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OPINION

Trump’s Health Questioned After News Conference But What Do We Know About JD Vance?

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During and after Donald Trump’s “rambling, weird, scary,” and “lie-filled” press conference Thursday afternoon, reporters, casual observers, political experts, and even his own former aide, expressed concern about the 78-year old’s physical and mental health. But if the ex-president wins re-election, his running mate, JD Vance, could at some point become president, and the Trump campaign has not told America much if anything about the freshman U.S. Senator from Ohio’s health.

“The surface layer of Trump cracked yesterday. Even his most ardent supporters could [see] someone unhinged and out of step with the times,” warned former Trump communications director and former longtime friend Anthony Scaramucci, on Friday, after Thursday’s presser.

As Thursday’s event began, The New Yorker’s award-winning journalist Susan Glasser remarked, “Trump looks ill.” Later, at The New Yorker, Glasser wrote that Trump “looked uncommonly pale and tired.” And referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, now the ex-president’s Democratic opponent, Glasser asked: “Was it just me, or did he have trouble remembering her name?”

Attorney George Conway, who recently founded an anti-Trump PAC he named the Anti-Psychopath Political Action Committee, responded to video clips 0f Trump during his press conference with words including, “Deranged,” “Whacko,” and, “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

None of this should come as a surprise.

READ MORE: ‘Pure Gibberish’: Trump Tried to ‘BS His Way Through’ Question About Abortion Drug

A majority of Americans (51%) now say Donald Trump is too old to be President, up from 44%, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. Morning Consult also found just 48% say Trump is mentally fit, a drop of five points from 53%.

A CBS News/YouGov poll taken July 30-August 2 found Americans almost evenly split on whether or not Trump has the mental and cognitive health to be president: 51% yes, 49% no.

Donald Trump has never provided a full medical history to the American people, and has been remarkably opaque about medical events. As President, when he contracted COVID, only months later did the American people learn Trump was far more ill than the White House had acknowledged.

The New York Times in February of 2021, after Trump left the White House, reported, “new details about his condition and about the effort inside the White House to get him special access to an unapproved drug to fight the virus help to flesh out one of the most dire episodes of Mr. Trump’s presidency.”

“The new revelations about Mr. Trump’s struggle with the virus also underscore the limited and sometimes misleading nature of the information disclosed at the time about his condition.”

In April, before the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally, for which Trump has never provided a full medical report from a physician who treated him at the hospital, The Washington Post reported, “Trump relies on a doctor who is a member of his golf club to vouch for his health.”

RELATED: Is Donald Trump ‘Quiet Quitting’? Here’s What His ‘Meltdown at Mar-a-Lago’ Reveals

“Former president has declined to release details about his own condition beyond a short letter from his physician, contrasting with Biden’s detailed report,” The Post noted. “Instead of specifics like blood pressure and medications, [Trump’s] letter had just three paragraphs without specific numbers proclaiming that Trump was in ‘excellent health’ and had ‘exceptional’ cognitive ability. It did not disclose Trump’s weight.”

As for Trump having taken a “bullet for democracy,” as he has claimed, the most detailed medical information came from his disgraced and demoted former White House Physician, Congressman Ronny Jackson, who “was allegedly nicknamed the ‘candyman’ for handing out pills to staff without prescriptions,” according to The Telegraph.

Aside from any potential age-related health issues, Trump faces the possibility of incarceration, having been convicted in New York of 34 felony charges. He is scheduled to be sentenced September 18. He also faces a possible state trial in Georgia and a possible federal trial in Washington, D.C.

And while the American people remain largely in the dark about Donald Trump’s health, both physical and mental, (not to mention his possible incarceration) they also know little about the man who would sit in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk should the former president win re-election but become unable – for medical or judicial reasons – at some point to serve as President.

Indeed, that Morning Consult poll also found, “more than 1 in 3 voters (36%) — including 45% of independents — said it is unlikely the Republican nominee would be capable of serving a full four-year term in office if elected in November.”

Those concerns are not related to Trump’s health as much as his fitness for office.

“Among these voters who questioned whether Trump could finish a full second term, their fears are less likely to center on his fragility or longevity than they were about Biden, whose bid was toppled by questions about his age. Instead, they center on perceptions of how Trump will behave — similar to swing-state voters’ worry that Trump is ‘dangerous.’”

And yet, U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) has released no medical report on the state of his health. At 40-years old, he likely is in fine health, but the American people deserve to know from a credible physician.

As it is, Vance has not released his tax records, but if he is to become Vice President or President, Americans at least have a right to know if he is fit to serve.

READ MORE: Harlan Crow Helped Fund Swiftboating. Trump Campaign Continues That Legacy in Walz Attack

 

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OPINION

Could RFK Jr. Be Trump’s Project 2025 Liaison? Asked to ‘Help Pick’ Government Officials

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Just days after suspending his run for the White House and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview with Tucker Carlson he has been asked to join the ex-president’s presidential transition team and “help pick” the administration officials in charge of running the government.

Although Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s extremist and now-toxic Project 2025, what RFK Jr. is describing is central to what Project 2025 was designed to do: Heritage calls its nearly 900-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” a “Presidential Transition Project.”

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” explains The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 website. “This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.”

ProPublica earlier this month explained, “The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.”

READ MORE: Expert Predicts ‘Smith Will Win’ as Special Counsel Appeals Trump Docs Case Dismissal

Enter RFK Jr., an attorney, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and HIV/AIDS denialist. Despite having initially launched his 2024 campaign as a Democrat, the Kennedy scion denounced by some of his family members is apparently familiar with Project 2025.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat populist running for president as an independent, has a copy of Heritage’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ on his desk. He attributes his own study of Heritage’s plan as an effort to collect ‘all of these different points of view about wasteful programs in government that could be eliminated,'” Deseret News reported in December of 2023. “Kennedy denies that he’s had any conversations with Project 2025, but he left the door open.”

Last month the progressive political action committee MoveOn commented on the report, writing: “That doesn’t seem like reference material a so-called ‘independent’ candidate would need to have.” 

The progressive group’s spokesperson Britt Jacovich wrote: “RFK Jr. has told us he’s open to using MAGA’s Project 2025 playbook for inspiration. That’s troubling and disqualifying. The Trump and Heritage Foundation effort would gut checks and balances and give MAGA full rein to ban abortions and end the rule of law by allowing the Justice Department to prosecute Trump’s political enemies.”

“You either support Trump and Project 2025, or you don’t,” Jacovich added. “By spoiling the race and reelecting Trump, he’d all but ensure this hellscape would become the law of the land.”

Project 2025 also appears to be familiar with RFK Jr.

Last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, James Bacon, described in the WSJ as “a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project,” penned a piece titled, “2024 Presidential Candidates Against the Administrative State.”

“Trump, DeSantis and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he wrote, “recognize the need to reassert political control.”

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he added, “began his White House bid by saying he’d ‘take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'”

READ MORE: Florida in Play? Trump Campaign Just Bought Thousands in Ad Time in ‘Deep-Red’ State

Fast forward to last week.

Paul Dans, the former Heritage official who was head of Project 2025 until he “stepped down amid intense criticism including from the former president,” as CNN reported his exit at the end of July, is supportive of RFK Jr.

“I can’t tell you how many MAGA people that I work with, really the hardcore, the most based, who are huge RFK Jr. fans,” Dans said last week, Media Matters reported. “And they kind of were always kind of talking about it. But, remember, RFK Jr. went and interviewed for a job in 2016 at Trump Tower. So, you know, their relationship goes back years. Obviously there’s a lot that doesn’t — some of his positions aren’t square with America First, traditional America First. But certainly, there’s no one better, I think, in the entire country to take on the administrative state, particularly HHS.”

In his interview with far-right host Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr. says, “I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team to help pick the people who will be running the government.”

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Black Jobs’: Trump Clarifies What He Meant

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OPINION

The DNC Was a Celebration of American Values. Peggy Noonan Is Accusing Democrats of Theft.

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The four-night Democratic National Convention concluded Thursday with Kamala Harris’s speech accepting her party’s nomination for President, and a massive balloon drop, as the polls show the Vice President continuing to beat and increase her lead against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

After Monday night’s four-minute standing ovation of President Joe Biden, with Chicago’s United Center arena filled with thousands of cheering supporters shouting “We love Joe,” Los Angeles Times‘ columnist LZ Granderson wrote those “deafening chants” really meant, “We love American values.”

American values were the centerpiece of the Democrats’ convention.

Vice presidential nominee Governor Tim Walz “sought to turn Republican arguments on their head while making an appeal for common sense rooted in his Midwestern values,” the Associated Press wrote after the third night. “’When they were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,’ he jabbed.”

READ MORE: Here’s What Donald Trump Will Get When RFK Jr. Endorses Him

“The differences between Harris’ speech in Chicago and the one Trump delivered last month at the Republican convention in Milwaukee could not have been more stark — and set the stage for the sprint to the November 5 election, with head-to-head confrontations in debates yet to come,” CNN reported Friday. “Vice President Kamala Harris capped one of the most extraordinary months in modern political history Thursday night with a speech that rallied Democrats around themes of patriotism — and cast Donald Trump as the enemy of classic American principles.”

But over at The Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan, the former President Ronald Reagan speechwriter, had a different take.

“Kamala Harris’s speech was fine, and delivered with assurance. I prefer ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ to ‘Never do anything half-assed,’ but tastes vary,” was Noonan’s opening salvo, criticizing the Vice President for sharing a direct quote from her late beloved mother, whom she and her sister had paid homage to on stage during the convention.

To her credit, Noonan’s piece is titled, “Kamala Harris Gets Off to a Strong Start,” and she offered up this comparison of Democrats vs. Republicans, or at least their parties:

“The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.”

RELATED: DNC to Showcase Next-Gen Dems, a Contrast to GOP’s ‘North Korean-Style Wasteland’: Critics

But Noonan is being resoundingly chastised for this allegation: Democrats “stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own.”

The Washington Post‘s Mariana Alfaro on Tuesday had reported: “The Democratic Party is presenting a message that there is ‘nothing more American than freedom,’ Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said.”

“’There’s no reason for us to be afraid of using those symbols, because those symbols are our symbols and there’s nobody that’s more proud to be American than we are,’ Rahman said.”

Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn responded to Noonan:”Stole? No one has an exclusive claim to patriotism.”

Former political science professor and attorney Carol Schultz Vento wrote: “My WW paratrooper dad was a patriot and person of faith and a Democrat before Peggy Noonan was born. The Republicans can no longer hijack those values from the rest of us.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: Seven Swing States Now ‘Toss-Ups’ According to Polling Analysis

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OPINION

Here’s What Donald Trump Will Get When RFK Jr. Endorses Him

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On Friday, when the 70-year-old scion of a political family whose time in the White House was likened to “Camelot” endorses Donald Trump’s presidential bid, as expected, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will bring with him some of his single-digit array of voters, and enough baggage that could sink the possibly-soon-to-be-sentenced convicted ex-president’s campaign.

Over the past month or so, since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, RFK Jr. has been chatting with the GOP presidential nominee, as a recording leaked by his nephew revealed the ex-president dangling a possible position in the Trump administration to the son of the late, great U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Senator, Robert Kennedy.

“I would love for you to serve,” Trump told RFK Jr. in the July video posted and subsequently deleted by Robert Kennedy III. During that call the two men arranged to meet while Trump would be in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention later that month. “I would love you to do stuff and I think it’d be so good for your and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy,”

When the two did meet, their discussion reportedly “included possible jobs that Kennedy could be given in a second Trump administration, either at the Cabinet level or posts that do not require Senate confirmation. The discussion also included the prospect of Kennedy leaving the race and endorsing Trump,” The Washington Post had reported, citing sources.

READ MORE: DNC to Showcase Next-Gen Dems, a Contrast to GOP’s ‘North Korean-Style Wasteland’: Critics

Now, RFK Jr. has said he will make an announcement Friday afternoon, “about the present historical moment and his path forward.”

NBC News reports Trump might nominate the anti-vaccine and AIDS denialist conspiracy theorist to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy, NPR reported last year, “paints a dark, conspiratorial picture of the world, bristling with debunked theories, misleading claims and outright falsehoods.”

“Wi-Fi causes cancer and ‘leaky brain,’ Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan,” NPR added. “Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings, he mused during an appearance with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender, he told right-wing Canadian psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson, echoing a false assertion made by serial fabulist Alex Jones. AIDS may not be caused by HIV, he has suggested multiple times.”

NPR also reports, “what stands out in Kennedy’s case is the sheer volume of what he has asserted over the years, from his insistence that Republicans stole the 2004 election to his claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance to his belief that the CIA assassinated his uncle.”

READ MORE: ‘I’ve Heard That Said a Lot’: Fox Host Defends Trump Over Harris-Putin Lie

Kennedy’s conspiracy theories don’t end there, with NPR adding Kennedy has “compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and promoted a film targeting disproven claims about vaccines to Black Americans. He touted the alternative treatments ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which have not been found to be effective at treating COVID-19. He appeared at the Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour alongside MAGA stars Roger Stone and Michael Flynn and QAnon conspiracy theorists.”

“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country,” Kennedy said last year.

NPR also notes, “the pandemic united anti-vaccine and anti-government groups,” and “Kennedy’s message has found fertile ground among an odd-bedfellows coalition of supporters, from vaccine opponents to far-right conspiracy theorists such as Jones, Stone and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley magnates including Musk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and venture capitalist David Sacks, who hold Kennedy up as a contrarian free-thinker.”

Recently, Kennedy has embraced the crypto crowd, declaring, “Transactional freedom is as important as freedom of expression,” and claiming, “I’m going to put the entire U.S. budget on blockchain.”

David Corn, Mother Jones. D.C. bureau chief, on Wednesday noted, “If RFK Jr. endorses Trump, it will demonstrate he doesn’t care anything about climate change, clean air and water, women’s freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Just one disingenuous conspiracy-theory-monger joining forces with another. A sad ending to a once noble brand.”

READ MORE: Seven Swing States Now ‘Toss-Ups’ According to Polling Analysis

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