Fat former President Trump on Wednesday filed a federal defamation lawsuit against writer EJ Carroll over her comments after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse, ABC News reports.

“In response to that specific inquiry, Counterclaim Defendant disregarded the jury’s finding that Counterclaimant did not rape her, and replied: ‘Oh yes he did, oh yes he did,'” wrote Trump’s lawyers in the complaint, claiming that the word games caused “significant harm to his reputation.”

Florida’s children can sleep well knowing that they’re being protected from the evils of socialism as the state has been using bureaucratic loopholes to kick thousands of them off of Medicaid following the expiry of a COVID-era policy banning states from the practice, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

“I’ve just been calling everybody that I can, any resource. I feel drained,” said Chianne Douberley, mom to a 2 year-old named Charlotte whose cystic fibrosis medication costs $26,000 a month and should move to Venezuela if she doesn’t like living where woke goes to die.

While he hasn’t yet officially decided to skip the Fox News-hosted first 2024 Republican presidential primary debate in August, disgraced former President Trump is leaning heavily toward it and is making plans to “counterprogram” it with some rally or whatever, NBC News reports. The thinking is that there’s no incentive for Trump to do it given his prohibitive lead in the primary polls and wanting to punish Fox News for their repeated failures to satisfy his capricious whims.

Whatever happens, it doesn’t seem like Fox News can really do anything to mollify the fat bastard at this point and he’s just going to come up with his own reasons to fuck them over in the ratings for the debate, the Republican Party and its primary voters be damned too.

Legendarily uncourageous Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy took a beating on Tuesday after the Trump regime found his lack of faith disturbing, Politico Playbook reports on the fallout from McCarthy’s ill-advised “Can he win that election? Yeah, he can win that election. The question is: ‘Is he the strongest to win the election?’ I don’t know that answer,” interview on CNBC.

Even McCarthy’s frenzied damage control re-do with Breitbart later in the day and personal apology call to Trump did little to temper the anger in the Orange God Emperor’s court. Worse, a fundraising email McCarthy sent out calling Donald the “strongest candidate” managed to piss Trump off even more, as “fundraising off of Trump’s name without permission is a huge no-no for the former president,” per Politico. “If Donald Trump wanted… he could have [McCarthy] out as speaker by the end of the week,” one GOP consultant unambiguously warned the hapless weakling.

At least eight civilians are dead, three of them children, in a Russian missile attack Wednesday on a pizza restaurant in the center of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, the BBC reports.

As many as 56 others were injured in the strike. “This is the city centre. These were public eating places crowded with civilians,” regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told Ukrainian television.

Texas Republican Will Hurd, a former CIA operative and Congressman who’s thrown his hat into the White House race, turns on the charm and turns up the heart-pumping energy during his CNN interview about Republican Florida Governor and primary opponent Ron DeSantis’s dodging of a question regarding the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress.  With the charisma of a half-eaten loaf of Wonderbread, or Jeb Bush, Hurd explains some hard truths for the Fox audience to hear:  “We should be clear about what happened in the past.  Donald Trump lost.  The election was not stolen.  It was not a tour that happened on January 6th; it was an attempt to stop the government and overthrow the government.”

GOP presidential nominee Chris Christie tore into Donald Trump like he was a Tastykake chocolate eclair on Tuesday, cracking that Trump is “the cheapest S.O.B. I’ve ever met in my life” after it was disclosed Trump is diverting ordinary Americans’ donations from his presidential campaign to his legal defense fund, Politico reports.

“What Donald Trump is good at is spending other people’s money,” Christie said, adding, “This is a billionaire who refused to pay his lawyers with his own personal money, and instead, men and women out there who believe in him and wanted [him] to be elected president are donating money to try to forward his candidacy … and he’s diverting that money to pay his own legal fees. He should take a pledge today to instruct his campaign to no longer spend any public money on his legal fees. He is the richest candidate in this race, yet he is using public money to pay his legal fees.  He should be ashamed of himself.”

Democratic Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz went into the lion’s den and tamed the kitty.  As Lawrence Jones–literally the name the pops up if you Google “Black host on Fox”–tries to push a narrative about how unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris is, according to a new poll, Moskowitz repeatedly points out that the same poll had the Biden-Harris ticket handily beating a Trump-led ticket.  A recent poll found 40.7% of respondents approving of Vice President Harris’s job performance, while 51.6% said they did not approve.  (Honestly, though, what’s the job:  go to funerals overseas and… well… don’t die.  That’s about it.)

Moskowitz also notes in passing that Harris’s predecessor had similar poll numbers at this point in his single term in office.  That’s only partially correct:  in 2019, a poll found 39% approved of Pence’s job performance, with 40% having an unfavorable opinion and 8% neutral.  Amazingly, in his third year as Vice President, 12% of respondents had never heard of Mike Pence.  (The same poll found 4 in 10 respondents rated the Trump administration the worst in American history, and that was before the pandemic.)

On Monday night after CNN published the damning 2021 audio of fat former President Trump telling his ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s ghostwriters that the document he was holding was “secret” and that he hadn’t declassified it, Donald claimed that the tape “is actually an exoneration.”

Which makes this Tuesday night Truth Social post kind of strange because you would think that he would be happy to be “exonerated” and not like calling for Jack Smith and his team to be prosecuted for letting it leak or coming up with all sorts of contradictory bullshit excuses.

Nosferatu cosplayer and one-time lawyer Rudy Giuliani was interviewed by investigators for Special Counsel Jack Smith regarding the fraud aspect of the plot to undermine the legitimate results of the November 2020 presidential election, CNN reports.  Giuliani and his attorney Robert Costello met with Smith’s team in recent weeks.  Sources reported that Smith is looking at a number of lawyers affiliated with Trump’s attempts to convince state legislatures to decertify legitimate results and to appoint fake electors.

“Now with Hunter, every day is ‘Bring Your Kid to Work Day’ at the White House, Air Force One, state dinners, Camp David…” the next future Fox prime time host to be booted off air for sexist remarks and misogyny Jessie Watters notes, forgetting that the previous administration had the then-president’s literal offspring on the White House staff.

Disgraced former President Trump told a Semafor reporter he was holding up a random piece of non-classified paper to impress Mark Meadows’s ghostwriters when he was recorded in July 2021 telling them that the document he had in his hand was “confidential” and “secret.”

“I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado,” Trump told Semafor and ABC News reporters. “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents. I just held up a whole pile of – my desk is loaded up with papers. I have papers from 25 different things,” the twice-impeached loser continued.

So in essence Trump is using his reputation for dishonesty as a defense and “coming clean” with a new lie. Nice of him to give his fanboys something to work with here after a rough 24 hours for them.

A federal judge on Tuesday told fat former President Trump to fuck off with trying to get the Stormy Daniels hush money criminal case moved from New York state courts to the federal circuit, thereby keeping it in front of “biased” Judge Juan Merchan, the Daily Beast reports.

Southern District of New York Judge Alvin Hellerstein hasn’t actually ruled yet, but according to the Beast told Donald’s lawyers point blank he’d heard enough and would reject the arguments in the coming days. “There’s no relation to any act of the president,” Hellerstein said, dismissing the claim that it was part of Trump’s “official duties” as president to pay money to a porn star to keep her quiet about their past sexual encounters and thus not a federal offense.

Chicago’s air quality ranks as worst in the world thanks to the smoke from resurgent Canadian wildfires, CBS News reports, giving Jim Jordan another thing to illogically claim is hypocritical about “Democrat-run cities” as he does with gun violence.  Chicago’s Air Quality Index hit 228 Tuesday afternoon, putting it in the “purple” zone signifying “very unhealthy” air quality.

As Tuesday carried on, Detroit overtook Chicago as the world’s worst air designee as the day went on.  Wisconsin and Iowa have already issued warnings for poor air quality, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul warned her state’s residents that air quality will return in the coming week.

Trump co-defendant and valet Walt Nauta’s Tuesday morning arraignment was postponed until later next week because the would-be counsel backed out after a dispute over fees with the fat former president’s legal slush fund/”Save America” political action committee, the Guardian reports.

Nauta needs local counsel admitted to practice in the Southern District of Florida to represent him in the case and his Orange Master has the final say over who can be retained. Trump’s conditions reportedly also stipulate that the defense lawyer can never have previously served as a prosecutor, which probably seriously narrows down the field. The problem overall however is that Trump is happy to cause any and every delay possible as to drag the trial out past the 2024 election.

A New York State judge ruled Ivanka Trump was no longer a subject of the civil lawsuit brought by state Attorney General Letitia James, but that the other aspects of the case involving her father, two brothers and other members of the Trump Organization can move forward, ABC News reports.  The lawsuit, which seeks at least a quarter billion dollars, stems from allegations that the Trumps and their company illegally manipulated the stated values of their assets to pay fewer taxes but gain more credit.

While it makes sense that Ivanka be removed from the suit–while she was an officer of the corporation, she was not involved in the daily operation of the business and her own enterprises were operated independently of the family’s alleged grift–the move also demonstrates Ivanka is smarter than the males in her family:  In April, Ivanka changed lawyers, dropping the ones also representing Junior and Eric who were paid for with family money and hiring independent counsel from a different firm, who brokered this motion.

Fat former President Trump called Fox News “fake news” in an interview with the sometimes-loyal right wing propaganda outlet on Tuesday about the incriminating 2021 audio leaked to CNN.

“I said it very clearly – I had a whole desk full of lots of papers, mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories, having to do with many, many subjects, and what was said was absolutely fine… We did nothing wrong. This is a whole hoax,” Trump said.

“My voice was fine. What did I say wrong on those recordings? I didn’t even see the recording. All I know is I did nothing wrong. We had a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up. In fact, you hear the rustle of the paper. And nobody said that I did anything wrong other than the fake news, which is Fox, too,” he added. When asked if there might be any other incriminating recordings, Trump said “I don’t know of any recordings that we should be concerned with because I don’t do things wrong. I do things right. I’m a legitimate person. I’m not like Biden that gets hundreds of millions of dollars from people and countries. We do things right, so I don’t care about any recordings.”

“I could say this is a classified document; it doesn’t make it true,” a Newsmax hostess Heather Childers declares about Trump’s recorded declaration that he was showing unauthorized individuals a classified document he was unauthorized to possess.  And then she gets to the root of Trump’s legal dilemma:  “You know how Trump is.  We don’t know [if anything Trump said on the recording is true].  We don’t know.”

This seems to be the rightwing echosphere’s settled reaction to the release of the recording of Trump boasting about classified information he had in his possession after he left the White House:  Trump’s a known liar, so we can’t trust what he’s claiming on the video and what he’s claimed later.  Because while that might be an effective defense in the feeble minds of Trump supporters, proclaiming that you don’t know when he’s telling the truth isn’t a good baseline for a politician.

Republican Presidential candidate Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, apparently plans to capitalize on the GOP’s base’s ongoing thirst for uneducated, underinformed candidates:  during a recent radio interview, Suarez pleaded ignorance about one of the world’s ongoing human rights issues, according to Politico.

“What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked a local radio host when questioned about how he would address China’s internal human rights abuses.  The plight of the Uyghur, a Muslim ethnic minority in western China, has been a decades-long subject of international pressure on Beijing, which has ordered Uyghurs into reeducation camps where they’re routinely tortured, beaten and raped.  US-China relations will be one of the key foreign policy issues in the 2024 presidential election in which Suarez thinks he has a chance.

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court ruled against Republican efforts to kill the state’s mail-in voting system, ending the lawsuit that focused on one of Donald Trump’s key conspiracy theories in the 2020 election, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports.

More than a dozen Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers joined the suit claiming state courts had usurped the power of the legislature by permitting changes to the state’s mail-in voting procedure during the 2020 election due to the coronavirus pandemic.  This case specifically focused on the court’s decisions to allow jurisdictions to count ballots that did not have the date properly signed on various parts of Pennsylvania’s complicated mail-in ballot, which requires voters to sign and date various parts of the ballot, an interior security envelope and an exterior envelope.  The 24-page opinion notes that while the courts ruled the ballots should be counted, the ruling did not invalidate state law requiring voters handwrite the date on an exterior envelope; instead, it gave local election officials the discretion to accept a ballot they deem valid despite not having the date signed.

Republicans had used this ruling to claim the entire mail-in voting law, passed in 2019, had to be voided because the law includes a provision that the entire law gets scrapped if a court strikes down any provision of the law.  Because the law required a signature on the outside of the envelope and the court ruled the signature unnecessary, Republicans argued unsuccessfully, then the entire law must be struck down.  However, the court pointed out that its ruling was for exceptional cases; it did not strike down the signature requirement.  Republicans vowed to take the case to the state Supreme Court, which has repeated ruled against GOP attempts to handcuff Pennsylvania voters.