Alexander Willis

President Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, or MAHA, has been featured prominently at the Great American State Fair, but on Monday, Fox News raised a few eyebrows with its coverage of the MAHA celebrations juxtaposed with footage of attendees attempting to eat as many pancakes as possible as quickly as they could.

“This morning, four younger Americans put their stomachs to the test with a pancake eating contest – that’s tough on any day, let alone in this kind of heat,” a Fox News host said, speaking over footage of the contest’s participants, along with the banner headline: “Great American State Fair Celebrates MAHA Movement.”

“The guy who won appeared really worried he wasn’t going to be able to keep the pancakes down, but in the end, he made it.”

The irony of Fox News promoting Trump’s health initiative over footage of fair attendees gorging themselves on batter bread wasn’t lost on onlookers.

“Fox: GREAT AMERICAN STATE FAIR CELEBRATES MAHA MOVEMENT. Fox footage: *people gagging on pancakes and nearly puking*,” wrote independent journalist Aaron Rupar Monday in a social media post on X to his more than 1.1 million followers.

Matt Rein, an attorney and pro-Democratic Party influencer, poked fun at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with a reference to his past eating habits, which include stuffing a bear’s corpse into a car to skin and eat later.

“RFK Jr.'s all-you-can-eat sauerkraut contest is up next!” Rein quipped in a social media post on X.

And House Majority PAC, a Democratic super political action committee, called Fox News’ coverage of the pancake eating contest the fair’s “best highlight so far.”

While much has been said regarding President Donald Trump’s “hateful language” over the past decade, his perception of “love” may hold the key to understanding him and his seemingly sporadic decisions, veteran New York Times columnist Frank Bruni mused on Monday.

Bruni catalogued a number of recent instances in which Trump invoked the word “love,” starting with his recent interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker – an interview that culminated with the president abruptly ending the interview and furiously storming off.

“I love the farmers, and the farmers love me,” Trump said during the interview, going on to boast about the billions of dollars his administration awarded farmers to help offset losses from China’s retaliatory tariffs, a payout he referred to as a “payday.”

“It was that simple. That syllogistic,” Bruni wrote in an op-ed published in the Times. “It’s love as a transaction. A contract. A pact. I’ll stroke your back — lightly — if you give a deep-tissue massage to mine. We’ll call that love. Nothing in Trump’s life comes any closer to it.”

Another example Bruni flagged was Trump’s remarks on love as recently as April.

“When somebody’s nice to me, I love that person,” Trump told reporters in the East Room of the White House. “Even if they’re bad people, I couldn’t care less.”

The startling admission, Bruni argued, summed up Trump’s logic behind every decision he makes.

“There you have it: the unifying theory for his cabinet choices, his diplomacy and his pardons,” Bruni wrote. “Rob any jewelry store you like, so long as you kiss the ring. Worry not about skills, only about sucking up.”

Bruni also reminded readers of a previous fixation of Trump that perhaps best illustrated his theory.

“Don’t forget that Trump 'fell in love' – his actual words – with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, after Kim supposedly sent him gushing letters,” Bruni wrote, going on to argue that no individual was below Trump’s love so long as they “tell him what big presidential muscles he has.”

President Donald Trump erupted Monday after his appeal of a sexual abuse verdict against him was rejected by the Supreme Court moments earlier, calling the court’s decision “surprising” while vowing to “continue the fight” against the decision.

“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 on his social media platform Truth Social.

“I will continue the fight against this Weaponization and Lawfare Case against me, including the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength. 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!”

In 2023, a civil court found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s. He was ordered to pay an $83 million judgement that the president’s legal team has tried to have overturned, including by submitting false information to the Supreme Court.

In his online outburst, Trump also blamed a New York law for his predicament, one he said was explicitly designed to target him.

“New York State created a Law, for an instant speck of time, going back many decades, in order to wrongfully ‘nab’ me,” Trump wrote. ”It was tailormade, and this Injustice cannot be allowed to stand! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) appears to be “leaning into” President Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims in his bid for re-election, but according to CNN data guru Harry Enten, the Trump-endorsed candidate’s midterm strategy is all but certain to hand Democrats a decisive victory.

“If Mike Collins thinks that Donald Trump is going to carry him over the finish line, then I have a brave new world that he needs to face because that is a belief that’s just, simply put, not on this planet,” Enten said on Monday. “It is in some galaxy far, far away.”

Despite no evidence supporting Trump’s claims of there being systemic election fraud in the 2020 election, a staggering 63% of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was, in fact, “stolen,” up three percentage points from 2021. And, while leaning into Trump’s false claims may bode well among GOP voters, such claims were “a losing message,” Enten cautioned, in a general election.

According to a recent Reuters/IPSOS poll, 64% of Georgia voters overall believe that the 2020 election was “not stolen,” an increase of five percentage points from 2021. Furthermore, Trump’s net favorability among Georgia voters, according to polling data aggregated by Enten, was at -14.

“Donald Trump deeply unpopular in Georgia,” Enten said. “Mike Collins should be running from Donald Trump – instead, he’s leaning into a belief that, simply put, has no evidence to back it up about the 2020 election.”

Trump’s false claims of election fraud still remain supported by a majority of Republican voters, however, something Enten was taken aback by.

“They just believe this garbage!” Enten said. “Most Republicans, despite all the evidence to the contrary, believe that the 2020 election was, in fact, stolen.”

CNN’s John Berman asked Enten whether leaning into false claims of election fraud was a “winning message” for a general election in Georgia.

“No!” Enten shouted. “This is the whole problem, which is the Republican Party is in one camp all the way over here on the right, and the rest of the American public is in the ‘this-is-the-real-world-we’re-dealing-with camp.’”

A Washington, D.C. resident who protested President Donald Trump’s surge of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital was awarded a “significant” settlement after being placed in handcuffs last year for following troops while playing “Star Wars” music.

“I’m pleased that the D.C. police recognize their part in violating my rights,” said Sam O’Hara, speaking with The Washington Post Friday after having just reached “a financial agreement with the D.C. government and four of its officers.” “I will say that I’m pleased and [the settlement] was significant and meaningful.”

Last fall, O’Hara followed a group of National Guard troops in D.C. while playing the "Imperial March,” a menacing orchestrated piece typically associated with the iconic “Darth Vader” villain from the “Star Wars” franchise. Despite having pulled similar acts of protest in the past, one National Guard soldier in particular wasn’t pleased with O’Hara’s form of protest, and ended up contacting D.C. police.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, O’Hara successfully sued the D.C. government over what he called his wrongful detention, though the specifics of the settlement were not disclosed by either party.

Working in the hospitality industry, O’Hara told the Post that the surge of National Guard troops in D.C. was a genuine strain on his line of work.

“Having the National Guard standing out in front of your beautiful restaurant is not really attractive for people coming into the restaurant,” he told the Post.

As for his unique form of protest, O’Hara said he continues it to this day, “often using a portable JBL speaker,” the Post reported.

“It’s just the idea that at any point someone can stop me from practicing my right to protest,” O’Hara said.

As reporting increasingly suggests that the U.S. federal aid cuts spearheaded by trillionaire Elon Musk last year have led to preventable deaths abroad – and potentially millions by 2030 – the Tesla CEO issued his critics a challenge to “cite a single name of someone who died,” but grew notably silent after being given countless examples.

“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died,” Musk wrote Sunday on his social media platform X. “Not a single name!”

Musk’s online post was immediately hit with thousands of replies, many of them citing the names of individuals as young as three years old whose deaths had been attributed to a disruption in U.S. foreign aid. Among the most notable responses came from New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, who’s extensively reported on the impact from U.S. foreign aid cuts spearheaded by Musk.

“Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts,” Kristof wrote, listing several individuals who died over the past year due to U.S. foreign aid cuts – people whose families or caretakers he had personally spoken with.

Despite Musk publishing countless social media posts since Kristof’s response, he ultimately did not respond, and instead authored posts related to other topics such as immigration, including a post published Monday morning advocating to “deal with traitors first, then the invaders.”

“Odd. No response from Elon Musk,” noted political commentator Tom Santos in a social media post to their nearly 40,000 followers. “Actually, not odd at all. Elon tends not to engage when actual facts are introduced to the bull--- he spews.”

Even Musk’s own generative artificial intelligence chatbot Grok refuted Musk’s claim of there not being a “single” death attributable to U.S. foreign aid cuts, with former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan sharing the chatbot’s response in a social media post on X.

“Musk lies like the rest of us breathe. Here's what Grok says,” Hasan wrote, posting a screengrab of Grok’s response listing names of those whose deaths were linked to U.S. foreign aid disruptions.

A professor of political science weighed in Monday on the latest controversy surrounding President Donald Trump and his family, one that involves allegations of corruption so blatant, the professor said, that a graphic outlining the alleged corruption bore resemblance to “an inbred family tree.”

According to an explosive report from The New York Times Sunday, the sons of both Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are expected to profit handsomely from a secretive deal signed off on by Trump last November. As revealed by the Times, the Trump administration approved “as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing” for a small American mining company in an arrangement to secure Kazakhstan’s tungsten reserves, a deal that both Trump and Lutnick’s sons are expected to financially benefit from.

Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford, noted the unprecedented simplicity of the alleged corruption scandal, writing on social media that the graphic created by the Times to illustrate the key players in the arrangement was unlike any similar graphic he’d seen before.

“Usually these political corruption maps have complicated plumbing,” he wrote in a social media post on Bluesky, a comment that was flagged by Zeteo on Monday. “You know it’s bad when it’s just a closed loop that looks like an inbred family tree.”

Trump’s sons – Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump – took a 20% stake in an entity “related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported, and Lutnick’s sons – Brandon and Kyle Lutnick – helped raise funds for the deal through their investment company Cantor Fitzgerald, something that “typically [nets] Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”

Even Pini Althaus, the owner of the aforementioned mining company, Kaz Resources, admitted to the Times that the optics of the arrangement looked "disturbing."

“I can see how the optics might be disturbing to some people,” Althaus told the Times.

A senior GOP official revealed a key strategy Republicans plan to employ heading into the midterm elections, but due to a number of new factors at play this year, the strategy remains “an open question” and could very well end up backfiring, NOTUS reported Monday.

That strategy largely centers around targeting voters who backed President Donald Trump in 2024 “despite a thin voting history,” NOTUS reported. Irregular or newly participating voters were significant in the president’s 2024 victory, and Republicans are hoping to bring out similar levels of support in November.

As part of that strategy, Republicans plan to also double down on their embrace of Trump.

“In the first Trump admin, to be very frank, the other [campaign] committees would be very comfortable telling people, ‘Run away from the president,’” said a senior GOP official, speaking with NOTUS on the condition of anonymity. “Everyone’s bought in this time around. It’s just completely different.”

However, the strategy of targeting infrequent voters who backed Trump in 2024, NOTUS’ Alex Roarty suggested, carried significant "risks" given the absolute cratering of support the president has seen over the past few months, as well as his increasingly frequent attacks on members of his own party.

“Trump’s ability to motivate voters at the same level he did in 2024 is an open question. He’s not on the ballot, for one, and in recent months he’s shown a rising disdain for some congressional Republicans, threatening the party’s unity,” Roarty wrote.

“Embracing him unapologetically also risks alienating some moderate voters, especially if his approval rating remains stuck in the 30s by November. And maybe most alarmingly for Republicans, he might not have the same appeal to some of his old supporters, given that many of them backed him for economic reasons but remain anxious about the state of their finances a year and a half into his term.”

When asked about Republicans’ big bet on infrequent voters who backed Trump in 2024, Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the pro-Democratic Party organization Swing Left, dismissed the plan as a “non-factor,” NOTUS reported.

“The GOP’s ground game is a consulting revenue stream dressed up as a turnout program,” Radjy told NOTUS.

President Donald Trump took to social media Monday to lash out at former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden amid widespread mockery of his Great American State Fair, an event he insisted was “packed with happy people” and loved by all – despite ample evidence to the contrary.

“Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people, and everybody loving it?” Trump asked on his social media platform Truth Social. “Ask yourself this simple question, ‘DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?’ THE ANSWER IS NO!”

Organized by the Trump-linked group Freedom 250, the fair got off to a rough start last Thursday after most of the artists previously slated to perform at the event backed out after learning of its connections to Trump. The fair has also experienced power failures that melted perishable foods and stalled a Ferris wheel, and has been ridiculed over what appear to be near-empty fields and booths.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will be forced, again, to navigate a “legislative minefield” this week due to President Donald Trump’s controversial agenda, a challenge that risks leaving the entire chamber “paralyzed for a second week in a row” and sparking a GOP "disaster,” Punchbowl News reported Monday.

At the heart of the difficulties facing House Republicans is Trump’s controversial voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act, which has passed in the House multiple times but continues to stall in the Senate.

House lawmakers are hoping to advance the annual defense spending bill this week before a July 4 recess, but one MAGA lawmaker is threatening to block all floor proceedings unless the SAVE Act is attached to the defense spending bill, an amendment that’s considered a non-starter for Democrats and would almost surely tank the bill.

That lawmaker is Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who’s already submitted an amendment to the defense spending bill to attach the SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote, something experts have described as a form of voter suppression.

“If Luna’s amendment is ruled out of order, the Florida Republican told us she’ll vote against the rule and continue her blockade on floor action, likely rendering the House paralyzed for a second week in a row,” Punchbowl News’ report reads.

“Johnson and top House Republicans are hopeful that Luna will drop her insistence on the language after Trump posted on Truth Social last week that the GOP members should stop messing around with rules votes. It’s true that Luna has close ties to the Florida crew in the White House. But Trump has less sway than ever. And his advice on legislating is oftentimes ignored.”

With “little fanfare,” the Supreme Court is quietly working to double its own police force, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported on Sunday, a push that justices and court officials apparently “loathe” discussing.

“The push for a rapid security buildout stems from the substantial threats to the justices at a moment of growing political violence in the U.S. and the sense that the system has just not been up to the task of keeping them safe,” Gerstein wrote. “That’s a belief that appears to be shared by at least some of the justices themselves.”

While a Supreme Court spokesperson declined to respond to Gerstein’s request for comment, an “in-depth review” of budget documents and interviews with “court insiders” revealed that the Supreme Court Police Department, which for years had less than 200 officers, may soon double its ranks amid the court’s plummeting favorability among Americans.

“It’s often said that the Supreme Court has no army,” Gerstein wrote. “Yet, with little fanfare, the size of the Supreme Court’s police force has begun mushrooming.”

The growing taxpayer expense from the Supreme Court’s ballooning security budget has even roiled some lawmakers, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the leading Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

“We provide money for the Supreme Court,” DeLauro said back in April. “I’ve been here a long time – they’ve never come up and tell us what they’re doing with the money that we appropriate. I want to give them all the security they need, but the court has to come up here [and] tell us what [they’re] doing.”

President Donald Trump’s decision to launch his unpopular war against Iran earlier this year has already sparked a global “shift,” renowned economic professor Richard Wolff argued recently, one that also set the president on an imminent path toward total irrelevancy in “only a few months.”

A professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and former professor at Yale, Wolff pointed to the recent progressive sweep last week in New York as evidence of his theory, and compared it directly with the civil unrest sparked during the Vietnam War that ultimately helped – at least, in part – bring about the U.S. withdrawal.

“We're beginning to see a significant self-defined socialist presence in our political life, and because it is coming at the time of the Iran war – and at the time of heightened focus on Israel and Palestine – it's very important to understand that there's a shift going on,” Wolff said in a recent appearance on the podcast “Dialogue Works,” adding that the “shift” had extended to “international affairs.”

“Not everywhere in the same way, but, in a number of districts where that was the issue, the vote of the people has clearly been in the direction of criticism of Trump, the war in Iran [and] Israel.”

Wolff, whose Jewish parents fled Nazi Germany for the United States, has been a fierce critic of Trump, the U.S. war against Iran and Israel. However, it’s been only after the Trump administration’s continued failures in achieving its stated war objectives in Iran that his views have gained enough traction to drive a major “shift,” he argued, one that would also result in Trump becoming largely irrelevant – and soon.

“People should also be aware that there's really only a few months left for Mr. Trump,” Wolff predicted.

“Once those elections happen in November – if, indeed they happen – he will then be a lame-duck president. And, given how badly his situation has developed over the first part of this year, we are looking at a man who is facing political pressures that include losing support and moving ever-closer to a day after which his relevance will be sharply reduced.”

Reporting from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Fox News’ Peter Doocy claimed that people were “still coming out” to the Great American State Fair, though he soon became the butt of a joke online after viewers noted a glaring contradiction directly behind him.

“It’s really something!” Doocy said Sunday, speaking from an elevated news desk on the National Mall about the fair, organized by the President Donald Trump-linked group Freedom 250. “The weather, not the best today, but people are still coming out.”

The problem, as noted by countless online critics, was that the expansive field behind him – the hub of the fair’s state exhibits – was almost completely empty.

“There’s literally no one behind them,” quipped Joanne Carducci, a prominent liberal influencer and commentator, writing in a social media post on X Sunday to her more than 1 million followers.

Carlos Turnbull, another prominent liberal influencer, said that even the descriptor of “not many people” would be a “generous way of describing attendance at the Trump fair,” and John Hartzell, who runs popular political humor social media accounts, quipped that Trump’s group behind the fair “was called Freedom 250 because that’s how many people went.”

Beyond what appears to be lower-than-expected turnout, the fair has been plagued with challenges since opening to the public last Thursday, including from power outages that halted a Ferris wheel and melted perishable foods. Weeks before the fair opened, artists slated to perform at the event pulled out en masse after learning of its ties to Trump.

The Supreme Court is “on the brink” of ruling on major cases regarding President Donald Trump’s “most audacious gambits,” Bloomberg reported Sunday, and one law professor is predicting the outcome may bode poorly for the commander in chief.

The Supreme Court is set to rule this week on two cases that will determine whether Trump can eliminate birthright citizenship and remove leaders from independent federal agencies — as he attempted with Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook.

William Baude, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Constitutional Law Institute, predicted things wouldn’t go in Trump’s favor, in spite of the Supreme Court’s conservative agenda and recent history of helping expand the president’s executive power.

“It seems likely the court is going to rule against the administration,” Baude said, according to Bloomberg.

Despite birthright citizenship being enshrined in the Constitution in 1868 with the 14th Amendment, Trump has long sought to eliminate the constitutional right, and has lashed out at “dumb judges and justices” for their critiques of his efforts. The president has also falsely claimed that the United States is the “only country in the world” to have such a right.

While the Supreme Court has done much to expand Trump’s executive power, including with a recent ruling that allowed his administration to expedite the deportation of as many of 1.3 million migrants, justices have also refuted the president on several occasions, perhaps most notably by ruling that his so-called reciprocal tariffs were implemented unlawfully.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham issued a grave warning to viewers last week in response to the recent progressive sweep of Democratic congressional candidates, a warning that included a potential “implication” that left two podcast hosts laughing hysterically.

“If we turn our government over to a bunch of Democrat socialists, Israel will be treated like South Africa was in the 1980s,” Ingraham said on Fox News last week. “It will be boycott all the way.”

South Africa was famously hammered with international sanctions in the 1960s to pressure the nation’s leaders to end its apartheid system of government, which institutionalized racially discriminatory policies on a systemic level, creating multiple legal frameworks for those of different ethnicities. The sanctions proved successful, with South Africa’s apartheid system being dismantled in the 1990s.

Critics, including leading human rights organizations, have accused Israel’s government of operating under apartheid, with the more than 3.2 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank living under different legal frameworks than the more than 700,000 Israeli settlers illegally living in the Palestinian territory.

As such, Jeremy Johnson and Gage Kosmanopoulos – two leftist podcasters who host the show “Head in the Office” – erupted into laughter after hearing Ingraham’s cautionary tale.

“Oh no, my steak is too juicy and my lobster is way too buttery bro, no! Is there an implication here that it was wrong to do that, that it was wrong to treat South Africa like that in the 80s?” said Kosmanopoulos.

“What are we talking about, genuinely? What are you supposed to do with this? Right-wing commentary has devolved to a point where it is genuinely beyond parody.”

Despite the international sanctions, Israel maintained a deep and friendly relationship with South Africa throughout its time operating under apartheid. The two nations established a secret defense agreement in 1975, and in 1977, the Carter administration voiced fears that Israel was cooperating with South Africa to develop a nuclear weapon.

“They list a good thing that Democratic socialists want that is broadly popular around the country, and then they try to make it sound evil and nefarious – here, she’s not even trying!” said Johnson. “She’s just saying Israel will face justice for what it’s done, oh no.”

Abier Khatib, a prominent pro-Palestinian advocate who shared the clip of Johnson and Kosmanopoulos’ reaction to Ingraham, said she “can’t believe she said that” in a social media post to her more than 368,000 followers on X.