Cognitive Decline? Trump Mixes Up Autocrats Who Love Him

Donald Trump blundered the name of one of his international friends during a campaign speech on Monday, mispronouncing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s name as “Viktor Orbán”—prime minister of Hungary.

The gaffe underscored a worrying detail about the 2024 GOP presidential candidate: Clearly, Trump has too many adoring fascists in his Rolodex to keep them straight.

“The whole world is exploding. You know I was very honored—Viktor Orbán, did anyone ever hear of him? He’s probably one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. Right? He’s the leader of Turkey,” Trump said to a quiet crowd in Derry, New Hampshire.

In some ways, it’s not too hard to confuse the two. Erdoğan and Orbán both lead authoritarian regimes, they both belong to NATO, and they’re both obsessed with the concept of an “illiberal democracy” that doesn’t protect individual rights or freedoms.

Then again, there are some big differences, like the countries they come from. Orbán, who has been accused of violating the Geneva Conventions regarding the rights of refugees*, was described by the late Senator John McCain as a “neo-fascist dictator.” He’s also curried a certain level of idolatry from the contemporary American right. Meanwhile, Erdoğan has rigged elections, restricted the press, and been described as an “electoral autocrat.” And again, they run completely different countries. You’d think a former president would be able to remember the difference.

*This article has been amended to clarify the Geneva Conventions that Orban is accused of violating.

Not all heroes wear capes. Sometimes, they just make us laugh.

While nine GOP candidates for speaker of the House were unveiling their platforms, Georgia Representative Mike Collins was at it again, cooking up some of the freshest memes from inside the caucus.

“Press releases are out, memes are in,” Collins wrote in a parodistic platform release on Monday.

“Carmines for dinner after every conference,” read another bullet point.

One name-check turned some heads, however. Collins’s deepest jab was directed at conservative pollster and talking point consultant Frank Luntz: that there would be “no more having to listen to Frank Luntz at retreats.”

Since former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was booted from the seat on October 3, Collins has repeatedly found a way to vent his frustrations, and ours, through humor.

The congressman’s gags grew markedly more absurd after Majority Leader Steve Scalise lost his bid for speaker. Since then, Collins has taken the helm of his own Twitter account, grabbing laughs in equal parts to relieve the exhaustion and to snipe at his own blundering peers.

Last Wednesday, in a post anticipating Representative Jim Jordan’s first floor vote, the chief memer shared a video of himself rolling a Magic Eight Ball as its die tumbled around. “Don’t count on it,” the ball predicted.

In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Collins shared that he writes most of his viral tweets down himself, though it can require a little collaboration with staff.

About $10 million in student loans were canceled on Monday—all thanks to the work of an activist group.

The action helps 2,777 former students who owed a collective $9.7 million to Morehouse College, a historically Black liberal arts school in Atlanta.

To accomplish the feat, Morehouse agreed to transfer the debt it held in collections to the Debt Collective, a self-described “debtors’ union,” which in turn, chose to unilaterally cancel the privately held loans. Notably, the erased loans were owed directly to the college by way of attendance fees, unpaid tuition, or even parking fees, reported USA Today. They did not impact any outstanding federal loans held by the cohort.

“In many ways, Black Americans are bearing the brunt of the student debt crisis,” tweeted the activist organization. “And now, Biden is resuming costly payments for the first time in 3 years. Shame.”

The $10 million comes as one small drop in the bucket for tens of millions of Americans who owe a collective $1.6 trillion in federal student loans, but the road to forgiveness has been a rocky one.

In July, the Biden administration skirted expectations when it canceled $39 billion in student debt for more than 800,000 Americans, just weeks after an ultraconservative Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to shoot down Biden’s federal student loan forgiveness plan, which would have erased as much as $20,000 per borrower for 43 million Americans under the Heroes Act of 2003.

The forgiveness of $39 billion was primarily the result of fixing bureaucratic errors in the files of thousands of borrowers who had long ago earned their forgiveness but were omitted due to partial or late payments or even claiming temporary pauses to further pursue their education.

Earlier this month, the president announced another $9 billion that amounted to more technical fixes for students who repaid their dues via public service.

But the Biden administration hasn’t given up on outright loan forgiveness. The latest plan hinges on the Higher Education Act, which allows Biden to direct the education secretary to “compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances.”

“This new path is legally sound,” Biden said when he rolled out the initial proposal in June. “It’s going to take longer, but in my view, it’s the best path that remains to provide for as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.”

In Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, the feud between District Attorney Kim Ogg and her own party has reached a boiling point.

On Monday, more than 60 Democratic Party leaders submitted a resolution to formally condemn Ogg’s role in weakening voter rights and attacking criminal justice reform, and her tacit approval of Republican voter-suppression laws. The move also comes after reports of Ogg using her power to investigate members of her own party over personal feuds.

“The primary mission of the Harris County Democratic Party is to elect Democrats who support the U.S. Constitution, share our values, and are willing to stand up against extremist Republicans,” the resolution penned by local precinct chairs begins. But Ogg has “stood silent” on Republican efforts to squeeze the life out of Harris County’s blue voting bloc, going so far as to bring criminal charges against a 64-year-old Black man for voting while on parole (the charges were quickly thrown out), and standing by while the Texas Rangers—an agency with a sordid history—opened a criminal investigation against election workers based on “debunked conspiracy theories and outright lies invented and promoted by Republican Party officials.”

Ogg has also used her position to attack political opponents with onerous court cases, effectively punishing them for challenging her. In mid-September, a county court-at-law judge told the Houston Chronicle that he warned colleagues not to cross her: “If you piss her off, you’re going to a grand jury and you may or may not be indicted.” In 2022, Ogg indicted three ex-staffers of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, a young progressive in charge of the local Commissioners Court, for steering $11 million in Covid-19 vaccine outreach funds to a politically connected vendor, but since then the case has hung in limbo. Hidalgo denies the charges, and no trial date has been set.

Previously a Republican, Ogg ran as a Democrat in 2016 promising reforms to fix the broken cash bail system, decriminalize drug offenses, and create “a system that doesn’t oppress the poor.” She quickly changed her tune, accepting thousands in campaign contributions from the local bail bond industry while claiming that progressives were trying to “defund” her department. In 2022, she attempted to have a self-described democratic socialist judge removed from the bench due to his criticism of the criminal justice system and his hesitancy to accept plea bargains, which often lock up low-income defendants for crimes they have not committed. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Ogg also noted she would prosecute those who violate Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s abortion ban, among the most extreme in the country, on a “case by case basis.”

The precinct chairs’ resolution is an early step toward the local party distancing itself from Ogg in the lead-up to her March 2024 primary, signaling that they’re not afraid of her any longer and are ready to fight.

It “says out loud what a majority of Democrats in Harris County have become increasingly alarmed about,” precinct chair Cameron Campbell said in a statement. “Her divisive bullying and appalling abuse endangers our community and undermines our civil rights.”

Donald Trump isn’t so buddy-buddy with his former star attorney these days. In fact, the former president appears to be panicking, claiming that Sidney Powell, who took a plea deal on Wednesday in the Georgia election conspiracy case, was never his attorney to begin with.

Powell cut the deal with Fulton County prosecutors last week, pleading guilty to six misdemeanor charges. She was sentenced to six years’ probation and a $6,000 fine, and ordered to testify against her 17 co-defendants, including her onetime client Donald Trump.

“Despite the fake news reports to the contrary, and without even reaching out to ask the Trump campaign, Ms. Powell was not my attorney, and never was,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, alleging that the election fraud conspiracy theorist was actually former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s attorney, not his own.

And the jokes were quick to come in.

“We’ve officially reached the ‘I don’t know her’ phase of Donald Trump’s relationship with Sidney Powell,” tweeted podcaster Ed Krassenstein.

Others were quick to point out the immediate pitfalls of Trump’s new, never-have-I-ever defense.

“If she was never his attorney, then there was NEVER attorney-client privilege either,” tweeted Star Trek actor George Takei.

Powell was a key member of Trump’s inner circle throughout the election conspiracy, claiming at one point that she would unleash a national wave of litigation she described as “the kraken” to secure Trump’s win. In the waning days of his presidency, some of Trump’s most extreme supporters implored him to name Powell as special counsel to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud.

“Her testimony, more than peripheral players like Scott Hall, will provide first-person insight into those critical moments in her part of the larger conspiracy. Powell’s role is only one prong but as dominoes continue to fall it is likely those other prongs will also be corroborated by Trump’s other co-defendants,” Bradley P. Moss, a Washington-based national security attorney, told ABC News in an email.

Kenneth Chesebro, another Trump attorney, also folded in the Georgia conspiracy case last week, pleading guilty to a felony charge tied to Powell’s own crimes. Together, their turning tide against Trump could potentially initiate a wave of new plea deals from the 17 other co-defendants, including former Trump attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani.