A lengthy pre-mortem of the 2024 Republican presidential primary by the New York Times reveals that disgraced former President Trump’s campaign earlier this month fired the regional director whose bailiwick included Johnson County, Iowa, which was the only one out the Hawkeye State’s 99 counties that the fat bastard lost to Nikki “Birdbrain” Haley, and there it was just by a single vote.

President Joe Biden will deliver remarks on his infrastructure accomplishments in Superior, Wisconsin on Thursday, where a new bridge linking the town with Duluth, Minnesota has been greenlit for construction. Watch for Joe to call out assclown Republican Minnesota Congressman Pete Stauber, who took credit for the bridge this week after having voted against the bill.

Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday ordered large-headed Trump spokesman Steven Cheung to leave the courtroom during testimony in the EJ Carroll defamation trial, the Messenger reports.

Unfortunately it was for a boring reason: Cheung’s phone rang and Kaplan is notoriously strict about electronic devices in his courtroom. No actual arrest-worthy disruption occurred.

This Fox Business News lady put in a pretty good effort to cope with Thursday’s GDP numbers, but she could’ve just said that stocks are getting too expensive because of Bidenflation or something.

A resolution being drafted by the Republican National Committee seeks to declare fat former President Trump to be the party’s “presumptive nominee,” even as there’s technically still a primary race currently underway as Nikki “Birdbrain” Haley hasn’t dropped out yet, the Dispatch reports.

“RESOLVED that the Republican National Committee hereby declares President Trump as our presumptive 2024 nominee for the office of President of the United States and from this moment forward moves into full general election mode welcoming supporters of all candidates as valued members of Team Trump 2024,” reads the resolving part of the resolution’s draft.

No need to speculate on how the MAGA propaganda-industrial complex would react if the Dems did this while there’s still technically a “race” between Biden, Dean Phillips, and that New Age weirdo.

DC federal Judge Amit Mehta on Thursday sentenced former Trump White House economic something douchebag and shitty board game designer Peter Navarro to four months in prison for criminal contempt of Congress after the asshole was swiftly convicted last year of defying a lawful subpoena from the House January 6th Select Committee, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

Every day that Nikki Haley stays in the race is an in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign. https://t.co/tSpLExWkTu

— Karoline Leavitt (@kleavittnh) January 25, 2024

Just moments ago Trump’s campaign also sent out another stupid fundraising email with the subject line “Suspend your campaign!” and reading “Patriot – I have one message for Nikki Haley: SUSPEND YOUR CAMPAIGN NOW! The primary is OVER! It’s time we stop wasting money, wasting time, AND UNITE AS A PARTY! Because what’s coming next will truly be a fight to Save America. Joe Biden & his CORRUPT Department of ‘Justice’ are waging a war that has never before been seen in American HISTORY. Now, more than ever, we need EVERY REPUBLICAN united to DEFEAT JOE BIDEN! Before the day is over, I’m asking every patriot reading this message to chip in and tell Nikki Haley, ‘DROP OUT AND ENDORSE TRUMP NOW!'” further underscoring the derangement.

American intel officials told Iran that some explodey ISIS guys were coming to explode the memorial services for exploded Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in the city of Kerman earlier this month, they didn’t listen and things got explodey, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In this week’s episode of the drama surrounding former Harris County, Texas GOP Chairman and current state House primary candidate Jared Woodfill, a character so debased our readers would reject him as too over-the-top if we had made him up in some silly satire article, the Texas Tribune reports they dug up a 2017 email written by a college kid who was on Woodfill’s payroll but assigned to work out of the home Woodfill’s law partner, retired Judge Paul Pressler, as his aide. In it, the aide informed Pressler’s family that the judge had touched him and bragged about being naked around young boys. All of it shows Woodfill knowingly abetted his partner’s predation until at least 2017.

From the email:

It gets even worse than that, with the college kid writing Pressler was preying upon a homeless 20 year-old who had stolen money from the judge and was manipulated into massaging him while naked. Pressler’s wife Nancy was aware too and had told not to take the 20 year-old home, but the old man did it anyway. The email was attached to a resignation letter addressed to Pressler which read “My conscience dictates that I step away. Please take me off the payroll. If I am to continue receiving paychecks from Woodfill in the continuing weeks, I will send them back.”

Trucker Convoys to “Take our Border Back” Being Organized for February 3 via @gatewaypundit https://t.co/Ka5FuimKgo

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) January 25, 2024

For the second time in three years in office, the economy under President Joe Biden surpassed every annual GDP growth rate of his predecessor, growing at a 3.1% rate, higher than pundits’ predictions, CNBC reports.  Fourth quarter 2023 growth was estimated at 3.3%.

The rate is a jump over the 2022 of 2.1%, but lower than the accelerated 5.9% rate in Biden’s first year in office, when he had to implement policies to boost the economy after the disastrous pandemic response from the Trump administration, which saw a -2.8% annual shrinkage in 2020.  Trump’s other annual GDP growth rates didn’t exceed 3.0%, a benchmark Trump frequently cited in the 2016 campaign as the standard for US economic growth because the Obama administration never exceeded it.  Trump’s annual growth rates: 2.2% in 2017; 2.9% in ’18, 2.3% in ’19, and the 2020 economic contraction of -2.8%.

Leadership of the Missouri state Senate’s Republican majority on Tuesday doled out a numbed of punishments to members of the chamber’s newly-formed local Freedom Caucasians franchise for what the Washington Examiner describes as “intraparty fighting” and stirring bullshit, with the funniest of these penalties being exacted upon state Senator Bill “Book Burner” Eigel, a 2024 gubernatorial primary candidate who was among those who “had their parking spots removed from the basement garage and moved further away from the Missouri Capitol,” per the Examiner.

Eigel – who recently introduced a bill removing Joe Biden from the 2024 ballot to avenge fat former President Trump’s 14th Amendment Section III disqualifications in Colorado and Maine – was also removed as chair of the state Senate’s Veterans Military Affairs and Pensions Committee, replaced with fellow Republican Mike Bernskoetter, who will now take over the parking space as well.

Thursday morning’s DC tip sheets are broadcasting loud and clear how the “establishment” GOP know they’re walking themselves into a disaster politically on this border bill shitshow but are essentially powerless to do anything about it simply because disgraced former President Trump’s genius plan to campaign on “Biden’s border crisis” is more important than actually addressing it.

“McConnell has now shifted some of the blame for this episode to Trump. Trump was bashing the tentative deal even before it was formally released… What should happen on the border while Trump is running his White House campaign? Democrats will get to say they made huge concessions on parole and asylum during these talks, and Trump tanked it. That’s a much better space politically than they were in just before these Senate talks began,” writes Punchbowl News.

Politico Playbook meanwhile spells it out in a direct quote from a “senior GOP aide” who said “It’s very clear that a large group of Republicans in the Senate and the House no longer want to do border security… Trump wouldn’t have his issue to run on. They don’t want to give up that issue.”

Texas is absolutely right.

This administration is deliberately breaking the law by aiding and abetting illegal immigration at an unprecedented scale!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 25, 2024

Those who had been paying attention probably saw this coming, but the Messenger reports the Republican National Committee are shutting down most of their two dozen or so “Hispanic Community Centers” due to neglect and lukewarm feedback from their target demographic.

“In this case they went big and it sounds like they didn’t get the response from the community they intended. That’s OK, they tried, we appreciate that. But you have to have people on the inside who can advise you – these are long-term things that need to be backed by resources,” said Dan Garza, the executive director of “grassroots” Latino conservative organization LIBRE Initiative.

“I write concerning the troubling operations of the 65 Project, a radical activist group actively targeting legal professionals. The 65 Project identifies and targets lawyers who represent or associate with clients they ‘disapprove’ of on personal, ideological, and political grounds. This group has increasingly pursued disbarment for lawyers for reasons unrelated to their professional duty and without any dereliction of duty or misconduct. They have been weaponized as a partisan political vendetta machine.The 65 Project, falsely parading as a bipartisan entity, is nothing short of a political intimidation tool, armed and operated by their partisan allies.”

“Their mission is clear: to systematically dismantle the careers of legal professionals who dare to represent or associate with President Trump. So far, they have successfully ‘identified’ and targeted 111 lawyers from 26 states for their involvement in President Trump’s post-election lawsuits. This targeted campaign against lawyers is a brazen attempt to polarize legal advocacy by chilling participation in the market of legal talent that doesn’t ascribe to or oppose a certain political mindset. Targeting attorneys based on their client’s political affiliation undermines the diversity of legal representation and poses a grave threat to the ideals of free speech and fair representation. The tactics employed by this organization are reprehensible, often involving threats of disbarment, public shaming, and underhanded attempts to manipulate the standards of the American Bar Association to serve a partisan agenda,” writes Texas MAGA Congressman Lance Gooden to the American Bar Association, complaining about the effectiveness of The 65 Project.

Given the softest of softball questions from the softballiest of Fox propagandists, Eric Trump completely fumbles the response as only a Trump can.  Asked to describe exactly where journalists gave his daddy an owie by Donald’s secret campaign advisor Sean Hannity, Eric responds, “Well, Sean, does that shock anybody?  I mean, they’ve been censoring my father since, y’know, the minute he went down the escalator.  Anything they put out, he would censor.”

Three days after she was sworn in to her first term in Congress, South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace was hiding in her office, swearing she was a never-Trumper, and sketching out a loony plan to confront the domestic terrorists invading the Capitol so she could get hit, thereby cementing her bona fides as a leader against Donald Trump.

Mace’s whacky idea, included in this gifted Washington Post story about how Congressional Republicans who once spoke out against Trump, his antics, and his violent rhetoric are now falling in line with the inevitability of his 2024 GOP re-nomination, fits perfectly with the story:  Mace herself has already endorsed Trump’s 2024 bid.

“For the Democrats like Jamie Raskin to act like this is no big deal…  I mean, I find it hard to believe that if a Trump child got five million dollars given to him by someone that just met Donald Trump at a political fundraiser a few weeks before and sent an email–‘We’ve got to get him this money or it’s gonna have political consequences’–I believe Jamie Raskin would have a little more concern than he showed during that deposition.”

We don’t have to think about what a Trump child might do:  We know what the Trump adults got, including the Obese Guy himself raking in $7.8 million from foreigners at his hotels, his daughter getting valuable Chinese trademarks while she worked in the White House, and his son-in-law collecting two billion dollars from a foreign government immediately after leaving his White House gig.  But sure, it’s Hunter that’s the problem.

Donald Trump has now issued his basis for membership in his cult:  anyone who donates to his last remaining opponent in the GOP presidential primary will be “banned from the MAGA camp,” according to a new post on his failing social media platform.

“Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country,” starts Trump’s missive, using his fifth-grade derogatory nickname for the former South Carolina governor before issuing the ultimatum:  “Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them, because we Put America First, and ALWAYS WILL!”

“… because we Put America First,” Trump claims in a statement where he’s literally putting loyalty to him above all else.