Adam Nichols

CNN chief Trump apologist Scott Jennings got a blistering tear-down for his pandering to the president — from a man who used to be the president's biggest fan.

Andrew Schulz, a pro-Donald Trump comedian and podcaster who hosted Donald Trump before the 2024 election, unloaded on CNN conservative commentator Jennings this week, mocking him for what Schulz called the impossible task of defending the president — no matter what.

On Wednesday's episode of his Flagrant podcast, Schulz, 42, went after Jennings after a discussion about Fox News pastor Robert Jeffress claiming Trump understands the Bible's teachings on government better than the Pope.

"That's a hard job, to just cap for that m----------- all the time," Schulz said in the podcast, which was reported on by The Daily Beast. "Yo, just let it go man, he's [messing] up everything, just call it what it is. You don't have to ... cap for this dude."

Schulz then zeroed in on Jennings specifically, taking a shot at the CNN commentator's appearance.

"I see that guy Scott Jennings, he's losing hair," Schulz said. "Do you know that guy who's on CNN and his job is just to be like 'Everything Trump is doing is right?' You can tell he is stressed."

Schulz also referenced Jennings' on-air meltdown earlier this month, when the 48-year-old former Bush strategist exploded at 23-year-old Democratic commentator Adam Mockler, yelling expletives as they argued.

"He's cursing at little teenagers they got out there arguing with him," Schulz said, mimicking the confrontation. "It's like a 14-year-old putting his finger in his face — 'Get your ... hands out of my face!' Like, he's stressed."

Schulz has grown increasingly critical of Trump since the election. In a July podcast episode, he said the president had done the opposite of everything he'd voted for.

"There'll be people that, they'll DM me like, 'You see what your boy's doing? You voted for this,'" Schulz said. "I'm like, 'I voted for none of this. He's doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for.'"

Jennings' outburst at Mockler has drawn calls for his firing from former CNN colleagues, including anchor Jim Acosta, who wrote on Substack, "Lighten up, Scott! Mockler is almost a kid. And a nice one at that. Either way, Jennings should be fired."

CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even one of President Donald Trump's most reliable defenders at Fox News appears to be losing the faith over the administration's Iran strategy.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade openly questioned Monday whether Trump grasps who is actually steering Iran's side of the talks — a day after the president torpedoed Tehran's latest counterproposal.

The moment came as Fox's chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst wrapped up a live update on the war, including reporting by The Wall Street Journal that Iran had offered to dilute some of its highly enriched uranium and ship the rest to a third country, while refusing to dismantle its nuclear facilities.

Kilmeade cut in with a challenge, according to Mediaite.

"Trey, is the president to believe – does he know who he's dealing with?" Kilmeade asked. "Is he dealing with the foreign minister and speaker, or is he dealing with the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]?"

The Fox host kept going, calling the Iranian offer a "huge step back" and warning that the proposal looked like a "total nonstarter." He added: "Makes me think the IRGC has taken over."

Yingst pushed back, telling Kilmeade that Trump understands the dynamic even when Tehran trots out civilian officials. The IRGC hardliners, Yingst said, "are actually calling the shots and they are swaying the negotiations so that they ultimately get what they want."

The exchange landed less than 24 hours after Trump publicly rejected Iran's response on Truth Social.

"I have just read the response from Iran's so-called 'Representatives,'" Trump wrote Sunday. "I don't like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!"

The Washington Post reported Sunday that Tehran's offer was delivered through Pakistani mediators and that the ceasefire that took hold in April is again being tested by drone strikes and incidents in the Persian Gulf.

Iranian state media said Tehran's counterproposal sought recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and compensation for war damages, and that nuclear issues would be hashed out over the next 30 days, CNN reported.

Kilmeade's skepticism is notable because of his long record as a Trump cheerleader on the network the president watches most closely.

A person was killed at Denver International Airport after trespassing onto a runway and being sucked into a Frontier Airlines jet engine Friday night — just hours after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appeared on Fox News to promote a family road trip reality series he'd been secretly filming for seven months while running the Department of Transportation.

The pilot's radio call captured the moment of impact.

"Tower, Frontier 4345, we're stopping on the runway. Uh, we just hit somebody… we have an engine fire," the pilot told air traffic control. "I do have limbs on the runway. ... There appear to be human remains on the runway."

The airport said the person had trespassed onto the runway just two minutes before being fatally struck. An official told ABC News he was consumed by one of the engines. Twelve people were injured and five were taken to hospital.

Duffy issued a statement early Saturday, leading with a warning rather than condolences.

"No one should EVER trespass on an airport," he wrote.

"Late last night, a trespasser breached airport security at Denver Int'l Airport, deliberately scaled a perimeter fence, and ran out onto a runway," Duffy continued. "The trespasser on the runway was then struck by Frontier Airlines Flight 4345 during takeoff at high speed. The pilot stopped takeoff procedures immediately."

The deadly incident came just one day after a Delta Air Lines employee died when an airport tug crashed into a jet bridge at Orlando International Airport.

The back-to-back tragedies have intensified scrutiny of Duffy, a former reality TV star turned Trump Cabinet official who revealed Friday on Fox & Friends that he had spent more than half his tenure as transportation secretary filming a road trip documentary called The Great American Road Trip with his wife, Fox News weekend host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and two of their nine children.

The DOT maintained that Duffy's seven-month filming was done "in small, one-day or two stops" and that "production costs were paid for by the Great American Road Trip, Inc., not taxpayers." Corporate sponsors for the project include Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Google, Comcast and United Airlines — companies Duffy is supposed to regulate.

A Virginia Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a voter-approved redistricting referendum has set a dangerous new precedent — and the Democrats whose voters were disenfranchised are barely putting up a fight, according to a scathing new analysis.

Last month, Virginia voters approved a new congressional map that would have left Republicans with a single safe seat in the southwest of the state. It was part of a broader Democratic response to Trump-backed gerrymandering efforts nationwide.

On Friday, in a 4-3 decision along partisan lines, the state's highest court threw the whole thing out, The New York Times' Jamelle Bouie wrote.

The ruling hinged on a definition. Virginia Republicans argued the first legislative vote on the amendment happened too close to the election because early voting had already begun. The court agreed, broadening the legal definition of "election" to include the entire early voting period — a move the dissent called "in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election."

He then blasted the local Democrats who seemed to roll over and accept the decision.

"Key Virginia Democrats quickly acquiesced to the decision," he wrote. "Don Scott, the speaker of the House of Delegates, said, 'We respect the decision of the Supreme Court,' while Gov. Abigail Spanberger said that she was 'disappointed' but didn’t challenge the ruling or the court’s authority.

"This is a mistake.

"To start, the ruling is absurd. As the dissent notes, 'The majority has broadened the meaning of the word ‘election,’ as used in the Virginia Constitution, to include the early voting period. This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election.'"

The dissent didn't stop there, Bouie wrote. The majority's new definition, it argued, "creates a causality paradox: An election is a process that begins with early voting, but early voting must precede an election by 45 days." The result, the dissent concluded, is "an infinite voting loop that appears to have no established beginning, only a definitive end: Election Day."

The practical consequences extend beyond redistricting. Virginia's constitution bars courts from pulling voters into judicial proceedings "during the time of holding any election." Under the majority's newly expanded definition, courts "could not mandate that voters attend trials in virtually any capacity, other than as a criminal defendant" for the entire duration of any election — a result that would throw the state's judicial system into chaos.

Making the ruling harder to defend, the court had an opportunity to halt the referendum process earlier this year and declined. Invalidating the result only after voters approved it, the analysis notes, suggests "the law here was less important than the politics."

The Democratic response has drawn as much criticism as the ruling itself. House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott said simply that Democrats "respect the decision of the Supreme Court." Gov. Abigail Spanberger called herself "disappointed" but stopped well short of challenging the court's authority.

Columnist Jamelle Bouie, writing in the New York Times, called that posture "a mistake" — and went further, questioning the court's authority to void a sovereign act of the people in the first place.

"On what basis can the State Supreme Court, a creature of that Constitution, invalidate a sovereign decision of the whole people?" Bouie wrote. "The court may have the right to say what the law is, but this doesn't extend to a veto over the people's right to change the fundamental rules of their political system."

Bouie reached back to the founding era to make the point, citing Pennsylvania jurist and Constitutional Convention delegate James Wilson, who argued that "the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power remains in the people" and that "the people may change the Constitutions whenever and however they please. This is a right of which no positive institution can ever deprive them."

It was under that same theory, Bouie noted, that Americans scrapped the Articles of Confederation in favor of the Constitution itself.

The ruling lands against a backdrop of rapid democratic erosion, he wrote. The Supreme Court last week gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, opening the door for Republican-led Southern states to erase majority-minority districts. Tennessee's Republican governor just signed a map dismantling the state's only majority-Black congressional district. And Indiana lawmakers who refused to go along with Trump's redistricting push lost their primaries, demonstrating the president's grip on Republican state politics.

"Democrats must meet the moment," Bouie concluded. "Or move over for people who will."

Sean Hannity and a former Marvel mogul are lobbying the president to hand Florida's term-limited governor one of the most powerful jobs in Washington.

Some of Donald Trump's closest allies want him to tap Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the next attorney general — despite him being a bitter enemy during the run up to the last general election.

Fox News host Hannity and Ike Perlmutter, the former Marvel Entertainment chairman who relocated to Florida and became a fixture in both men's orbits, have been quietly lobbying Trump to put DeSantis in charge of the Justice Department, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Hannity even gave DeSantis a prime-time platform on May 6, lavishing praise on the governor for turning Florida into a billionaire magnet.

DeSantis, asked directly about the push, told the Journal, "I haven't asked for a job. So it's not a question of interest or not. I want to help the country, and I want the president to do well."

The maneuvering comes on the heels of a more colorful account from Axios, which reported that DeSantis had made his interest considerably more explicit over lunch at Trump's Mar-a-Lago golf club in late April. According to the outlet, Trump told a confidante that DeSantis had been "begging" him for the AG post.

Meanwhile, the man currently warming the attorney general's seat is watching his clock tick.

Todd Blanche — Trump's former personal defense attorney, now serving as acting AG after Trump ousted Pam Bondi on April 2 — has been working overtime to make himself indispensable. He oversaw the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram post. He green-lit charges of fraud and conspiracy against the Southern Poverty Law Center, then went on Fox News to argue — incorrectly, the SPLC insists — that the organization never shared intelligence gathered from paid informants with law enforcement agencies. The SPLC has demanded a retraction and accused Blanche of feeding the grand jury bad information.

When CBS Mornings asked Blanche whether he was auditioning for the permanent job, he bristled.

"I don't audition for this job," he snapped, before rattling off his résumé.

According to Axios, Blanche has roughly 90 days to convince Trump he's the right pick — or the job goes to someone else.

DeSantis is term-limited in Florida and constitutionally barred from running for governor again. His term ends in January 2027, leaving him in need of a next act.

During Republican primaries before the 2020 election, Trump nicknamed DeSantis "DeSanctimonious" and subjected him to merciless mockery.

The White House did not respond to the Journal's request for comment.

Trump's Iran war accidentally sparked a global renewable energy revolution — handing a big win to an industry he openly despises, an analyst wrote Saturday.

Donald Trump's military campaign against Iran has triggered what energy experts are calling the worst oil supply crisis in recorded history — and in a twist the president almost certainly never intended, it may have permanently accelerated the world's shift away from fossil fuels, wrote columnist Sabrina Haake on her Substack.

"The irony of an uninformed charlatan who relentlessly calls green energy a con job causing it to proliferate is so, so sweet," she wrote.

Haake contined, "With Trump’s Iran war now in its third month, countries are scrambling to circumvent the geopolitical tug of war by transitioning more quickly to renewables. Climate change almost seems like an afterthought as calls to speed the transition are now framed as a matter of security and economics, a strategy to avoid the war-driven upheaval of global oil markets.

"Wind and solar energy, produced entirely within national boundaries, insures against war-driven supply upset. It also insulates allies from future trade sabotage threatened by a psychopath hell-bent on retribution."

Haake wrote that International Energy Agency Director Fatih Birol told The Guardian that, "almost overnight," foreign leaders lost faith in fossil fuels. The crisis, he said, will cause "a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future" that will "cut into the main markets for oil."

Haake wrote that nearly 60 nations representing more than one-third of global economic power met in Colombia last week to draft national roadmaps away from oil, gas and coal. The summit was deliberately organized outside of normal U.N. channels to avoid obstruction by petrostates — and the United States was not invited.

"As an anti-science, anti-information nihilism spreads its ignorant rot across the U.S., it is reassuring to know that other nations aren’t similarly afflicted," the columnist wrote.

"Idiocracy, it would seem, is not contagious."

Donald Trump is souring on Vladimir Putin as the Russian president's grip on power weakens and his war in Ukraine drags into an embarrassing stalemate, according to a new analysis.

The shift comes as Trump prepares for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, a meeting that has left Putin nervously watching from the sidelines, Sarah Baxter wrote for The i Paper.

Trump, who "loves dictators" and "has cosied up to Putin for years," is now confronting the uncomfortable reality that his longtime ally leads "a declining nation that has lost much of its superpower glow," Baxter wrote Saturday.

The central problem for Putin is simple, she wrote. Trump can't stand losers.

"He hates to be associated with losers," Baxter wrote — and Russia's performance in Ukraine is making that association harder to avoid by the day. The war has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union's entire campaign against Nazi Germany in World War II, at a cost of more than a million casualties.

Trump offered a telling signal of the shift in a recent televised interview with the pro-MAGA Salem News Channel, delivering what Baxter described as "a surprisingly friendly olive branch" to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

"I like Zelensky, I've always gotten along with him, other than the one moment in the White House, when I thought he was a little aggressive on his behalf," Trump said.

That "one moment" was the February 2025 Oval Office ambush, when Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly berated Zelensky. His message that day — that Putin would "flatter and string them along but was not serious about peace" — has since proven resounding.

"Given the difficulty Trump has had settling the Ukraine war on 'day one,' this truth is now self-evident," Baxter wrote.

Making matters worse for Putin, a leaked European intelligence report — covered by CNN and denied by Russia — claimed the Russian president has spent weeks hiding in a "palatial bunker" fearing assassination or a coup, while Zelensky has been photographed visiting troops on the front lines.

Trump also absorbed a political blow when his MAGA ally Viktor Orbán was routed in last month's Hungarian elections, a defeat that Baxter says signals Putin's "axis of influence is shrinking" — and one that dealt a quiet blow to Vance, who had invested heavily in Orbán's success.

Meanwhile, Trump is eager to project strength heading into Beijing. His push to resolve the Iran conflict before the summit — the meeting was initially postponed after war broke out, given China's alliance with Tehran — underscores how much the president wants a clean win with Xi, Baxter wrote.

Far from the often-theorized strategy of using Russia to isolate China, Baxter argues the dynamic has flipped. Putin now has reason to fear the two superpowers cutting deals that leave him behind entirely.

"There is no far-sighted master chess strategy at work," Baxter wrote, dismissing theories that Trump has been playing geopolitical chess. "The most consistent guide to Trump's outlook on the world is that he loves dictators, has cosied up to Putin for years and has never been seriously hostile to China."

A leaked threat from Donald Trump's Chief of Staff Susie Wiles warned she'd fire West Wing staff members who discussed the president's administration outside of a very close circle, Politico reported.

The internal warning told insiders they could be hit with immediate termination if they spoke to reporters.

Wiles, who caused a recent firestorm herself by talking with a Vanity Fair writer, is reportedly frustrated by loose-lipped members of the White House team spilling details about the administration.

The March email, obtained by Politico, declared that "no staff member within the Executive Office of the President is permitted to speak with members of the news media without the explicit approval of the White House Communications Office."

Wiles added that "unauthorized leaks will not be tolerated and are subject to sanction up to and including termination," warning that policy violations "can result in significant disruption to ongoing operations and can potentially endanger missions and activities of national significance."

The memo was driven by frustration with West Wing staffers who had been using journalists to wage internal political battles, a source told Politico. But the tipster stressed the crackdown didn't stem from one single incident.

"She was generally very frustrated with leaks," the source said.

The memo threatening consequences for unauthorized press contact was itself immediately leaked to the press.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston defended the policy in a statement to Politico, saying hundreds of White House staffers "are held to strict policies — including a zero-tolerance policy against speaking to the media without explicit authorization from the Communications Office — to ensure the President's message is communicated clearly, accurately, and directly to the American people."

Wiles' sprawling Vanity Fair profile published late last year generated enormous blowback after she described Trump as having an "alcoholic's personality" and offered sharp assessments of several top administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Democratic Party stalwart James Carville is crowing as he watches Donald Trump's once devoted fans cave in their support for the MAGA movement.

Speaking on his Politicon podcast Thursday with co-host Al Hunt, the famed 81-year-old Democratic strategist described watching Trump's hardcore backers drop their allegiance to the president — and it left him giddy.

"People are so mortified about what he's... going to pull off between now and Election Day," Carville said. "And you got to worry about what he's going to do in a foreign policy arena between now and Election Day, because his swift and impending doom is coming."

The former Clinton aide emphasized the palpable shift in public sentiment. "I mean... he's got to know that they can't protect him enough. You can feel it. It's not just that the polling is bad; you can feel it. I mean, you... walk around, and you can just see the anger, and the anger coming from people that you don't — you would never expect."

Carville described a Kentucky Derby encounter last weekend with Jimmy Williams Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. The union leader reported substantial Trump voter remorse among membership.

"[Williams] said their members... most of them did vote for Trump, and they got real buyer's remorse now, which I think is a good sign," Carville said. "I mean, now we know that young people are starting to have real buyer's remorse, we know that there's real buyer's remorse among Hispanics. Apparently, among blue-collar people, it's pretty substantial."

Rapper M.I.A. won't finish Kid Cudi's North American tour — the support act was booed off a Dallas stage Saturday after taking a swipe at "illegals."

She was axed by the headliner Monday.

"I've been canceled for many reasons. I never thought I would be canceled for being a brown Republican voter," she told the crowd as they booed her, according to Reddit posts from fans who were present at the opening act of Cudi's May 2nd show in Dallas. The event was reported on by The Daily Beast.

The booing came after she told the audience she wouldn't perform her song "Illegal" because "some of you could be in the audience" — a remark captured on video that quickly went viral.

Kid Cudi wasted little time responding. "TOUR UPDATE: M.I.A is no longer on this tour," he wrote Monday on Instagram. "I told my management to send a notice to her team before we started tour that I didn't want anything offensive at my shows, cuz I already knew what time it was, and I was assured things were understood."

He added, "After the last couple shows, I've been flooded with messages from fans that were upset by her rants. This, to me, is very disappointing, and I won't have someone on my tour making offensive remarks that upsets my fanbase."

The Sri Lankan-born British rapper, born Mathangi Arulpragasam, was vocally anti-Trump before COVID, after which she embraced vaccine skepticism, appeared on Alex Jones' Infowars to hawk her clothing line, and ultimately endorsed Trump in 2024 after RFK Jr. dropped out of the race.

Despite her vocal MAGA support, M.I.A. is not a U.S. citizen and could not have voted in any of the last three presidential elections.

Fans posted that she attempted to walk back the Dallas remarks, telling the crowd, "I'm illegal — half of my team aren't here because they couldn't get their visa," before dedicating her next song to Mexico.

Just a day after CNN"s resident right-winger Scott Jennings descended into a profane attack on a rising Democrat guest, a second leading conservative lost it.

NewsNation commentator — and ex-Fox News legend — Geraldo Rivera attacked the Democrats' new darling Adam Mockler — a day after Jennings fumed into an F-bomb-laden attack on CNN's NewsNight with Abby Phillip.

Rivera addressed the incident with colleague Chris Cuomo on Friday.

"Chris, the kid was a d---... he was really being a d---," Rivera said.

"Shut up! Go out and get some life experience!" he added in an imagined conversation with the young Democrat. Regarding Jennings' outburst, Rivera observed there was "a freshness about it."

Cuomo slapped back. "Being annoying, slash insistent — and was also right" about Jennings, who previously served as special assistant to former President George W. Bush, Cuomo stated on Instagram.

However, he cautioned: "Disagree with decency."

Jennings vented fury as he got into a debate over Iran with the Democratic Party pundit Mockler — and Mockler got expressive with his hands as he argued Trump was losing.

"Get your f------ hand out of my face!" snapped Jennings "I'm not gonna have this guy's hand in my face."

Phillip intervened, stating: "Hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa guys."

The outburst was instantly mocked. "Scott Jennings just humiliated himself live on air," wrote Democratic commentator Harry Sisson on X.

Cuomo told Rivera he opposed Jennings' language, noting that despite temptations both men have faced throughout their careers, "you would never allow yourself to act that way" for engagement metrics. "I hear that," Rivera conceded, though the 82-year-old refused to retreat from his own Mockler criticism.