The Presidency Brought Trump ‘Rich Friends’

“The question I get asked more than any other question: ‘If you had to do it again, would you have done it?’ The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”

— Donald Trump, saying the “rich friends” he acquired from his presidency made it all worth it to him, according to Maggie Haberman’s upcoming book, the HuffPost reports.

GOP ‘Platform’ Features Fake Lincoln Quote, Video from Russia and Ukraine

When Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich unveiled his “Contract with America” in 1994, you might have been forgiven for not engaging your dial-up modem to fact check it. But in 2022 there’s no reason why, with the search capabilities of today’s internet and the widely available cheap stock images and video, the Republican Party employed a quote from an advert and attributed it to Abraham Lincoln and used video shot in Russia and Ukraine to represent scenes of American exceptionalism.

Maybe they should have stuck with their 2020 strategy of going platform-free. Apparently, the GOP’s “Commitment to America” does not include a commitment to either accuracy or American videographers.
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Voters Are Questioning the Pols Who Don’t Question Trump

“The impact that the Mar-a-Lago issue has had is it’s raised the stakes on the unquestioning fealty of Republicans to Trump. So I don’t think they are necessarily litigating the details of Trump’s possession of super-classified documents, but voters are litigating the blind loyalty that Republicans have to President Trump and that is part of what people think about when they think about MAGA Republicans.”

— Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, quoted by the Washington Post.

Christie Roasts Trump

“We have a former president of the United States who went on national television last night and said ‘I declassified the documents thinking about it.’ Imagine all I could have accomplished if I only knew that I didn’t actually have to do it. I just had to think about it – this is a credible candidate for 2024.” He added: “There is a sector of our party, which cannot find themselves genetically unable to not defend Donald Trump… This is a disaster. It’s bad for the country.”

— Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) “got lots of laughs at the expense of ex-President Donald Trump while lamenting the current state of national politics at an upstate business convention Thursday night,” the New York Post reports.