Trump Has a New V.P. Contender—and He’s the Worst of Them All

The latest addition to Donald Trump’s horror show of vice presidential candidates is Senator Tom Cotton, The New York Times reports.

Trump reportedly thinks the Arkansas senator is a reliable communicator, and likes the fact that Cotton is a military veteran with undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard.

“When we do talk, we talk about what it’s going to take to win this election in November—to elect President Trump to another term in the White House and elect a Republican Congress, so we can begin to repair the damage that Joe Biden’s presidency has inflicted on this country,” Cotton said.

Cotton may be on Trump’s shortlist for a different reason: his foreign policy hawkishness and itchy trigger finger.

Even before his political career began, he called for American journalists to be jailed for reporting on classified information. After becoming senator, he made a name for himself by constantlycalling on the United States to attack Iran. But he’s also called for a brutal use of force domestically as well. In 2020, the Arkansas senator infamously called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to quell Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Most recently, he again called for troops to be deployed against protesters, this time against demonstrators who oppose Israel’s brutal massacre in Gaza, which he continues to cheer on.

This year, he’s also made headlines for badgering TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew in a racist onslaught of questions about Chew’s background, repeatedly asking if the social media executive was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ignoring Chew’s assertion that he was Singaporean.

To many Republicans in today’s Trump-led GOP, these disturbing stances are welcomed, not rejected. The question is whether the Republican presidential nominee thinks Cotton and his record would help him return to the White House.

Criminals of a feather flocked together on Thursday as Trump hosted two Brooklyn rappers out on bail for murder conspiracy during a campaign rally in the Bronx.

Rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow were indicted in 2023, alongside some 30 other people, as part of a massive investigation into two rival Brooklyn gangs. Sheff G—real name Michael Williams—allegedly used his accomplishments to help fund widespread violence. According to the New York Daily News, Williams was released on a $150,000 cash or $1 million bond in April after being charged with conspiracy, multiple murder counts, criminal possession of a weapon, assault with a weapon, and 12 shootings. Williams’s lackey Sleepy Hallow—real name Tegan Chambers—was released with a $200,000 cash or $150,000 bond bail for conspiracy charges.

Chambers kept it even more brief and simply shouted, “Make America Great Again.”

As the duo departed and before Trump resumed making promises to “turn New York City around,” Trump noted that he wants teeth grills similar to Sheff G’s, according to reporting from Daily News reporter Chris Sommerfeldt.

It’s unclear how the duo connected with the Trump campaign or why the Trump campaign felt it was a wise move to host a man accused, per the Brooklyn district attorney, of “using his fame and fortune to elevate gang violence in Brooklyn.”

Representative Byron Donalds won’t answer a simple question on whether he thinks the FBI wanted to assassinate Donald Trump while searching his estate for classified documents.

The contender for vice president kept dodging CNN’s Abby Phillip Thursday night when she tried to get a straight answer out of him regarding the conspiracy theory.

“What conspiracy theory?” Donalds replied, sounding clueless.

“That the FBI, by having on a document that they are authorized to use deadly force, was trying to harm or assassinate Donald Trump,” Phillip replied. “That is false. Will you acknowledge that?”

“Can I be very clear with you?” Donalds asked, talking over Phillip, who tried in vain to get him to acknowledge the truth of the situation. “I’m not sure what Merrick Garland is trying to do these days, because it is clear that the Department of Justice is being weaponized against Donald Trump.”

Phillip and Donalds argued throughout the rest of the interview, with Donalds spending more than three minutes trying to steer their discussion back to his assertion that the Justice Department is being weaponized, and Phillip trying to pin down the congressman on how there was no plot to kill Trump, as the former president claimed on a Truth Social post earlier this week.

A former president claiming their successor tried to kill them is unprecedented, according to The Washington Post. The FBI has already testified that it chose to search Mar-a-Lago on a day that Trump would not be there in order to prevent any conflict. The FBI and Merrick Garland each confirmed that standard procedure for searches includes a deadly-force policy and that the same policy was used when President Biden’s homes were searched for classified documents.

Donald Trump rallied at a park in the Bronx on Thursday to an adoring crowd of hundreds of current and future Florida residents, alongside rappers accused of murder, while rambling about putting his pants on.

During his speech, Trump referred to imaginary business executives while reliving his glory days as a racist housing developer. “Some of the greatest days of my business career were in the toughest times,” Trump said from prewritten remarks. “But I enjoyed waking up every single morning and—go to battle,” he continued, veering off script.

Trump then proceeded to have an imaginary conversation with himself and unnamed Toughest Business People begging him to tell them how he puts his pants on. “‘How do you get up in the morning and put your pants on? Why do you put those pants on?’ ‘I’ll explain it to you someday’ ‘How do you do it? How do you get up? How?’”

The tangent appeared to be intended to boast of Trump’s strength but ultimately served as a conduit for his greatest weakness: his tendency to ramble incoherently. The stumble is one in a series of particularlynonsensicalgaffes the 77-year old Trump has had lately, raising questions about his mental acuity. Recent polling shows six in 10 Americans have doubts about Trump’s—and Biden’s—aging mental capability.

The presidential candidate who stood and watched as scores of his supporters rampaged through the U.S. Capitol is being proactive about security for the Republican National Convention in July.

The Trump campaign hasdecided that the Secret Service’s current security plans don’t provide enough clearance between the GOP event and its liberal protesters. In a letter to Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle, the campaign described the current programmed distance between the Milwaukee event and its protesters as an “unacceptable” and “critical flaw.” Specifically, it requests that the agency add the inclusion of a nearby park—effectively an extra one-block cushion area—to the security perimeter in a preemptive effort to keep thousands of the event’s anticipated detractors far away from its attendees.

“To date, the local USSS team has been unresponsive to the RNC’s reasonable proposal, as set out in my April 26 letter, to alleviate these safety risks through a very modest alteration of the Perimeter—namely, to expand a small portion of the Security Perimeter approximately one block to the East to encapsulate the Park,” wrote Republican National Commit