Latest news with #WitchHunt
Time of India
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Was Donald Trump dozing off during welcome ceremony in Saudi Arabia? Viral video sparks ‘sleepy Don' jibes online
US President 's trip to Saudi Arabia gathered a lot of attention, but not for the reasons his team might have hoped. While on a diplomatic visit to the Middle East, the 78-year-old US president was caught on camera with his eyes frequently closing during a special welcome ceremony held in his honour at the Saudi royal court, prompting many on the internet to wonder if he was feeling sleepy. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The incident quickly went viral, with social media users slamming Trump as 'Sleepy Don" and "Dozey Don." Netizens posted a range of comments, with some suggesting it was jet lag, while others responded by sharing clips of former US President Joe Biden in similar situations. Trump landed in Riyadh on Tuesday as part of a four-day diplomatic mission, which he claims will bring billions in investments and trade agreements with Gulf nations. However, the US president was frequently seen with his eyes closed during the ceremony. At the event, , Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, extended a warm welcome to Trump. 'Trump is having a hard time keeping his eyes open in Saudi Arabia,' tweeted reporter Aaron Rupar, sharing a video of Trump seemingly nodding off on X. Other users joined in, with one commenting, 'Sleepy Don can barely keep his eyes open while representing the United States in Saudi Arabia. If this were President Biden, there would be nonstop coverage of his cognitive condition and physical fitness. Where is the media outrage?' The White House did not comment immediately on the incident. It's not the first time that Trump has faced allegations of dozing off in public, and the moment in Riyadh has reignited discussions about the president's age and stamina. Trump's predecessor, Biden, has been frequently mocked by Trump as 'Sleepy Joe.' But now, some are questioning whether the same standard is being applied to Trump, particularly as he is set to become the oldest sitting US president during the final year of his second term. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now A similar instance occurred during his 2024 hush money trial, where reporters in the courtroom claimed Trump appeared to fall asleep during the proceedings. In response, Trump denied the allegations in a post on Truth Social, writing, 'I don't fall asleep during the Crooked D.A.'s Witch Hunt, especially not today. I simply close my beautiful blue eyes, sometimes, listen intensely, and take it ALL in!!!'
Hindustan Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Trump's sleepy moment at Saudi Summit sparks social media jokes and criticism; ‘Visualising that new floating palace'
Donald Trump's enthusiasm for his trip to Saudi Arabia was short-lived as netizens trolled the 78-year-old president for dozing off at key summit with Gulf leaders. Trump declared he will achieve billions in trade agreements and investments with Gulf countries during his four-day diplomatic tour to the Middle East, which began Tuesday when he landed in Riyadh. However, it seemed that the lengthy red-eye flight from the United States had taken its toll; Trump was constantly spotted with his eyes closed and even seemed to startle himself awake at a special ceremony. The event saw the attendance of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. MBS was more understanding of Trump's lack of focus, but social media viewers were quick to point it out. Reporter Aaron Rupar shared a video of Trump seemingly dozing off on X and wrote, 'Trump is having a hard time keeping his eyes open in Saudi Arabia.' 'He's just visualising that new floating palace he's getting,' one X user commented on Rupar's post. 'Trump's napping through Saudi talks? Maybe he's saving energy for his next golf game. Real leadership, folks,' another user trolled Trump. 'Sleepy Don can barely keep his eyes open while representing the United States in Saudi Arabia. If this were President Biden, there would be nonstop coverage of his cognitive condition and physical fitness. Where is the media outrage?' a third user wrote. Also Read: Trump asks Saudi Crown Prince MBS 'How Do You Sleep at Night?' in bizarre speech, takes dig at Tim Cook Trump has frequently been accused of sleeping in public. He will surpass Joe Biden as the oldest sitting president in American history in the last year of his second term. His 2024 hush money trial was one of the most well-known events as reporters inside the New York courthouse claimed that he seemed to nod off during the significant proceedings. However, Trump rejected the claim and asserted that he remained fully conscious throughout the trial. 'I don't fall asleep during the Crooked D.A.'s Witch Hunt, especially not today. I simply close my beautiful blue eyes, sometimes, listen intensely, and take it ALL in!!!' Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Grants Interview to Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg ‘Out of Curiosity' After Signal Scandal
This is no accident: President Trump on Thursday said he will be meeting with The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg later in the day. The meeting stands out, considering Goldberg was infamously added to a group chat last month among several Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in which strikes against the Houthis in Yemen were discussed. Goldberg was inadvertently added to the chat, on the messaging app Signal, by national security advisor Michael Waltz. That mistake led to a media uproar and had many questioning whether Hegseth and Waltz should remain in their roles. President Trump has downplayed the incident, saying it was 'old and boring' and part of the 'Radical Left's Witch Hunt.' 'Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, and the person responsible for many fictional stories about me, including the made-up hoax on 'Suckers and Losers' and, SignalGate, something he was somewhat more 'successful' with,' President Trump wrote on Truth Social. The Trump-Goldberg interview comes as the two have been publicly grappling for years. The president, in his post, was referring to a 2020 Atlantic story by Goldberg that said Trump called those in a military cemetery 'suckers' and 'losers.' Goldberg said his reporting was based on 'four people with firsthand knowledge' of the president's comments. President Trump has denied ever making those comments on multiple occasions, including during his 2024 debate with Joe Biden, when the former president referenced the report. 'Jeffrey is bringing with him Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker, not exactly pro-Trump writers, either, to put it mildly!' the president continued. 'The story they are writing, they have told my representatives, will be entitled, 'The Most Consequential President of This Century.' I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it's possible for The Atlantic to be 'truthful.'' He concluded: 'Are they capable of writing a fair story on 'Trump'? The way I look at it, what can be so bad – I won!' The post Trump Grants Interview to Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg 'Out of Curiosity' After Signal Scandal appeared first on TheWrap.
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Marine Le Pen ruling is fuel for the global right's attacks on court authority
The three-word message, launched minutes after the verdict came in, was succinct in its solidarity. 'Je suis Marine!' Hungary's Viktor Orbán posted on social media after France's far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, was found guilty of embezzling European parliament funds and barred immediately from running for public office. Messages soon came tumbling in from Brazil to Belgium, hinting at how rightwing nationalist and populist leaders had seized on the ruling to push their own narrative. Most of them paid little heed to the judges' finding of the key role Le Pen and more than two dozen others had played in a scam that prosecutors alleged had diverted more than €4m (£3.4m) of European parliament funds to benefit the party. On Thursday, Donald Trump became the latest to weigh in, railing against the court's sentencing of Le Pen to four years in prison, of which two years were suspended and the other two set to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet. 'The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison,' Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, describing the charge as 'minor'. He added: 'FREE MARINE LE PEN.' As France reeled from the political upheaval, opponents of liberal democracy jumped at the chance to peddle their claims that some justice systems are being used as a blunt tool to silence the will of the people. 'When the radical left can't win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,' wrote Elon Musk. 'This is their standard playbook throughout the world.' The Kremlin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, described the verdict as part of a broader pattern of European capitals 'trampling over democratic norms', while Italy's deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, likened the ruling to Romania, where courts overturned the first-round results of the presidential election and later upheld a decision to ban the frontrunner amid suspicions of Russian interference. 'People who are afraid of the judgment of the voters are often reassured by the judgment of the courts,' Salvini wrote. 'In Paris they have condemned Marine Le Pen and would like to exclude her from political life – an ugly film that we are also seeing in other countries such as Romania.' Legal experts pushed back against the claims. 'The decision is extremely well reasoned, the court handed down a judgment that seems to me implacable on its merits and without any real possible dispute,' said Mathieu Carpentier, a law professor at Toulouse Capitole University, citing the more than 150-page ruling delivered by the three judges. 'If Madame Le Pen had not broken the law, she would not have been convicted.' It was a point that leaders in countries such as the US, Russia and Hungary – all of whom have faced accusations of undermining their country's judiciary – were seemingly content to overlook. 'It's very interesting because these are the same people who call for absolutely exemplary sentences for delinquency and for justice to be severe,' said Carpentier. Le Pen, for example, called in 2013 for lifelong ineligibility for politicians convicted of criminal acts while in office. Ultimately, said Carpentier, Le Pen and her defenders 'don't like the rule of law, they use justice always and only as a political instrument'. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion 'We're living in a period which is extremely problematic, where judges are being pitted against democracy despite the fact that they are only applying the laws that have been passed by the representatives of the people,' said Carpentier. 'It's a sort of constant manipulation, or instrumentalisation that's really harmful.' As far-right figures lined up behind Le Pen, the three-time presidential hopeful didn't shy away from stoking the fire. 'The system has launched a nuclear bomb,' she told supporters as she vowed to appeal against the sentence. 'If they are using such a powerful weapon against us, it's obviously because we're about to win elections.' But behind the bluster lay a conundrum for Le Pen and her anti-immigration the National Rally (RN) party, said Célia Belin, who heads the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. 'With this decision, I think we are really at a crossroads for the National Rally,' she said. 'If they want to benefit from this, they have to go full anti-system and really cry wolf,' she said. 'Really underline that the system is against them, that they are prevented from governing, and that they want to use the echo chamber of the European and American far right.' This approach – catapulting the RN into the spotlight as the standard-bearer of a movement that spans from Orbán in Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil – risks derailing Le Pen's decade-long drive to soften the party's image. The delicate balancing act was laid bare earlier this year when Le Pen's right-hand man, Jordan Bardella, abruptly cancelled plans to deliver a speech at the US Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, after Steve Bannon flashed what Bardella described as a 'gesture alluding to Nazi ideology'. A poll carried out in the wake of the verdict for French broadcaster BFMTV suggested that the narrative being pushed by Le Pen's international supporters diverged from the view of many in France, with 57% of respondents saying they believed the courts had delivered justice without bias. 'That's the paradox,' said Belin. 'I don't think they've [the RN] decided whether they're going to align themselves with these outside supporters or whether they will continue with their strategy of sovereigntism, of gaining respectability and of participating in some of this rightwing movement, but with a lot of caution.'
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Marine Le Pen verdict fuels debate that Europe's ‘rule of law' is throttling the ‘will of the people'
This week, a French court found far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzling millions of euros of European Union funds and banned her from running for political office for five years – knocking the frontrunner out of the 2027 presidential race and enraging her supporters. Coming so swiftly after Romania canceled the first-round election victory of a far-right candidate, Le Pen's verdict has deepened a transatlantic debate about whether courts risk disenfranchising voters by removing a politician from electoral competition. Le Pen's case is becoming a political Rorschach test. Critics say the court's decision is another instance of liberal elites weaponizing the judiciary to bar their political rivals from power. Supporters say the decision shows institutions working as designed, prosecuting any citizen who is guilty of a crime regardless of their political stripes and the potential backlash. For the first camp, 'the will of the people' ought to be supreme. For the second, adhering to the 'rule of law' outweighs voters' demands. The two cases have stoked fury among Europe's right-wing nationalists, Donald Trump and many members of his administration, who feel the US president was subjected to similar acts of 'lawfare' to try to stop him winning a second term. He is the first convicted felon to become president. 'The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison,' Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. 'When the radical left can't win via a democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,' Trump's billionaire aide Elon Musk wrote on X after Monday's verdict. 'This is their standard playbook throughout the world.' Vice President JD Vance has also singled out Romania as an instance of what he sees as democratic backsliding in Europe. Calin Georgescu unexpectedly won the first round of its presidential vote in November, but Romania's constitutional court annulled the election after intelligence services suggested Russia had interfered to boost his TikTok campaign, which he and Moscow denied. The electoral bureau later banned Georgescu from May's rerun, after prosecutors charged him with establishing a fascist group and other crimes. In a blistering speech in February in Munich, Vance said the evidence against Georgescu was 'flimsy' and chastised mainstream European leaders for 'running in fear' of their voters. Although Vance's intervention was broadly condemned in Europe – while Romania was praised for acting against alleged foreign interference – scholars of liberalism have warned that those attempting to defend democracy can end up digging its grave. 'If we empower courts to cancel the outcome of elections because we're shocked by who the winner is, we're very close to living in a system of government whose ultimate arbiters are judges rather than people,' said political scientist Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement for using EU funds to pay her party's political staff from 2004 to 2016, falsely claiming they were working as assistants to its members of the European Parliament. Her party, the National Rally (RN), was ordered to pay back the €4.1 million ($4.4 million) the court said it had embezzled, as well as €2 million in fines. Le Pen has said she will appeal the court ruling. Without disputing the merits of the case, Mounk said such judicial decisions risk overreach. 'In a democracy, the way to beat extremists… is at the ballot-box,' Mounk told CNN. If mainstream parties are unable to build durable coalitions, they cannot in the long-run resort to 'a clever institutional end-run around the will of the people.' Although this debate is deeply entrenched and goes back centuries, the two camps have recently switched sides. Conservatives typically treasure civic institutions as a storehouse of ancestral wisdom; those on the left have championed universal rights, individual freedoms and the vox populi. But in recent years, those philosophical starting points have flipped, said Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. Left wing-progressives, once skeptical of the status quo, have become stolid guardians of institutions, while right-wing conservatives – once champions of prudence – are tearing down fences. This reversal is particularly stark in the United States. Mike Lee, a Republican senator from Utah, spent years arguing that America is a republic, not a democracy, and that its system of checks and balances is more important than the will of the people. 'Power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power,' he wrote in 2020. Now, perhaps swayed by Trump's popular vote victory – the first for a Republican candidate in 20 years – many US conservatives appear to have changed their position, arguing the US is more a democracy than a republic. Trump pushed this argument to its extreme when he wrote on X in February, quoting Napoleon: 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.' If an elected president is the will of the people incarnate, why should his prerogative be circumscribed by the courts? It is not clear how widely this belief is held in America, but Europe's history may make its soil less fertile for such ideas. In countries such as Germany, Spain, Italy – and on the other side of the Iron Curtain that split the continent for decades – many citizens have visceral memories of life under dictatorships and accept that their hard-won institutions are needed to prevent abuses of power. Nonetheless, a populist-peddled argument is taking root even here that these same institutions have been 'captured' by liberal elites and are now themselves abusing their power. This perception could turn those who, like Le Pen and Georgescu, are penalized by those institutions, into martyrs, warned Mounk. 'In purely political terms, I think it is more likely to strengthen than to weaken' Le Pen's RN party, he said. Le Pen's hard-right European allies immediately rallied to her defense. 'Je suis Marine,' said Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in a message of solidarity. Matteo Salvini, Italy's deputy prime minister, said that those who fear the voice of voters often take comfort in the judgment of the courts. The Kremlin, which leaps at chances to portray Western democracy as a sham, said the judgment showed Europe was 'trampling on democratic norms.' Despite the noise and seeming groundswell of support, Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at political risk consultancy the Eurasia Group, said this is unlikely to be a vote-winner in France. While the perceived political persecution of politicians like Le Pen will 'motivate' the RN base, it is not clear if it would sway the swing voters needed to clinch an election, he said. The RN is also likely to suffer if Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's inexperienced 29-year-old protégé, leads the party into the 2027 election, he said. 'Any marginal benefit that the far right may gain from this broader conspiracy narrative will be offset by the fact that Bardella as a candidate is less effective,' Rahman told CNN. And the conviction of Le Pen – who long railed against politicians getting caught with their 'fingers in the till' before it happened to her – has precedent. Before France's 2017 election, Francois Fillon – a mainstream conservative frontrunner – was found guilty of embezzling public funds to pay his wife and children for work they had not done. Although he was not banned from running, the verdict derailed his campaign. Other French politicians – including on the left – have had their political ambitions dashed by legal travails. Ansell said European populists may be learning the wrong lessons from Trump's victory. The president's ability to win re-election – despite his hush-money conviction in New York and the mountain of other legal challenges he faced – might falsely suggest that he won because of the attempts to prosecute him, rather than despite them. In a year when voters punished incumbents everywhere, Trump's 2024 victory was more because he ran against an unpopular president who presided over an inflationary economy, Ansell said. An opinion poll conducted for CNN's French affiliate, BFMTV, found 57% of those surveyed believe Le Pen's conviction was a 'normal judicial decision.' Being banned from running for political office 'is bad for her – and it's mad that that's controversial,' Ansell told CNN. While there is a risk of the courts being perceived as biased, there is also the danger of their overcorrecting, he said. If courts choose not to hear a case against a politician for fear of public backlash, despite prosecutors believing they have sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, institutionalists fear this would harm the rule of law. And although right-wing populists often claim they are the victims of a 'two-tiered' justice system, this claim could go both ways if courts routinely decline to prosecute candidates to avoid stoking outrage. Ansell warned against pandering to populists who would 'play the victim' regardless of the merits of a case, casting doubt on the integrity of the institutions attempting to curtail wrongdoing. 'There's an odd double standard here,' he said. 'The populists are supposed to get a kind of extra benefit that the other parties don't get when their leaders get into trouble.'
