Potential Trump V.P. Dodges Simple Question on Dangerous Trump Lie

Representative Byron Donalds won’t answer a simple question on whether he thinks the FBI wanted to assassinate Donald Trump while searching his estate for classified documents.

The contender for vice president kept dodging CNN’s Abby Phillip Thursday night when she tried to get a straight answer out of him regarding the conspiracy theory.

“Congressman, I just want to note that you are not responding to a very simple question about a conspiracy theory that you voiced,” Phillip said, at times talking over Donalds.

“What conspiracy theory?” Donalds replied, sounding clueless.

“That the FBI, by having on a document that they are authorized to use deadly force, was trying to harm or assassinate Donald Trump,” Phillip replied. “That is false. Will you acknowledge that?”

“Can I be very clear with you?” Donalds asked, talking over Phillip, who tried in vain to get him to acknowledge the truth of the situation. “I’m not sure what Merrick Garland is trying to do these days, because it is clear that the Department of Justice is being weaponized against Donald Trump.”

Phillip and Donalds argued throughout the rest of the interview, with Donalds spending more than three minutes trying to steer their discussion back to his assertion that the Justice Department is being weaponized, and Phillip trying to pin down the congressman on how there was no plot to kill Trump, as the former president claimed on a Truth Social post earlier this week.

A former president claiming their successor tried to kill them is unprecedented, according to The Washington Post. The FBI has already testified that it chose to search Mar-a-Lago on a day that Trump would not be there in order to prevent any conflict. The FBI and Merrick Garland each confirmed that standard procedure for searches includes a deadly-force policy and that the same policy was used when President Biden’s homes were searched for classified documents.

Donalds and other Trump allies are all seizing upon this conspiracy theory to distract from the recent news that more classified documents were found in Trump’s bedroom at Mar-a-Lago four months after the FBI’s initial search. Meanwhile, the actual case against Trump remains in limbo thanks to Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon’s indefinite stay.

Donald Trump rallied at a park in the Bronx on Thursday to an adoring crowd of hundreds of current and future Florida residents, alongside rappers accused of murder, while rambling about putting his pants on.

During his speech, Trump referred to imaginary business executives while reliving his glory days as a racist housing developer. “Some of the greatest days of my business career were in the toughest times,” Trump said from prewritten remarks. “But I enjoyed waking up every single morning and—go to battle,” he continued, veering off script.

“A lot of people say to me today, the toughest business people, people that you know about, ‘Could I ask you a question: How do you do it?’ I say, ‘Do what?’”

Trump then proceeded to have an imaginary conversation with himself and unnamed Toughest Business People begging him to tell them how he puts his pants on. “‘How do you get up in the morning and put your pants on? Why do you put those pants on?’ ‘I’ll explain it to you someday’ ‘How do you do it? How do you get up? How?’”

The tangent appeared to be intended to boast of Trump’s strength but ultimately served as a conduit for his greatest weakness: his tendency to ramble incoherently. The stumble is one in a series of particularly nonsensical gaffes the 77-year old Trump has had lately, raising questions about his mental acuity. Recent polling shows six in 10 Americans have doubts about Trump’s—and Biden’s—aging mental capability.

The presidential candidate who stood and watched as scores of his supporters rampaged through the U.S. Capitol is being proactive about security for the Republican National Convention in July.

The Trump campaign has decided that the Secret Service’s current security plans don’t provide enough clearance between the GOP event and its liberal protesters. In a letter to Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle, the campaign described the current programmed distance between the Milwaukee event and its protesters as an “unacceptable” and “critical flaw.” Specifically, it requests that the agency add the inclusion of a nearby park—effectively an extra one-block cushion area—to the security perimeter in a preemptive effort to keep thousands of the event’s anticipated detractors far away from its attendees.

Trump is not the only politico to request the change, though he’s almost certainly the loudest. Some of the biggest GOP lawmakers in the country have already made the special request, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senators Ron Johnson and Rick Scott.

“To date, the local USSS team has been unresponsive to the RNC’s reasonable proposal, as set out in my April 26 letter, to alleviate these safety risks through a very modest alteration of the Perimeter—namely, to expand a small portion of the Security Perimeter approximately one block to the East to encapsulate the Park,” wrote Republican National Committee counsel Todd Steggerda in the letter.

The city of Milwaukee did not agree with the Trump campaign’s assessment of the security perimeter. Milwaukee’s director of communications Jeff Fleming told ABC News that the city did not identify “any critical flaws” in the security plan and that it is coordinating with “multiple agencies” to ensure a safe event for everyone involved.

A border bill negotiated by Republicans and Democrats has died in the Senate—with the help of lots of opposition from Republicans, including the bill’s main author.

Senators voted 43–50 to take down the bill, an attempt to renew a border proposal that was tanked earlier this year thanks to Donald Trump.

In February, Republicans killed an attempt to pass a bill for border security, also a product of bipartisan negotiations. Back then, several Republicans called out Trump and the rest of their party for killing a bill that essentially gave the GOP what they wanted: rather draconian immigration restrictions. Back then, Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump were more afraid of handing the Democrats a win than they were of a supposedly insecure southern U.S. border. Months later, that again seems to be the case.

This time, even the bill’s authors, such as Senators James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, and Kyrsten Sinema, an independent for herself, voted against advancing the legislation. The GOP, hypocritically, also sees the vote as a political boost to President Biden.

​​“Today is not a bill, today is a prop,” said Lankford on the Senate floor before the vote. “Everyone sees it for what it is.” This is especially ironic, considering that Lankford was among those Republicans who called B.S. the last time a border deal failed.

Some Democrats also voted to kill the bill due to other issues. “It fails to address the root causes of migration or to establish more lawful pathways,” Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, told the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, Republicans still use fearmongering and racist tropes whenever the issue of immigration comes up, especially when they are up for reelection. No matter how much danger they claim Americans are in from an unsecure southern border, they still would rather use it as a talking point against Democrats instead of actually doing something about it.

On Thursday, former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb accused Judge Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing his ex-boss’s classified documents case, of “incompetence,” insisting that there’s more than enough evidence—and time—to take the case to trial before Election Day.

“I don’t think this case will move at all,” Cobb said on CNN. “And I think the fact that she’s scheduling hearings, multiple hearings, sort of one or two motions at a time, is compelling evidence of that. Most federal judges would have long ago ruled on all the pending motions.”

“And frankly, this is a case that should’ve started trial yesterday or two days ago when the original trial date was set,” he continued. “This case could have easily gotten to trial. Only her incompetence and perceived bias has prevented that.”

Earlier this month, the Trump-appointed judge ordered a stay on the GOP presidential nominee’s legal requirement to give the government advance notice of which classified materials will be discussed—but offered no expiration date for the theoretically temporary reprieve. Legal analysts have worried that a strategy of continual delays could be the Trump-appointed judge’s way of surreptitiously dismissing the trial altogether.

Cobb also accused Cannon of simply failing to understand the case—or the determination of the serial fraudster being tried.

“Trump has a consistent record of lying about the judicial process, and his perception of that process is really odd,” Cobb said, pointing to Trump’s accusation that the Biden administration had authorized the FBI to shoot him during its search and seizure of Mar-a-Lago—a claim that was, in actuality, a wild, willful misread of a standard policy statement regarding the use of deadly force.