Texas GOP Official Begs Party to Stop Focusing on Abortion

A precinct chair in the Houston GOP is calling on her party to drop its anti-abortion platforms, warning that the state’s draconian restrictions to the medical procedure are alienating its base.

Speaking at the Texas Republican convention, Harris County Precinct 178 chair Gilda Bayegan claimed that she was “shocked” to learn how many of her constituents were no longer Republicans.

“I asked them, ‘What matters to you?’ It’s the things that all these people have been telling you to focus on,” Bayegan said, motioning to the people around the room while rolling through a list of issues, ranging from judicial accountability to border security. “Nobody told me that they wanted stricter abortion laws.”

“Every time we talk about abortion we are putting gas in the tank of the Democrats,” Bayegan continued. “I’m up here begging you not to make it one of our priorities.”

Texas has some of the strictest abortion laws in the nation, banning all use of the medical procedure except in the event of a severe medical emergency—though even that exception isn’t a given. Last year, Dallas mother Kate Cox became the first woman to challenge the state’s post-Roe emergency clause after learning that her fetus had a fatal genetic condition that would have jeopardized Cox’s health and future fertility if carried to term. But although Cox qualified for the procedure under Texas law, a district judge’s ruling allowing her to receive an abortion was effectively overridden by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who not only called for the Supreme Court to intervene in the case but also promised to convict abortion providers with felony charges, even if the procedure was court-ordered.

Still, Republican officials are continuing to milk the issue, proposing increasingly cruel ways to punish medical providers and women for giving or receiving reproductive care. Last month, leaked video footage captured Hood County GOP officials at a meeting supporting the death penalty for women and minors who seek abortion or even in vitro fertilization treatments.

It’s those kinds of initiatives, according to Bayegan, that serve as the metaphorical end of the road for voters. “One of my colleagues was in the health … committee. There was a guy in there saying ‘Make morning-after pills illegal, and prosecute anybody who uses them for murder.’ Murder?” mocked Bayegan. “What are we going to do, stone women next?”

But Republican attendees at the conference wouldn’t hear it. Instead, one man asked if she believed a “child in the womb was a human being,” while another man pressed Bayegan on her religious beliefs, asking if it mattered “what God believes in us” or if it only matters to win elections.

“If we lose this election, I want you all to think about the reality of what this country will become,” Bayegan replied.

Move over, George Santos—there’s another Republican politician with a taste for the finer things in life.

Royce White, the leading Republican candidate for the Senate in Minnesota, reportedly spent campaign funds from a previous failed political campaign on strip clubs, posh hotel stays, limousine services, and many other items that could only be described as personal expenses, reports The Daily Beast.

White, a retired NBA player, racked up the aforementioned ritzy expenditures, including more than $1,200 to a Miami strip club called “Gold Rush Cabaret,” during a failed run for Congress in 2022 while also taking part in Ice Cube’s “Big3” three-on-three professional basketball league at the same time. He might have gotten away with his two-year-old spending spree if he hadn’t decided to run for the Senate, as his violations of campaign finance law—which seem to rival Santos’s—went unnoticed in 2022.

“In nearly a decade of reviewing FEC disclosures, I’ve never seen a mess quite like White’s disbursements,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said to The Daily Beast.

White is a notorious conspiracy theorist, who’s gone from being a Black Lives Matter protester to an acolyte of Steve Bannon. He has also been accused of publicly opposing abortion while pressuring a woman to have one. Thanks to Bannon’s endorsement, White earned the endorsement of the Minnesota Republican Party in a landslide victory last weekend, garnering more than two-thirds of the vote.

With Minnesota’s Republican Senate primary set for August, Royce is not guaranteed to end up as the Republican nominee who will face incumbent Senator Amy Klobuchar in November. But the fact that he has made it so far to get a state party’s endorsement is telling. It’s anyone’s guess whether he makes it to November without criminal charges.

Trump is plotting ways to make it illegal to prosecute him for all the crimes he loves to commit if he retakes the White House—and he’s tapping GOP leaders to carry out the plan, according to sources who spoke with Rolling Stone.

“Even after a second term, he doesn’t think any of this is going to end,” one source told Rolling Stone. “He doesn’t think Democrats are going to quit coming after him.”

Trump has held meetings with “several” Republican lawmakers and attorneys about passing legislation to indemnify former presidents from nonfederal prosecutions, according to Rolling Stone—an idea he probably wishes he thought of during his first term and before getting hit with a dazzling array of criminal and civil charges over and over and over and over and over again.

Sitting presidents are granted presidential immunity for actions they take in their official capacity, but that doesn’t extend beyond the presidency or apply to activities unrelated to the presidency.

Trump has previously argued—including in a case now before the Supreme Court—that he has absolute immunity on the basis that everything he did as president qualifies as an official act. This, however, doesn’t absolve him from crimes he committed prior to and after his time in office, nor does it extend to nonfederal crimes.

Trump hinted at his new scheme during a break from his hush-money trial, telling cameras Congress needs to “pass lots of laws” to prevent “things like this” (Trump being charged for crimes). Whether the ploy will work is a matter of elections: Trump would need to win in November, and Republicans would need to control the House and Senate.

Despite that, efforts have been underway to shield Trump from prosecution, including the introduction of the “No More Political Prosecutions Act” introduced to the House in 2023 by Republican Representative Russell Fry, which seeks to move state and civil cases against current and former presidents and vice presidents up to federal courts, effectively freezing those cases. Simultaneously, Trump’s team has been working to revive and expand a Nixon-era Department of Justice memo prohibiting the prosecution of sitting presidents—and former presidents.

Team Trump is up to its old tricks again and falsely claiming a lackluster rally in the Bronx on Thursday drew a crowd of 25,000 supporters. This estimate comically contradicts on-the-ground reports, the NYPD, aerial views, and the laws of physics.

But reality is no match for the notoriously anti-factual Trump and his supporters, who have been obsessed with lying about his crowd size since the 2017 inauguration—and have become the living embodiment of the Nazi-era propaganda tactic of “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”

In reality, Trump requested an event permit for 3,500 people, according to The New York Times. On Thursday, 3,400 tickets had been issued for the rally, according to NYPD statements made to Raw Story. How many ticket holders showed up is unclear, but according to live aerial shots from ABC, Trump’s rally was confined to just one area of the palatial park: the amphitheater.

Conservatives’ claims of 25,000 showing out in the Bronx is roughly 30 times what reality depicts of around 800 people in Crotona Park’s amphitheater, with a few hundred hanging around past the gates. For comparison, Waldo Stadium in Kalamazoo fits 30,000 people—as noted by a crowd-size visualizer blog this reporter has often referred to when people violently inflate their numbers.

Were 25,000 people to have shown up in the Bronx, tightly packed, they would have occupied 13.8 baseball diamonds. With room to move around, a crowd that big would have occupied 30.8 baseball diamonds. But aerial visuals indicate Trump supporters on Thursday left the baseball field–size amphitheater less than a quarter full, roughly the size of one baseball diamond—or around 800 people.

An amateur sting operation in a bitter feud between Republicans in a small town in central New Jersey has now resulted in the arrest of a local councilman.

The hustle, reports the New Jersey Globe, was organized and planned by a growing cohort of MAGA Republicans in Readington Township. Frustrated by the increasingly routine disappearances of their political placards, they decided to plant six repurposed boards from the district’s 2022 House race as bait, pinning them with Apple AirTags before planting them next to a group of signs supporting a pair of moderate conservatives running for Readington mayor.

The signs were then stolen, and the AirTags led the Donald Trump–aligned cohort to an unexpected location: the home of committeeman John Albanese.

Albanese, a member of the town’s Republican old guard and a former Readington mayor himself, was arrested May 17 and charged with “unlawfully taking or exercising control over certain moveable property,” according to a summons issued by Patrolman Brandon Griffiths.

Incumbent Mayor Adam Mueller and Committee Member Juergen Huelsebusch, both aligned with the town’s new conservative wing, issued a joint statement denouncing Alabanese’s alleged behavior. “The arrest of Committeeman Albanese, an elected official and former Mayor, is deeply troubling and indefensible,” the pair told the Globe. “Given the considerable damage and embarrassment this has caused to Readington Township and the Republican Party, we call for his immediate resignation from all elected offices. This is a necessary step to begin restoring trust and integrity within our community.”

Still, the election boards weren’t exactly the MAGA cohort’s property to be stolen. Originally, the House district signs belonged to the campaign for Representative Thomas Kean Jr., though the backs of the signs had since been marked as “Property of Readington GOP,” according to the Globe.

A spokesman for the Kean campaign declined to comment to the local paper, though the freshman lawmaker is backing Huelsebusch and Mueller.

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.

Cotton told Fox News on Monday that Trump has not discussed the vice presidency with him, and the two only discussed what the former president needs to do to be elected a second time.

“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 constantly calling 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.

Trump proudly brought the rappers on stage with him to give remarks to the red behatted crowd on Thursday. Williams told the crowd, “They’re always going to whisper the accomplishments and shout your failures. Trump gonna shout the wins for all of us.”

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.

“Congressman, I just want to note that you are not responding to a very simple question about a conspiracy theory that you voiced,” Phillip said, at times talking over Donalds.

“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.

Donalds and other Trump allies are all seizing upon this conspiracy theory to distract from the recent news that more classified documents were found in Trump’s bedroom at Mar-a-Lago four months after the FBI’s initial search. Meanwhile, the actual case against Trump remains in limbo thanks to Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon’s indefinite stay.

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.

“A lot of people say to me today, the toughest business people, people that you know about, ‘Could I ask you a question: How do you do it?’ I say, ‘Do what?’”

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 particularly nonsensical gaffes 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 has decided 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.

Trump is not the only politico to request the change, though he’s almost certainly the loudest. Some of the biggest GOP lawmakers in the country have already made the special request, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senators Ron Johnson and Rick Scott.

“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 Committee counsel Todd Steggerda in the letter.

The city of Milwaukee did not agree with the Trump campaign’s assessment of the security perimeter. Milwaukee’s director of communications Jeff Fleming told ABC News that the city did not identify “any critical flaws” in the security plan and that it is coordinating with “multiple agencies” to ensure a safe event for everyone involved.