siskel on Friday sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in which he declared the GOP-led impeachment probe of the president dead.

As Axios reports, Siskel encouraged Johnson to formally drop the impeachment probe and concentrate on solving problems that matter to American voters.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough excoriated Donald Trump's understanding of foreign policy and national security on Friday.

The former president and presumptive Republican nominee told Newsmax host Greg Kelly that European nations weren't spending enough to support NATO, adding that they were actually in more danger from Russia than the U.S. due to their geographic proximity, and the "Morning Joe" host ripped his claims to shreds.

According to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a ruling on Thursday by United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon has the tell-tale signs she is playing the long game to derail a Donald Trump trial if it ever gets started.

After scorching Cannon's ruling on Thursday that left open for Donald Trump the possibility of asking for charges to be dropped against him on constitutional grounds at a later date, Vance claimed that a "nightmare scenario" looms for special counsel Jack Smith.

Federal judge Aileen Cannon finally ran into an argument from Donald Trump's lawyers she found "ridiculous," according to a very relieved legal expert.

The U.S. District Court judge rejected Trump's bid to throw out his classified documents case and appeared to be skeptical of a separate effort to strike down the Espionage Act statute that supports much of the case against him, but MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin told "Morning Joe" that the ruling contained some warning signs.

Judge Aileen Cannon's decision to kick the can down the road when it comes to ruling on the constitutionality of prosecuting Donald Trump for obstructing justice when he refused to return sensitive government documents was blasted by one former U.S. attorney who mocked her written justification.

On her Civil Discourse platform, former prosecutor Joyce Vance took aim at Judge Cannon's ruling for its impenetrable legal prose, including sentences such as, "The overall question presented depends too greatly on contested instructional questions about still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases as charged, along with at least some disputed factual issues raised in the motion.”

Vance called Cannon's lament about “unconstitutional vagueness” worrisome before taking up the judge's key assertion.

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"The Judge’s ruling was virtually incomprehensible, even to those of us who speak 'legal' as our native language. If you tried to write something that was deliberately dumb, this sentence would be it," she argued.

Continuing in that vein, she added, "Trump’s motion didn’t raise any argument that warranted 'serious consideration,' and the court’s determination was made before the 'lengthy oral argument' she heard today, unless she typed her written opinion up on a 15-minute break."

According to Vance, Cannon's writing was remarkably shallow.

"It looks like the kind of sentence a law clerk might decide was insufficiently precise for anyone to understand, which could be its appeal here for Judge Cannon," she wrote before suggesting, "But I’m afraid of what I think it means."

When members of the U.S. House of Representatives are sworn into Congress, they are given a pin as a symbol of their membership. That pin, in the past, was green.

But according to Emma Dumain, a reporter for E&E News, the House Republican majority spent a reported $40,000 to replace it with a pin that had a different color — as they thought the word "green" sounded too liberal/progressive.