Tom Cotton Haunted by His Own Painfully Incorrect Trump 2020 Claim

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has found himself on the outside looking in at Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential vice presidential candidates. He’s taken to TV to raise his profile—which now means defending Trump’s election denial and minimizing the January 6 insurrection.

During a segment with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Cotton was shown a comment he had made in 2020 claiming that Trump pledged to accept the results of the election and commit to the peaceful transfer of power if he lost. When Tapper pointed out that Trump neither accepted the legitimate results of the election nor transferred power to President Biden peacefully without encouraging an insurrection, Cotton resorted to the same technicality-laden, mealymouthed nonanswer required by any GOP member hoping to stay in Trump’s good graces.

“Of course we will accept the results if the results are from fair and free elections,” Cotton said, his answer heavy with the baseless implication that the election might not be free or fair. Cotton, Trump, and the rest of the Republican Party relied on the same phrasing to cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots in the run-up to 2020 elections.

“Every candidate in any race has a right to go to court, to seek legal redress if they think there’s been any kind of fraud or cheating,” he continued. Faced with his own comments and pressed by Tapper on Trump’s continued insistence that the election had been rigged and his encouragement of the insurrection after exhausting his legal avenues, Cotton deflected, minimizing the Capitol riot and casting peaceful protests outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes as left-wing equivalents of January 6.

“What happened on January 6, 2021, is that there was a protest in Washington that got out of hand, and it became a riot, and as I’ve said from the very beginning, anyone who injured a law enforcement officer or committed acts of violence on January 6 at the Capitol should be prosecuted and face severe consequences, and again, that’s unlike Democrats, who won’t prosecute violent protesters, for instance, from Democratic street militias outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.”

Cotton, who has previously called for the National Guard to quash protests against police brutality, remains behind Senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and J.D. Vance and Governor Doug Burgum in the race to be Trump’s running mate, according to sources close to the Republican presidential nominee. It’s no wonder, then, that he’s making the rounds on television to engage in revisionist history about the threat to democracy his party poses.

Republican Senator Tim Scott started his week off by getting brutally fact-checked about just about everything. While Scott passed the Donald Trump loyalty litmus test with flying colors, he was only able to do so because he refused to fully answer a single question he was asked during Sunday’s episode of This Week With George Stephanopolus on ABC. 

When asked about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to lift a ban on bump stocks, one which was put in place by Trump himself, Scott quickly agreed with the court’s decision, before pivoting to criticizing President Joe Biden about something entirely different.

“Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the movement to defund the police, leaving communities like the one I grew up in devastated and ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades,” said Scott. 

“Actually, senator as I—as you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and on the murder rate, they’re actually down this past year,” said ABC co-host Jonathan Karl, before he attempted to go back to his Supreme Court question.

Scott, instead, refused to budge from his point that families are “trapped in their houses” every night because of spiking crime.

Just last week, the FBI released its quarterly crime report, which found that violent crime in the United States has dropped by more than 15 percent since the beginning of the year, including a 26.4 percent decrease in murder, in line with a decrease over the past two years. 

It appeared that the South Carolina Republican would rather defer to Trump’s talking points than openly agree with the court’s decision to undo his executive order. Karl then asked Scott if he would support congressional action to ban bump stocks.

“Well, I’m strongly in support of the Second Amendment,” Scott started. “But what we’re going to do in the party, and President Trump said it on Thursday, we’re going to focus—”

“I asked about the ban on bump stocks, not the Second Amendment,” Karl said, cutting Scott off again—but the senator continued undeterred, delivering a short stump speech about violence at the southern border.  

Scott continued to cement his position, not as a politician, or even a person capable of independent thought, but as a Trumpian record player, going over and over the same old tracks. 

At every turn, Scott skirted the questions being asked in order to deliver talking points for Trump. 

Karl then asked Scott how he felt about Trump’s proposal for tariffs on imported goods, which the former president raised during a meeting with House Republicans last week. Scott himself had previously criticized Trump’s approach to tariffs, but—clearly unable to own up to even the smallest defection from his beloved leader—he again pivoted to something else entirely. 

“I was in the Senate meeting. But what I can tell you he spoke about during his time with the Senate is actually exempting taxation on tips,” he said, and went on to talk about that plan, which would likely benefit hotel owners such as Trump and hurt workers in their efforts to raise the minimum wage. 

In an effort to solve the dramas surrounding its new corporate leadership, The Washington Post is returning to something that works.

The paper has tapped one of its longest serving managing editors, Cameron Barr, to lead its coverage of publisher and CEO Will Lewis’s Fleet Street scandals, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Monday. Barr had left the organization in June 2023 after serving as managing editor for 19 years but is returning on contract to oversee controversies surrounding Lewis and Rob Winnett, the paper’s new editor in chief, currently the deputy editor of Telegraph Media Group, who is due to take his position after Election Day.

Lewis was named as a central figure in a hacking cover-up at Rupert Murdoch’s News U.K. A phone-hacking lawsuit filed across the pond by attorneys for Prince Harry, Guy Ritchie, and Hugh Grant accused Lewis of “giving a green light” to erase millions of emails pertaining to the phone-hacking accusations, even after authorities had instructed the company to retain all of its records.

But Lewis has been involved in other unsavory efforts to cover emerging details of the lawsuit, as well. Earlier this month, Folkenflik reported that the British tabloid journalist had offered him an unsavory deal in a “heated” exchange: an exclusive on the Post’s health if he promised to squash a story about Lewis’s involvement in the phone-hacking lawsuit.

Lewis’s legal troubles also appeared to fuel the unceremonious departure of the Post’s editor in chief Sally Buzbee, who reportedly refused to cave to Lewis’s demands in March and May about the paper’s own coverage of his legal battles.

As it stands, Barr may be uniquely situated to translate the British scandal to American audiences: The newsroom leader left the Post to move to England with his wife last year—a return to her home country, according to Barr’s exit announcement.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media behemoth swallowing up local news stations and spitting them out as zombie GOP propaganda mills, is ramping up pro-Trump content in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Its latest plot? A coordinated effort across at least 86 local news websites to suggest that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency, based on edited footage and misinformation.

According to Judd Legum, Sinclair, which owns hundreds of television news stations around the country, has been laundering GOP talking points about Biden’s age and mental capacity into news segments of local Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates. One replica online article with the headline “Biden appears to freeze, slur words during White House Juneteenth event” shares no evidence other than a spliced-together clip of Biden watching a musical performance and another edited video of Biden giving a speech originally posted on X by Sean Hannity. The article was syndicated en masse on the same day at the same time, Legum found, suggesting that editors at the local affiliates were not given the chance to vet the segment for accuracy.

Most outrageously, the article, along with at least two others posted in June, makes the evidence-free claim that Biden may have pooped himself at a D-Day memorial event in France, based on a video of the president sitting down during the event. According to Legum, one of the article’s URLs includes the word “pooping.”

The shoddy evidence behind the segments, originally published by Sinclair’s National Desk, appears to have been lifted directly from social media posts by RNC Research, the X account operated by the Lara Trump–run Republican National Committee. On at least one occasion, a Sinclair piece quotes directly from the Trump campaign social media team’s response to an RNC Research post. “Lights are on but no one’s home,” the campaign’s reply to a post showing a “dazed” Biden watching a musical performance, was included in the syndicated article.

Sinclair’s takeover of local news is a dire development for the future of independent journalism in the United States. But the gutting of newsrooms (and the weaponization of their remnants by right-wing conglomerates) across the country isn’t just a problem for tomorrow; it’s having devastating effects on American democracy today.

Donald Trump has privately been fuming that GOP lawmakers aren’t doing enough (in his opinion) in his crusade for political vengeance following his conviction on 34 felony charges, amid his ongoing efforts to weaponize House Republicans.

Trump has been urging his close allies within the Republican Party to take up their swords for the embattled former president, who has continued to insist that his conviction is somehow the doing of President Joe Biden, Rolling Stone reported Sunday.

“I need action,” Trump told them, one source repeated to Rolling Stone.

A second source recounted to Rolling Stone that the former president had delivered an angry, profanity-laced tirade, complaining that lawmakers weren’t doing enough to punish the Biden administration for his conviction.

Since Trump’s guilty verdict, leading Trump fanboy Representative Jim Jordan has begun his own side quest against New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who led the case over Trump’s hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Jordan invited Bragg to speak before the Ohio Republican’s subcommittee on the supposed weaponization of the federal government, but apparently even that’s not enough for his beloved leader.

“[Trump] doesn’t just want Congress to defund Alvin Bragg. He thinks there needs to be a wider net cast,” the second source said.

Speaker Mike Johnson also reportedly believes the House can have a role in overturning Trump’s conviction. House Republicans have set out to devise new legislation that would allow any president or former president to move a trial from a state court to a federal court, which would allow Trump to pardon himself should he be found guilty and wind up in the White House anyway. Trump held several meetings with Republican lawmakers before the verdict even came out, pushing for any legislation to shield him from non-federal prosecutions.

While Republicans can slow things down, any GOP-backed, revenge-fueled legislation would have absolutely no shot at passing the Senate. But that’s never been the point for do-nothing Republicans, who simply wish to disrupt governance, rather than execute plans. Too bad for them, Trump wants them to actually do something this time.

Steve Bannon is naming names and specifics on Donald Trump’s anticipated “retribution” list.

Speaking at a Turning Point Action convention on Saturday, the former Trump adviser and soon-to-be incarcerated criminal dropped that Trump will be targeting the Justice Department’s powers that be, should he return to the White House after November.

“We’re coming after Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, the senior members of DOJ that are prosecuting President Trump,” Bannon told the crowd. “Jack Smith. And this is not about vengeance. This is not about revenge. This is not about retribution. This is about saving this republic! We’re gonna use the Constitution and the rule of law to go after you and hold you accountable.”

Elsewhere in his speech, Bannon urged a cheering crowd to “give it all on the battlefield” between now and Election Day, and posited that a Trump win in November would either be “victory or death.”

Legal analysts were alarmed by Bannon’s violent rhetoric and described his motivations as “chilling.”

“The career ranks at DOJ, the people who do their jobs day in and day out and are committed to the Constitution, those folks aren’t legitimate targets for retribution,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC. “And I think it’s chilling to hear what’s going on here. This is payback for Donald Trump being held accountable.”

Bannon was sentenced to prison more than a year and a half ago, but he has remained free this whole time to spew disinformation and hatred online. Earlier this month, the far-right conspiracy theorist was ordered to submit to federal prison on July 1, when he will begin his four-month sentence for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena during the January 6 House select committee hearings.

Former Trump communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin revealed that Trump called for the execution of a staffer on several occasions during his time in the White House—and somehow, the disturbing news (and Trump’s even more troubling reaction to it) already seems to be fading from the headlines.

Griffin told Mediaite on Friday that Trump called to execute a staffer who leaked a story about Trump hiding in a bunker during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd.

He “straight up said [the] staffer who leaked … should be executed,” Griffin noted, adding that “there were [other incidents] where he talked about executing people.”

Griffin went on to call out former Attorney General Bill Bar, whom she claimed knew of the whole thing when asked about the report in a CNN interview in April. “Bill Barr kind of danced [around] it and said, ‘I don’t recall that specific instance,’ but there were others where we talked about executing people.”

During that CNN interview, Barr did in fact seem to justify the remarks, claiming Trump “would lose his temper” and “blow off steam” by calling to execute people. Creepily, Barr noted that eventually Trump could be talked down from his desire to see people he got upset with put to death, saying, “I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.” Barr made no mention of what would happen if Trump couldn’t be talked down, nor could Barr say with absolute certainty—instead hedging in doubt—that Trump wouldn’t have gone through with overseeing the execution of political enemies.

In response to the news that Trump had called for a staffer’s execution, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung issued an ominous and bizarre statement to Newsweek: “As President Trump has said, the best revenge is the success and prosperity of all Americans.” Cheung did not confirm or deny any of the details of the meeting between Griffin, Barr, and Trump.

Trump’s disturbing penchant for execution is just par for the course for the would-be dictator, whose bloodlust has increased in the public eye post-conviction. In early June, Trump told Dr. Phil that “sometimes revenge can be justified.” On Newsmax days earlier, Trump suggested he may pursue charges against Biden in retaliation for his hush-money trial—an investigation that he blames on Biden but which began in 2018—when Trump himself was president and more than a year before Biden announced his 2020 bid for the White House. And in 2016, Trump regularly called to imprison Hillary Clinton—calls that the freshly convicted felon now denies making but which were a hallmark of his campaign.

Donald Trump struggled to make sense during another campaign stop over the weekend—but this time couldn’t help himself from boasting one more time that he “aced” a cognitive test during his presidency.

While speaking during a rally in Detroit Saturday, Trump returned to degrading the concept of electric batteries, going as far as to mock the idea of environmental sustainability while alleging that environmental activists were pushing the U.S. Army to make their war machines sustainable.

“They want to make them now electric. So that when you go into enemy territory, and you obliterate the enemy and you knock down what those tanks are firing, you do it in an environmentally friendly way,” Trump said to rising laughter. “The problem with the Army tanks like cars and like trucks, the problem is that you would have to bring a battery pack along. You’re going to pull it like a little wagon, like a child pulls a wagon. So they want to build an Army tank. But, you know, the battery is very big and very heavy.”

Trump has been on a tirade recently against the basic concept of electric batteries. Speaking at a Las Vegas rally last week, Trump tried to explain his opinions on why electric batteries might be a bad addition to boats and other water-based vehicles, but ended up complaining about his fear of sharks.

But Trump’s recent gripe with environmental advocates may have started with misinformation: a Greta Thunberg deepfake that went viral last fall, in which the manipulated image and voice of the youth environmental activist called for “biodegradable missiles,” “vegan grenades,” and “sustainable tanks and weaponry.”

Despite the complete lack of coherence—or precedent—for claiming that environmentalists want green war, Trump then went on to remind the crowd how he “aced” a cognitive test … but forgot his doctor’s name while doing so.

“I took a cognitive test, and I aced it. Doc Ronny. Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas?” Trump said, misremembering Representative Ronny Jackson’s name while challenging President Joe Biden to take a cognitive test. “He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much immediately.”

“In fact, he said if I didn’t eat junk food, I would live to 200. That’s what he said. But I said, Ronny, should I take a test? He said, well, you know, it’s Walter Reed. It’s sort of a public hospital. If you don’t do well, they’re going to find out about it. I said, well, you know, like I’m a smart person and, how tough is it? He said, it gets very tough as you get to the middle of it. And I did something that he’s never seen done. I aced it. I got every question right. I aced it,” Trump boasted.

Trump has taken to arguing that cognitive exams should be mandatory for higher office since special counsel Robert Hur issued a damning, 388-page analysis of Biden’s mental acuity, in which he described the 81-year-old president as having “significant limitations.”

In the years since he “aced” the exam, Trump has invariably tweaked the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication, while at other times insisting that he passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That is, in spite of the fact that the test’s authors claim that none of the three versions in circulation actually have a whale on them.

Donald Trump can’t outrun his tactless comment about Milwaukee, so now, he’s decided to pretend it never happened in the first place.

Last week, in a meeting with House Republicans, Trump called Milwaukee a “horrible city,” even though he is expected to head there for the Republican National Convention next month.

Republicans rushed to provide a smattering of explanations for why the former president would self-sabotage in such spectacular fashion, including Trump, who offered his own excuse—and doubled down on his insults, arguing that the city was overrun with crime, even though statistics from the city’s police department don’t support his claims.

Now Trump’s given up on excuses, and has decided to deny, deny, deny. During an interview on Newsmax Saturday, Trump insisted that he’d never said anything about Milwaukee at all.

“They make up a story that I said something bad about Milwaukee, and I just ask you this, who would do that? Who would say something bad about a place that you want to win, you want to win over?” Trump demanded.

Too bad for Trump, not only had several of his lackeys already backed him up and into a corner, but he himself had already acknowledged the original comment.

He’ll get an unpleasant reminder of his words once he arrives in Milwaukee for his likely nomination for president. National Democrats have set up 10 billboards around the city plastered with his face and comment.

Trump held a roundtable meeting at a Black church in Detroit over the weekend that perfectly summarized Trump’s snake oil tendencies—with vastly inflated audience numbers, at least half of whom were white, and Trump ranting his staple complaints about the border, inflation, and crime.

Trump allies praised Trump’s appearance on Saturday at 180 Church as a smashing success, with Kellyanne Conway claiming over 8,000 people magically packed into the rows of seats where only a few hundred could have sat, even as many pews remained empty. Reuters notes the venue wasn’t at capacity by the time the roundtable began.

The pitch by Team Trump to appeal to Black voters in a city where in 2020 Biden won nearly 95 percent of the vote was further foiled by observations that many in the audience were, in fact, not Black. Per Russ McNamara of WDET, roughly half the crowd were white. Of the eight Black people who attended that he spoke with, none were congregates of the church.

The pastor of the church who agreed to host Trump, Lorenzo Sewell, told MSNBC that people laughed in his face when he attempted to pitch them into attending the event.

“I remember walking down Grand River, a place that is desolate on the west side of Detroit, and walking down the street and just inviting people, saying, ‘The former president is here if you want to come,’” Sewell told MSNBC. “They were laughing like I was when I first was approached.”

Sewell spent time before the event began wearing a ‘Make Black America Great Again’ shirt, according to Reuters, with the panel moderated by Trump V.P. hopeful Byron Donalds. NAACP Detroit Chapter leader and Detroit pastor Dr. Wendell Anthony panned the event, telling MSNBC, “He did not articulate any policy. He articulated the fact that he wanted to come and get some Black votes.”

After his church stunt, Trump gave the keynote address to his real base of racists and white nationalists at Turning Point’s “The People’s Convention.”