GOP’s Dumbest Senator Tommy Tuberville Launches Run for Governor

Tommy Tuberville, one of the GOP’s most dim-witted senators, is leaving Capitol Hill to run for governor in his alleged residence of Alabama next year.

“Coach Tommy Tuberville is running for governor!” his newly minted campaign website reads. His platform consists of “standing up for Alabama values,” fighting “woke ideology,” keeping Alabama pro-life, among other cookie-cutter MAGA Republican positions. Tuberville is looking to succeed term-limited Governor Kay Ivey, and is the clear favorite in the deep red Heart of Dixie.

Tuberville confirmed on Fox News that he’s ending his Senate career after just one term to run for governor.

Tuberville’s time in the Senate has been defined by shameless, gaffe-ridden loyalty to Trump and the MAGA agenda. He spent nine months of 2023 personally blocking over 450 military promotions to protest the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing soldiers forced to travel out of state for an abortion. In the end, he caved, and nothing changed at the Defense Department.

He has also made national headlines for refusing to acknowledge that white nationalism is racist, fumbling the question so badly that it led to questions about his general competency. He lied about his dad getting five bronze stars in World War I. He tried to goad President Trump into taking over the Panama Canal, and spread vaccine misinformation in defense of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And that was all in just one term. The upcoming gubernatorial campaign is sure to provide more classic, alarmingly ignorant moments from Coach Tuberville.

Donald Trump has a five-step plan to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives in 2026, as part of a desperate bid to stave off yet another impeachment inquiry, Axios reported Tuesday.

There is no shortage of potential subjects for an impeachment inquiry. Trump has openly profited from his seat, and helped his allies get rich too—whether by manipulating the market or by turning administration officials into salespeople. Not to mention, he claims to have accepted a massive gift from a foreign government, likely violating the U.S. Constitution. Suffice it to say, Trump needs to keep the Democrats out of power.

Trump “knows the stakes firsthand. He saw what can happen. It’s clear he doesn’t want that again,” Matt Gorman, a top official for House Republicans’ campaign arm in the 2018 midterms, told Axios.

“Investigations, impeachment—he knows it’s all on the table with a Speaker [Hakeem] Jeffries.”

In an effort to maintain a GOP-led House, the president will try to prevent lawmakers from leaving their seats, either to retire or to run for another office. Any defections could hurt the party’s chances of retaining the seats and cost millions of dollars—which could hurt them come the next general election.

Earlier this month, Trump endorsed New York Representative Mike Lawler to keep his seat, despite the congressman’s ambitions to run for governor. Last week, during a contentious meeting with Republicans to secure the passage of the president’s “big beautiful bill,” Lawler had fought to restore state and local tax, or SALT, deductions—in part, to boost his viability as a candidate statewide—but failed. Trump told him to forget the SALT, warning, “I know your district better than you do. If you lose because of SALT, you were going to lose anyway.”

The Trump team is already concerned over the defections of Michigan Representative John James, who has opted to run for governor, and Kentucky Representative Andy Barr, who is leaving his seat to run for Senate.

In that same vein, an essential part of Trump’s plan involves shutting down primary challenges. If the president endorses vulnerable Republicans in the early stages of their races, it could potentially ward off challengers. Over the weekend, Trump made posts endorsing New York Representative Andrew Garbarino and Montana Representative Troy Downing. Although Downing handily defeated his Democratic challenger, he’d also had to defeat eight Republican challengers in the primary.

The next two steps of Trump’s plan are to raise big and spend big. The president has proven to be the GOP’s most effective fundraiser, raising more than $35 million for the cowardly National Republican Congressional Committee at a dinner in April. More events like these are sure to fill the party’s coffers ahead of the midterm elections.

Additionally, Trump’s political operation already has about half a million dollars ready to spend on future elections, and has launched a massive ad campaign backing the president’s tax plan, which will cost an estimated $5.3 trillion over the next decade.

Finally, the president will get hands-on with his recruitment. Gorman explained that the president would act as a “closer,” bringing in candidates to run in swing districts.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t want government scientists to publish their work in the world’s leading medical journals.

In the Ultimate Human podcast on Tuesday, the secretary of health and human services accused the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet of being “corrupt” and in the pocket of major pharmaceutical companies.

“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop [National Institutes of Health] scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” Kennedy said. The NIH is the world’s largest funder of health research.

Last week, the HHS released a report saying that overprescribed medications were the source of increased chronic diseases in children, blaming the pharmaceutical industry and a culture of fear for preventing doctors and scientists from studying these diseases’ root causes. And earlier this month, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to medical journals around the country, accusing them of partisanship.

“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications … are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” wrote Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia at the time, in a letter to the medical journal CHEST. According to NPR, the letters did not cite any evidence to back up Martin’s claims.

The head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, said in an interview earlier this month that he supports academic freedom, meaning that “I can send my paper out even if my bosses disagree with me.”

On the surface, that would seem to run counter to Kennedy’s proposed ban, but Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary, who are both also vaccine skeptics, just happen to have launched their own medical journal, Journal of the Academy of Public Health. The two are listed as “on leave” from the journal, which has raised concerns about promoting misinformation.

“It looks like a well-put-together journal, it’s been nicely designed and so forth,” Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, told the journal Science. “But when you look at the papers that have been published and at the editorial board, you see that it’s really dominated [by] a small clique of contrarians around the COVID pandemic. There is certainly nothing like even representation of consensus viewpoints within infectious disease epidemiology.”

For all of their talk about academic freedom and corruption, Kennedy, Bhattcharya, and Makary seem to be pushing their own views and stifling others’. Their appointments also coincide with mass layoffs and staff purges at their respective agencies, leaving behind smaller staffs less likely to raise objections out of fear of losing their jobs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer recommending Covid-19 vaccines to young children and pregnant women—even though the agency’s own research recommends doing so.

The lifesaving jab was removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule Tuesday at the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another Covid shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children,” Kennedy said in a video statement, promising that the move would advance the Trump agenda to “Make America Healthy Again.”

But exactly how Kennedy came to the conclusion that avoiding the booster would be healthier for those groups is unclear, especially when the CDC lists pregnancy as a condition that increases the risk of experiencing “at least one severe Covid-19 outcome” based on its own research.

Young children are also at a higher risk of developing serious illness. Babies 6 months old and younger face the same health risks as adults who are between the ages of 65 and 74, American Academy of Pediatrics vaccine expert Sean O’Leary told The New York Times last week.

But vaccination during pregnancy can actually offset that risk, granting children temporary immunity to some illnesses, such as Covid-19, before they’re even born thanks to the transfer of protective antibodies.

“These antibodies can help protect your baby from those diseases during the first few months of life,” according to the CDC. But after six months of life, they wear off—a detail that alarms medical experts about Kennedy’s new strategy, as removing the vaccine from the vaccine schedule will make it harder for parents and pregnant women to get the shot as insurance companies stop paying for them.

Whatever the rationale for stripping the vaccine, it was made without the input of the CDC’s usual advisers: Its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is not scheduled to meet until the end of June.

What is clear though is that Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—has made it his mission to attack vaccine access in his time atop HHS.

Kennedy’s contagious beliefs are spreading in spite of the science. Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The jabs are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox, a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

The Trump administration is halting all student visa interviews while it decides on how heavily it wants to surveil the social media pages of applicants, according to an order to all U.S. embassies reviewed by Politico.

“Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued [in a separate telegram], which we anticipate in the coming days,” read the cable, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

While the cable does not specify what platforms or content the State Department will be targeting, it’s likely that the process will target international students who showed solidarity with Palestine online. However, all student visa applicants are expected to undergo the social media vetting.

This move will impede the visa processes of thousands of students, upturning their education, and delay a massive portion of the student population of many American universities.