MAGA Senator Claims Biden’s Shoes Are Proof of His Mental State

Voters may be concerned by President Joe Biden’s age, but one Republican lawmaker appears to have taken the story a little too far.

Speaking with Fox Business’s Cheryl Casone on Monday, Senator Roger Marshall suggested that Biden’s choice of footwear could be a sign that the chief executive has developed Parkinson’s disease, a nervous system disorder that results in tremors in a person’s hands and feet.

“People have taken a good look at the fact that he used to wear dress shoes,” said Casone. “Now he wears those tennis shoes. Does this all factor into what you’re hearing and seeing?”

Marshall quickly agreed. “Exactly, first of all, there’s several different types of Parkinson’s,” he said. “Some of them have a bigger impact on his cognitive abilities than other types of Parkinson’s do. So, again, if there’s nothing to hide, then the president should do a cognitive test.”

“My guess is he has done one. Certainly, they’ve done a neurological examination. That would be part of an annual examination.… I guarantee you that this Parkinson’s disease doctor that showed up did an in-depth neurological exam—and America deserves to know,” Marshall continued. “Again, I don’t know if the president has Parkinson’s or not, but we’re concerned about it. And four years is a long time.”

To make the argument, the Kansas senator fell back on his medical expertise as a former ob-gyn, a specialty that has practically zero medical crossover with diagnosing a neurological illness such as Parkinson’s.

Marshall’s theory may have been sparked by reports from over the weekend that a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders was seen at the White House eight times between last summer through the spring. It is unclear whether the doctor was attending routine White House medical team meetings or if he was there specifically to consult on Biden’s health. The White House says Biden is not exhibiting signs of Parkinson’s.

Biden, meanwhile, has rejected the notion that he should be subject to a cognitive test during his high-profile one-on-one interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday, arguing instead that the daily grind of the presidency is testing enough.

“I have a cognitive test every single day,” Biden said. “Everything I do. Not only am I campaigning, I am running the world.”

But Marshall did let one detail slip in his closing comments on Biden’s health: The conservative lawmaker believes that Vice President Kamala Harris has a future running the Oval Office.

“Any way you look at this, I think we end up with Kamala Harris as the president, either going into the future or the nominee now,” Marshall said.

Biden released a letter to congressional Democrats on Monday warning that discussions about him stepping aside need to come to an end as calls for him to leave the race continue to dog him more than a week after his disastrous debate performance sent Democrats into a massive tailspin.

The letter, first published by Axios reporter Stephen Neukam on X (formerly Twitter), appeared on a personalized letterhead for Biden, not the White House. In the letter, Biden noted “extensive conversations” he has had with “the leadership of the party, elected officials, rank and file members, and most importantly, Democratic voters over these past 10 days or so.” He briefly acknowledged that he is well-aware of the “good faith fears and worries about what is at stake” but ultimately warned that he will not step aside.

“I want you to know that despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump,” Biden wrote.

Biden made the case for himself by noting that he’s already the presumptive nominee by a wide margin after primary voters largely chose him in a re-election campaign he reportedly told aides in 2019 he would not pursue. “I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,900 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin,” Biden noted before detailing some wins the Democratic Party has secured during his presidency, such as student debt relief and lowering the cost of insulin for seniors, and casting his campaign in stark contrast to Trump’s.

“We have an economic vision to run on that soundly beats Trump and the MAGA Republicans. They are siding with the wealthy and the big corporations and we are siding with the working people of America,” Biden wrote. “It wasn’t an isolated moment for Trump to stand at Mar-A-Lago and tell the oil industry they should give him $1 billion and he will do whatever they want. That’s whose side Trump and the MAGA Republicans are on.”

Biden’s letter concluded with a call to end discussions around him leaving the race and focus on unifying behind him to defeat Trump, a sticking point leading Democrats, influential donors, editorial boards of numerous media and news outlets, and voters have struggled to embrace.

“The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now. And it’s time for it to end,” Biden warned. “We have one job. And that is to beat Donald Trump. We have 42 days to the Democratic Convention and 119 days to the general election. Any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It is time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump.”

Biden’s letter was issued at the start of a week described by CNN as “the most critical days of his 50-year career” and a day before the Congressional Black Caucus is slated to meet, which some members anticipate will be incredibly consequential, according to CNN.

President Joe Biden believes that the American public wants him to stay in the 2024 race, even though his perspective seems to be a bit askew.

The forty-sixth president told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday that, despite growing calls from inside the Democratic Party for him to withdraw, his rallies around the country have inspired him to remain resolute.

“I want to make sure I was right, that the average voter out there wanted Joe Biden, and I’m confident they do,” Biden said. “We’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere.”

But the people don’t actually seem to want Biden. A new poll by Black Futures Lab, conducted long before the president’s disastrous debate performance last month, indicates that Black voters—whose historic turnout put Biden into the White House in 2020—would lean toward Vice President Kamala Harris if given the option.

The poll, which ranked the popularity of electable politicos among more than 200,000 Black voters, saw Harris soar with a 71 percent approval rating. Biden was close behind, with 68 percent of Black Americans approving of the job he’s doing. Donald Trump, meanwhile, tanked, with just a 5 percent approval rating among the Black community.

Dissent against Biden’s campaign is center stage even at his own rallies. Steps away from the podium at his Wisconsin rally on Friday, a protester waved a sign urging him to “pass the torch.”

In the days since Biden and Trump’s painful face-off, the former president has solidly overtaken Biden in the polls. Several national polls published in the aftermath of the rocky debate figure Trump with a multipoint lead over Biden. A New York Times/Siena College poll pegged Trump with a seven-point lead when independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were thrown into the mix, a CBS News/YouGov poll found Trump to have a four-point lead under similar circumstances, and a Wall Street Journal study listed Trump with a six-point advantage.

Other Democratic options didn’t fare much better in postdebate polling against Trump—all except for one unexpected, left-field candidate: Michelle Obama, who in two separate Reuters/Ipsos studies polled with an 11- and 12-point lead over Trump in a possible November matchup.

Harris, meanwhile, has skirted addressing direct calls for her to overtake the top of the ballot by focusing her joint campaign with Biden on one objective: defeating Donald Trump.

“People voted in record numbers in 2020,” Harris said at the Essence Festival in New Orleans on Saturday. “This is what was able to happen, and when everyone votes in those numbers again in 122 days, we can see it through.”

Donald Trump wordlessly threw a bone to his Islamophobic followers Sunday night, by mocking President Joe Biden’s outreach to the Muslim community.

The presumptive Republican nominee posted a caption-less screenshot of a post from Biden’s X (formerly Twitter) account to his own Truth Social account.

“Jill and I wish a Happy Islamic New Year to all families who celebrate. May the arrival of the 1446 Hijri New Year bring you love, peace, and prosperity,” read Biden’s original post. Although Trump’s screenshot bore no caption, his intention was clear: to stir up his followers’ anger that the president would deign to well-wish Muslims.

Since the beginning of his first presidential campaign, Trump has used Islamophobia to attract voters. After Trump first called for a nationwide ban on Muslims entering the United States, while on the campaign trail in 2015, hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs nationwide spiked 23 percent. After he was elected, Trump implemented this overtly racist policy.

During his first election, hate crimes seemed to follow Trump wherever he went. Counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes, according to one study.

During the presidential debate earlier this month, Trump said Biden had “become like a Palestinian,” the second time he has publicly referred to the victims of an ongoing genocide as if it were some kind of slur. Trump urged Biden to let Israel “finish the job”—the job being a deadly military campaign that has killed more than 38,000 people, primarily women and children; displaced nearly one million refugees; and resulted in a widespread famine and humanitarian catastrophe.

Since the beginning of Israel’s military campaign, the Republican front-runner promised that if elected, he would bar immigrants who “support Hamas” from entering the United States and arrest and deport pro-Palestinian protesters.

As questions remain about Joe Biden’s fitness for the presidency after his disastrous debate less than two weeks ago, some Democrats are now floating a unique plan to replace him as the Democratic presidential nominee.

The plan would have Biden step down as the party nominee in the next couple of weeks, followed by the announcement of a “blitz primary” before the Democratic National Convention in August. Candidates would use the next few days to enter the race, and then pledge to run positive-only campaigns for a quick primary in the month or so before the convention.

The “blitz primary” would include candidate forums every week to engage voters, hosted by celebrities such as Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift, among others. The eventual nominee would be chosen by delegates using ranked choice voting before the convention begins on August 19.

“In the midst of malaise and crisis, we can forge an uplifting path,” said Ted Dintersmith, a Democratic philanthropist and one of the two architects of the plan. The other person behind the proposal is Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who served in the Obama and Clinton administrations and volunteered for Biden’s 2020 campaign.

Brooks and Dintersmith outlined their plan in a memo that they sent on Tuesday to donors, campaign officials, Biden appointees, and other powerful Democrats. But it remains to be seen if any such Democrats will sign on. Biden said in a Friday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that only “the Lord Almighty” could persuade him to drop out.

In the past couple of days, the wagons appear to be circling. A group of Democratic senators led by Virginia’s Mark Warner is seeking to convince Biden to withdraw, and several top Democrats in Congress are making public calls for him to go. For the “blitz primary” plan to work, Biden would need to drop out quickly, but he’s clearly not there yet. Plus, while the GOP is more than happy with Biden as their opponent, they are already strategizing on how to handle a replacement nominee.

Nobody seems to trust Ted Cruz anymore.

The Texas senator’s simple hurricane warning message was ill received by state residents late Sunday, apparently reminding the Lone Star citizens of another one of his climate misfires.

Cruz reshared an emergency relief video made by local businessman Jim McIngvale, better known as Mattress Mack to Houstonites, offering help should the storm take a turn for the worse. Cruz urged people to stay safe, ahead of Hurricane Beryl’s landfall.

“Mack is an American hero,” Cruz wrote on X. “Stay safe & avoid high water as the hurricane makes landfall.”

But sending a message of care to Texas residents reminded too many critics of 2021, when Cruz ditched his constituents—and his dog—during a historic winter storm to take a conveniently timed trip to Cancun, Mexico. That record cold snap, and Texas’s failure to mitigate damage to critical infrastructure, resulted in the deaths of 246 people.

Cruz’s vacation mishap also led him to propose legislation to reallocate airport security toward high-powered officials, a move that would have made it significantly harder for the press to catch him (and other lawmakers or judges) in efforts to bail during future bad weather. Ultimately, Cruz’s amendment was blocked in April by Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson.

“I’m glad that sanity prevailed and this provision—which almost no one really wanted—wasn’t included in the final FAA bill text,” Thompson said in a statement at the time. “Congress should be focusing on improving TSA and keeping our skies more secure, not burdening its workforce and potentially diminishing security.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene spent the Fourth of July weekend getting barbecued after boldly declaring that several people who did not sign the Declaration of Independence were signers of America’s most well-known document.

Among those Greene incorrectly claimed as signers of the Declaration of Independence was Alexander Hamilton, the subject of an extremely famous Broadway musical about his life prior to and after helping craft and sign the Constitution in 1787—more than a decade after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. In addition, Hamilton was 19 when the Declaration of Independence was signed, not 21 like Greene stated.

It’s unclear where Greene got this information, what prompted her to post it, or why, days after making it, she hasn’t taken it down or corrected it. One user mused that were Greene to have to take a citizenship test, as all immigrants to the United States seeking citizenship must do, she would likely fail, while others wondered how a sitting member of Congress could be so brazenly ill informed about U.S. history.

Other users skewered Greene by building on her list of signers detached from reality, adding names like Karl Marx, Gandalf, Kermit the Frog, and Beethoven.

Only two of the people Greene named actually signed the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it, and John Hancock, who was the first to sign it. Here’s the full list of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and here’s an explainer about the differences between the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution.

Senator Marco Rubio ran a flimsy defense for Donald Trump Sunday, after the former president tried to distance himself from a conservative think tank’s fascist plan for Trump’s potential presidential takeover.

During an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Dana Bash played the Florida Republican a clip of Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. The far-right think tank is behind Project 2025, a sweeping 180-page shadow platform that explains how to roll back rights and tear apart the administrative state and replace civil servants with loyal Trump sycophants.

Bash played a clip of Roberts making a chilling warning during an appearance on the far-right network Real America’s Voice last week. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” he said.

“Are you comfortable with that?” Bash asked Rubio.  

“Well, he’s not running for president, is he?” Rubio said. “I mean, our candidate’s Donald Trump. I didn’t see Donald Trump say that.”

“Donald Trump’s running on common sense, on restoring common sense versus the lunacy of the last four years, on the far left, and the shadow government that now is running our country with Joe Biden as its figurehead. That’s what he’s running against.

“Think tanks do think-tank stuff,” Rubio said, as nonchalantly as one might say, “Fascists do fascist stuff.”

“Look, I like the Heritage Foundation, I agree with some of the things they stand for,” but, Rubio said, the group has a lot of different projects. 

“And Donald Trump is running on restoring common sense, working-class values, and making our decision on the basis of that, and not on ideological lunacy, which is what we’ve seen over the last four years under Joe Biden.”

“Is that what Project 2025 is, is ideological lunacy?” Bash asked. 

“No, I think it’s the work of a think tank. Of a center-right think tank, and that’s what think tanks do,” Rubio said, going on to argue that plenty of “left-wing think tanks” and “opinion writers” had now become the policy of the Biden administration. How that point could possibly help his argument that Project 2025 should not concern voters is unclear.

Since Roberts’s cryptic threat last week, Trump has tried to claim that he doesn’t know what Project 2025 even is, although it was written by several former members of his administration. 

More top Democrats are vehemently shifting away from President Joe Biden after a disastrous debate performance last month revealed key issues with the chief executive’s age.

The number of lawmakers who believed that Biden should throw in the towel in the 2024 race outweighed the number backing his decision to stay in, during a Democratic leadership call on Sunday afternoon. At least four more prominent Democratic representatives joined a growing chorus urging Biden to step out, reported NBC News. Those lawmakers included New York Representatives Jerry Nadler and Joe Morelle, California Representative Mark Takano, and Washington Representative Adam Smith. All four men serve as the ranking members on powerful House committees.

But even lawmakers who didn’t outright agree that the former president’s place on the November ballot was compromised thoroughly questioned his ability to retake the White House for a second term. Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, Virginia Representative Don Beyer, and Connecticut Representative Jim Himes expressed concerns that Biden was not the strongest candidate the party could put forward.

Most lawmakers on the call believed that Vice President Kamala Harris would be a stronger option at the top of the ticket, calling her the obvious choice to replace Biden should he leave the race.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held the hour-long call with the Democratic brass but did not weigh in with his opinion on the movement to oust Biden, according to CNN.

Last week, Representatives Lloyd Doggett, Raúl Grijalva, and Seth Moulton formally called on the president to exit the race. But many more have signaled their preference in subtler ways, including legacy politicians such as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the latter of whom suggested that growing concern over both candidates’ ages was a “legitimate question.”

Panic over Biden’s age and ability has consumed the Democratic Party since the president’s abysmal debate performance last week, during which he appeared dumbfounded and frail through the majority of his first 2024 matchup against Donald Trump. Since the face-off, droves of private-sector leaders, donors, and consultants have urged Biden to call it quits, looking for spontaneous alternatives to a candidate that they openly describe as “comatose” and “dead.”

Donald Trump’s lawyers on Friday used the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling—and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion—to argue that his entire classified documents case should be put on hold until the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment is clarified.

Trump’s legal team filed a notice of supplemental authority asking the Trump-appointed Cannon to review Smith’s qualifications to pursue the case, citing Thomas’s opinion that questioned whether Smith was legally appointed to his position.

“Highlighting grave separation-of-powers concerns, Justice Thomas suggested that [U.S. penal code 28 subsections 515 and 533] do not establish ‘by Law’ Jack Smith’s position under the Appointments Clause,” the motion states.

In an ouroboros of conservative chaos, Thomas’s questioning follows Trump’s lawyers crafting that argument to Cannon, which The New York Times describes as one of the “far-fetched issues” Trump’s team has raised in an effort to remove Smith from the case. A notice of supplemental authority is essentially a summary of notable concerns addressed in oral arguments, meaning Trump’s lawyers argued against Smith being on the case, which Thomas in his concurrent Supreme Court opinion that ruled in Trump’s favor also floated, which Trump’s lawyers then used as support for their argument to remove Smith.

The notice follows hearings held by Cannon exploring whether Smith was legally appointed. The crux of the argument from Trump’s lawyers (and Thomas) is that special prosecutors have so much power, they should be voted into their roles by Congress and that Smith’s appointment is unconstitutional—even though settled law states the attorney general can appoint a special prosecutor and they are accountable to the attorney general.

“The legal issues and questions she claims to be struggling with are quite basic,” Joëlle Anne Moreno, a law professor at Florida International University, told The New York Times in June. “Most judges would consider many of the defense arguments to be meritless.”

Cannon has struggled with basic law concepts, is reportedly prone to exploitation due to her inexperience, and has shown unusual deference for Trump—including intervening in a Trump lawsuit arguing the classified documents he kept were his personal property, which Cannon ruled in his favor only for it to be overturned. That failed intervention provoked calls from more experienced judges to encourage Cannon to pass the case over to a better qualified judge when it was assigned to her in 2023, which she refused. Cannon also postponed the case indefinitely in May, and has spent weeks entertaining questions about Smith’s qualifications and funding with ineptitude that legal experts have described as “bonkers.”