Fat former President Trump has no campaign events scheduled as CNN reports that he’s been spending his days mostly playing golf and hosting donors at Mar-a-Lago, while over the last two weeks Joe Biden has hit nearly every battleground state. In the same period Trump went to one and held another rally in Ohio, both of which drew a shit ton of negative mainstream coverage.

Trump’s minions claimed to CNN that his schedule has been eaten up by court appearances, ones that the article pointedly notes were not mandatory for him to attend, and that he’ll start getting back on the trail soon. A parallel report by Politico this morning said that at a campaign conference call last Friday leadership acknowledged that it had been a particularly bad week between the stupid shit Trump said about cutting Social Security and admitting that he didn’t have money to pay the $464 million appeal bond in New York. That was before he said there would be “a bloodbath” if he didn’t win reelection and then admitted to Fox News’s Howie Kurtz that he was eyeing pushing for a 16 week abortion ban. Then that changed to 15 weeks two days later. And he said Jews who vote for Democrats hate their religion. Also his campaign canceled an Arizona rally to save money.

“The only person who can beat Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” former senior Trump campaign adviser David Urban told Politico. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” he added and there’s no additional context or framing for that second part. We hope it’s him trying to self-soothe and he meant more like “I’m not freaking the fuck out for my Orange Jesus yet, but I’m starting to worry.”

Botswana Minister of Environment and Tourism Dumezweni Mthimkhulu is pissed enough over a bill moving through British Parliament banning the import of trophies taken on hunting safaris that he’s threatening to ship 10,000 live elephants to Britain and dump them in central London to let the Limeys know what it’s like living with a large surplus of the massive pachyderms, Sky News reports.

Mthimkhulu later told Sky it was more of a rhetorical something and they weren’t actually going to pull a Greg Abbott. Then there’s the whole thing about Botswana being landlocked and not having the naval or merchant marine fleet necessary to ship 10,000 elephants more than 5,000 miles north to Britain. Would probably be pretty costly and beyond the means of Botswana too.

That said maybe they could manage like 100. Why not just charter a cargo ship out of Namibia and then set the elephants loose by the docks? Botswana would probably go viral for that kind of stunt.

Anyway Mthimkhulu’s real point was that the elephant population is out of control and he says hunting is more like a culling, estimating that the circa 150,000 in Botswana is 100,000 too many since conservation efforts have worked too well from a nadir of 10,000 elephants in 1984.

Georgia state House GOP lawmakers are set to vote Thursday on erecting a monument honoring a prominent Black jurist who, in defiance of the odds, rose from humble beginnings in the Peach State to a seat on the bench of the highest court in the land, married a white neo-Confederate, and even got a rich Caucasian guy to buy an RV for him, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

It’s not clear yet if the bill funding to build a statue of Justice Clarence Thomas on the state Capitol grounds also includes an appropriation for additional security to prevent vandals from putting on a hat similar to the QAnon Shaman’s, painting the face white, taping green Monopoly money to its hands, or just the old dumping fake blood on it, but they might do well to tuck in an extra line item.

Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 40,000 mark Thursday morning, a telltale sign of the massive gains in wealth realized by the Biden Administration and its management of the economic recovery after the brutal recession wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The impressive figure was spotted during an unrelated segment of Fox Business News in which far right New York Congresswoman Claudia Tenney complained that Democrats aren’t helping impeach President Biden and said Republicans just need more evidence to prove their case to Americans.

FBI officials have resumed contact with social media platforms to share tips on foreign disinformation campaigns after arguments at the Supreme Court from MAGA plaintiffs including the Gateway Pundit and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana seeking to prohibit government from having any agency against right wing bullshit went badly, NBC News reports.

“In coordination with the Department of Justice, the FBI recently implemented procedures to facilitate sharing information about foreign malign influence with social media companies in a way that reinforces that private companies are free to decide on their own whether and how to take action on that information,” said an FBI spokesperson told NBC on Wednesday. That they didn’t even wait on the official ruling has gotta be an extra hard dickpunch to Jim Jordan and the rest of the chodes who think the Kremlin has a right to free speech on America’s internet in an election year.

“Today, my Administration is cancelling student loans for an additional 78,000 public service workers – teachers, nurses, firefighters, and more – through Public Service Loan Forgiveness. These public service workers have dedicated their careers to serving their communities, but because of past administrative failures, never got the relief they were entitled to under the law.”

“Because of the fixes my Administration has made, we have now cancelled student debt for over 870,000 public service workers – compared to only about 7,000 public service borrowers ever receiving forgiveness prior to my Administration. And through all of our various student debt relief actions, nearly four million Americans have had their student debt cancelled under my Administration,” says a Biden statement on the slow end-run around the Supreme Court’s fuckery.

Images of fat former President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein with text saying only “Paid for by ProtectChildrenQ LLC” have been appearing on electronic billboards across Georgia and North Carolina recently and the Daily Beast reports that nobody has any idea who the hell is behind it.

North Carolina liberal Jeff Wagenius has been documenting the billboards on TikTok, saying “I live in this little tiny Trump town and there’s one person here that I want to be friends with, cuz this right here deserves the best beer we have in town on me, I swear to God.” A Georgia Trump fan was predictably pissed. “This is right above our welcome sign to our town. Anything to fit that left narrative. Y’all ought to be ashamed. That’s pathetiful,” they said on TikTok, per the Beast.

“Pathetiful” probably wasn’t a typo. The only public records data the Beast could find on the “ProtectChildrenQ LLC” was a Delaware registration, but that does not necessarily they’re associated with the Biden Campaign. “People who want to engage in skullduggery in American elections anonymously don’t have to go to tax havens to create organizations. They can just use Delaware. There’s going to be no information about who created it,” campaign finance lawyer Brett Kappel said, adding that the pic of Trump and Epstein together in the 1990s colors well inside the lines of FEC requirements. “It’s a clever way to avoid FEC reporting. It doesn’t really advocate anything, it’s just a picture of two lowlifes, one of whom happens to be running for president and one who killed himself in prison. Draw your own conclusions about why those people would be together.”

Colombia’s government on Wednesday announced they’re ready to start collecting an estimated $17 billion worth of silver, gold, and emeralds from the wreck of a Spanish galleon sunk off its coast during a 1708 battle with a British warship in the War of the Spanish Succession, ABC News reports.

Spain’s foreign ministry had no comment, nor did ABC ask them. However it’s easy and fun to imagine that the Spaniards are pretty fucking pissed the Colombians are just going to help themselves to all the shit that was supposed to fund one of the sides in the war, ABC doesn’t say which. It was probably either the Habsburgs or not the Habsburgs. Or maybe one incest-deformed branch of the Habsburgs against a marginally less incest-deformed branch of the Habsburgs.

Anyway the Colombian Navy will start unloading the wreck of the San Jose next month. With an estimated 11 million gold coins to be found expect their government to invest heavily in advertising on Fox News, providing stiff competition for commercial slots against other collectible currencies.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken on Wednesday submitted a draft resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip to the UN Security Council, Axios reports.

Blinken told a Saudi Arabian journalist in an interview that the draft calls “for an immediate ceasefire tied to the release of hostages, and we hope very much that countries will support that. I think that would send a strong message, a strong signal. But, of course, we stand with Israel and its right to defend itself, to make sure that October 7th never happens again, but at the same time, it’s imperative that the civilians who are in harm’s way and who are suffering so terribly – that we focus on them, that we make them a priority, protecting the civilians, getting them humanitarian assistance. And we’ve been leading the effort to do that, to get more in, to get more to the people who need it. We are pressing on that as hard as we can.”

GOP lawmaker says Republicans ‘don’t have the guts’ to impeach Biden https://t.co/lHcG1JaTdE

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 21, 2024

As it already struggled to raise funds, Donald Trump’s “Save America” leadership PAC spent more than $6.5 million on his legal fees in February, averaging $238,000 per day, including Leap Day, the Daily Beast reports; it raised just $6 million in the month.

The accounting:  Lawyers took home $5.6 million, with a half-million payment to the lawyer who’s the definition of “failing up” Alina Habba being deferred.  Another $645,000 went to a record-keeping company relating to his New York State civil suit.  And who is going to be surprised by the PAC sending $150,000 to the Article III Project, a farther-right Federalist Society-type group.

Another interesting tidbit:  the PAC only has $4 million in cash in the bank, meaning that it’s living the PAC version of paycheck-to-paycheck; in fact, it’s underwater.  It won’t be able to fund anything other than Trump’s legal bills, so money that would traditionally go to down-ticket candidates won’t be distributed.

Addressing some of the national security problems Donald Trump taking a loan from a billionaire of a foreign country could cause on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Andrew Weissman summed up nicely how fucked up our national security would be with Donald Trump around any classified information:

Having been in the intelligence community, this is one– this is not and shouldn’t be a partisan issue.  What Donald Trump has done, not just–leave aside whether he gets the [bond] money from a foreign person or adversary–what he has done in the way he treated both the intelligence community and denigrated them and in the way he’s treated classified documents isn’t a future harm; that is a current harm to our national security.

What Ambassador [Susan] Rice knows is that in order to keep this country secured, you have to complete alliances and trust with your colleagues overseas, with the so-called Five Eyes.  Other countries need to trust that you will keep their secrets and they can work with you to prevent terrorism….  All of that is put in jeopardy when they’re thinking that this man, Donald Trump, could be back in the Oval Office because all of those things can become public and that is not in the interest of our allies and even our adversaries who are willing to work with us on this problem.  It is an incredibly serious problem for this country now.

“What I did today,” South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace says as she preps to pat herself on the back, “was implicate Joe Biden in every single aspect of Hunter Biden, Jim Biden and their business associates’ foreign interest and business dealings.  Nobody has done that yet, and it’s really important for the American people to judge for themselves who’s telling the truth.”

Editor’s note:  Nancy Mace’s questioning was televised.  She established no such link.  Her five minutes of questioning was a mess of loosely- or never-connected statements that she somehow concluded implicated the President. In fact, at one point in the hearing, professional wrestling freak Jim Jordan admitted they had not uncovered anything that merits impeachment.

Two deputies in Idaho were shot in an ambush on Wednesday to free the prisoner they were transporting to a local medical center for care, and a third was shot by responding Boise Police officers, during a daring escape leading to a major manhunt for the men, CBS News reports.

Boise State Public Radio identifies the prisoner as Skylar Meade, who was serving a 20-year sentence for aggravated assault for shooting at a sheriff’s officer during a high-speed chase.  Officials believe the man who shot the officers was Nicholas Umphenour, but the connection between the two is unclear.  None of the officers received life-threatening injuries, but the two shot by Umphenour are hospitalized with serious injuries.

Lara Trump, the newly appointed co-chair of the Republican National Committee, continues to work tirelessly to promote the agenda of her bank account, using her name and position to enrich herself and her family, needing the grift because she’s talentless and without skill.  The one-time culinary student and Inside Edition segment producer, now leading one of the major political Parties in the world, has committed to making an exercise video with former Democratic poser Tulsi Gabbard and an unnamed WWE performer, from the stable of accused sexual assaulted Vince McMahon.

Angela Chao, the sister-in-law of outgoing Senate Minority Leader and statue-in-training Mitch McConnell had a blood alcohol content three times higher than the legal limit when she drove her car into a pond in a fatal accident on a private ranch in Texas, the Associated Press reports.  The report into her death describes Chao driving her Tesla into the pond, with guests and deputies trying to get her out.  In her car, Chao phoned a friend and spent eight minutes on the phone as the car filled with water and sank.  After about two hours in the water, rescuers were able to pull her out but she was already done.  Her blood alcohol content was .233, nearly three times the 0.08 legal limit in Texas.

A proposed budget plan created by the influential conservative Republican Study Committee would increase the retirement age for Social Security benefits and push an anti-choice agenda, a plan that would give President Joe Biden a major campaign issue in the upcoming election, NBC News reports.

The group of more than 170 House Republicans, most of whom are allies of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, pushes a higher age to get Social Security benefits to make up for longer life spans, the proposal reads.

Outside of budget goals, the reports says Republicans should support policies “designed to advance the cause of life,” including what they call the “Life at Conception Act” which would grant personhood to fetuses, screwing up IVF and other reproductive healthcare and giving Democrats a key talking point against Republicans.

Treasury Department: “Today, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated two individuals and two entities for services they provided the Government of the Russian Federation (GoR) in connection with a foreign malign influence campaign, including attempting to impersonate legitimate media outlets. Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze (Gambashidze), the founder of the Moscow-based company Social Design Agency (SDA), together with Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin (Tupikin), the CEO and current owner of Russia-based Company Group Structura LLC (Structura), were involved in a persistent foreign malign influence campaign at the direction of the Russian Presidential Administration. SDA and Structura have been identified as key actors of the campaign, responsible for providing GoR with a variety of services, including the creation of websites designed to impersonate government organizations and legitimate media outlets in Europe. Leading into Fall 2022, Tupikin and Gambashidze implemented a campaign that impersonated news websites, staged videos, and fake social media accounts.”

That’s technically election interference, right? If the Biden Administration is punishing Russians who are trying to help Republicans get elected then it’s like politicization or weaponization of law enforcement or something… Why isn’t Jim Jordan doing anything about this?

House Oversight Chairbilly James Comer is now at the point where he’s asking President Joe Biden to come in and testify to Republicans’ stupid dead-end impeachment inquiry, lol.

Alabama has entered a new golden age of election integrity as Governor Kay Ivey on Wednesday protected the right to vote by signing SB1, a measure banning ballot harvesting and making potentially a Class C felony to receive payment for assisting in the distribution, filling out, delivering, and ordering of absentee ballots applications, the Montgomery Advertiser reports.

“Here in Alabama, we are committed to ensuring our elections are free and fair. I commend Secretary of State Wes Allen, as well as members of the Alabama Legislature for making election security a priority, and I am proud to officially sign Senate Bill 1 into law. Under my watch, there will be no funny business in Alabama elections,” said Ivey in a statement lauding her accomplishment.

Hear that libs? You’ve been put on notice. No funny business. That means you can’t interfere in Alabama elections by collecting sealed absentee ballots and delivering them to county clerks or by paying canvassers to make sure voters apply for absentee ballots and send them in any more. Don’t like it? Well how about next election you put in the money and hard work to get a Democratic governor and legislature elected by collecting sealed absentee ballots and delivering them to county clerks or by paying canvassers to make sure voters apply for absentee ballots? Oh wait, LOL!

National Zero will resume our regular coverage after this important update on a stunning victory for election integrity over the forces of funny business. We hope our MAGA readers enjoy the win.