Mike Johnson Doubles Down on Wild Threat Ahead of Netanyahu Speech

Speaker Mike Johnson is doubling down on threats to arrest anyone who interrupts or protests Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress Wednesday, including members of Congress themselves.

He told fellow Republicans Tuesday that protests would not be tolerated, and he plans to send a “Dear Colleague” letter warning other members of Congress about protesting.

Tuesday’s message reiterates Johnson’s warning last week to arrest any Democratic lawmakers who seek to interrupt or disrupt the speech. He called for “extra sergeants at arms on the floor” to deal with and arrest any dissenters, whether from the House floor or the gallery. Several Democrats have said they plan to boycott the speech or protest.

Congress’s invitation to Netanyahu comes at a time when the Israeli prime minister is facing arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court along with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and top Hamas leaders over accusations of war crimes in Gaza. A meeting with President Joe Biden was pushed to Thursday after briefly being up in the air. Vice President Kamala Harris won’t be presiding over Netanyahu’s address to Congress, and will instead be campaigning in Indianapolis while planning to meet privately with the Israeli prime minister later.

Netanyahu isn’t getting the red-carpet treatment that he has gotten in years past in Washington, D.C., because of the brutality of his war in Gaza. His willingness to drag out the war for more than nine months with a staggering civilian death toll has contributed to Biden’s drop in popularity among young people and communities of color. It seems that Johnson’s invitation to speak and the loads of laundry washed on his behalf may be the only major benefits Netanyahu gets from his U.S. visit.

A new report from CNN reveals more evidence that Trump vice presidential pick J.D. Vance once believed accusations of sexual assault against his running mate.

Earlier this month, Mediaite reported that, in a 2016 MSNBC appearance, Vance said he believed Jessica Leeds’s accusation that Trump groped her. Sarcastically noting Trump’s tendency to lie, he said, “This is sort of he said/she said, right? And at the end of the day, do you believe Donald Trump who always tells the truth? Just kidding, or do you believe that woman on the tape?”

On Tuesday, CNN reported that Vance repeatedly expressed similar sentiments online.

In October 2016, after the Access Hollywood tapes were released, Vance tweeted a since-deleted post asking, “What percentage of the American population has @realDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?”

Vance also reportedly liked tweets that read, “Maybe the Central Park 5 could take out a full-page ad to condemn the coddling of thug real estate barons who commit serial sexual assault,” and, “I wish there was a 2nd Vice Presidential debate just to see [Mike Pence] deny that Trump said he grabbed p*ssy.”

On Facebook, he shared a Washington Post op-ed by a Southern Baptist Convention leader who condemned conservative religious leaders’ support of then-presidential candidate Trump “following the disclosure of his sexually predatory recorded comments.” Vance posted an excerpt of the article that read, in part, “[Trump] has reaffirmed who he is over and over again, even during this campaign—from misogynistic statements to racist invective to crazed conspiracy theorizing.”

Vance’s team told CNN that the posts in question “from nearly a decade ago are old news that have been addressed numerous times since he entered the political world. They don’t reflect his views on President Trump today and haven’t for many years.” Indeed, after Trump was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, Vance quickly said he believed his “friend” Trump.

The unearthed social media activity—piling atop a mountain of examples of Vance once railing against his current running mate—has fueled ongoing conversations questioning his convictions and speculating that Trump may be regretting his vice presidential pick.

U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle will resign Tuesday following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump earlier this month.

Cheatle’s official announcement is expected later in the day, but two law enforcement officials have confirmed her exit to NBC News. Her ouster comes amid widespread criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over security failures at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.

In her resignation letter, which NBC obtained from a senior official who received it, Cheatle wrote that she takes “full responsibility for the security lapse,” and that “scrutiny over the last week has been intense and will continue to remain as our operational tempo increases.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson called Cheatle’s decision “overdue” after hearing the news. “She should have done this at least a week ago. I’m happy to see that,” he said, according to Politico.

In a statement, President Joe Biden said he was grateful for Cheatle’s decades of public service. “The independent review to get to the bottom of what happened on July 13 continues, and I look forward to assessing its conclusions,” Biden said. “We all know what happened that day can never happen again.” He added that he plans to appoint a new director soon.

Cheatle’s resignation comes one day after she appeared before the House Oversight Committee, where she failed to give satisfying answers about the shooting, which killed one rallygoer and critically injured two others. Trump’s ear was also wounded, although his official medical report has not been released.

Lawmakers demanded answers for how the shooter was able to get to his vantage point, but Cheatle offered little insight. She revealed that she believed “there was some sort of communication” about a suspicious individual between two and five times, and said that the Secret Service was not aware that the gunman was armed when it allowed Trump to take the stage.

When it came to Cheatle’s vague responses, the typically polarized committee found itself in agreement, for once.

“This committee is not known for … its model of bipartisanship, but I think today we came together unanimously in our disappointment in your lack of answers,” James Comer told Cheatle, according to Politico.

MAGA Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene was predictably fierce when defending her beloved leader, but even Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said that the timeline for an initial report on the shooting, which Cheatle said would take 60 days, was “simply not acceptable.”

“It has been 10 days since an assassination attempt on a former president of the United States, regardless of party. There need to be answers,” said Ocasio-Cortez. The clip of the New York progressive lawmaker went viral, with many Republican social media users astonished they actually agreed with her.

This story has been updated.

Within 36 hours of being handed the reins of the Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris has already begun to send out vetting materials to possible running mates. But for now, she appears to have skipped over one name that has gotten a lot of early buzz.

Vetting materials have been distributed to North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, according to a post on X (formerly Twitter) from The Wall Street Journal’s White House reporter Ken Thomas.

Notably missing from Harris’s list of potential vice presidential candidates was Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he had not received any materials from the Harris campaign.

Not only is Beshear one of the most popular governors in America, who has gained wide appeal despite being a Democratic leader in a red state, but ever since Harris was endorsed by President Joe Biden on Sunday, Beshear has repeatedly voiced his support for the new presumptive nominee and begun mounting attacks against Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

Beshear appeared on CNN Monday night, launching an informal audition to go head-to-head with Vance. Beshear specifically went after Vance for his “phony” opioid charity, and touted his own record as an attorney general who was tough on opioid companies.

“We need folks that have substance; we need folks that are up for the job. And J.D. Vance certainly isn’t, and never will be,” Beshear said.

The Kentucky governor claimed that any of the names that have been floated for Harris’s vice president would “eat J.D.’s lunch every day on a debate stage leading up to November.”

“Listen, J.D. Vance is a phony. He’s fake. I mean, he first said that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he’s acting like he’s Lincoln. I mean, the problem with J.D. Vance is he has no conviction, but I guess his running mate has 34,” Beshear said.

Beshear had started bright and early on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday, when he lauded Harris’s character, as well as her record, and began attacking Vance’s harsh anti-abortion stance, one of the Trump pick’s weakest spots with voters. He also called him a phony.

Vance had responded to some of Beshear’s attacks by calling it “weird” for Beshear to call him fake, when Beshear had “inherited” the governorship from his father, Steve Beshear, who served as Kentucky governor from 2007 to 2015.

Beshear was quick to hit back Monday night. “Well, what was weird was him joking about racism today, and talking about diet Mountain Dew. But in all seriousness, he ain’t from here. He is not from Kentucky,” Beshear said.

He criticized Vance for profiting off his writing about people in eastern Kentucky, while being raised in Ohio. “He called them ‘lazy,’ acting like he understands our culture, and he’s one of us; he’s not,” Beshear said. “This is a guy who went out to Silicon Valley, that’s trying to be an everyman. He ain’t one of us.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has only been running for president since Sunday, and she’s started off her campaign with a shot at Donald Trump.

At Biden campaign headquarters in Delaware Monday, Harris spoke about her record before politics, when she “was a courtroom prosecutor.”

“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris said to cheers and applause.

This could signal the tone for how Harris’s campaign for president will go. Contrasting her prosecutorial background against Trump’s many legal cases will keep Trump on the defense. Trump and the GOP are already having trouble coming up with talking points against Harris, and the former president and convicted felon is already trying to back out of debating her.

Harris’s campaign is off to a great start, immediately setting a fundraising record on just her first day, while Trump’s campaign is wondering if making J.D. Vance the vice presidential candidate was a mistake. Trump is looking weaker, and the new Harris campaign will have to press their advantage to turn around the sagging poll numbers inherited from Joe Biden.

On Tuesday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took to X to add to the many conspiracy theories surrounding Biden’s exit from the presidential race. Greene attributed the ascendance of Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee after Biden’s decision to step down to the same shadowy forces supposedly behind the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

“They tried to assassinate Donald Trump,” Greene posted. “Joe Biden is rumored to have had a medical event … and is no where to be seen. Now they have propped up Kamala Harris without any Democrat voters casting a single vote. What is going on??? Who is doing this??? Who is running the country???”

Greene’s conspiracy theorizing adds to what The New York Times called “a torrent of falsehoods and misleading posts by right-wing influencers that have spread since Mr. Biden’s announcement.” In Greene’s post, the pronoun “they” works not unlike the red string on a conspiracy board, connecting Harris’s rise and the Trump shooting.

Others in the MAGA world are drawing similar connections. On Monday evening, Tucker Carlson captioned an interview with far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec: “The assassination failed, so they took out Biden.” Another right-wing X user posted that a “soft coup by Kamala Harris & the Democratic Elite” was to be expected “after they prosecuted [Trump] on bogus charges & likely tried to assassinate him.”

These remarks represent a development in the initial conspiratorial rhetoric that emerged following the attempt on Trump’s life. Then, right-wing figures like Cory Mills, Ben Carson, and, of course, Hulk Hogan attributed the shooting to a shadowy “they,” rather than the 20-year-old would-be assassin whose motives remain rather turbid.

As Axios reported earlier this month, when Trump supporters invoke this ambiguous “they,” they are conjuring “a composite of real but distinct controversies,” encompassing those “responsible for Trump’s convictions in New York, his federal indictments, his multimillion-dollar fines in civil lawsuits, record illegal border crossings,” and the assassination attempt. Such rhetoric serves to reinforce an image of Trump that’s popular among his supporters, as “a victim who’s seeking retribution.”

Around that time, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump observed that such ambiguous language posits a “broad, nebulous galaxy of opponents” persecuting Trump and his allies. Greene’s comments suggest this galaxy is still expanding.

Kamala won’t appear beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he speaks to a joint session of Congress this week, in what appears to be a tactful political play. However, the vice president will still speak one-on-one privately with Netanyahu at an undetermined time. 

According to an anonymous White House aide who spoke with Politico, Harris plans to discuss the ongoing cease-fire deal and winding down the war in Palestine. Seven in 10 likely voters support a permanent cease-fire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza, according to Data for Progress. 

Though Harris has spoken about Israel’s right to defend itself, the vice president plans to “convey her view that it is time for the war to end in a way where Israel is secure, all hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can enjoy their right to dignity, freedom, and self-determination,” the aide said. 

Harris’s decision not to appear next to Netanyahu “probably wasn’t an accident,” a former senior Biden administration official told The Times of Israel, as Harris may look to differentiate herself slightly from Joe Biden’s ironclad support of Israel. 

According to one person close to the vice president’s office, Harris believes the United States should be “tougher” on Netanyahu and “more forceful at seeking a long-term peace and two-state solution,” according to Politico. 

Biden will likely meet with Netanyahu on Thursday, after their meeting was briefly up in the air. A date for the meeting with Harris has not been set. While in town, the prime minister will also meet with several congressional leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.  

Aides to both Donald Trump and Netanyahu have confirmed they will also attempt to meet, likely on Tuesday. 

While Netanyahu has many meetings lined up with individual political change-makers, his address to Congress may not be well attended. Fifty to 100 Democrats are expected to skip the speech, likely surpassing the 58 who declined to attend Netanyahu’s speech in 2015. 

It’s only been two days since President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and Donald Trump is already trying to get out of debating Vice President Kamala Harris.

The former president was up late again Monday night ranting on Truth Social, and turned his attention to ABC News, which is set to hold the second presidential debate on September 10. The change-up in presumptive Democratic presidential nominees means Trump will likely face Harris onstage.

“ABC Fake News is such a joke, among the absolute WORST in the business. They try to make Crooked Joe into a brave warrior because he didn’t have the ‘guts’ to fight it out—He quit!” Trump wrote. “They then tried to make ‘Sleepy’ look like a great President—he was the WORST, and Lyin’ Kamala into a competent person, which she is not. ABC, the home of George Slopadopolus, is not worthy of holding a Debate, of which I hope there will be many!”

In a separate post, Trump also accused the Democratic Party of misleading the Republican Party and “causing it to waste a great deal of time and money.” In another, he labeled Harris the “‘Border Czar’ who never visited the border,” and knocked her for her “absolutely terrible pole [sic] numbers.”

These posts mark day two of Trump’s meltdown over Biden’s withdrawal and endorsement of Harris. In the place of well-reasoned, or spelled, criticisms, Trump seems set on airing his grievances over the next debate, possibly to create a context for skipping it altogether.

“Now that Joe has, not surprisingly, has quit the race, I think the Debate, with whomever the Radical Left Democrats choose, should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC,” Trump wrote on Sunday. It’s not clear why these two thoughts are connected, but one thing is certain: Trump is scared enough of Harris to seek a friendlier debate venue.

When it came to Biden, Trump said he’d debate him “anytime, any place.” Now it’s only sometimes and a few specific places. Although, to be sure, Trump did a lot of whining about the first debate too. He tried desperately to undermine the credibility of the hosts and Biden’s performance before it had even happened.

Ultimately, Trump was able to flourish in CNN’s controlled environment, where his many baseless claims went uninterrupted, and undisputed until after the program had ended.

Republicans are scrambling to come up with talking points against Kamala Harris now that President Joe Biden has pulled out of the presidential race and endorsed her—and it’s not going well.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a memo Monday with suggestions to Republicans on how to attack Harris, and many of them are attempts to transfer their criticisms of Biden onto Harris. These include calling Harris Biden’s “border czar and the architect of his biggest failure” and accusing her of “siding with Hamas terrorists, not Israel.”

But at the bottom of the memo is a section titled “Weird,” which seems more hilarious than cutting. Among the attempted criticisms are “Kamala Harris loves Venn diagrams,” “Kamala Harris loves electric school busses because she went to school on a school bus,” and “Kamala Harris recently discovered that electricity doesn’t smell.”

The memo shows that Republicans don’t have any new ammunition to use against Harris beyond their standard attacks on most Democrats. The “Weird” section is especially weak considering convicted felon and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s own litany of weird stuff, like that time he went on a bizarre rant about sharks and electric batteries or, more seriously, his history of disgusting comments about his own daughter. And that’s barely scratching the surface.

It’s pretty clear that the GOP was taken by surprise with Biden’s announcement to leave the race and his subsequent endorsement of Harris on Sunday. They’ve been freaking out ever since and, despite earlier reports that Harris taking over was a real possibility, they apparently have only come up with weak lines of attack. They are reportedly even second-guessing Trump’s running-mate choice, J.D. Vance, as he seems to have been selected to drive up turnout from the MAGA base against a weak Biden rather than attract swing voters away from Harris, whose popularity has been rising in the last day.

As Monday began, Vance had already made one boring, low-energy speech at the Republican National Convention last week. By the late afternoon, he added another one in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where he attempted a weird, anti-woke punch line about diet Mountain Dew that fell flat with his friendly audience. If Republicans think they are offering something normal to Americans in the face of Democratic weirdness, they may soon receive a rude wake-up call.

As Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington, D.C., this week with a plan to address Congress, he may not be meeting with President Joe Biden.

Citing a source in the Israeli prime minister’s office, Axios’s Barak Ravid reports that Netanyahu’s meeting with Biden, originally scheduled for Tuesday, isn’t expected to happen.

“We are still waiting for an answer from the White House,” the official said.

Only last week, the White House said that Biden was expected to meet with Netanyahu this week, despite the president being diagnosed with Covid-19 on Wednesday. Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, circumstances seem to have changed, although it’s possible he may still be experiencing symptoms from the virus.

Netanyahu is scheduled to address Congress on Wednesday, despite a backlash and calls to boycott the address from Democrats. Some Democrats have reportedly discussed attending the speech but protesting or disrupting it in some way, and Speaker Mike Johnson has threatened police action in response.

But the most conspicuous action at Netanyahu’s address might be Vice President Kamala Harris’s absence. The Biden campaign scheduled Harris to speak at a campaign event in Indianapolis, likely not by accident, which, coupled with the possibility of Biden choosing to meet with Netanyahu, could signal a shift in U.S. policy toward Israel, or at least toward Netanyahu.

Biden’s support for Netanyahu and Israel’s brutal war in Gaza cost him a lot of support, particularly from young people and communities of color, and may have been a contributing factor in his decision to withdraw from the presidential race. Netanyahu is arriving in Washington as the International Criminal Court has filed for arrest warrants for him, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and top Hamas leaders over accusations of war crimes. Is Biden finally seeking the wisdom of cutting ties with Bibi? If so, the next step is to take action to push for a cease-fire and cut off weapons shipments to Israel.